ABOUT THIS EDITION

Studies in Islamic Mysticism is Reynold A. Nicholson’s 1921 study of three landmark figures and texts of classical Sufism: the Persian saint Abú Sa‘íd ibn Abi ’l-Khayr, the doctrine of the Perfect Man (al-insánu ’l-kámil) expounded by ‘Abdu ’l-Karím al-Jílí, and the mystical odes of the Egyptian poet Ibnu ’l-Fáriḍ, including his celebrated Wine Ode, in which wine and intoxication serve as a traditional Sufi metaphor for the rapture of divine love — a convention comparable to the erotic imagery of the Song of Solomon, not a literal endorsement of drinking. The book entered the public domain long ago, 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 Nicholson’s text in full, including his own translations of the Persian and Arabic originals. Original page-number references from the 1921 printing have been removed for reflowable digital reading. Nicholson’s footnotes in this book consist almost entirely of dense academic citation apparatus — manuscript references, textual variants, and cross-citations to other Orientalist scholarship — running to hundreds of notes across the three studies; since virtually all of the substantive explanation he offers is already present in his main text, this edition omits the citation apparatus in favour of clean, continuous prose. The back-of-book indices (of names, subjects, and technical terms), which are keyed to the original printed pagination, have likewise been omitted, as they do 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.