Ranks of the Divine Seekers: A Parallel English-Arabic Text. Volume 1

Winner of the 2021 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding (category: translation from Arabic into English)

This is an unabridged, annotated, translation of the great Damascene savant and saint Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s (d. 751/1350) Madarij al-Salikin. Conceived as a critical commentary on an earlier Sufi classic by the great Hanbalite scholar Abu Isma'il of Herat, Madarij aims to rejuvenate Sufism’s Qur'anic foundations. The original work was a key text for the Sufi initiates, composed in terse, rhyming prose as a master’s instruction to the aspiring seeker on the path to God, in a journey of a hundred stations whose ultimate purpose was to be lost to one’s self (fana’) and subsist (baqa’) in God. The translator, Ovamir (‘Uwaymir) Anjum, provides an extensive introduction and annotation to this English-Arabic face-to-face presentation of this masterpiece of Islamic psychology.