A Critique of the Critical Edition of Bahr al-Maʻāni

Bahr al-Maʻāni is a collection of mystical letters of the Chishti Order Sufi, Seyyed Muhammad ibn Nasir al-Din Ja’far Makki Hosseini (732-825 AH/ 1332-1422). The Academy of Persian Language and Literature (The Department of the Encyclopaedia of Persian Literature and Language in the Subcontinent) published it in 2018, edited by Dr. Mohammad Sarvar Molaei. After a lithography print in 1889 in Moradabad, this book is the first edition of Bahr al-Maʻāni, but due to the accumulation of incorrect, illegible, and ambiguous words and phrases, incoherence and disorganization can be seen throughout the book. On the one hand, this is related to the editing process, in which the editor should have revised the misreadings of the author or the scribes by comparing various copies of Bahr al-Maʻāni and the sources used by its author. On the other hand, it is related to the fact that a large part of the book is reciting previous mystical works without mentioning the references. By false omissions and additions, the author has impaired the text’s coherence, fluency, and integrity, and consequently, in many cases, he has left the reader with considerable ambiguities. In this paper, we have tried to analyze these issues in the abovementioned edition of Bahr al-Maʻāni with a critical approach.