«رومی» بهمن شکوهی؛ نسخهٔ فارسی، رمان انگلیسی و مسیر خواندن تا خیام

From Iranian Australia to historical fiction

In an interview published on 31 August 2019, SBS Persian identified Bahman Shokouhi as an Iranian-Australian writer and poet living in Sydney. The report described Rumi as his fourth work and recorded its Persian publication by Negah in the Iranian year 1397. This independent report is the strongest public starting point for his professional biography.

Most of Shokouhi’s public trail is made of books: early poetry and humour, a long novel about Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi, A Sufi’s Dream about Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, and later the English publication of Rumi alongside publishing activity in Australia. That sequence is more useful than an expansive promotional biography because each stage is attached to a book, interview, bibliographic identifier or public event.

A search of public sources produced no dependable record of Shokouhi’s parents’ names, detailed childhood history or private family life. Social-media profiles give conflicting accounts of birthplace and education, with no independent record available to resolve them. The feature omits those claims and marks the boundary of what the available evidence can establish.

Images and information supplied directly for this AlefBa campaign are used to document literary work and public activity. Private messages, addresses, passwords, financial information and unrelated correspondence are excluded. The public portrait presented here is built from books, published interviews and cultural appearances.

The path described in Shokouhi’s own interview

A substantial 1397 interview conducted while Shokouhi was visiting Negah’s Tehran office introduces him as a former student of Mohammad-Reza Shafi’i Kadkani and a friend of Qeysar Aminpour. In the discussion, Shokouhi says that he attended Shafi’i Kadkani’s classes frequently, wrote poetry and was close to Aminpour. No independent university record or corroborating account was located. The details therefore remain attributed to that interview and do not carry multi-source biographical confirmation.

The substance of the conversation bears directly on the method of Rumi. Shokouhi approaches Rumi through Persian poetry, Sufism and literary history, moving between the energy of the Divan-e Shams, the didactic architecture of the Masnavi, Saadi’s clarity and Hafez’s density. Celebrated quotations serve a larger inquiry: how a jurist and teacher becomes a poet whose language can carry ecstasy, loss and release.

The presence of the book’s editor, Farid Moradi, also matters. He pauses over historical claims, checks dates and presses the author on the boundary between fact and invention. The exchange lets readers observe the making of the book: the author’s enthusiasm, his narrative choices, the editor’s resistance and the points at which the historical record requires a correction or clearer explanation.

The interview and the novel reveal a literary formation expressed through Shokouhi’s questions, his attention to the music of language and his focus on Rumi’s process of becoming. His reported personal relationships with teachers and poets remain separate from his demonstrable analytical relationship with classical texts.

A book in Sydney and a question about Rumi’s whole life

In the Negah interview, Shokouhi describes the novel’s origin with unusual candour. Saideh Ghods’s Kimia Khatoon reached him in Sydney, and its concentration on one part of Rumi’s story prompted him to imagine a wider canvas. He jokingly calls his initial motive “personal jealousy,” but the practical result was serious: he gathered novels, commentaries and historical materials about Rumi. What began as a response to another book developed into a search for the arc of an entire life.

The first plan ended with Rumi’s marriage. Shokouhi then concluded that the character’s transformation could not be completed without Shams. A section envisaged at roughly one hundred pages expanded into several hundred. The change in scale reveals a structural shift: the novel’s centre moved from recording childhood and migration to explaining how Jalal al-Din became a different kind of person.

Shokouhi describes the main line as a journey of about twenty-five years from Balkh to Konya. The family travels west through cities and centres of learning, spends time in Laranda and eventually settles in Konya. Alongside geography, the novel concentrates on childhood, adolescence, early adulthood and gradual formation—periods that traditional hagiographic sources tend to treat less fully than the celebrated years of Rumi’s maturity.

The author calls the book a romance and gives love a broad field: family, teacher and pupil, human longing and the divine, and the bond between Rumi and Shams. The linear journey lets readers observe transformation in stages. Shams enters after years of accumulated experience; their meeting gathers those experiences and opens another form of life.

