As for the remaining sheets whose edges were damaged, we undertook their restoration and repair. By Allah’s grace, most of the damage was confined to blank margins, and the little that did touch the text we were able to remedy by various means, so that nothing of what the Shaykh—may Allah protect him—had written was lost, praise be to Allah.
The handwriting is in liquid ink, fine and generally legible, except for certain spots on the translucent pages mentioned earlier, which can be read only with some difficulty.
We also discovered a few fair-copied leaves reproduced from the Shaykh’s original, even-numbered from (pp. 12–16) on paper newer than the main manuscript—corresponding here to (pp. 58–77). They carry several notes and corrections in the Shaykh’s own hand. It appears he had entrusted someone to make this clean copy, so after typesetting we amended the master text in light of it. Regrettably, what precedes those leaves is missing, and what follows them is likewise missing—or perhaps was never completed. Allah knows best.
We then subjected the manuscript to close examination, inserting the appendices the Shaykh had added in their proper places and ensuring that the discussions in both main text and marginalia followed sequentially. Unfortunately, we found one missing leaf—number 13 in the Shaykh’s own pagination—whose content is what is referred to here (pp. 108 and 110).
During typesetting we took care to follow the Shaykh’s later stylistic conventions in matters of layout, embellishment, and design that highlight the scholarly and legal aims: arranging paragraphs with clear openings, printing certain passages in bold, adorning the text with appropriate punctuation, and other touches the reader will notice.
We likewise overlooked the minor slips from which no work is entirely free, particularly in an early composition such as this, which its author never prepared for print or circulation. We corrected them without overburdening the footnotes with repeated notices, and we revised those places where we found the Shaykh still adhering to earlier conventions.