The acknowledgment that matters: Łukasz Piątak on my 2025 Edition of Suhrawardī’s al-Wāridāt wa’l-Taqdīsāt

 

 

https://brill.com/display/title/74625

There are moments in scholarly disputes when the most consequential acknowledgment comes not from a sympathetic reviewer, nor from an ally, but from the scholar whose work one has sharply criticized. Such an acknowledgment has now appeared in Łukasz Piątak’s new Brill volume, Divine Inspirations and Sanctifications: A Parallel English-Arabic Text, his critical edition, translation, and commentary on Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī’s al-Wāridāt wa’l-Taqdīsāt.

Readers familiar with my work will know that in November 2025 I published Prayers to the Orient of Light, containing the Arabic text of the Wāridāt, my complete English translation, and extensive textual and interpretive notes in the form of glosses. Piątak’s work on the text does not, however, predate mine since I began working on this text in the late 1990s, but without possession of all the MSS. Instead his critical edition underlying his present book originated in his 2018 doctoral dissertation at the University of Warsaw. But that dissertation remained unpublished. Piątak himself states this explicitly in the preface to his Brill volume: “The critical edition and most of the commentary first appeared in my unpublished doctoral thesis from 2018.” That distinction—between the chronology of research and the chronology of publication—is important. I also detailed that history—and where it intersected with my work—in the translator’s introduction to Prayers to the Orient of Light.

My edition and complete translation became publicly available in November 2025. Piątak’s Brill book followed in September 2026. And, rather remarkably, Piątak’s own preface establishes this chronology while also acknowledging that my work affected the preparation of his published edition.

What Piątak actually says

In a substantial footnote to his preface, Piątak discusses criticisms of his earlier doctoral work. After mentioning Malihe Karbassian’s recent Persian study, he turns directly to mine:

“Very recently (November 2025), Wahid Azal published an online edition of al-Wāridāt wa’l-Taqdīsāt, including the Arabic text, an English translation, and extensive commentary in the footnotes.”

He then immediately attempts to delimit its scholarly status. He describes my publication as neither peer-reviewed nor, in his estimation, “a critical or academic edition,” characterizing it instead as a religious publication intended for liturgical use by a contemporary religious movement. Readers may make of those characterizations what they will, but I am on record for rejecting the neo-colonial Western institutional and epistemic hegemony upon which Piątak’s wave of hand dismissal relies. Yet what interests me much more is what Piątak is obliged to say immediately afterwards.

He acknowledges that my publication nevertheless possesses merit because certain textual variants in my rendition, together with my criticisms of his doctoral dissertation,

“highlighted my own errors in reading the manuscripts or prompted reconsideration of earlier editorial decisions.”

He adds that although he does not accept all my criticisms, where he considers them “grounded in scholarly considerations,” he refers to them in the notes to his new book. That is the acknowledgment that matters.

The qualifications cannot erase the concession

There is a curious tension here. On one side, Piątak wishes to establish a firm classificatory boundary around my publication: religious rather than academic; liturgical rather than critical; unrefereed rather than peer-reviewed—precisely those neocolonial Western institutional and hegemonic categories that I interrogated in my introduction as representative of an imperialist Western Ivory Tower gatekeeping. But on the other side, he acknowledges that my readings of the Arabic manuscripts identified errors in his own readings and caused him to reconsider editorial decisions made in the dissertation from which his present Brill edition developed. These two facts have to be allowed to coexist.

I have no objection whatsoever to Piątak describing his edition as a critical edition in the strict technical sense. His Brill volume undertakes precisely the sort of work conventionally associated with that designation: analysis of the manuscript tradition, codicological discussion, an explicit editorial methodology, a reconstructed Arabic text, and critical apparatus. The structure of the book makes that perfectly clear. But the distinction between a formal critical edition and another scholarly edition or translation does not determine whether textual observations are correct. Manuscripts are wonderfully indifferent to academic sociology. I will be highlighting this fact in my forthcoming critical review of Piątak’s edition. This is due to the fact that a reading is not transformed from correct to incorrect depending upon whether the person who noticed it possessed institutional affiliation, submitted it to anonymous referees, or published it through a Western academic press. Ultimately, the manuscript either supports the reading or it does not. And Piątak has now acknowledged that, in some instances, mine did.

