Description of the Manuscript Copy
Only one handwritten copy of Kitab al-Ijmaʿ is known to exist. It is kept in the Ayasofya collection in Turkey under catalogue number 1011 (1). A photographic reproduction is also preserved in the library of the hadith scholar Shaykh Hammad al-Ansari (may Allah have mercy on him) under number 18, and it is from that reproduction that I obtained my own copy.
The manuscript consists of 21 folios. The first folio serves as the title page, on which the following endowment statement appears:
“I have endowed this noble copy to our greatest sultan and exalted khāqān, ruler of the two continents and the two seas, Servant of the Two Sacred Sanctuaries, the sultan—son of sultan—son of sultan, the victorious Maḥmūd Khān (2), as a sound legal waqf for anyone who reads, benefits, learns, and imparts knowledge from it. May Allah, Exalted is He, magnify his reward on the Day of Summoning. Written by the humble Aḥmad Shaykh-zādah, assistant to the endowments of the Two Sacred Sanctuaries—may Allah forgive them both.”
The copy is clear and well written in an Eastern script. It has been carefully collated, and its title page bears the seals of both the waqf and the collation.
(1) Cf. Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, p. 496.
(2) For his biography, see Hilyat al-bashar fi tarikh al-qarn al-thalith ‘ashar, 3:1467, 1456; ‘Ujaib al-athar, 1:217; and Tarikh al-dawla al-‘aliya al-‘Uthmaniyya, p. 398.
Al-Jabarti records in ‘Ujaib al-athar, 3:406: “Late in that year a messenger arrived from the Ottoman realms carrying a royal decree (firman). It was read in the law court on Sunday the 28th, in the presence of Kathkhuda Bey, the qadi, the shaykhs, the leading officials of the state, and a large gathering of people. Its purport was an order to the mosque preachers that, during the Friday sermon when invoking blessings for the ruler, they should say: ‘the sultan, son of the sultan’—repeating the title ‘sultan’ three times—‘Mahmud Khan, son of the sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid Khan, son of the sultan Ahmad Khan al-ghazi, Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries.’ He was deemed worthy of these honorifics because his armies had opened (i.e., liberated) the lands of the Two Sanctuaries, fought the Kharijites, and expelled them. The mufti had issued a legal opinion declaring them unbelievers for excommunicating Muslims, branding them polytheists, rebelling against the sultan, and shedding innocent blood. Accordingly, whoever fought them was to be considered a ghazi and mujahid, and, if killed, a martyr.”