The Mystics of Islam

When this book appeared in 1914, there was no introduction to Sufism in English at all. Reynold A. Nicholson had spent twenty years among the Arabic and Persian manuscripts at Cambridge. Asked to write a short book for readers who knew nothing of the subject, he did it in under two hundred pages, and it has never really been displaced.

He crosses the whole territory in six chapters: the Path and its stations, illumination and ecstasy, the gnosis, divine love, the saints and their miracles, and the unitive state in which the self is lost. He does not smooth over the hard parts, and he does not pretend the tradition agrees with itself. Where he can, he stands aside and lets Rumi, Hallaj, Attar and Jami speak, in his own versions from the originals.

"Sufism is, to possess nothing and to be possessed by nothing."

This edition reprints Nicholson's English in full, with G. R. S. Mead's editor's note, the introduction, all six chapters and the bibliography. Nothing is abridged. Nicholson's thirty-one footnotes are presented as endnotes at the close of each chapter, linked in both directions so you can reach a note and return to your place.

This ebook is free: pay what you want, from $0. It includes both an EPUB and a PDF. The EPUB works on Kindle through Amazon's free Send to Kindle tool, and on any other e-reader or reading app that supports the format. The PDF is formatted for a comfortable print-style read on a tablet, laptop, or in physical print.