Presented in collaboration with Penn's Middle East Center

After Rumi: The Mevlevis and Their World by Jamal J. Elias is the first major book since the mid-20th century to focus on Rumi’s religious, social and literary legacy. In this book talk, the author will briefly introduce important aspects of Rumi’s impact on Sufism, language and society in Turkey and beyond. The talk will be followed by a discussion with Ahmet T. Karamustafa, one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of medieval Sufism.

Jamal J. Elias specializes in Islamic thought, literary and visual culture as well as history in Western and South Asia. His current research focuses on processes and understandings of religious community formation from the medieval to the modern world, as demonstrated in historical and literary writing as well as in visual and material culture. His most recent book, After Rumi: Language, Kinship and the Making of a Religious Community, was published by Harvard University Press in 2025. A book edited by him entitled What Makes Islamic Literature Islamic? was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in February 2026. He is the author of Alef is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies (2018); Aisha's Cushion: Religious Art, Perception and Practice in Islam (2012); On Wings of Diesel: Trucks, Identity and Culture in Pakistan (2011); This is Islam: From Muhammad and the Community of Believers to Islam in the Global Community (2011); Islam (1999); The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of ‘Ala’ ad-dawla as-Simnani (1995); the coauthor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001); the editor and translator of Death Before Dying: Sufi Poems of Sultan Bahu (1998); the editor of Key Themes for the Study of Islam (2010); the coeditor of Light Upon Light: A Festschrift presented to Gerhard Böwering by His Students (2019); and the author of numerous articles. His writings have been translated into at least nine languages. Dr. Elias is Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies, and the Director of the Penn Forum for Global Islamic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He was director of Penn's Wolf Humanities Center from 2021–2025.

Ahmet T. Karamustafa is Professor & Chair of the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His expertise is in the social and intellectual history of medieval Sufism and Islamic piety. He is the author of three books: Vahidi’s Menakıb-ı Hvoca-i Cihan ve Netice-i Can (1993), a study of a sixteenth-century mystical text in Ottoman Turkish; God’s Unruly Friends (1994), a monograph on dervish movements in medieval Islam; and Sufism: The Formative Period (2007), a comprehensive historical overview of early Islamic mysticism. He also served as an editor for, and wrote several articles in, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (1992), and co-edited Mystical Landscapes in Medieval Persian Literature (2025). Currently, he is at work on a book project tentatively titled The Age of Hızır: Islam in the Mirror of Early Turkish Literature.