The Need for a New Critical Edition of the Ma‘arif of Baha’ Walad

The manuscript 2116 at the Mawlānā Museum in Konya, Turkey is the only extant copy of the fourth chapter of the book Ma’arif by Baha’Walad (1148-1231), who was the great Sufi master and the father of renowned Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. This manuscript is of great importance, as it is believed to had been written while Baha’Walad was still alive. Moreover, there are notes and corrections in the text, penned in red, that are considered to have been added Baha’Walad himself. In 1957, B.Furuzanfar edited this work and published it. However, there are many mistakes in his edition, and these add further ambiguity to an already very difficult text, making some passages totally incomprehensible. The reasons for the mistakes are manifold: the poor quality of white and black colors manuscript images in the possession of Furuzanfar, intentional changes or omissions made by him due to social scruples about sexually explicit material, errors in re-ordering wrongly ordered pages, and so on. The result of all of this was that later researchers who based their work on his edition were misled into sometimes taking completely wrong positions, while at the same time some very interesting material offering new insights into Baha’ Walad’s teachings, sources, and inspirations remained obscured. In this paper, I discuss some of the substantive mistakes made in the previous edition and explain the importance of my new findings.

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