On page 47 of The Path of Yearning….just before the paragraph that begins with “Regarding love of perfection…” Sidi says: “our purpose with the love is limited to 3 parts”….my question is about the dots under all the “h’s” in the transliteration. I know the difference in the Arabic pronunciation with and without a dot, however is there a significance to the fact that they all have the dot? Ihsan traditionally does not carry it.
The dots under the h’s are indeed the correct transliteration (in the transliteration system of the Library of Congress and most other scholarly, non-idiosyncratic transliteration systems) of the ح . Hence, “al-iḥsān” is the correct transliteration. The purpose of that subscript dot is to distinguish the ح (an aspirated letter) from the ه , which, for example, we see in words like هو Huwa/Hū , where the “h” is a non-aspirated sound.