Among the few places where the two editors followed their manuscript source is p. (571) of this volume: they omitted (4/ 352) the heading “Section” before the entry “Milk” because it was absent from the manuscript, although it appears in every other manuscript and printed edition. Their recourse to the manuscript here thus did the book a disservice!

As for their method of verifying references and tracing hadiths to their sources, they stated: “We consulted the Sunnah books, musnad collections, mu‘jam collections, and many of the sources from which the author drew, checking against them all the hadiths, reports, and statements he cited—a vast quantity, an enormous number. Wherever we found an error, we corrected it; an omission, we supplied it; or an addition, we removed it, for in composing his work he relied—may Allah have mercy on him—on his memory and retention ...” This is the very pretext that Shaykh al-Fiqī had previously invoked to justify his alterations to the text of the book. Yet here too they followed no consistent method. Sometimes they changed a hadith’s wording to match its source; sometimes the wording was already identical to that of the source, but they changed it because of an apparent defect, without consulting that source; and sometimes they retained al-Fiqī’s alterations to the wording of a hadith without changing them. Examples of such interventions include:

• (4/ 26): The author quoted a hadith from Sahīh Muslim containing the words: “and Iblīs was created from a flame of fire.” The two editors of the al-Risāla edition (4/ 20) printed: “and the jinn were created ...”, as in the Sahīh.

• (4/ 40): In the hadith narrated by al-Tirmidhī, “If any of you develops a fever ...”, they altered the text (4/ 30), following their manuscript source in some places and Jāmi‘ al-Tirmidhī in others. In fact, the author was drawing on the book of Ibn Tarkhān al-Hamawī, and the wording is that book’s wording. That is why he stated that the hadith was narrated by Rāfi‘ ibn Khadīj, as given in the aforementioned book, although it was actually narrated by Thawbān.