ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm ibn Taymiyyah al-Ḥarrānī …”.

Beneath the title he added, “This biography was copied from a transcript taken from the handwriting of Shaykh Jamāl al-Dīn al-Mizzī.” In fact, it seems to have been copied from the archetype (the Köprülü manuscript), for it accords with that copy in both wording and arrangement. The scribe misunderstood, thinking the archetype itself was taken from al-Mizzī’s own hand. That is not the case; the only material drawn from al-Mizzī’s handwriting is the title and the author’s name.

The copyist also took it upon himself to abbreviate a number of the author’s quotations—those passages drawn from the writings of Shaykh al-Islam. Thus, when the author cites portions of al-Ḥamawiyyah, the debates with Ibn al-Wakīl, or the Shaykh’s epistle on the Tatar campaign and its parallels with the Battle of the Trench, the copyist shortens them and notes this by saying, “The author then continued the rest … and we have omitted it for brevity,” or words to that effect. I have indicated every such abridgement in the book’s footnotes. The manuscript ends where the printed edition reaches p. 512, and the scribe marks the conclusion only with a dotted circle ⊙. Several ownership statements appear on its title page, one of them dated the first of Rajab 1082 AH.

Note: Shaykh Zuhayr al-Shāwish records—in his edition of al-Radd al-Wāfir, p. 64, note 3— that Shaykh al-Albānī said a sound copy of this book exists in the Awqāf Library in Aleppo, as mentioned in the catalogue I compiled many years ago.