Divine Deviants

The Author: Manijeh Mannani is Lecturer of Comparative Literature and English Literature at the University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton (Canada). She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Alberta. She specializes in the poetry of the English Metaphysical poet, John Donne, and the Persian mystic, Rumi. She has presented and published papers extensively in her primary and secondary areas of interest including cultural studies.

"Manijeh Mannani's study is the first systematic, comparative analysis aligning two master poets, Jalal al-Din Rumi and John Donne. Attentive to differences in history, language, and culture, she lays bare the spiritual and poetic affinities between Donne and Rumi. Meticulous and close textual readings are juxtaposed with crucial insights culled from biographical, religious, and cultural history. 'Divine Deviants' makes it possible to understand mysticism in a global context. Written in a lucid prose, it is accessible to the general reader as well as to the experts in the field." (Nasrin Rahimieh, Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies, Dr. Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, University of California, Irvine)
"There is a kind of rage for Rumi in the Western world that has existed in the last several years, quite apart from the Western world's bewilderment with Islam, and it is a fascination for a poet who has been loved, especially in Iran, for centuries. To study Rumi side by side with John Donne, a seventeenth-century English poet who seemed lost until the early years of the twentieth century, would appear perfectly natural, and, in fact, scholars have from time to time suggested it. With much courage, Manijeh Mannani, who is steeped in traditions of poetry and mysticism, has come forward and compared them with the intensity their writing deserves. Scholars and readers of both poets will welcome this book, especially, if not solely, for what it says about how much these two cultures, that seem so opposed, have in common. Her achievement is unparalleled and responds to a significant desideratum in Rumi and Donne scholarship." (E. D. Blodgett, University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta)