Antoszewska sees the exhibit as a goodwill ambassador for 'another side of what Islam has to offer.'

The new century's loaded religious politics have raised the exhibit's stakes and added a geocultural dimension to what might otherwise have been a merely aesthetic experience. 'It would be like basing your impression of Christianity on the Inquisition,' Antoszewska said of Islam's notoriety in the West. For most of us, the injustice is academic, but for Sufis and other Muslims, the widespread stereotypes and caricatures are a renewable source of frustration. The post-9/11 culture of fear and thinly veiled xenophobia has spawned pervasive misrepresentations of Islam throughout the media and the public discourse. Middle Eastern culture, and particularly Islam, can be touchy topics these days, for obvious reasons. 'It's a great introduction to a different culture.' 'The dervishes just turn - they're not particularly expressive - but the sema really seems to mesmerize and move people,' Reza Antoszewska, the exhibit's curator and one of its contributing artists, said during a recent interview at her North Street studio. 8, nine days before the annual sema in Turkey. Over its two-month span, the exhibit will include two workshops in ebru printmaking - one each for children and adults - as well as a performance of traditional and improvisational music by the Euphony Groove Trio tomorrow evening at 7 and an informal sema on Dec. The exhibit features the beadwork, paintings and ebru (a Turkish printmaking technique with roots in the ancient Far East) monoprints of seven American women inspired by Rumi and Sufism, a general term for mystic Islam. In a nod to the Year of Rumi, the Lichtenstein Center, Pittsfield's community arts center and public gallery space at 28 Renne Ave., will be celebrating the poet and contributing to the yearlong commemoration with 'In the Realm of Rumi,' a multimedia, four-event exhibit dedicated to his work and to broader mystic Islam that begins with an opening reception this afternoon at 5 and runs through Jan. We're all guilty of blithely massacring the reference, but any one of us would recognize a true whirling dervish if we saw one - which we'll have the chance to do next month. Though his poetry is widely read, Rumi's most enduring legacy may come in the form of the whirling dervish ritual - the 'sema' - with which his disciples remembered him after his death on Dec. His most famous work, the epic 'Mathnawi' ('Spiritual Couplets'), sometimes referred to as 'the Persian Koran,' began as an ode to his probably murdered mentor, Shams-e Tabrizi, but evolved into an epiphanic six-volume verse through which he developed and taught his guiding philosophy. Rumi's poetry focuses on the soul's yearning to reunify with its creator (and vice-versa). English translations of his work have sold over a half-million American copies in the last 10 years, outpacing any other poet and proving that the cult of Rumi is alive and well in the United States. The BBC has labeled Rumi (1207-1273) - a Persian Muslim who spent most of his life in Konya, Anatolia (modern Turkey), to which he had fled the Mongol invasions of his native Khorasan (in modern Afghanistan) - 'America's most popular poet,' an impressive, if poorly sourced, superlative for a country with a proud ethnocentric streak. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is responsible for the latter designation, the first of its kind, which honors the Sufi poet Jellauddin Rumi's 800th birthday on Sept.

But you almost certainly didn't know that it's also the Year of Rumi (don't worry, neither did I). If you keep abreast of such things, you probably know that 2007 is the Year of the Boar.

Shams tabrizi birthday