Introduction to the Critical Edition

Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and may blessings and peace be upon our Prophet Muhammad and upon all his family and Companions.

To proceed: This is a new and distinctive edition of Islamic Governance for the Reform of the Ruler and the Subjects, by Shaykh al-Islam Abū al-Abbās Ahmad ibn Abd al-Salām Ibn Taymiyya—may Allah Most High have mercy on him. It is distinguished in several respects:

1. It is the first complete edition of the book. Previous editions were abridged because they relied on manuscripts that had been abridged or redacted from the book’s complete original version—the version we are publishing today as part of the Works of Shaykh al-Islam series. (The distinctive features of this edition will be discussed in detail on p. 28.)

2. It is the first scholarly critical edition of the book to treat it as it deserves. We hope that it fully meets the requirements of critical editing.

One point I wish to emphasize from the outset is that the Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—did not intend this book to encompass every detail that could fall under the subject of Islamic governance, nor did he follow the conventional method of works in this discipline, such as the books of al-Māwardī and al-Qādī Abū Ya'lā. Rather, as he states in the introduction, this treatise contains the essential principles of divinely ordained governance and Prophetic administration—that is, the foundations of its issues and its overarching concerns.

This is precisely what the occasion and the time required. As for the occasion, this treatise was written for one of