Al-Arba'in of Abd al-Rahman Jami (Chihil Kalima)

Al-Arba'in of Abd al-Rahman Jami. Forty Hadiths on Ethics and Practical Wisdom.

The Arba'in or Chihil Kalima of Jami is a choice collection of Traditions of the Blessed Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace). The main emphasis is on cultivating high qualities of character. The compiler, a great Persian scholar and poet, further enriched his beautiful Hadith selection with pithy and eloquent paraphrases in verse. In this edition, Turath Publishing presents the original Arabic and Persian texts together with English translations of both. These are complemented by an introductory account of Jami and his works, and also by notes on both the content and the sources of the Hadiths.

Translated by Muhammad Isa Waley.

Mawlana Jami

Born near Kharjird in western Afghanistan, Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 896/1492) was already a religious scholar of tremendous ability when he experienced a call to the mystical Path. Settling in the Timurid capital of Herat, Jami embarked on a spiritual and intellectual journey that led him to produce some of the greatest didactic and lyric verse in the canon of classical Persian poetry, as well as prose works on a remarkably wide range of subjects, including metaphysics, ethics, jurisprudence, biography, and Arabic grammar.