Thirteenth of the implications, and the second column. What the traditions knew assembled seven contemplative traditions; the western column added the esoteric West. Both skipped the middle. This is the Islamic material — not “Sufism” as one thing, but named texts, named authors, named centuries: a Quran commentary of the twelfth, a Persian manual of the eleventh, an autobiography of the twelfth, a definitions dictionary of the fifteenth, a teaching poem of the thirteenth. It is the tradition this series has quoted least, and the one with the most precise vocabulary for the failure at the centre of it.
Status. This post presents primary-source passages found via Source Library, a library of AI-translated historical texts, as the traditions post did. The translations are machine-generated and I have not checked them against the originals; the reading of them through this series’ model is my interpretation, not the texts’. The cosmology is not endorsed — this post is about what the tradition recorded, and §10 says plainly what it is not. Content is CC-BY-SA-4.0 (attribution: Source Library).
On the quotations below. The passages from Source Library are reproduced under CC-BY-SA-4.0, with attribution to Source Library and a link to the source page for each. That licence and its share-alike term travel with the quoted passages; the post’s own prose is separate from them.
The traditions post listed seven traditions with no contact between them, and the western column made the set eight. Neither went to the middle. That gap is not a completeness problem. It matters because the Islamic material is the one body of practice this series has found that gives the failure-which-looks-like-success a word of its own — not a description, not a warning, but a term with a definition, a Quranic root, a commentary tradition, and a place in the technical vocabulary of the path.
The mechanism post argued that the collapse is recoded as attainment because the state cannot report itself and whoever stands on the far side supplies the appraisal. The claim of this post is narrow: a tradition of practitioners wrote that sentence down, centuries ago, and gave it a name. Everything below is that name and its surrounds — what the sources say, and where the mapping to this series’ model is the post’s own inference.
One boundary first, because it binds throughout. This post describes texts and structures, and names the authors of those texts. It does not describe Islam, Muslims, or “Sufism” as a single thing — the material below spans six centuries and four languages (Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and an English translation of an Arabic travelogue), and the texts argue with each other about exactly the practices discussed here. Where a source condemns a practice, the condemnation is the source’s, quoted as a document of the tradition’s self-scrutiny, not this post’s verdict on any practitioner.
Start with the Quranic root, because the tradition itself starts there. Al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1144), commenting on the verse “We will lead them step by step from where they do not know” (Q 7:182), glosses the term istidrāj — from daraja, a step, a degree — and states the mechanism:
The meaning of “We will lead them step-by-step” is: We will draw them closer, little by little, to that which destroys them and doubles their punishment, “from where they do not know” what is intended for them. This occurs when God makes His blessings follow one another for them despite their immersion in error. Every time He renews a blessing for them, they increase in arrogance and renew a sin. Thus, they are led on in sins because of the succession of blessings, thinking that the succession of blessings is a mark of God’s favor and drawing near, while it is actually a forsaking from Him and a pushing away.1
Read that last clause against the model and the correspondence is exact — so exact it needs marking as the post’s reading, not the commentator’s. The mechanism post’s finding is that the collapsed state is recoded as attainment from outside: the state cannot report itself, so the appraisal arrives from whoever holds the frame. Al-Zamakhsharī’s structure is the same shape applied at the scale of a life: the signals read as approval are the very mechanism of the loss, and the person cannot tell from inside, because the inside reading is precisely what has been captured. And the tradition’s term for it is not “punishment” or “trial” but istidrāj — being led on, degree by degree, while believing oneself to be advancing. The blog’s sentence and the commentator’s word are the same finding, a millennium apart.
The term then enters the technical vocabulary, and picks up a definition pitched directly at the practitioner. Al-Jurjānī’s dictionary of the path’s terms (d. 1413), cited in a lexicon of the terminology of Ibn Qaṣī’s twelfth-century Khalʿ al-Naʿlayn, defines karāma — the “miraculous grace” — and immediately gives its failure mode:
“The appearance of an extraordinary matter through a person that is not accompanied by a claim to prophethood. If it is not joined with faith and righteous deeds, it is a gradual luring toward destruction (istidrāj) […].”2
That is a one-sentence falsification procedure for the exact experience a practitioner is least able to doubt. An extraordinary event happens. The tradition’s rule: the event itself carries no information about its source. The test is whether it is joined with the ethical life — and the test is external to the experience. The Qushayrī treatise (eleventh century) puts the same discrimination inside a saying it records of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Sayyārī:
“His giving is of two types: generosity and gradual drawing-on (istidrāj). So, what He keeps with you is generosity, and what He removes from you is gradual drawing-on.”3
The same gift, two species, indistinguishable from inside — and the tradition supplies a verbal hedge (“say: I am a believer, if God wills”) rather than a self-diagnosis. That is the sensor-destroyed-by-the-failure-it-detects problem, stated as a practice: the practitioner is told to speak as one who does not know, because the tradition has concluded that the practitioner’s own read of his state is not a reliable instrument.
