“Jerusalem and its surrounding areas are already the land of Prophets and Saints. I was in Jerusalem last November. My intention was to experience the Qisas al-Anbiya and Süleyman Dede’s Mawlid hagiography. I wanted to pray two rak'ahs of prayer, just as Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa did, in the place where he led the “spirits of the Prophets” in prayer…

Not daring to climb the slope, I looked left and right, and a bookstore window drew me in. Before long, I was inside this bookstore, wandering step by step until I stopped in front of an English book. Its name was: THE PROPHET!

Before leafing through the book, I looked at the name of its author. He was a Near Easterner. I looked inside the book. It had been printed in New York. And forty-four times!

Today, I too could be in the company of a Prophet, and no one else could satisfy me!... We were face to face with the Prophet. We sat and talked… I listened to the Prophet by reading it from beginning to end, and I rejoiced. Because I had found a book that expressed everything I held within, manifesting it and stating it clearly. And the name of this book was “The Prophet”! But was the hero of this book truly a Prophet? It did not seem so to me. For more accurately, he was a Saint, one of the Righteous Ones (Hak Erenler). And the language he used was the very language of the Saints. But how beautifully he had used this language! And how beautifully he had said what he wanted to say with it! In every subject he touched, he was a Saint who made the soul speak with all its purity and sincerity, making the subject speak with the language of nature...

Who is this Saint? An Easterner like us!.. This Saint is like Rumi, like Attar, like Sa'di, and especially like Rumi. He is a fruit born in Rumi’s garden, plucked from his garden. He is an arrow he cast from the East to the West. And that arrow has found its mark and fulfilled its duty…

I decided to translate this work into Turkish exactly on that Night of Mi'raj, and I translated thirty or forty pages in one breath. Because the work was the essential expression of my soul. And it was as if this work had been born within our hearts and minds just as it had been born within the mind and heart of its author. There was such familiarity between us that I was writing as if I were translating without even looking at the original work. Because this work was a new expression of the Masnavi. Or rather, the Masnavi of today. It, too, like the Masnavi, was a cascade of our soul.” (Ömer Rıza Doğrul)