The digitization of Latin-script languages has fundamentally changed the scope of scholarship in the humanities, but only recently have scholars undertaken similar projects for Arabic-script texts. The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) represents the most significant effort to date in producing a corpus of machine actionable texts written in Arabic, currently containing over 10,000 works. Despite the size of this project, some bodies of literature are significantly unrepresented, chief among them are works on Sufism, usually understood as Islamic mysticism. In fact, only 153 of the 10,393 entries in OpenITI are Sufi works, despite Sufism’s immense popularity over the last millennium. Given this gap in the extant textual corpora, this project will produce the first machine actionable corpus of medieval Sufi works, comprised of twenty-four key texts annotated according to the field standard mARkdown “tagging” schema. Furthermore, this project will put together a suite of Python-based tools to allow for various analyses. These tools will focus on four areas: extracting names of individuals for network analysis to better understand Sufi social history; examining Qur’ānic references to illuminate how Sufis interpreted and understood the word of God; using algorithms to elucidate the complex and subtle ways in which authors drew from one another; and exploring the changing semantics of key terms and foundational concepts in Sufi thought across time. This project will not only shed new light on medieval Sufi history but also contribute to efforts already underway to digitize Islamic texts by introducing a previously neglected body of literature.

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