And al-Hujwīrī (eleventh century) extends it from the person to the false teacher. In the Kashf al-Maḥjūb, extraordinary acts performed by pretenders to godship “fall under the principle of Divine deception (istidráj)” — Pharaoh’s four hundred years, the water following him uphill — and the point of the acts is not to prove the impostor but to expose him:
“one who falsely pretends to be an apostle may perform an extraordinary act, which proves him an impostor, just as a similar act performed by a true apostle proves him genuine. But no such act can be performed if there be any possibility of doubt or any difficulty in distinguishing the true claimant from the impostor.”4
The extraordinary act is not evidence of attainment. In al-Hujwīrī’s structure it can be evidence of the opposite — and the tradition’s confidence that the two can always be told apart is itself a safeguard: it licenses the community to read a wonder against its performer, which is exactly the read the western column’s fake-Secret-Chiefs case had no procedure for.
Around the word sit two named vices, and the naming is the point — these are technical terms of the path’s own moral anatomy, not adjectives.
ʿUjb — vanity, self-satisfaction with one’s own state. Al-Ghazālī’s Minhāj al-ʿĀbidīn names it as one of the two blights that can undo a lifetime of practice in a moment:
“Showing off (riyāʾ) and vanity (ʿujb) are a great blight that occurs in a moment, perhaps spoiling seventy years of worship for you.”5
Kınalızāde Ali Çelebi’s Ahlāk-ı Alâʾî (sixteenth century) defines the mechanism of ghurūr — delusion — and locates it exactly where the model would predict: in a self-observation that cannot see its own blind spot:
“Generally, the cause of vanity is that the soul is aware of its own knowledge and perfection, but is heedless and ignorant of the perfection of others. This is a delusion. Because the perfections of the soul are known to it through presence … one’s knowledge of their own perfection is strong and their knowledge of another’s perfection is weak, they see their own perfection as complete.”6
That is a cognitive account of the inflation: the instrument is asymmetric — the self is measured by presence and others by report, so the self always wins the comparison. And the same text gives the practice consequence, in a passage about what spiritual guides do with a seeker’s experiences:
“This is why spiritual guides (murshids), when a seeker (sālik) presents a good vision, unveiling, or miracle, they deny it and say, ‘These are the lowest stations and the humblest of miracles.’ They do not say ‘bravo’ to the seeker so that his ego (nafs) does not become strong and fat.”6
Read that against the safeguards’ fifth column. The director’s job, on this account, is not to interpret the experience upward — it is to refuse to, on principle, and the refusal is given a reason: praise feeds the exact vice the path is trying to starve. The text even carries a cautionary miniature: a seeker reports a vision, the master praises it, “the seeker kissed the master’s knee. Immediately, he saw another vision: a black dog was touching and kissing his knee.” The next vision shows the dog the praise made.
That is the appraisal trap, named and dramatised inside the tradition. The experience arrives; the director’s office exists to supply an appraisal that does not recode it as attainment; and the tradition records what happens when a director fails at that office.
The traditions post found, in Tibetan Mahāmudrā, a taxonomy that keeps experience and realisation apart. The Islamic material has the same distinction, in different terms: the maqāmāt (stations) and the aḥwāl (states). Al-Suhrawardī’s Nuṣūṣ ishrāqiyya (twelfth century) defines both, and the definitions carry the whole discrimination:
“Know that a Station (maqām) for them is a ‘disposition.’ It is the ability to do something whenever desired without needing reflection or effort. The ‘difficulty of the State (ḥāl)’ refers to a perfection that is quick to vanish and not easily perceived.”7
A station is a stable disposition — the permanence is the criterion. A state is a perfection that vanishes. The taxonomy itself is a safeguard: it says that the moving, luminous, compelling thing the practitioner is in is the category that does not last, and the thing that lasts is a disposition, checkable by whether the conduct persists without effort. A tradition that maintains this filing system is a tradition that has watched people mistake the vanishing thing for the destination.
Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Futūḥāt (thirteenth century) supplies the same warning from the other side, and joins it directly to §2’s word. Contrasting “the people of graces” with “the people of stations,” the text says the people of the worlds remain hidden in their state “for the trickery and the istidrāj — gradual enticement/luring into destruction” — the graces themselves, unaccompanied by stations, being the entrapment.8 The reading of that elliptical chapter is the post’s, and the translation is machine-generated; but the junction it records — graces without stations = istidrāj — is the Jurjānī test of §2 restated in the vocabulary of §4.
The western column had Jung’s Red Book — a first-person descent, honestly kept. The central column has al-Ghazālī’s al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl (Deliverance from Error, c. 1108), and it is the most exact document of the failure this series has quoted, because the man kept records while it happened.
The crisis begins as an epistemic one — doubt spreading from the senses to reason itself — and then does the thing the mechanism post says it should do: it takes the body with it. In the English editions of the autobiography (quoted here from a 1909 bilingual edition and Macdonald’s 1912 study), the sequence is al-Ghazālī’s own:
“God caused an impediment to chain my tongue and prevented me from lecturing. Vainly I desired, in the interest of my pupils, to go on with my teaching, but my mouth became dumb. The silence to which I was condemned cast me into a violent despair; my stomach became weak; I lost all appetite; I could neither swallow a morsel of bread nor drink a drop of water. The enfeeblement of my physical powers was such that the doctors, despairing of saving me, said, ‘The mischief is in the heart, and has communicated itself to the whole organism.’”9
Two things are worth marking. First: the tradition’s own account does not medicalise the event away — the physicians are brought in, they fail, and al-Ghazālī keeps both the physical collapse and the spiritual reading in the same paragraph. Second: the resolution, when he records it, is not a proof:
“At length, God healed me of that disease, and my soul returned to health and balance; the necessary intellectual truths returned, accepted and certain. This did not happen by means of a proof or by any form of words, but by a light which God cast into my breast.”10
The post’s marking of that passage: it is quoted as what a text records. The light is al-Ghazālī’s own frame for his recovery, and this post does not endorse the frame — it notes the structure. The recovery is reported as given, not achieved; it arrives after the physician has failed; and the man who spent a book dismantling the certainty of the senses and reason is careful to say the restoration of certainty was not an argument. What the document gives the series is not a mysticism but a timeline: six months of escalating inward conflict, a somatic collapse the doctors could not treat, and a recovery the subject himself refuses to claim as his own work. That is the held-versus-unheld distinction, in the first person, nine centuries old.
Set the five safeguards of the safeguards post against this material and the correspondence is close — but here the safeguards are not a list beside the practice. They are the shape of the path itself.
Ethics first. The Jurjānī definition makes the ethical life the test attached to the experience: the extraordinary event is read by whether it is “joined with faith and righteous deeds.” The nafs-vocabulary of §3 — ʿujb, ghurūr, riyāʾ — is an ethics of the inward, and it is what the states are measured against. The ordering is the safeguard post’s first: the moral anatomy comes first, and the experiences are checked against it.
A metered pace. The maqām/aḥwāl distinction is a pacing structure: the states that come and go are explicitly not the stations one is established in, and no text in this set treats a state as a licence to skip. The Bayazid story below turns on the same metering — the man in the state is not the authority; the arrangement made before the state is.
A plural community and a bound teacher. This is where the material is strongest, and it comes as a story. Rūmī’s Masnavī (thirteenth century) retells the case of Bayazid Bastāmī’s ecstatic utterance — the shaykh who, in the state, declared “I am God Almighty” — and the arrangement he made for exactly that eventuality:
“Next morning, when his ecstatic state had passed, / They said, ‘You said so and so, which was impious.’ / He answered, ‘If I do so again, / Straightway slay me with your knives! / God is independent of me; I am in the body. / If I say that again you must kill me!’ / When that holy person had given this injunction, / Each of his disciples made ready his knife. / Again that overflowing cup became beside himself, / And his recent injunctions passed from his mind.”11
The poem continues: the disciples strike, and in the story’s own logic the blows turn on the strikers — Rūmī’s point is the opposite of a licence to violence, and the moral he draws is “the man in his senses fought with him beside himself, and thrust the thorn into his own eyes.”12 The structural finding, and the reason the story is quoted: the authority was installed while the practitioner was not in the state, against the time he would be. The state’s own testimony is discounted in advance, by the practitioner himself, in favour of an arrangement made in sobriety and held by others. That is the external-check safeguard (the fifth), the plural community (the third), and the teacher-pointing-past-himself (the fourth) — Bayazid’s own instruction makes his ecstatic self, not God and not himself-as-master, the thing to be checked.