An interesting chronology

The sequence established by Piątak’s own preface is therefore worth setting out plainly. His critical work originated in his 2018 unpublished doctoral dissertation. My complete Arabic text, complete English translation, and commentary were published in November 2025. Piątak consulted that publication while revising his work for the present Brill edition. Some of my variants and criticisms exposed errors in his manuscript readings or led him to reconsider previous editorial decisions. He incorporated references to those observations he considered scholarly into his own apparatus.

The resulting Brill volume was published in 2026. Its copyright page identifies Koninklijke Brill BV as publisher and gives the book its 2026 copyright date. This chronology does not diminish Piątak’s earlier research. He had plainly been working seriously on these manuscripts for years. But equally, the existence of an unpublished dissertation cannot retrospectively alter the chronology of publication, never mind the fact that I had been publicly drip feeding earlier drafts of my translations years before Piątak, to which I had been acknowledged in a publication during 2007.

Yet my publication was available before the Brill volume, and the author of the Brill volume tells us that he consulted it in preparing his published text. That is now part of the bibliographical record.

More than a citation

What makes the footnote significant is that this is not merely a perfunctory bibliographical citation. Piątak could simply have listed my edition among previous publications. Instead, he tells his readers something about its effect upon his scholarship. That distinction matters. To say Azal also published this text in 2025 establishes chronology. To say Azal criticized my readings establishes scholarly disagreement. But to say that Azal’s textual variants and criticisms “highlighted my own errors in reading the manuscripts” is an acknowledgment of substantive textual contribution. And to say that other observations “prompted reconsideration of earlier editorial decisions” establishes that my work entered the editorial history of Piątak’s own published edition. This, then, also neutralizes the un-peer-reviewed, religious and non-affiliated dismissal earlier. Other non-affiliated independent scholars should take note.

The qualification that he disagrees with some of my criticisms is entirely unsurprising. Textual criticism would be an extraordinarily dull discipline if editors agreed about everything. Indeed, I would expect Piątak and me to continue disagreeing over numerous readings, editorial principles, questions of interpretation, and the religious significance of this extraordinary text. None of that alters what he has conceded.

“Religious” and “scholarly” are not antonyms

There is also a larger methodological issue lurking behind Piątak’s characterization of Prayers to the Orient of Light as a religious publication. It certainly is a religious publication. I have never pretended otherwise.

While for Piątak and his mentor John Walbridge matters may be different, Suhrawardī is not merely an archaeological object for me. The Wāridāt wa’l-Taqdīsāt belongs to a living spiritual and intellectual universe in which I participate. My translation was intended not merely to place another historical artefact beneath the academic microscope and its gatekeeping but to make this extraordinary cycle of invocations available to readers as a living text.

Yet it does not follow that philological work undertaken within a religious context is therefore non-scholarly—unless, that is, Piątak wishes to lay the same charge on Suhrawardī himself as well as all those who have diligently worked on his writings in religious seminaries for centuries. The history of Oriental studies itself makes such a binary impossible to sustain. Some of the most important editions, translations and manuscript discoveries in the history of Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist textual traditions have been produced by people for whom the texts concerned possessed religious significance.

But that aside, the relevant question is not whether an editor believes in the text. It is whether he can read the manuscript. On that question, Piątak’s footnote supplies an unexpectedly concrete answer: at several points, my readings caused him to recognize errors in his own.

The irony of the apparatus

There is consequently a pleasing irony to the whole affair. My edition may be characterized as “religious.” It may be denied the designation “critical edition.” Its institutional pedigree may be contrasted with a Brill volume produced within an established academic series—and one which, as usual, is out of the financial reach of the layman. Yet my readings have entered that Brill volume anyway. They entered because manuscripts compelled the issue. I will take that for a substantial victory. At least, and unlike Walbridge, Piątak posseses the intellectual honesty to acknowledge a piece of writing/scholarship in the same area preceding his own.

