Elif Shafak is one of Turkey’s most acclaimed and outspoken novelists

Sources 
While writing this novel I benefited greatly from my readings of the Mathnawi by R. A. 
Nicholson and The Autobiography of Shams-ı Tabrizi by William Chittick. I am indebted to the 
works of William Chittick, Coleman Barks, İdris Shah, Kabir Helminski, Camille Helminski, 
Refik Algan, Franklin D. Lewis, and Annemarie Schimmel. 
The poems by Rumi were from the following sources: 
William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love, Albany: State University of New York, 1983 
Coleman Barks, A Year with Rumi, New York: Harper Collins, 2006, and The Essential Rumi, 
1995 
Kabir Helminski, The Rumi Collection, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2005 
Poems by Omar Khayyám from Richard Le Gallienne’s translation as found on 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyám
 
Of the two translations of the verse Nisa, the first is by M. H. Shakir (The Qur’an, translated by 
M. H. Shakir, 1993), the second is by Ahmed Ali (Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation, 
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)