The verification of manuscripts and the care of texts is a discipline in its own right. Muslim scholars, from earliest times, laid down its rules with exemplary precision, and ever since the age of handwritten transmission they have left us superb models of critical scholarship. Among these are two works that may stand for scores of their peers: the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Imām Mālik in the recension of Yaḥyā ibn Yaḥyā al-Laythī, and Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī.

The Muwaṭṭaʾ in the Laythī transmission was diligently studied by the distinguished scholar Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf, better known as Ibn Masdī al-Andalusī al-Gharnāṭī, who lived and was buried in Mecca (599–663 AH). He received this recension from numerous teachers in many lands through a variety of chains of transmission. After collating the available copies, he produced for his own use a critically established version based on those multiple narrations. To each narration he assigned a distinctive siglum, which he listed at the beginning of his copy, and in its margins he recorded the points of divergence between them.¹

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, for its part, was the object of rigorous labor by two eminent scholars: al-Yūnīnī and Ibn Mālik, author of the Alfiyyah. They collected the various recensions of the work, compared them line by line, chose the preferred readings, and set out the variants in the margins. Their edition became one of the finest, most accurate, and most meticulously controlled copies of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. It achieved wide circulation, and when Sultan ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd—may Allah have mercy on him—ordered the Ṣaḥīḥ to be printed, he relied on the Yūnīnī recension. To this very day it remains the soundest, most precise, and best-executed edition of the book; every subsequent publication of the Ṣaḥīḥ depends upon it, and I doubt that any contemporary editor could surpass it.

The ease and proliferation of modern printing, however, have encouraged many people of weak conscience—those who venture into publishing or lay claim to expertise in textual criticism—to release books riddled with misreadings, corruptions, omissions, or to pirate carefully prepared editions in the hope of quick profit. In doing so they usurp the moral rights of the authentic scholars and the material rights of serious publishers, harming every diligent endeavor and every sincere press.

A maxim of economics states: “Bad money drives out good.” We ask Allah for protection and well-being.

Dar Ibn Kathir for Printing, Publishing, and Distribution, established in 1984 in Damascus and Beirut, is among the large, serious publishing houses serving Islamic culture. It has sought to contribute to the re-editing and release of foundational works in its field, and its very name was perhaps the strongest incentive to undertake a critical edition of al-Bidayah wa’l-Nihayah, one of the greatest legacies of the ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathir, renowned above all for its treatment of history