Jalāleddin Mohammad Rumi is a 13th century Persian mystical (Sufi) poet and thinker, among the most renowned in the West. His fame is due both to the immense size of his poetry work, which comprises Masnavi-e ma’navi and Divān-e Šams e Tabrizi, and a relatively recent popular demand in English-speaking North America for his spiritually inspiring poetry. Translating Rumi cannot be devoid of political implications given the topical character of transcultural relations between Western societies and the Islamic world as well as the complexity of Rumi’s eclectic thought, subject to controversy within the orthodox paradigm of Islam. As a result, multiple examples can be cited of the interference between political, ideological, and poetic instances in the process of transferring Rumi’s message into European languages. This article shows how ideology interferes with the operation of translation in light of ethical, sociolinguistic and hermeneutic theories of translation, and presents some notable occurrences of this intervention. Among the cases examined are suspicions of antisemitism arising from the English translation of an allegorical story of Masnavi, the intervention of some political institutions to annex the Persian thinker to the Turkish culture, and the Islamising tendencies of certain translators and specialists of Rumi who attempt, through their commentaries, to associate the author’s universal thought with the central doctrine of Islam.