Abstract
Scientific misconduct is a type of ethical violation that is seen in sufi history studies as well as in other disciplines. Undisciplined research, duplicate publications, falsification, fabrication and plagiarism are forms of misconduct in scientific research. In the article, only distortion and fabrication, among these ethical violations, are emphasized in the context of the history of Sufism. As a matter of fact, the abuses revealed in the studies of some researchers in the field of Sufi history reveal the necessity of questioning the scientific reliability of researches in this field, as in other disciplines. The researchers’ falsification of the information in the sources by interpreting, or fabrication of evidence by adding sentences and ideas that are not in the source, in order to defend their own ideologies and support their hypotheses, have been influential in the popularity of unfair accusations about the history of sufism and sufis. In this context, in this study, the researches of an academician who is accepted as an authority in his field have been examined and examples that could be considered as falsification and fabrication have been determined, and then scientific abuses in Sufi studies have been evaluated based on individual examples. The examples in the book have been reclassified and evaluated under the headings of falsification and fabrication. In this study, within the scope of falsification, it has been seen that the researchers try to show the ideas they defend with irrelevant citations, they cause a semantic shift in the texts with their biased translations, they point to the sources that will support their hypotheses, they ignore the ones that contradict their ideas, and they criticize the concepts by ignoring the meanings of the terms. Within the scope of fabrication, the practices of researchers such as showing them as quoting although they are not included in the relevant source have been identified, changing texts with translation and reading errors, making gratuitous references to long chapters, presenting legends, which are highly likely to be fabrications, substituting personalities who will support their own ideas in place of the anonymous names in the texts, presenting their personal predictions as scientific data and arbitrarily attributing the works to some authors. It is understood that these distortions and fabrications are scientific irregularities with great negative effects as they mislead both the scientific community and the society.