Bridging Traditions: The Case For Translating a Rare Pashto Naqshbandi Manuscript Into The English Mystical Canon

Abstract

This article examines the literary and scholarly case for translating and critically editing a rare Pashto-language Sufi manuscript, attributed to Baba Jeo Khawaja Noor Muhammad Tirahi and discovered at Choora Sharif in the historically Pashto-speaking borderlands of present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Situating the manuscript within the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi Adamia Ahsania tradition, this article argues that the project of translation and editing serves three overlapping purposes: it extends the English-language corpus of Islamic mystical literature, which has drawn heavily on Arabic and Persian sources while comparatively neglecting Pashto prose; it engages a mystical and metaphysical strain already present, if often understated, within the English literary tradition itself; and it preserves textual material that survives, so far as can be established, in a single extant copy. Drawing on the established body of English-language Sufi scholarship produced by orientalists including Arberry, Nicholson, Burckhardt, Lings, and Nasr, this article contends that a Pashto prose treatise of this kind occupies a genuinely underrepresented place in that literature, and that its translation would constitute a meaningful contribution to both Islamic studies and comparative literary scholarship.