The distinguished position of the seventeenth-century Ḥijāz attracted Sufis from across the Islamic world, making it the largest Sufi center of that era, with more than forty Sufi orders active during the Ottoman period. Most of the region’s many scholars were associated with Sufism and affiliated to these orders; their lives and Sufi activities more broadly were documented by one of their number, al-ʿUjaymī, in two texts. These texts, critically edited here for the first time, constitute some of the best evidence for the character of spiritual life in the Ḥijāz during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

Naser Dumairieh, Ph.D. (2018), McGill University, researches post-classical Islamic theology and Sufism. He has published on the intellectual history of the Ottoman Ḥijāz, including Intellectual Life in the Ḥijāz before Wahhabism (Brill, 2021), and critical editions including al-Barzanji’s al-Laṭāʾib al-ghaybī.

This critical edition will interest historians and graduate students studying Sufism, Islamic intellectual thought, the Ottoman Empire, and the Ḥijāz; Arabophones interested in Sufism; and libraries with Arabic primary source collections.