Spiritual Insights: The Threaded Pearls & Other Ba-A'lawi Treatises

About the translator

Mostafa al-Badawi: Mostafa al-Badawi (b. 1948 CE, Cairo) is one of the leading contemporary translators of classical Islamic texts from Arabic into English, and a scholar associated with the Ba ʿAlawi sayyids of Hadramawt in Yemen. He graduated from Cairo University Medical School in 1971 and completed his postgraduate training in the United Kingdom, where he has practiced as a consultant psychiatrist and is a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Alongside his medical career he pursued a serious study of the Islamic sciences and of the spiritual path of the Ba ʿAlawi tradition. He is best known for his translations of the prose works of Imam ʿAbdallah ibn ʿAlawi al-Haddad, the great Hadrami sage and poet, including The Book of Assistance, Gifts for the Seeker, Counsels of Religion, and The Lives of Man. His translation work also extends to The Degrees of the Soul of Shaykh al-Shabrawi and Key to the Garden of Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad. As an author in his own right, he wrote Sufi Sage of Arabia, a full biography of Imam al-Haddad drawing on the life and teachings of seventeenth-century Yemen, and Man and the Universe, among other studies. He is regarded as a careful, faithful translator who has made the devotional and ethical literature of the Ba ʿAlawi masters accessible to a wide English readership.