Rawan Farhadi (b. 1929) received Sufi knowledge from his father, Abdul Baqi, a disciple in the Naqshbandi Sufi Tradition in Kabul, Afghanistan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris and spent years studying and editing classical Persian Sufi poetry. He knew and exchanged views with several well-known Rumi scholars, such as Salahuddin Saljuqi, and translator É va de Vitray-Meyerovitch. He taught Persian Literature at three universities, was the Afghan Ambassador to France in 1973 and to the UN from 1993-2006, and is the author of Abdullah Ansari of Herat: An Early Sufi Master. Ibrahim Gamard received his Ph.D. in 1986. He has studied Sufism for over forty years and has been affiliated with the Mevlevi tradition of Islamic Sufism (which originated with Rumi himself) since 1976. He taught himself to read classical Persian for the purpose of studying Rumi's poetry, and in 2007, he was made a Mevlevi Shaykh. Many of his translations of Rumi's verses are on his website: www.dar-al-masnavi.org. He is the author of Rumi and Islam: Selections from His Stories, Poems, and Discourses (2004) and editor and co-author of Sultan Walad: In the Footsteps of Rumi and Shams (2022).