The chain. The silsila — the chain of transmission — makes the teacher accountable to a line rather than to himself, and the sources record it as a literal chain. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (fourteenth century), receiving the cloak in a lodge in Isfahan, records the full succession: “he was clothed by his father, Shams al-Din; and he was clothed by his father, Taj al-Din Mahmud; and Mahmud was clothed by Abu Shihab al-Din Ali al-Raja … and Ali was clothed by Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd; and al-Junayd was clothed by Sari al-Saqati; and Sari al-Saqati was clothed by Dawud al-Ta’i; and Dawud was clothed by al-Hasan ibn Abi al-Hasan al-Basri; and al-Hasan … was clothed by the Commander of the Faithful, Ali ibn Abi Talib.”13 A chain is not a safeguard by existing — it is a safeguard because a teacher inside one has a past and a peer set his own words can be checked against. The same documents record the licence (ijāza) as the thing that makes teaching lawful: “He is the place of the ijāza — license to teach — and the baiʿa … that has met with the masters … a trust in religion.”14 To teach without the chain is, in the documents’ own terms, to have put oneself in the seat — the thing the empty leader post found at the centre of every predation case.
Discernment as procedure. The murshid-refusal of §3 is procedure: experiences are brought to the director, and the director’s standing instruction is deflation, not confirmation. Al-Hujwīrī’s audition rules make the director’s presence a condition of the practice itself: “It is necessary that a spiritual director should be present during the performance, and that the place should be cleared of common people…”15 The practice does not happen without the holder in the room.
The safeguard this material adds, which neither the eastern nor the western column states so sharply, is a boundary outside the path itself. The Persian Kashf al-Maḥjūb, in the passage on the Law and the Truth, states it as a mutual impossibility:
“the establishment of the Law without the existence of the Truth is impossible, and the establishment of the Truth without the preservation of the Law is impossible. … Likewise, the Law without the Truth is hypocrisy, and the Truth without the Law is deceit.”16
The verse-couplet tradition puts the same structure in an image — Shabistarī’s Gulshan-i Rāz (fourteenth century, Whinfield’s translation):
“The law is the husk, and the truth is the kernel, / The mystic path lies between this and that. / Error in the traveler’s path is the spoiling of the kernel, / When the kernel is ripe it is good without its husk.”17
The metaphysics is not this post’s concern. The structure is: the ecstatic truth is not permitted to declare itself independent of the lawful form — “the Truth without the Law is deceit” is the tradition’s own one-line verdict on the claim that a state has outgrown its boundaries. Against the model, this is the strongest structural safeguard of the set: a boundary the practitioner cannot move, held by a community and a law outside the practice, against exactly the claim a captured state would make — this is beyond the rules. The Gulshan’s own note that one class rests at fanāʾ “where the law no longer governs them” while the more perfect class returns “to sobriety after intoxication … fulfilling the law as an example to others” shows the tradition grading the same boundary-crossing claim and ranking return above it.17
Set the five safeguards beside the material and the correspondence is one-to-one, with one row weaker than the rest — marked accordingly.
| the safeguard | traditions & clinic | the central column |
|---|---|---|
| ethics first | the precepts bind the teacher | the Jurjānī test: the extraordinary is read by whether it is “joined with faith and righteous deeds”; ʿujb/ghurūr as named vices of the inward |
| metered pace | no skipping, graded | maqām (stable disposition) vs ḥāl (“a perfection that is quick to vanish”) — the taxonomy itself refuses the state as destination |
| plural community | not the group alone | Bayazid’s knives — the arrangement made in sobriety, held by the disciples; the director present as a condition of audition |
| the teacher points past himself (the post’s reading — see below) | apophatic refusal | the silsila and ijāza: the teacher accountable to a chain; to teach without it is to have “put oneself in the seat” |
| discernment as procedure | discretio spirituum | the murshid’s standing refusal (“the lowest stations”); istidrāj as a named, defined, Quran-rooted category of false progress |
The fourth row is the post’s reading. The sources state the chain and the licence; that a chain functions as the teacher-points-past-himself safeguard — by making him answerable to a line rather than his own claim — is the inference, offered as such. It is also the row where the material’s own record is most mixed: chains are documents, and documents can be forged or claimed; the sources themselves distinguish the licensed teacher from the pretender, which means the tradition knew the safeguard could be counterfeited.14
The one word the column adds that the others do not have. The eastern traditions named the failure; the western column graded it into a curriculum. The central column went further: it named the failure that looks like success as a category of providence, gave it a definition (istidrāj), a root (Q 7:182), a commentary, and a place in the dictionary of the path. A tradition that maintains that category is a tradition that has concluded, from its own case material, that progress-signs cannot be trusted from inside — and that their arrival can itself be the mechanism of loss.
