THE NEW MASNAVI WEBSITE, WWW.MASNAVI.NET

IS NOW LIVE AND ACTIVATED ON THE INTERNET FOR ANYONE AND EVERYONE TO USE!

It contains the entire Persian text of the Masnavi plus complete line by line translations in English and Turkish, with word-search capacity in all three languages.

Praise and thanks be to God! Al-hamdu li-llâh! Ash-shukru li-llâh!

There will continue to be a need for the help of volunteers and donations.

In my view, masnavi.net is one of the most important contributions to Masnavi studies in my lifetime. I feel greatly blessed to have been invited several months ago to be a consultant to the Project Manager (who wishes to remain anonymous and who has been developing the website for more than a year).

This website has great potential for improvements and expansion in the future.

New features recently added: (1) keyboard directions ("Quick guide to Navigating the Poem") added to the top of each page; (2) if Persian or English or Turkish text only is selected, when a particular verse is highlighted and the Tab key is clicked, a drop box will appear containing the verse in another (pre-selected) language; (3) if the reader closes the website, the last page of the website visited will appear the next time the website is opened.

As stated before, there are currently Persian audio files for the first 111 verses of Book 1 on the website, with audio for each verse started and stopped by the space bar. At present, this only works for one verse at a time; it is planned to change this to continuous audio, started and stopped by the space bar. And the goal is (with the help of volunteers) to have Persian audio files for each of the 25,000 verses of Masnavi on the website--God willing, inshâ' 'llâh.

For further details, please read the About section on the website, as well my article:

http://dar-al-masnavi.org/masnavi.net.html

İbrahim Gamard