Section Five: A Description of the Manuscripts on Which I Relied
By Allah’s grace, I was able to obtain the following copies of the book:
- A facsimile of the Maktab al-Islāmī copy.
It consists of only three pages written in a legible naskh hand, save for a few words at the top of the final page that are obliterated. The line count of these pages varies: the first page has 23 lines, the second 31, and the third 17 lines. The wording across the three pages is continuous from start to finish.
These pages belong to the latter part of the work, as I discovered when I collated them with the Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyyah copy described below. They bear no indication that the text was ever compared with its exemplar or any other source, nor do they record the scribe’s name or the date of transcription. Nonetheless, this does not detract from attributing the text to the author, as I have clarified earlier (1).
Shaykh al-Albānī—may Allah preserve him—stated that the handwriting most likely dates to the eleventh century AH (2). The principal merit of this copy is that, at its very beginning, it explicitly ascribes the book to Shaykh al-Islām, as mentioned above (3).
- The Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyyah copy.
This manuscript is part of a collection kept at Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyyah under catalogue number 1899 in the Theology section. It is penned in a fine naskh script, comprises 12 pages, and each page contains 21 lines.