Method of Critical Editing
Our method may be summarized as follows:
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We relied on the original manuscript to include all the additional material it contains that is absent from the other copies, after establishing that this material was written by Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyya and that the other copies were either selected or abridged from the original (as explained earlier). In three places in the original, however, passages are repeated verbatim. The copyist may have inadvertently repeated them, or the passage may have been an insertion in the original whose proper location he did not know and therefore copied more than once, or there may have been some similar explanation. We have drawn attention to this in the relevant places. See (pp. 111, 113–114, 131).
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Since our manuscript is unique in containing the additions mentioned above, we encountered difficulty deciphering some of its passages. We corrected those whose proper reading we were able to determine and noted the problematic readings in the relevant places.
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As for the remainder of the book, we established the text on the basis of the best available reading and did not adhere to any one manuscript. This is because the original manuscript—as we have explained—is not of a quality that can be relied upon, while some of the manuscripts we used are of higher quality. We also made use of the edition of the book included in Majmū al-Fatāwā, which is designated by the siglum (ط).
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We provided source references for the hadiths and reports and traced quoted passages to their original sources wherever possible.
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In the book’s footnotes, we included certain comments appropriate to the context from the commentary of the eminent scholar Shaykh Muhammad ibn Uthaymīn—may Allah Most High have mercy on him. In its original form, that commentary was