The night of Bayazid

One of Shokouhi’s most tangible memories of composition concerns a thirty-five-page passage about Bayazid Bastami. He says that his notes were already prepared and the prose itself arrived in one night. He describes the experience in inspired language while explicitly disavowing any claim to mystical rank. For a literary reading, the episode illuminates the gap between slow research and the moment when notes become scenes and dialogue.

The author’s admission that chronology was altered

The most important passage in the 1397 interview arrives when historical fidelity is questioned. Shokouhi acknowledges changing dates and encounters for narrative purposes and bringing together figures who could not have met in the historical time or place. His own example concerns the treatment of Umar al-Suhrawardi and Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi, and the gathering of several figures around Ibn Arabi.

This disclosure establishes the novel’s contract. Rumi is historical fiction: it takes recognised points in the life, builds scenes, dialogue, motives and emotional continuities between them, and sometimes compresses or moves time to sustain the narrative. Academic biography and critical editions of thirteenth-century sources follow different rules; readers can assess the novel’s freedoms more accurately once that distinction is clear.

In the same interview, editor Farid Moradi corrects a date in real time and repeatedly asks how a general reader can distinguish invention from record. The exchange gives readers direct evidence of editing at work. Scholarly history also requires selection, while fiction has wider permission to construct a scene. Editorial responsibility lies in making that freedom visible.

What can the novel teach?

Fiction can make the scale of migration, the pressure of insecurity, the atmosphere of school and Sufi lodge, generational conflict and the psychological cost of transformation palpable. It can show why the meeting with Shams acquires such force within the design of a life. For the precise date of an encounter, a family relationship, the attribution of a saying or the contemporaneity of two thinkers, however, readers need historical scholarship and specialist sources.

The most productive reading proceeds in two stages. First, let the narrative perform its work and draw us into the journey and transformation. Then compare historically consequential passages with Encyclopaedia Iranica, responsible Rumi scholarship and critical treatments of early sources. The method preserves the pleasure of fiction while clarifying the difference between literary truth and a historical claim.

What route does the reader follow?

The novel presents Jalal al-Din before the familiar image of the celebrated poet has formed. He is a child in an unstable world, shaped in succession by family, teachers, migration and changing cities. This design gives the character time. Before the arrival of Shams, readers encounter fear, discipline, education, marriage, responsibility and loss.

The journey from Balkh into Anatolia forms the novel’s narrative spine. Every move opens a new intellectual horizon and introduces networks of scholars, Sufis, merchants and local powers. The long distance between origin and Konya reveals the many layers of Rumi’s cultural identity. Persian language, historical Khorasan, Baghdad, Anatolia and several intellectual traditions all participate in his formation.

In the latter movement, Shams becomes a disruptive force. He questions the teacher’s social authority and destabilises the order Jalal al-Din has built around himself. The novel presents that change as prepared by years of travel, study, grief and searching. For that reason, the early proposed English title, Becoming Rumi, accurately described the book’s narrative logic.

Who is this edition for?

• Readers seeking a long, continuous fictional life of Rumi.
• Those who want a narrative map of characters and places before specialist study.
• Bilingual readers planning to compare the Persian and English editions as separate books.
• Historical-fiction readers prepared to distinguish evidence from literary reconstruction.

From the working title Becoming Rumi to the 2025 edition

At the end of his 1397 interview, Shokouhi said that he was translating the novel into English under the title Becoming Rumi, a phrase tied directly to the character’s arc. The edition that entered the market in 2025 appeared under the shorter title Rumi, with a subtitle identifying the great Persian mystic and poet. Across that interval, translation and publication developed into a substantial project with its own edition and imprint data.

The public record leaves the final editor, the extent of structural change and any chapter-by-chapter collation undocumented. Those gaps rule out claims such as “complete and unabridged translation” and any unsupported judgement of translation quality. The published English edition, its ISBN and physical specifications, its imprint, and the long route from working title to finished book are all verifiable.

