Ibrahim Gamard
DR. IBRAHIM GAMARD is a Rumi scholar, born in the United States in 1947. A student of Sufism since 1971, Ibrahim was initiated into the 700 year-old Mevlevi Order (also known as the "Whirling Dervishes" ) in 1976, was a semazen (whirling dervish) during the following years, and today is a Shaykh (authorized teacher) in the international Mevlevi Order led by Faruk Hemdem Chelebi, the 22nd generation direct descendent of Mevlana Rumi and the leader of all Mevlevis.
Ibrahim converted to Sunni Islam in 1984 and fulfilled the requirement of every Muslim (who can afford it) to make the Hajj (Pilgrimage) to Mecca in 1999.
Though professionally a licensed psychologist in California with a Ph.D. (1986) in Psychology (from the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco), Ibrahim’s passion is studying and translating the poetry of Rumi in his spare time. Around 1981, he began teaching himself classical Persian for the sole purpose of reading Rumi's poetry in the original language. And in 1985, he began collaborating with Dr. Ravan Farhadi, an Afghan professor of Persian Literature (at the University of California, Berkeley), in a translation of the nearly 2,000 quatrains attributed to Rumi, together with commentary and Persian text, in what is presently a 700 page manuscript (entitled, "The Quatrains of Rumi"), to be published by Sophia Perennis around the end of 2007.
In 1997, he began posting articles on the Internet concerning Rumi translation issues, and over the next couple of years his own literal translations of selections from Rumi's Masnavi appeared on "Sunlight" (a Rumi listserve group that offers daily translations and versions of Rumi's poetry) on a weekly basis. In 1999, he started his own website, Dar-al-Masnavi, which contains all the Masnavi selections he has translated (with commentary and transliteration of the Persian) over the years, selections of other kinds of Rumi poetry, plus numerous other articles on related subjects.
In 2004, his first book of literal Rumi translations was published, Rumi and Islam, Skylight Paths Publishing. This work contains translations and commentary on many of the beautiful things Rumi said in his poetry and prose about the Prophet Muhammad: stories about his virtues, quotations of his wise sayings, and praises of his wonderful qualities.
Ibrahim has attended and presented at a number of Rumi conferences, beginning in 1997. During the UNESCO-declared "Year of Rumi" in 2007, he went to an international conference in Istanbul, Turkey, and another one in Kabul, Afghanistan--which included a visit to Balkh, formerly an ancient city in the area where Rumi was born.
