الصوفي الذي أنقذني

Readers of Arabic need no explanation for some references that might be unfamiliar to others. For this reason, the translation occasionally differs from the original. The English text directly identifies Ali, the last of Islam’s four rightly guided caliphs; the Arabic text does not, offering instead only a snippet of a devotional song that evokes this martyr to whom every Sufi order traces its lineage. Similarly, the translation names the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish alongside a line of his verse that readers of Arabic might recognize; the original does not. Finally, I struggled with the concept of ghaib (the unseen). The translated text uses “Sufi intercession” for the literal “help from the unseen.”