Jawid Mojaddedi

Jawid Mojaddedi is an Afghan researcher and professor.

Mojaddedi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. At age five, along with his mother and brother, he moved to Great Britain. He lived in several British cities and towns, including Glasgow, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Westcliff-on-Sea and Exeter.

During the 1990s, Jawid Mojaddedi attended University of Manchester, where he earned his BA and PhD in Middle Eastern Studies.

He graduated from the University of Manchester. He then worked as a full-time faculty member of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, where he taught Arabic and Islamic Studies.

In 1998, Jawid moved from Great Britain to the United States. He worked at Columbia University for two years as an editor of Encyclopædia Iranica. He began teaching at Rutgers University in 2003. He is Chair of the Department of Religion there and a former director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Mojaddedi is known worldwide as a Rumi expert. His published books include translations of Rumi's longest poem, known as the Masnavi, into simple English. The Masnavi: Book One was published in 2004 and was awarded the Lois Roth Prize for excellence in translation of Persian literature by the American Institute of Iranian Studies. He continued with The Masnavi: Book Two in 2007, The Masnavi: Book Three in 2013 and The Masnavi: Book Four in 2017. All four volumes were published as Oxford World's Classics Editions. This project has been supported by a literature translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2015. Mojaddedi was also awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2018 to support the progress of this project.

Mojaddedi's analytical study, Beyond Dogma: Rumi's Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012.