The English edition offers readers who do not read Persian an Iranian novelist’s interpretation of Rumi’s life. English-language readers already have many Rumi books, yet much of that market is built from selected translations, general-spirituality retellings or stories more distant from Persian literary language. Shokouhi’s project began in Persian and then moved outward into English, giving this edition a distinct position.

A publishing activity with a public legal trail

Australia’s official business register shows one Alphabet publishing name attached to Bahman Shokouhi’s active record from 1 May 2024 and a second form from 26 May 2024. The government record establishes the legal connection between writer and imprint. Location data and unrelated historic trading names are omitted because they do not help readers understand the books.

The publisher’s website describes its purpose as publishing meaningful works that connect history, philosophy and the human spirit. Rumi is the featured title, and Rooyaye Yek Sufi also appears in the collection. The positioning matches the two novels: each follows a historical figure through intellectual crisis or personal transformation.

Some details on the publisher’s website do not match the physical edition held by AlefBa. The publisher’s homepage refers to other formats, while AlefBa’s copy is a paperback. This feature therefore records purchase specifications from the physical copy and its ISBN.

The site also answers a practical question about Shokouhi’s web presence. The verifiable public website currently presenting his work is the Alphabet Publication House site. This research did not locate a separate, comprehensive personal website containing a fully documented biography and bibliography.

Internal dialogue grounded in Sufi thought

The tenth International Rumi Conference was held in Nicosia from 3 to 5 December 2025, jointly organised by the Rumi Research Center at Near East University and the Mevlana Literary-Philosophical Research Institute at Khazar University. Khazar’s report says that researchers and artists from twelve countries joined a programme devoted to peace and reconciliation from Rumi’s perspective.

During the third session on the second day, Bahman Shokouhi presented on “internal dialogue based on Sufi thought.” The title aligns with a problem explored in Rumi: how a character hears the competing voices of social role, fear, private desire and spiritual searching, and how a decision emerges from that conflict. The university report verifies participation and topic. No full paper or authorised recording was located, so this feature remains within the information the organisers published.

The importance of the appearance lies in the meeting of fiction with international scholarly discussion. The conference placed spiritual psychology and Jungian archetypes beside social peace, architecture, Rumi’s Arabic poetry and his influence on other cultures. In such a setting, a novelist confronts questions beyond plot: how Rumi is read now, how translation relocates him, and how literary, religious, therapeutic and political uses of his legacy diverge.

The supplied conference photograph shows Shokouhi in front of the event’s official banner and is consistent with the date and title. Its evidentiary scope is attendance; the university report supplies the event details used here.

The second novel in an intellectual project

On 27 January 2022, SBS Persian published an eight-minute conversation with Bahman Shokouhi about A Sufi’s Dream. The programme introduces the novel as a work about Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali and names religion, politics, power and ethics as its central fields. Those four terms offer a useful reading contract: al-Ghazali enters the narrative through scholarly authority, proximity to power, doubt and the wish for release, acquiring a human presence beyond his name in intellectual history.

At the time of that recording, SBS reported that the Persian Rumi had reached its eighth printing. Shokouhi’s next historical subject was another figure whose life is remembered through internal crisis and a change of direction. The two novels use different structures. Rumi develops through migration, education, love and the encounter with Shams. The crisis in A Sufi’s Dream grows from within an already established teacher’s reputation and his relationship to truth and institutional power.

The historical al-Ghazali and the character in the novel

A responsible reading distinguishes recorded events from dramatized scenes. Al-Ghazali rose to prominence at the Nizamiyya in Baghdad, withdrew from teaching and passed through a period of travel and seclusion. Fiction can make the fear, doubt and inner argument of such a decision vivid. The exact words of a conversation, the sequence of some encounters and private motives remain literary reconstruction unless a historical source is identified.

Khayyam appears among the surrounding figures in the novel’s Seljuk world, alongside Malik-Shah, Nizam al-Mulk, Hassan-i Sabbah and Ahmad Ghazali. His presence leads into the next chapter of this feature. A Sufi’s Dream remains centred on al-Ghazali. Attributing a separate Khayyam book to Shokouhi would require independent publication evidence, which the inspected sources did not provide.

