He also said:

“His testimony—meaning Ibn al-Qayyim’s—that his teacher authored on this question a well-known treatise, of which nothing has surfaced except the three pages mentioned earlier whose copyist and date are unknown, pages that fail to satisfy the conditions observed in scholarly methods of research and verification, and it is well known to specialists what such shortcomings entail in terms of non-establishment.” (1)

This may be answered as follows:

First:
So long as the fragment explicitly attributes the book to Shaykh al-Islam, neither the unknown date of the copy nor the anonymity of its scribe undermines that attribution. To invoke the rules of research and textual criticism to reject its authenticity on the grounds of an unidentified copyist and undated manuscript is untenable, for none of those rules deem either factor sufficient to cast doubt upon a work whose author is clearly named at the head of the copy. (2)

Second:
If we were to allow the anonymity of the scribe and the date of copying to invalidate an explicit attribution, we would end up questioning a large number of manuscript works that carry neither the scribe’s name nor a date of transcription, as anyone who surveys manuscript catalogues knows. Moreover, a second, complete copy of the book has now been found; at its end the copyist gives his name and affirms that he collated it with the original.

Third:
Further proof of the correct attribution of this epistle to Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah lies in the passages and cross-references it contains, which correspond exactly to quotations and works whose ascription to him is firmly established, as becomes evident upon examining the edited text, its documentation, and the accompanying annotations. (3)