Background reading
Who was Aḥmad al-Būnī?
A scholar of Sufism from the Algerian shore, he died near Cairo about 1225. His name came to be linked with the most widely reproduced, and most frequently denounced, work in the Islamic esoteric canon. Some of that association he deserved; some of it most likely he did not.
The life
His complete name was Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Būnī, and the final element reveals his origin: Būna, the coastal Algerian settlement now known as Annaba. He was born there at some point during the latter half of the twelfth century.
In common with many ambitious scholars from the Maghrib, he journeyed eastward. He pursued study in Tunis and Cairo, passing through the web of instructors and Sufi hospices that linked North Africa with Egypt and the Levant. He made Cairo his home and died there, according to most accounts in 622 of the Islamic calendar, corresponding to 1225.
He was thus an exact contemporary of Ibn ʿArabī, the dominant presence in Islamic mysticism, who passed away in Damascus in 1240. The two operated within the same intellectual milieu, tackling related questions, and each was drawn to the notion that Arabic letters carry significance beyond their phonetic value. Ibn ʿArabī achieved canonical status; al-Būnī became a cautionary tale.
What he actually wrote
Here matters become complicated, and where much popular commentary goes astray.
Al-Būnī did compose a text titled Shams al-Maʿārif, the Sun of Knowledge, together with various other works including Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt, a more compact and technically demanding examination of the same subject matter.
Yet the form of Shams al-Maʿārif that achieved the widest circulation, and the one meant whenever the title is used today, is the expanded version known as Shams al-Maʿārif al-Kubrā, the Great Sun of Knowledge. Current research, notably the manuscript studies carried out in the past two decades, tends to conclude that this longer edition was put together long after al-Būnī's death, accumulating material as scribes and subsequent practitioners added their own content.
The honest assessment, then, is this. The Kubrā is the volume that spread, that was copied over eight centuries, that influenced practice from Senegal to Sumatra, and that faced prohibition. It stands as a genuine and highly consequential work. In its totality, it is probably not something Aḥmad al-Būnī sat down to write himself.
This point appears on our own sales page too. Marketing a book would be simpler if we merely claimed that a celebrated thirteenth-century master authored every line. That would also be inaccurate, and the audience purchasing this volume is precisely the group that would spot the error.
Why he was condemned
The complaint from orthodox scholars was never that the material failed to function. It was that it worked, and that this created the difficulty. Employing the divine Names to bring about an outcome in the material world can appear, from one perspective, as attempting to coerce God, and from another as siḥr: sorcery, strictly outlawed.
Al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest continuously functioning establishment in Sunni Islam, has repeatedly assigned the work to that category. A number of governments list it among banned texts. The censure is real and stretches back centuries.
It also failed entirely. The book continued to be reproduced, precisely because those copying it rejected the categorisation. That friction, between an authority structure that denounced the work and a readership unwilling to let it vanish, accounts for much of the historical significance of the text.
Read further
The science of letters outlines the framework within which al-Būnī operated. Magic squares addresses the grids that became his hallmark. Should you wish to consult the original work, our complete English edition extends to 1,465 pages across two volumes.