The book suits readers drawn to the process of becoming in Rumi who now want to observe another kind of transformation: a person at the height of social authority reassessing the knowledge he teaches and the power that granted his position. Reading the two novels together clarifies the difference between Shokouhi’s treatment of a poet’s transformation and a theologian’s crisis.

A separate search for a claim that remains undocumented

An early question in this campaign asked whether Shokouhi had published an English book about Omar Khayyam. The publisher’s site, the official English Rumi listing, two SBS interviews, the substantial Negah interview, the government business record, bibliographic catalogues and the supplied photograph of three English books were checked. None provided reliable evidence of a Khayyam book written by Bahman Shokouhi.

A responsible bibliography omits hypothetical titles. A work may be in preparation or may have circulated through a limited channel; published status requires a cover, imprint page, ISBN or official publisher record. If such evidence later reaches AlefBa, this section can be updated with precise date and edition data.

Why does Khayyam appear in this dossier?

Khayyam provides a valuable comparison in the global movement of Persian literature. Modern images of Rumi in many languages have been formed through translation, retelling and selected excerpts. The English-language fame of Khayyam’s quatrains was likewise shaped to a remarkable degree by Edward FitzGerald’s free translation. In both cases, translation widened the audience while raising questions about lost historical, religious and philosophical context.

Encyclopaedia Iranica examines Khayyam as a scientist, mathematician and the putative author of a large body of quatrains, and draws attention to the problem of attribution. Poems accumulated under his name across centuries do not all carry the same evidentiary weight. A multilingual edition is rewarding for comparison, but translating a quatrain and proving that Khayyam wrote it are separate tasks.

Shokouhi receives no authorship attribution in the four-language volume sold by AlefBa, so the title sits outside his bibliography. Its role here is contextual reading: a bridge for readers who, after following Rumi between Persian and English, want to compare the afterlife of another classical text across Persian, English, French and Arabic.

What public records actually document

The 2019 SBS interview calls Rumi Shokouhi’s fourth work and lists three earlier titles in the forms printed on that page: the satirical Yek Tork-e Tahsil-Kardeh, the poetry collection Faseleh, and a title rendered there as Maghoulat-e Ash’ar dar Iran. The third wording is unusual, and no independently inspectable edition was found that would justify silently correcting it. The SBS form is therefore retained with a source note.

Persian bibliographic catalogues document multiple printings of Rumi, while the edition introduced by AlefBa is a specific Negah edition with a verifiable ISBN. A Sufi’s Dream likewise has an identifiable Persian edition in catalogues. The supplied photograph shows three English books, but at the time of review only Rumi had a complete bibliographic record.

An Arabic bookseller also records a title equivalent to A Sufi’s Dream under an Arabic rendering of the author’s name and supplies an ISBN. This may document an Arabic edition, but no official publisher page or inspectable imprint page was available. Its publication details therefore remain pending verification.

The classification is deliberately conservative. A title appearing online, a physical book appearing in a photograph and identification of the exact edition are three distinct levels of evidence.

Hearing the method before judging the book

The long Negah interview is the most informative source for Shokouhi’s method. He discusses the initial stimulus, the expansion of the Shams section, the narrative’s twenty-five-year journey, his use of the term romance and his deliberate alteration of some dates. The two SBS programmes are shorter, but they establish publication dates, introduce the books and locate the author within Australia’s Iranian community.

The author’s public Instagram account, under the handle shown below, was accessible during research. This article links to it but does not import follower counts, changing profile wording or unverified personal details into the biography. Social media is useful for new announcements; dates, ISBNs and edition claims should still be checked against the publisher, the physical book or a bibliographic catalogue.

The search located no official, verifiable YouTube channel for Shokouhi. This page plays media only when attribution and permission are clear; the two official SBS interviews currently meet that standard. If the author or publisher later confirms an official YouTube URL, an authorised video can be added with a silent start and an explicit sound control.