Jawid Mojaddedi is Professor of Religion at Rutgers University and the Chair of the department. His area of research is early and medieval Sufi literature. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and raised from the age of five in Great Britain, he completed his studies at the University of Manchester, receiving his Ph.D. in 1998. He served for two years as Assistant Editor for Encyclopaedia Iranica at Columbia Univesity, before taking up his current position at Rutgers

Professor Mojaddedi began his research with a focus on early Sufi historiography, which culminated in the publication of his book The Biographical Tradition in Sufism: The Tabaqat Genre from al-Sulami to Jami (Routledge, 2001). This study focused on the function of works of Sufi historiography for their compilers while also tracing the biographies of Abu Yazid al-Bastami (d. 874) and Abu l-Qasim al-Junayd (d. 910) within such works.

In more recent years, he has become primarily known for his work on Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) because of the global popularity of the poetry of this Sufi Master. Since the publication of his verse translation of Rumi’s The Masnavi: Book One for Oxford Word’s Classics, which was awarded the Lois Roth Prize for translation of Persian Literature in 2005, he has been working toward completing the six books of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s magnum opus. Books Two, Three, Four and Five have already been published, and Book Six, the final volume, is scheduled to be released in September 2025. This project has been supported by a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (2015) and a Humanities Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2020).

Professor Mojaddedi has also published a research monograph on the teachings of Rumi, entitled Beyond Dogma:Rumi’s Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories (Oxford, 2012). In this study, he contextualizes Rumi’s teachings on Friendship with God (walaya), which is central to his mystical vision, within the historical tradition of Sufism. At the same time he presents a theory for the development of Sufi theoretical writings from the earliest sources to the thirteenth century with a special consideration of the temporary harmonizing efforts between the 10th and 11th centuries.

Professor Mojaddedi has also co-edited several volumes, including the following volumes with the late Norman Calder and the late Andrew Rippin: Classical Islam:A Sourcebook of Religions Literature (Routledge, 2004; 2nd edn 2013) and The Wiley Companion to the Qur’an, 2nd edition (Wiley, 2017).