A Critique on the Correction of Shams Tabrizi's Discourses and the Necessity of Its Re-correction

The mode of expression and teaching method of great masters in pedagogical circles is often called ‘Majlis-Gooyi’. Shams Tabrizi has also paid attention to this mystical tradition in his mystical narrations and has conveyed most of the important mystical teachings and categories to his audience and students through this method. The numerous and diverse surviving versions of Shams Tabrizi's writings have somehow prevented the presentation of a revised and correct text of Shams's Discourses. Therefore, in the scientific-critical correction of this work, which was done by Movahed, there are some shortcomings in the corrected text, which sometimes caused ambiguities in the text and made it difficult for the readers to understand. In the present study, while criticizing the mentioned correction based on the versions available in the Konya Museum, the importance and validity of the old versions of the discourses have been investigated in an analytical manner and the necessity of re-correction has been explained. Among the old editions of Shams's Discourses, the third edition of Konya Museum, No. 2155, is of particular importance due to its antiquity and historical validity, the comprehensiveness and consistency of the text, and the logical sequence of Shams's words. The relative absence of additions and scribes' corrections in this version is another finding of this research. By considering this version as the basis, it is possible to provide a re-correction and uniform text of the discourses, and other old versions can be used as replacement versions according to their preference and prioritization to fix the defects and problems of the base version.