Chapter: A Description of the Manuscript

Our manuscript, it appears, is both more accurate and of higher quality than the copy that lay behind the Indian edition. It has been proof-read and collated against the author’s own autograph: on the margin of its final folio one reads,

“Collation with the author’s copy, written in his own hand—the source from which this was transcribed—has been completed; the wording is now sound. All praise and bounty belong to Him.”

A similar note is found on the verso of folio 31 and in several other places.

The scribe himself is a learned, upright, and devout man, well known for seeking knowledge and for copying texts for his own use and for others. At the close of the manuscript he writes:

“This was set down by the servant in need of Allah’s mercy—and hoping for it, and for the intercession of His Prophet Muhammad ﷺ—Masāʿid b. Abī al-Layl al-Sakhāwī. May Allah pardon him, his parents, his teachers, and all Muslims. Praise belongs to Allah alone; may His blessings and peace be upon our master Muhammad, his family, and his Companions.”

On the recto of the first folio we read:

“His son—our teacher Zayn al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān—has granted me authorization for all the works of the Shaykh (i.e., the ḥāfiẓ al-Dhahabī). I read to him in the village of Kafr Batnā several fascicles besides what I had already heard… Written by Masāʿid b. Sārī b. Masʿūd b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Raḥma al-Ḥimyarī al-Hawārī al-Sakhāwī, in the village of al-Shibʿā, in the southern Ghūṭa of Damascus, in the year 857 AH.”

The figure 857 is precisely what stands in his own handwriting, yet it is problematic, for he had died several years earlier: al-Sakhāwī records this in al-Ḍawʾ al-Lāmiʿ 9/155, and Ibn al-ʿImād in al-Shadharāt