RUMI FESTIVAL FEATURES FRIEDLANDER FILM

The work of Shems Friedlander, a close associate of the Adham Center, dominated the Rumi Festival that was co-sponsored by the Performing and Visual Arts Department (PVA) and the Adham Center early on in the spring 2002 semester. The festival, which was a two-day affair, honored the great Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, whose translated poems are now the most popular, best-selling poetry in the United States and whose work has inspired an interest in Islamic mysticism among hundreds of thousands of readers in the West.

In particular it was Friedlander's documentary film, "Rumi: The Wings of Love," screened on the first night at the Falaki Main Stage which was the centerpiece of the festival. Friedlander was the writer, producer and director of the film, which premiered at the Parabola film festival in the USA only a few months before this screening in Cairo and has more recently been selected and screened at the Damah Film Festival in Seattle. It was in recognition of his work on this film that Friedlander received this past summer the first Sony Broadcast Filmmakers Award, given to promising documentary filmmakers or video journalists.

Prior to the screening Friedlander was joined by Cairo's famous storyteller, Chirine El-Ansary, and his fellow American poets Daniel Abd Al-Hayy Moore and S. Abdallah Schleifer in a reading of selections from Rumi's poetry. El-Ansary, whose reading dramatized several tales from Rumi's "Mathnawi," has performed extensively in Europe and the Middle East. Her best known reading performances are from her own versions of the Arabian Nights, and she was one of the first artists to perform in the restored Islamic monuments of the Zeinab Khatoun quarter in back of Al-Azhar; those performances were instrumental in the subsequent revival of this quarter as a center for the performing arts.

The following night Friedlander appeared with Moore and Schleifer at a reading of Sufi poetry in honor of Jalaluddin Rumi at Oriental Hall. This was Moore's second visit to Cairo. His first book of poems "Dawn Visions" was published by City Lights Books in San Francisco in 1964. Since then he has published five more books of poems - most recently the Ramadan Sonnets and The Blind Beekeeper. Moore's attachment to Rumi's work is apparent in his own credo as a poet: "For me the province of poetry is a private ecstasy made public, and the social role of the poet is to display moments of shared universal epiphanies capable of healing our sense of moral estrangement - from ourselves, from each other, from our source, from our destiny, from the Divine."

S. Abdallah Schleifer, like Moore, began publishing as a young Beat poet in the late fifties and early sixties. He also edited a journal of literary and social criticism, Kulchur, in the early sixties, described as "the house organ of the Beat Generation," and more generously by the New York poet Gil Sorrentino as "one of the finest little magazines to be published in America." After a hiatus of more than two decades and an adventurous career as a war correspondent and TV news bureau chief before joining the AUC faculty, Schleifer resumed writing poetry, much of it mystical and some of which he read in honor of Jalaluddin Rumi.

But it is Shems Friedlander who could quite possibly be AUC's own Renaissance Man. Besides reading some of his own poems, recently published in the collection "Poems and Other Works," Friedlander also provided the still photos for the Sony Gallery show "The Garden of the Dervishes" which was part of the Festival; the gallery opening preceded the reading of Sufi poetry. The exhibit included photographs of the modern-day Whirling Dervishes, disciples of Rumi, and many of these photographs had originally appeared in Friedlander's best-known book about Rumi and his disciples, "The Whirling Dervishes." Friedlander is also an award winning graphic designer and he heads up the Apple Center for Graphic Communications. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries in the United States and more recently at the Ewart Hall gallery here at AUC.

THE EDITORS