Piątak’s present volume appears as Volume 16 of Brill’s Islamic Translation Series, edited by Ayman Shihadeh. And in its acknowledgments Piątak particularly thanks Abdurraouf Oueslati, Brill’s senior acquisitions editor, for his guidance “throughout every stage of the publishing process.” Thus the acknowledgment of my contribution is not buried in an informal exchange, private correspondence, conference conversation, or social-media post. Brill published it.

It appears in the author’s preface to the definitive commercial publication of his edition. That gives it a permanence considerably greater than any dispute surrounding the work.

A Note on Brill’s Catalogue Description

There is, however, a separate bibliographical problem that requires correction. Brill’s promotional description of Piątak’s volume presently creates the impression that his edition and translation preceded mine. Whatever distinction one wishes to draw between my 2025 publication and Piątak’s subsequent critical edition, that chronology cannot be sustained by the evidence—and, remarkably, Piątak’s own published Preface supplies the evidence against it.

As we have seen, Piątak explicitly dates my publication to November 2025, describes it as containing the Arabic text, an English translation and extensive commentary, and acknowledges having consulted it while revising the work that has now appeared through Brill. More significantly still, he states that some of my textual variants and criticisms exposed errors in his manuscript readings or prompted reconsideration of earlier editorial decisions. His earlier critical edition, meanwhile, is expressly identified by Piątak himself as having appeared in his unpublished doctoral dissertation of 2018. The Brill volume itself bears a 2026 copyright date.

This is why the distinction between priority of research and priority of publication must be maintained. I make no claim that my work preceded Piątak’s doctoral research; plainly it did not. My point is narrower and readily verifiable: my publicly available Arabic text and complete English translation appeared before the publication of Piątak’s Brill edition and translation. Indeed, Piątak’s acknowledgment demonstrates that my publication was available sufficiently early to be consulted during the preparation of his eventual Brill volume.

Consequently I have formally contacted Brill and requested that the catalogue description be corrected so that it accurately reflects the bibliographical chronology. I have supplied the relevant documentary evidence and have also brought the matter to the attention of appropriate senior editorial personnel at Brill. I will report their response when I receive it.

This need not become a controversy. Publishers make catalogue errors, and catalogue copy can be corrected. But once the documentary record has been brought to a publisher’s attention, accuracy requires that the distinction be made properly. Piątak’s unpublished 2018 dissertation unquestionably predates my work, although the origin of my own work on al-Wāridāt wa’l-Taqdīsāt predates Piątak’s by nearly two decades. Nevertheless my published 2025 edition and translation unquestionably predates his published 2026 Brill volume. Those propositions are perfectly compatible.

There is therefore a certain irony in the situation. The clearest evidence for the correction I have asked Brill to make is contained inside the very Brill book being promoted. Piątak himself records my publication, dates it, cites it, acknowledges its effect upon his subsequent editorial decisions—and thereby establishes the chronology more effectively than I ever could by assertion alone.

Update, 18 September 2026: Following publication of this article, I received an acknowledgment from Abdurraouf Oueslati, Senior Acquisitions Editor for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Brill, confirming receipt of the matter and stating: “Thank you very much for your message and for flagging this. We will take it into consideration.” I will update this post again should Brill advise me of the outcome of its consideration.

UPDATE 20 September 2026: Brill Has Corrected Its Claim of Priority

There has been a significant development concerning my recent correspondence with Brill over its description of Łukasz Piątak’s Divine Inspirations and Sanctifications: A Parallel English-Arabic Text.

As I documented previously, Brill had advertised the volume with the following claim:

“This volume presents the first critical edition and English translation of Al-Wāridāt wa’l-Taqdīsāt…”

The problem was straightforward. My own edition and English translation of Suhrawardī’s al-Wāridāt wa’l-Taqdīsāt, Prayers to the Orient of Lights, was published in November 2025, before Piątak’s 2026 Brill volume. More importantly, Piątak himself expressly acknowledges this fact in his Brill book, describing my publication as containing “the Arabic text, an English translation, and extensive commentary in the footnotes.”

