the handwriting of the eighth century AH. Consonantal dots are sparse, and words sometimes run into one another. The copy has been read and corrected, and I do not rule out the possibility that its copyist was one of the author’s students. Allah knows best.

The drawback of this copy is that it is incomplete: the surviving portion represents exactly half the fatwa. Were it not for this, I would have used it as the base manuscript for the critical edition. I have designated it by the letter (أ).

The Second Copy:
A complete, recent copy held at the King Fahd Library in Riyadh under the shelfmark 672/86. It is written in a clear naskh hand. Neither its copyist nor the exemplar from which it was copied is identified. The date of transcription is recorded at the end as 1338 AH, and it consists of thirteen pages.

The copy contains some corrections written in the margins. I have designated it by the letter (ب).

The Manuscript’s Title:
Neither copy bears a title, and none of Ibn al-Qayyim’s biographers (may Allah have mercy on him) specifies a name for it. Even al-Saffārīnī (may Allah have mercy on him), when quoting his abridgement of it, gave no title. This is perhaps unsurprising, for such is the nature of fatwas: questions are submitted to a scholar, who answers them in his own hand or by dictation, then leaves them untitled. They circulate among people as the fatwa of so-and-so, not as a fatwa bearing a title!

Upon examining the manuscript, we observe the following: