Ibn al-Qayyim’s Kitāb al-Rūḥ 129
al-Qayyim’s Kitāb al-Rūḥ. “Extracts” from Kitāb al-Rūḥ are found
in three other Yahudah manuscripts now at Princeton: 336Y, 38b-43a;
976Y, 147b-163b; 2798Y, 32a-41b. I have no information about these
remains of the text.
The opening folios of the India Office manuscript appear to have
undergone serious damage since it was described by Otto Loth well
over a century ago.^13 The manuscript comprises 331 folios, which
obviously contained much more than Kitāb al-Rūḥ as we know it. It
bears the longish title, Kitāb fī al-Kalām ʿalā al-rūḥ al-arwāḥ fī taḥqīq
aḥwāl mā baʿd al-mawt wal-ākhira wal-barzakh. Loth of course had
no printed version with which to compare his manuscript; nonethe-
less he indicated the India Office has some materials in addition to
Ibn al-Qayyim’s book. Loth further observes that “by mistake” only
nineteen queries are counted in this manuscript.^14 There certainly was
some oversight on the part of the copyist, who gave the seventh query
the number five, even though the fifth query had already been cor-
rectly numbered earlier on. As we shall see in the following section,
the preface in this copy is particularly interesting, though it too is now
in a sorry condition.
Several epitomes of Kitāb al-Rūḥ are known.^15 A small (eight pages)
manuscript found at al-Azhar (no. 302737) and available online^16 con-
tains an epitome of the entire text by one Ismāʿīl b. Muḥammad b.
Rakīn. Ibn Rakīn limits himself to the question posed in the title of each
of the 21 queries that make up Kitāb al-Rūḥ; nearly all of the numerous
proof-texts and sources are omitted, as well as the fuṣūl that are found
in most of the queries and which treat of diverse issues, closely or dis-
tantly related to the question posed at the beginning of the masʾala. For
the most part he is interested in the spirits of the dead, their fate after
leaving the body, and the implications for the legal and religious status
of the graveyard. Interestingly enough, though, he does devote a good
13 Loth, Otto: A Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the India
Office, London 1877, p. 41.
14 Loth corrects the numbering in the chapter titles that are copied out in his cata-
logue.
15 Derenbourg, in his description of Escorial 699 (Catalogue, I, pp. 495–496), calls
MS Escorial 1591, which is a copy of Ibn al-Qayyim’s Hādī al-arwāḥ, an abré-
gé of Kitāb al-Rūḥ. This is incorrect. Hādī al-arwāḥ covers the whole slate of
issues connected to al-janna, and it has little if anything to do with the topics
covered in Kitāb al-Rūḥ.
16 Accessible at http://www.al-mostafa.com via ahlalhadith.com as m000184.pdf (visited
19.12.2012).
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