Jawid Mojaddedi
Jawid Mojaddedi is Professor of Religion at Rutgers University. He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. At the age of five, he along with his mother and brother moved to Great Britain. He lived in several British cities and towns, including Glasgow, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Westcliff-on-Sea, and Exeter. [1]
During the nineties, Jawid Mojaddedi attended University of Manchester, where he earned his BA and PhD in Middle Eastern Studies. After graduating from the University of Manchester, he worked as a full-time faculty member of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, where he taught Arabic and Islamic Studies.
In 1998, Jawid moved from Great Britain to the United States. He worked at Columbia University for two years as an editor of Encyclopædia Iranica. He has been teaching at Rutgers University since 2003. He is a former director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Rutgers University, and currently Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religion.
Jawid Mojaddedi is known world-wide as a Rumi expert. He has published several books, including translations of Rumi's longest poem, known as the Masnavi, into simple English. The Masnavi: Book One was published in 2004 and was awarded the Lois Roth Prize for excellence in translation of Persian literature by the American Institute of Iranian Studies.[2] The Masnavi: Book Two was published in 2007 and The Masnavi: Book Three in 2013. All three volumes were published as Oxford World's Classics Editions. Jawid Mojaddedi's analytical study, Beyond Dogma: Rumi's Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012.