The counterweights, in the body, as the series’ rule requires.
The istidrāj material is not about meditation collapse. Al-Zamakhsharī’s gloss is about sinners receiving blessings; al-Hujwīrī’s is about impostors; the Jurjānī definition is about extraordinary acts. None of the passages, read literally, is a warning to a practitioner in an altered state. The mapping — that the tradition’s category for being-led-on-while-believing-one-advances describes the same structure as the model’s appraisal trap — is this post’s inference, and it is the load-bearing inference of §2. What supports it is the convergence: the same word in a Quran commentary, a dictionary of the path, a manual for seekers, and a first-person collapse narrative, always with the same inside/outside asymmetry. What would not support it is any claim that the sources describe the collapse this series models — they do not; no passage contains a threshold, a fold, or a dynamics, and the traditions post’s limit applies unchanged: this is qualitative corroboration of the phenomenon’s features, not validation of the model.
The al-Ghazālī passage is a spiritual autobiography, not a case report. It is quoted as a document of what a tradition recorded about a collapse-and-recovery, not as evidence of what happened. The subject’s own frame — a light from God — is his, and the post does not adopt it.
“Sufism” is not one thing, and this material is not a survey. The texts span Baghdad to Banten, the eleventh century to the sixteenth, Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish, and they argue with each other — the Kashf al-Maḥjūb itself condemns whole schools of its own tradition by name. A set of ten texts is a reading, not a canon, and the selection is the post’s.
The Bayazid story is a poem, and it does not license what it describes. Rūmī’s own moral turns the blades on the strikers; the post quotes it for the arrangement, not for the knives. Any reading of it as a permission is a misreading of the passage the poem itself forecloses.
The Arabic alchemical and Hermetic material is not this column. The Islamic world also carried the Hermetic corpus, the Picatrix tradition, and the philosophical brotherhoods — and the blog has read the Picatrix as Western astrological magic, which is what the Latin transmission made of it. That line is Greek-through-Arabic: Hellenistic material preserved and translated in Arabic, not the operative esoteric tradition of Islam this post is about. The two circles touch — the traditions post quotes a Syriac ascetic text, and the Arabic Hermetica circulated in the same centuries as the Risāla — but nothing in this post’s sources is Hermetic, and nothing Hermetic is claimed for it. Where the two bodies differ is exactly where this column’s finding lives: the Hermetic-alchemical material is operator-craft, addressed to a worker who wants a result; the istidrāj material is addressed to a practitioner whose danger is mistaking the result for the goal. A tradition that writes that warning is not writing the same genre as the one that writes talisman operations.
This post does not describe Islam, Muslims, or any community. It names texts, authors and periods, and describes structures the texts record. Nothing here is a claim about any living practitioner, teacher or school — and the sources’ own ferocity about pretenders is a document of internal scrutiny, not an invitation to external judgement. The series’ rule stands: describe structures, diagnose no one.
The model is not an instrument. As the label post states, it must not be used to assess any individual, validate or disqualify anyone’s experience, or restrict anyone’s practice — least of all here, where the material is another tradition’s own self-description. A reader who took istidrāj as a test to apply to someone else’s spirituality would be doing exactly what the term itself warns against: supplying, from outside, an appraisal that recodes another person’s state.
The cosmology is bracketed. Whether the blessings of Q 7:182 are providence, whether the light was cast into a breast, whether the silsila reaches where it says it reaches — the post takes no position, and needs none. The finding is about recorded structures: a named failure category, a taxonomy that refuses the state as the goal, an office whose duty is deflation, a boundary that does not move, and a chain that makes the teacher answerable. Those are checkable in the texts, whatever one believes.
Seven eastern traditions, the clinical field, the western column, and now this one — the fourth body of practice. The test is the same each time: does the tradition, independently and in its own vocabulary, record the failure and build the countermeasures? The central column’s answer is the sharpest of the four, because it did not merely name the failure — it named the failure’s disguise. Istidrāj is the category of being led on while reading the leading as progress; ʿujb is the named vice of being satisfied with one’s own state; the maqām/ḥāl distinction files the compelling experience under “quick to vanish”; and the murshid’s standing instruction is to call the marvel “the lowest of stations.” A body of practice that writes all of that down, and grades the return to the law above the state that transcends it, is a body of practice that has watched the appraisal trap take people — and has built its whole shape against it.
