were transcribed, in all probability, from copy (F), even though the scribes do not state this explicitly.

I established the text of the book on the basis of the archetype. The differences among the manuscripts in the ordering of the book’s discussions were not extensive; they were limited, except at the very end of the work where the poems composed in elegy of the Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—are cited. There the archetype differed from the other copies in both the sequence and the number of poems. We therefore adopted its tally and arrangement, and then, at the close of the book, appended the poems absent from the archetype but present in the other manuscripts, so that no benefit would be lost. In correcting the poetic texts—which in this work occupy more than 150 pages—I was greatly assisted by my two esteemed brothers, Shaykh Muhammad Ajmal al-Islahi and Shaykh Muhammad ʿAzīr Shams.

It is clear from the archetype that the book ends with that number of poems, and it is likely that this is exactly what the author—may Allah have mercy on him—wrote. Someone who came after him must have added the poems he found and attached them to the work, and later copies reproduced them as if they were his.

The same holds true for the epistle of Shaykh ʿAbd Allah ibn Ḥāmid al-Shafiʿi and the tāʾiyyah poem on qadar (predestination): neither appears in the archetype, although both are found in the other manuscripts. In those copies they also occur in unsuitable places—the epistle of Ibn Ḥāmid appears in the midst of the elegiac poems, while the tāʾiyyah on qadar is placed at the very beginning of the elegies, immediately after the mention of the Shaykh’s death. We did not include them in the appendix to this book, because the tāʾiyyah has already been printed in