The contradiction was therefore internal to Brill’s own publication: the book acknowledged an earlier English translation while Brill’s catalogue simultaneously advertised the subsequent translation as the first.

I consequently wrote to Brill requesting correction. I made clear throughout that two quite different questions were involved. Brill might wish to maintain that Piątak’s volume constitutes the first critical edition, according to whatever scholarly criteria it considers applicable. My objection concerned the separate and objectively verifiable claim that his was the first English translation. As I put it to Brill:

“An earlier English translation does not cease to exist for purposes of bibliographical priority because a subsequent scholar considers its editorial methodology non-critical, non-academic, or otherwise distinguishable from his own.”

The documentary evidence was unusually strong: my November 2025 publication itself; its independent National Library of Australia record and digitised copy; and Piątak’s own published acknowledgement of its date and contents in the subsequent Brill volume.

Brill’s initial response

Brill’s initial response was less than satisfactory. After I supplied the additional evidence from Piątak’s own footnote, Senior Acquisitions Editor Abdurraouf Oueslati replied:

“I am very glad to hear that your book was properly credited in the work.”

But this did not address the issue. Credit and priority are not the same thing. The fact that Piątak properly cited my earlier translation was precisely part of the evidence demonstrating why the later translation could not accurately be represented as the first.

I therefore made the position explicit and treated the matter as a formal demand for correction. Complaints concerning the continuing promotional representation were also brought to the attention of the appropriate Dutch advertising and regulatory bodies.

And then Brill changed the wording

On 20 September 2026, Brill altered the catalogue description.

It now reads:

“This volume presents the first critical edition and an English translation of Al-Wāridāt wa’l-Taqdīsāt…”

One word has been inserted:

an

But bibliographically, that one word changes everything.

The former construction—

the first critical edition and English translation

—attributed priority to the English translation.

The revised construction—

the first critical edition and an English translation

—no longer does so. “First” now modifies the claim concerning the critical edition, while Piątak’s translation is described simply as an English translation.

This is, in substance, precisely the distinction I had asked Brill to make. In my correspondence I expressly stated that Brill could, if it considered the claim sustainable, continue describing Piątak’s work as the first critical edition, but that this was analytically separate from claiming that his was the first English translation.

Brill’s revised wording now embodies that distinction.

Why this matters

This was never about denying the scholarly value of Piątak’s work. I stated that explicitly from my first communication with Brill. Nor was I asking a publisher to pronounce my edition academically superior to his. No such claim was necessary.

It was about something considerably simpler: the integrity of the bibliographical record.

Academic prestige cannot reverse chronology. Peer review cannot make a later translation earlier. A publisher’s assessment of whether an earlier publication qualifies as “critical,” “academic,” “religious,” or anything else cannot erase the fact that the translation was published.

And in this instance the subsequent translator himself had already documented that fact.

The correction is therefore welcome. It restores the distinction that should have been present from the outset and removes Brill’s claim that Piątak’s translation possesses a chronological priority that the documentary record does not support.

There remains a secondary matter concerning the extent to which the former wording may already have propagated through distributor, bookseller, library-supplier, and bibliographical metadata. My correspondence specifically requested that corrected descriptive metadata be transmitted through the appropriate channels where Brill had supplied the earlier description. I will therefore continue to document whether the correction propagates beyond Brill’s own catalogue.

But the principal issue has now been resolved on Brill’s website. Sometimes the difference between an inaccurate bibliographical claim and an accurate one is only two letters: “an.”

Let this episode stand as notice that I will defend the integrity and priority of my scholarship vigorously! Institutional prestige does not intimidate me nor place a publisher or scholar beyond challenge, and where the documentary record supports my position, I am prepared to pursue correction through every appropriate scholarly, editorial and legal channel available to me.