4 – Is the present work merely an abridgement of a larger book by the author?
Before addressing this point, it should be noted that, as far as I am aware, no one ever claimed that the author produced two separate works—a large one and a shorter epitome of it—until modern times.
The evidence on which the proponents of this view rely is essentially twofold:
1 – The author’s statement in this book (p. 7): “This is an abridged treatise on Prophetic, Sharīʿah-based horsemanship … .”
2 – His words in Iʿlām al-Muwaqqiʿīn (4/22): “… and we discussed them in our large book on Sharīʿah-based horsemanship.”
From these two passages it has been inferred that the author composed both a sizeable treatise and a condensed version of it.¹
What appears to me, however—on the strength of the biographical sources and the internal evidence of this very book, as will be shown—is that the volume now in our hands is itself the book he referred to as “our large book.”² I say this for several reasons:
1 – He described it as “large” only to distinguish it from his separate monograph devoted exclusively to the question of requiring a muḥallil in racing, since both works touch on that topic