and dispatched them with him to the Shaykh, where they remained for more than a year. He then returned that fascicle to me through one of our brothers living in Cairo—but without the introduction. By Allah’s grace, I had kept a spare copy of the latter.

The fascicle came back to me without the venerable Shaykh sending so much as a word to indicate his view of it or of the introduction. I therefore seized the first opportunity to type them both—together with the second fascicle—on the typewriter and then reproduce them with a stencil duplicator.

When I compared a number of issues in the old printing on which I had based Tamām al-Minna with several of the newer editions—especially the three-volume set published by Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī—it became clear that the Shaykh had derived virtually no benefit from my book, whether from the portion I had sent him or from what later appeared in print. I found that the hadith and juristic errors remained exactly as they were, without the slightest correction or amendment—save in a very small handful of matters. I do not know whether this was because he had no time to read it, or because he was not persuaded by the purely academic critique it contained. The first explanation seems likelier, for my book sets out principles that every scholar must uphold, and discusses issues and hadiths no scholar should pass over without stating his position—endorsing or challenging, weakening or authenticating them—were he to encounter them. As the readers will see, there are very many such cases.

What prevents me from being certain of that supposition, however, is that I have noticed the Shaykh has in fact benefited from my critique in several places; I have pointed out some of them in the notes on pages 44, 62, 104, 137, and 145. One such instance concerns his stance on whether contact with camels that are under prohibition requires ablution, for in the edition on which I placed my marginalia he had cited—in support of the view