In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.

Editorial Introduction
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of all creation. Blessings and peace be upon His Messenger Muḥammad, and upon his family and every one of his Companions.

This book is among the finest works that have reached us from Imām Ibn al-Qayyim—may Allah have mercy on him. In it he gathered a remarkable array of benefits, subtleties, lessons, admonitions, insights, fine points, observations, and reflections drawn from many fields. He did not arrange them by subject or chapter; rather, it appears that he kept a notebook in which he recorded these scattered thoughts and useful points, inserting whatever appealed to him at various stages of his life. His method throughout is to preface each entry with the word “Section,” “Principle,” “Benefit,” or “Alert,” and then set down either his own reflections, statements transmitted from the early generations, or selected lines of poetry and aphorisms—whatever he deemed most helpful to anyone seeking the path of salvation and success in this world and the next.

The book touches on numerous topics in tawḥīd (monotheism) and creed. He states that knowledge of Allah is attained by contemplating His acts and pondering His signs (ص 28), that the people most complete in their knowledge of Him are those who know Him through His perfection, majesty, and beauty (ص 264), and that knowledge of Allah is of two kinds: an acknowledgment shared by both the obedient and the disobedient, and a deeper knowledge that engenders modesty before Him, love for Him, and turning back to Him—this is the special knowledge (ص 248). The author also clarifies the varying degrees of people in tawḥīd (ص 282), the benefits of tawḥīd in both this life and the hereafter (ص 72), and that the comfort of heart and body lies in obeying Allah (ص 293). He further mentions