on a valuable manuscript. Wherever we use the definite expression “the printed edition,” it refers to the al-Risāla edition, though it may also encompass earlier editions. In some footnotes, we explicitly name that edition or others, individually or collectively, using expressions such as “the earlier editions,” “the printed copies,” and the like.

In the fourth volume, we referred to the ʿAbd al-Latīf edition. We consider it likely that this edition followed the al-Maymaniyya edition here too, as it did in the first volume. However, we did not have the second volume of the al-Maymaniyya edition available to us, so we could not establish this with certainty.

In tracing hadiths and other reports to their sources, we generally adopted a concise and measured approach. We did not alter the author’s wording, even where it differed from the sources, except in narrowly defined cases of an obvious omission or a scribal misreading, which we duly noted.

When the manuscripts—which derive from different exemplars—agreed on an obvious error, we retained it in the main text, unless its written form admitted the possibility of a scribal misreading. In that case, we corrected it in the main text and recorded the manuscript reading in a footnote.

We placed additions to the manuscript text in square brackets []. These were usually drawn from the author’s sources or supplied to remedy a disruption in the sense or a scribal oversight, with an explanation in the footnotes.

We traced the author’s various sources, whether he explicitly named them or not. Identifying and comparing them helped us correct the text and determine the proper reading where there was uncertainty or where the sources differed, as we explained in our discussion of the author’s sources. The author may, for example, quote a passage from Sahīh Muslim while drawing it from another work, such as al-Bayhaqī’s Dalāʾil al-Nubuwwa (Proofs of Prophethood) or al-Hamawī’s work on medicine. In such cases, preference is given to the wording