About This Edition

Written in Persian in the middle of the eleventh century, the Kashf al-Maḥjúb is the earliest formal treatise on Sufism to survive. Its author, ‘Alí b. ‘Uthmán al-Jullábí al-Hujwírí, travelled for forty years across the Islamic world and, by his own account, met more than three hundred masters of the Way. He died at Lahore around 1072, where his tomb remains a place of pilgrimage and where he is known as Dátá Ganj Bakhsh.

Reynold A. Nicholson (1868–1945), Lecturer in Persian at Cambridge, translated the work from the Lahore edition, compared with manuscripts in the India Office and the British Museum. It appeared in 1911 as Volume XVII of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series. It remains the standard English translation.

This Hidden Lantern edition has been newly typeset. The translator’s own published corrections and additions have been incorporated into the text where he directed. Two of his notes were observations rather than instructions, concerning the kunya of Núrí and a conjecture about the word sháhmurghí; the text at those places has been left as he printed it. Nicholson’s footnotes are preserved in full and gathered as linked endnotes.

Cross-references in the text and notes, in the form “(p. 166)”, refer to the pagination of the 1911 edition and not to this one.

The transliteration follows Nicholson throughout, with one regularisation: he occasionally set the letter ẓá with a line below rather than a dot, and these have been brought into line with his usual practice. The publisher’s advertisement for the Gibb Memorial Series and the index to the 1911 pagination have been omitted.