William Chittick, PhD, discovered Rumi during his junior year at the American University of Beirut. In 1966, he enrolled at the University of Tehran, where he completed a doctorate in Persian literature with a dissertation on Jami, a fifteenth-century follower of Ibn Arabi, the greatest of the mystical philosophers. During the 12 years he was in Iran, leaving right before the revolution, he studied Sufism and Islamic philosophy with a number of different teachers and taught comparative religion at a technical university. In 1983 he joined the religious studies program at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, where he has continued to teach. Among his many books are The Sufi Path of Love, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, Me & Rumi, The Heart of Islamic Philosophy, and Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God.