of the unbelievers, even when he deems it most likely that they will kill him, provided that this brings benefit to the Muslims; and we have treated this issue at length in another place.1
That other place is the present book.
The eminent scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī—may Allah have mercy on him—mentions it in al-ʿUqūd al-Durrīyah2 under the heading: “A Principle on Throwing Oneself into the Enemy—Is It Permissible?” That is the source I have relied upon here.
At the beginning, the author—may Allah have mercy on him—defines the issue as follows: “It concerns a man or a group who fight an enemy force exceeding twice their own number when such fighting benefits the religion, even though they judge it most likely that they will be killed.”
Description of the manuscript:
I have depended on a single copy contained in a majmūʿ of Shaykh al-Islam, preserved in the Egyptian National Library under the shelf-mark 444 Fiqh Teymur.
This copy comprises 48 pages, as numbered in the original. Each page has 13 lines and is written in an elegant ruqʿah hand. It was transcribed in 1319 AH, but the scribe is unknown.