This edition is distinguished by its division of the text into paragraphs, its correction of errors in earlier editions, its explanation of some unfamiliar words in the text, and its comments on certain passages in the author’s discussion.

The shaykh stated in his introduction that, once he had firmly resolved to publish the book, he began searching for its manuscripts. In the Egyptian National Library, he found “a complete copy missing a few leaves from the first volume (no. 230, Hadith), and separate parts that together make up another copy, numbered (231, 232, 233, 234); both copies were written (sic) before 780 AH.” We have the last three manuscripts, but the copy numbered 234 is undated, so we do not know how the shaykh determined that it had been written before that date. As noted earlier, the Maymaniyya edition also relied on this copy. Yet the shaykh referred to these manuscripts only rarely in his annotations.

The shaykh criticized the earlier editions as “derived from one another, so that the errors in the first appeared in the second, which added new errors, and likewise with the third.” The shaykh was right, but his own “critically edited and improved” edition—as he described it—is subject to the same criticism. He relied on the ‘Abd al-Latīf edition, carrying its errors over into his own while correcting a number of them. He then proceeded to alter the text, particularly the wording of the hadiths, on the grounds that Ibn al-Qayyim had composed his book while travelling and had therefore relied on his memory, which can fail its possessor. He referred to this in his introduction, saying: “This comparison (meaning the comparison of the hadiths with the Six Books and other sources) revealed distortions and omissions in the wording of many hadiths, as well as distortions in many names. I therefore restored each to its correct form.” Thus he deleted, added, and altered