20/3/1393 AH. Beneath this stamp is the book’s title—mentioned earlier—and to the left of the title is an oval seal inscribed: “Endowment of Shaykh Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, 1381 AH.”

Below this seal appears the following ownership note: “This copy has come into the possession of the servant in need of Allah, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, by lawful purchase; may Allah pardon him by His grace. Āmīn. Year 1335 AH.” Two small oval seals follow, but I could not decipher their contents.

This copy is written in a regular, easily legible script. It comprises 385 medium-sized pages, each page containing 21 lines, and at the foot of every page one or two words are written to indicate the beginning of the following page.

The manuscript ends with the words: “... I have read the statements of those among them whom I have mentioned affirming these attributes—and of those whom I have not mentioned as well. Their works, and the works of those who quote from them, are filled with such affirmations and with refutations of those who interpret these attributes and reports figuratively, declaring that such interpretation is the way of the Jahmiyyah and the Muʿtazilah, and that—”

About four lines are missing, as in the exemplar, and roughly a page and a half has likewise been lost. Thus the writing is continuous while the meaning is disjointed. (1) This is one of the reasons I did not adopt it as a base manuscript for my critical edition, in addition to its lacking both the date of copying and the name of the scribe.

[The Third Copy]

The printed edition. To the best of my knowledge, it was first published in Majmūʿ Fatāwā Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah, volume five, which contains al-Tisʿīniyyah, al-Sabʿīniyyah (2), and Sharḥ al-Aṣbahāniyyah (3), at the Kurdistan Scientific Press owned by Faraj Allah al-Kurdi.