ABOUT THIS EDITION

Rabi’a the Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam is Margaret Smith’s 1928 biography and sourcebook on Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya al-Qaysiyya of Başra, the earliest and most celebrated woman saint of Islam, together with her own critical survey of the Arabic, Persian, and European sources and an account of the wider place of women among the saints of Islam. First published by Cambridge University Press in 1928, the book has been in the public domain in the United States since 1 January 2024. The text used here is drawn from the public-domain digitization of the University of Michigan Library’s copy, made available by HathiTrust (catalog record 001924413).

This Hidden Lantern edition reproduces Smith’s text in full, including her substantial critical essay “Survey of Sources” and the closing “List of Authors Quoted”, with the following changes made for a reflowable digital edition. Unlike this series’ other titles, the scanned source gave no typographic distinction between Smith’s footnotes and her main narrative — both were run together in a single continuous text stream, page by page. Each chapter’s footnotes have been identified from their position and citation style, separated out, renumbered, and converted into linked endnotes at the close of the chapter in which they occur; nothing has been abridged or omitted in the process, since Smith’s footnotes here are themselves a running work of comparative-religion scholarship, drawing constantly on Christian mystics such as St Bernard, St John of the Cross, Ruysbroeck, and von Hügel. A small number of footnotes broken across a page boundary in the scan have been rejoined by hand; in the rare case where a break fell in a way that could not be reconstructed with confidence, the quotation has been closed at the last clearly legible point rather than completed by guesswork. Original page-number references have been removed throughout. Diacritical marks in Smith’s transliteration of Arabic and Persian names and terms survived the scan fairly well, but inconsistently — the same word often appears with and without its marks, or with different marks, from one occurrence to the next; this edition normalizes each recurring name and term to a single consistent spelling (for instance, “Rabi’a”, “Şūfī”, and “Başra” throughout, rather than the several variant renderings found in the scan). The three back-of-book indices (Proper Names and Titles, Subjects, and Technical Terms), which are keyed to the page numbers of the 1928 printing, have been omitted, following this series’ standard practice for page-indexed reference material that cannot carry over to a reflowable format. Three severely scrambled chapter-opening passages, disrupted in the scan by decorative drop-cap initials, have been reconstructed from context and cross-checked against the surrounding text; a small number of other evident scanning errors, none affecting meaning, have been silently corrected. 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.