• (6/ 343): “And here is the Book of Allah: it contains nothing that negates the obligation to observe the waiting period in the home.” In the al-Risāla edition (5/ 614), yanfī (“negates”) was corrupted to yanbaghī (“is appropriate”), disrupting the sense.

• (6/ 405): “Her usual menstrual pattern must therefore govern the judgment and take precedence over abnormal bleeding outside that pattern.” In the al-Risāla edition (5/ 652), this was corrupted to: “… outside worship.”

The two editors described the earlier editions as follows: “Yet in none of these editions did the book receive its due share of critical editing, correction, and scrutiny. They were all full of errors, misreadings, textual corruptions, and poor presentation, with insufficient attention to verifying its hadith texts and distinguishing the sound from the unsound. This prompted the publisher to propose editing the book and publishing an accurate edition in accordance with the established scholarly principles of critical editing …”. They then singled out Shaykh al-Fiqī’s edition in a footnote, saying: “Even the edition prepared by Shaykh Muhammad Hāmid al-Fiqī—may Allah have mercy on him—is, like the others, riddled with errors, despite his claim that he relied on two manuscripts held at the Egyptian National Library and checked its hadiths against their original sources in the Six Books and elsewhere!”

We say: Everything with which they characterized the earlier editions in general, and Shaykh al-Fiqī’s edition in particular, applies equally to the al-Risāla edition prepared by these two shaykhs. Their edition incorporated the errors that al-Fiqī’s edition had inherited from its predecessors, together with his alterations, and then surpassed them through its own editors’ interventions in the book’s text: omissions, additions, and changes!

After all this, can this edition really be “an accurate edition in accordance with the established scholarly principles of critical editing,” as the proprietor of Mu’assasat al-Risāla intended?