ABOUT THIS EDITION

The Alchemy of Happiness (Kimiya-yi Sa’adat) is Al-Ghazali’s own Persian abridgment of his monumental Ihya-ul-ulum (“Revival of the Religious Sciences”), written in the eleventh century. This edition reproduces Claud Field’s English translation, first published in 1909 in the “Wisdom of the East” series. The translation entered the public domain in the United States after its copyright expired, and the text used here is drawn from the public-domain digital edition maintained by the Internet Sacred Text Archive (sacred-texts.com).

This Hidden Lantern edition reproduces Field’s translation in full. A small number of evident scanning errors in the source digitization — a handful of misread words and stray punctuation marks, none affecting meaning — have been silently corrected. Original page-number references from the 1909 printing have been removed for reflowable digital reading, and footnotes have been renumbered and converted into linked endnotes at the close of each chapter (the original book numbered footnotes per printed page, which does not carry over to a reflowable format). Typesetting is in Literata, a typeface designed for sustained on-screen reading.

Hidden Lantern publishes public-domain works of classical Sufi spirituality — Al-Ghazali, Rumi, Ibn Arabi, and their circle — as new print and ebook editions.