- The Manuscripts of the Book
Regrettably, we have not come across any complete manuscript of the work. To the best of our knowledge it exists only in three copies: the Aleppo manuscript, the Berlin manuscript, and the manuscript housed in the Iraqi Museum (1). Since the Iraqi Museum’s copy was transcribed from the Aleppo exemplar, the presence of the latter makes the former redundant.
The first manuscript—the Aleppo copy:
This copy is kept in the Ottoman Library in Aleppo and has since been incorporated into the al-Assad National Library under catalogue number 15324.
It consists of 137 folios, 273 pages, in large format; each page is ruled for 35 lines, with an average of seventeen words per line.
Its title reads: “Kitāb al-Ṣawāʿiq al-Munazzalah ʿalā al-Ṭāʾifah al-Jahmiyyah wa-al-Muʿaṭṭilah, composed by the eminent Imām, the learned scholar Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr ibn Ayyūb Ibn al-Qayyim al-Ḥanbalī—may Allah have mercy on him.”
Beginning: the opening of the book.
Ending: the last portion extant of the work, after which the scribe wrote: “Its copyist completed it on the day…"