Of all the poets in the millennium-long history of Persian literature, no figure is better known in the United States today than Jalal al-Din Rumi. Widely known as "Mawlana" ("Our Master"), Rumi is revered to this day as a guide who presents his written work — a volume of ecstatic lyrical poems, and the "Spiritual Couplets," a sprawling collection of tales, homilies, and the occasional dirty joke — as a program of spiritual growth and self-mastery. In this class, we will situate the close study of Rumi's oeuvre within a broad contextual framework that includes excerpts from the major Sufi poets who preceded him, examples from contemporary Jewish and Christian mystical writing, and the historical milieu of medieval Anatolia where he preached. The politics of translation, by which he is largely known in North America today, will also be a topic of conversation. By reading Rumi from these multiple perspectives — with a microscope in one hand and a wide-angle lens in the other, so to speak — we will gain not only a solid foundation in the work of one of the most popular and enduring literary figures in Islamic thought, but a broader understanding of why and how the mystical legacies of the medieval Middle East continue to be highly relevant today.