She was lying on the divan, a large tray of cigarette stubs beside her.

Of the two, the Ottoman Divan poetry, a highly ritualized and symbolic art form, was the dominant stream.

I sometimes think it's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan.

Among the tens of thousands of verses attributed to Rumi, some 44,000 verses are collected in two epic books named Divan e Shams e Tabrizi (his ghazals, love and mystic poems) written in honour of his friend, and some 25,000 are collected in Mathnawi Ma nawi (lines of wisdom).