Rawan Farhadi (b. 1929) received Sufi knowledge from his father, Abdul Baqi, who was a teacher of Persian literature and a disciple in the Naqshbandi Sufi tradition in Kabul, Afghanistan. Rawan's native language is Dari Persian and he had a talent for learning other languages. He studied at the University of Paris with Louis Massignon (1950-55), where he received his Ph. D. He spent years studying and editing classical Persian Sufi poetry. He also studied the history of Persian language with Emile Benveniste. And he knew and exchanged views about Rumi' s's poetry with such well-known Rumi scholars as Salahuddin Saljuqi, Khalilullah Khalili (both of Afghanistan), and Badi' uzzaman Foruzanfar (of Iran, who traveled from Tehran to Kabul on many occasions). In addition, he knew and helped É va de Vitray-Meyerovitch, the translator of Rumi's works into French, starting in 1952, when he was a graduate student in Paris. He taught Persian Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, then at the University of California in Berkeley (for five years) and then at the International Islamic Institute of the Islamic University of Malaysia (for one year). He also had a career as a diplomat (from 1958-1978, during which he was the Afghan Ambassador to France in 1973). He also was the Afghan Ambassador to the United Nations (1993-2006, representing the Northern Alliance). He is the author of Abdullah Ansari of Herat: An Early Sufi Master (1996, edited by Ibrahim Gamard). He is retired and lives in Northern California. Ibrahim Gamard is a psychologist by profession and received his Ph.D. in 1986. He has been a student of Sufism for over forty years and has been affiliated with the Mevlevi [Mawlawi] tradition of Islamic Sufism (the 700-year-old tradition which originated with Rumi himself) since 1976. In 2007, he was made a Mevlevi Shaykh, or authorized teacher, by the 22nd generation direct descendent of Rumi and the international leader of the Mevlevi tradition. Ibrahim's Mevlevi spiritual teacher, Sefik Can (1909-2005) was very learned in the Persian of Rumi and also translated the quatrains (into Turkish, 1991). Ibrahim began teaching himself to read classical/medieval Persian starting in 1981, for the sole purpose of studying Rumi's poetry. He began posting his (fairly literal) translations of Rumi's verses on the Internet in 1997 and a few years later he put these, as well as many related articles, on his website: www.dar-al-masnavi.org. His other website (masnavi.net, since 2015) contains Rumi's entire Masnavi. He is the author of Rumi and Islam: Selections from His Stories, Poems, and Discourses (2004) and the editor and co-author (with Hu] lya Ku] ç u] k) of Sultan Walad: In the Footsteps of Rumi and Shams (2022). He is retired and lives in Northern California.