—are extremely important, both for the light they shed on the Shaykh’s biography and because, in many cases, this book has become the only surviving source for the materials it transmits. Had he not preserved them, they would have vanished along with other lost portions of our heritage.

The third source consists of reports that the author himself relates from his own firsthand observations.
These are few in proportion to the size of the work, although one would have expected them to be plentiful, given Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s closeness to the Shaykh and his status as one of his students.
His wording in such places varies, for example: “One day I sat with the Chief Judge Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAlī al-Ḥanafī” (p. 346); “I used to visit him frequently, and I read the Forty [Hadith]” and “I once accompanied him to the orchard of Emir Shams Luʾluʾ” (p. 395); “News reached me from some of the shaykhs of Aleppo” (p. 8); “More than one person informed me” (p. 108); “I read, in the handwriting of one of his companions, an account of the Tatar assault” (pp. 226–233); “I read, in the handwriting of some of the Shaykh’s students” (p. 308); “Some of our associates informed me” (p. 342); “I was told this by someone who was present at the consultation” (p. 397); and “I was informed” (p. 307).

• The book’s subject-matters and the order in which the author arranged them:
  • He opens with the Shaykh’s lineage and birth, his family’s migration from Harran, a number of his teachers who possessed chains of transmission, his scholarly upbringing, precocious brilliance, and the praise lavished on him by scholars while he was still young. He then moves on to how leadership in both knowledge and practice ultimately devolved upon him.