its discovery. His incisive student, Ibn al-Qayyim, even cites it in his celebrated rhymed Nuniyya when enumerating some of his teacher’s works, saying:

So read the writings of the true Imām,
Shaykh of existence, the godly scholar—
I mean Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad,
an ocean that surrounds every gulf.

He then continues:

Likewise, the philosophers’ so-called monotheism—
their “oneness” is the summit of unbelief.
A subtle book that demolishes their foundations
with sound reason and decisive proof.

In these last two lines he names the work and describes it in terms that fit our present treatise perfectly, both in title and in content.

Yet my delight at discovering it was soon clouded once I began to study the manuscript. The copyist had made the editor’s task extremely difficult: he left many words without diacritical dots, which further obscured numerous expressions and forced me to examine them closely to uncover the author’s intent. He also distorted a good number of words, and it seems he copied from a poorly written exemplar, drawing some words without understanding their meaning.

By Allah’s grace I managed to resolve many of these issues, and I hope I have succeeded in reading the text correctly. Whatever was patently erroneous I corrected and flagged in the footnotes; where a reading remained possible yet uncertain, I left it unchanged but noted the uncertainty. Still, I do not absolve myself of error.