ʻAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad al-Bisṭāmī (Arabic: عبد الرحمن البسطامي) was a leading intellectural figure in the Ottoman world of the early fifteenth century.
[1] Educated in Cairo, he moved to Bursa, where he enjoyed the patronage of Sultan Murad II.
[2] Bisṭāmī, who wrote exclusively in Arabic, was the author of a remarkably large number of treastises encompassing literature, Sufism, medicine and history.
His work has been little studied and its identification is complicated by multiple versions, some made by the author himself, the variation of titles in the surviving manuscript copies, and the number of extracts that were made, either for separate works or for anthologies.
Bisṭāmī drew freely on Ahmad al-Buni (أحمد البوني) with whom he is sometimes confused, as found, for example, in an anthology of prayers and charms in the Bijapur Collection from India.