The western column closed on the finding that the tradition that knew the most about the collapse trusted it least. The central column states the same finding one step earlier: the tradition that gave the failure-which-looks-like-success its own word had already decided, centuries ago, that the experience is not the evidence — and that the person having it is the last person qualified to read it.
Marking: quoted — every passage in §2–§7 is from the translation cited, located through Source Library (https://sourcelibrary.org), whose content is CC-BY-SA-4.0 (attribution: Source Library); the translations are AI-generated and unchecked against the originals. Interpretation — the mapping of istidrāj and the surrounding vocabulary onto this series’ model (§2’s reading of al-Zamakhsharī, §4’s reading of the Futūḥāt chapter, and the fourth row of §8) is the post’s inference, offered as one; the sources describe categories of providence and of the path, not the model’s dynamics, and no passage contains a threshold or a mechanism. Not claimed — any description of Islam, Muslims or any community as a class; any endorsement of the cosmology; any validation of the model by these texts.
Al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1144), al-Kashshāf (Quran commentary), on Q 7:182 — page 351 of the library scan. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/al-kashshaf-quran-commentary-al-zamakhshari↩︎
Al-Jurjānī’s Taʿrīfāt (Definitions), as cited in a modern scholarly lexicon of the terminology of Ibn Qaṣī’s Khalʿ al-Naʿlayn (the library’s companion glossary to that twelfth-century text) — p. 426. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/khal-al-nalayn-wa-iqtibas-al-nur-min-mawdi-al-qadamayn-remov↩︎
Al-Qushayrī (d. 1072), Al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya, chapter on tawḥīd — p. 10. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/al-risala-al-qushayriyya-treatise-on-sufism-al-qushayri↩︎
ʿAlī al-Hujwīrī (d. c. 1077), Kashf al-Maḥjūb, translated by Reynold A. Nicholson — p. 248. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-kashf-al-mahjub-revelation-of-the-veiled-nicholson↩︎
Minhāj al-ʿĀbidīn, the work of this name current under al-Ghazālī’s name, Or. 7024 manuscript — p. 128. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/minhaj-al-abidin-or-7024↩︎
Kınalızāde Ali Çelebi (1510–1571), Ahlāk-ı Alâʾî, Ottoman Turkish — pp. 162, 273. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/ahlak-ala-i-manuscript-undated-ali-celebi↩︎
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191), Nuṣūṣ ishrāqiyya — p. 87. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/nusus-ishraqiya-three-treatises-on-vision-and-metaphor-shiha↩︎
Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya — p. 218. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/meccan-revelations-al-arabi↩︎
Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl, an early twentieth-century English edition (“Confessions of Al-Ghazali”, Wisdom of the East series, 1909; bilingual Arabic-English) — p. 48 of the library scan (printed p. 44). https://sourcelibrary.org/book/deliverance-from-error-al-ghazali↩︎
Duncan Black Macdonald, The Religious Attitude and Life in Islām (1912), quoting al-Ghazālī’s own account in his translation of it — p. 203. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-religious-attitude-and-life-in-islam-macdonald↩︎
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Masnavī (English, Trübner, London, 1887 — the library’s copy is catalogued under E. H. Whinfield), Book I material: the Bayazid story, “How Bayazid cried out, when beside himself” — p. 253. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/masnav-i-manav-spiritual-couplets↩︎
Rūmī, Masnavī (same edition), continuation and moral — p. 254. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/masnav-i-manav-spiritual-couplets↩︎
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 1369), Riḥla, the cloaking at Isfahan — p. 153. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/rihlat-ibn-battuta-battuta↩︎
Silsilah Syattariyah manuscript, Or. 7327 — p. 8. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/silsilah-syatariyah-or-7327↩︎
Al-Hujwīrī, Kashf al-Maḥjūb (Nicholson trans.), the rules of audition — p. 443. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/the-kashf-al-mahjub-revelation-of-the-veiled-nicholson↩︎
Al-Hujwīrī, Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Persian critical edition ed. V. A. Zhukovsky — p. 509. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/kashf-al-mahjub-persian-critical-edition-zhukovsky↩︎
Maḥmūd Shabistarī, Gulshan-i Rāz, translated by E. H. Whinfield — p. 60. https://sourcelibrary.org/book/gulshan-i-raz-the-mystic-rose-garden-whinfield↩︎
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