ABOUT THIS EDITION

Awarif-ul-Ma’arif (“A Manual of Sufism”) is Lieut.-Col. H. Wilberforce Clarke’s 1891 English translation, made in Calcutta, of the Persian Misbahu-l-Hidayat — itself a Persian rendering, by Mahmud bin ‘Ali al-Kashani, of the Arabic ‘Awarifu-l-Ma’arif of Shaikh Shahabu-d-Din ‘Umar bin Muhammad-i-Suhrawardi (1145–1234). Clarke’s translation, the first of this work into English, has long been in the public domain, and the text used here is drawn from the public-domain digitization of the original 1891 Calcutta printing held by the Internet Archive (archive.org).

This Hidden Lantern edition reproduces Clarke’s translation in full, with the following changes made for a reflowable digital edition. The original diacritical marks used throughout Clarke’s transliteration of Arabic and Persian terms (macrons, dots, and other marks distinguishing letters such as long vowels, h vs. ḥ, s vs. ṣ) did not survive the source scan and could not be reliably reconstructed; all transliterated terms are therefore given here in plain, unmarked Latin letters. Footnotes, originally numbered per printed page, have been renumbered and converted into linked endnotes at the close of each chapter. Original page-number references from the 1891 printing have been removed. The translator’s prefatory table of authorities on Sufism (English and Persian sources, pp. iv–v of the original) has been omitted, as a page-based table of this kind does not carry over to a reflowable format; the original text of that table is preserved in this edition’s production archive. A small number of evident scanning errors in the source digitization — misread words and stray punctuation, none affecting meaning — have been silently corrected; a handful of short passages too damaged in the source scan to render reliably are marked as such where they occur. 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.