A Note on the Text

This edition reprints the English of Reynold A. Nicholson's The Mystics of Islam, published in London by G. Bell and Sons Ltd. in 1914 as a volume in the Quest Series edited by G. R. S. Mead. The work is in the public domain in the United States, having been published before 1929, and in the United Kingdom and Europe, Nicholson having died in 1945.

What this edition contains. The complete text: Mead's editor's note, Nicholson's introduction, the six chapters and his bibliography. Nothing of Nicholson's text has been abridged. The thirty-one footnotes are Nicholson's own; they are presented here as endnotes at the close of each chapter, linked in both directions in the digital editions so that a note can be reached and left without losing the place.

The source. The text was set from the Project Gutenberg edition (ebook 67388), produced by Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team from scans held by the Internet Archive. That text has passed through several independent proofreading rounds against the page images, which is a materially different thing from a raw optical transcription, and it arrives with the Arabic ayn and hamza already distinguished as separate characters rather than collapsed into apostrophes.

What was checked. Every section was compared with the source character by character after conversion. The comparison reconciles exactly for all eleven sections: no word, mark of punctuation or diacritic was lost, altered or duplicated in the setting of this edition. Two faults were found and corrected during preparation, both introduced by the conversion rather than present in the source: thirteen footnote references standing inside verse quotations and one inside a chapter subheading were at first not linked to their notes, and a check for stray typesetting marks returned false matches that were verified rather than acted on.

Transliteration. Nicholson's own transliterations are retained exactly as he set them, including his long vowels and his use of the ayn and hamza. No attempt has been made to modernise his system or to make it consistent with present-day scholarly convention; where he is inconsistent, so is this edition.

The index. Nicholson's index has been omitted. Its eight hundred and fifty-four page references are to the 1914 printing, and this edition is set to a different measure, so they no longer point where they claim: the divergence grows through the book and reaches twenty-eight pages in the closing chapters. An index that sends a reader to the wrong page is worse than no index, and correcting it would mean rewriting Nicholson's own apparatus, so it has been left out. The complete text is searchable in the digital editions.