Ibn al-Qayyim’s Kitāb al-Rūḥ 133
He continued – may the prayer of God and peace be upon him – to pro-
claim the essence of God. No opponent could stop him. [He continued]
to execute His order, and no resister could restrainer him, until the dawn
of belief rose, and the sun of unicity and gnosis (ʿirfān) shone. His call
moved along like the sun to the ends of the earth, so that his creed reached
what day and night have reached.^25 So may the prayer of God be upon
him and his kinsfolk, good and pure, an eternal prayer, as eternal as the
heavens and earths, and peace and blessing.^26It seems, then, that the preface found in the Hyderabad edition, which
so exercised the anonymous editor, is a fluke of whatever manuscript
was used for that edition. The Hyderabad printing, unfortunately,
gives no information about the manuscript or manuscripts that were
utilized. Presumably the manuscript(s) are found in Indian libraries.^27
However, the fact that the same preface reappears in all subsequent
printings, rather than the authentic preface by Ibn al-Qayyim, proves
that all subsequent printings derive from the Hyderabad version. None
of the later “editors” seems to have gone to the trouble of checking
manuscripts.
4. The Composite Nature of Kitāb al-Rūḥ
In the opening section of this paper I suggested that Kitāb al-Rūḥ was
left unfinished by Ibn al-Qayyim. It is my opinion that he intended
to form the book out of several essays that he had written, suitably
edited and sutured together. He did not finish this project, and the
textus receptus reveals signs of the composite and unpolished state that
it was left in. The most important clue to this state of affairs is found
in Ibn al-Qayyim’s reference, within Kitāb al-Rūḥ, to another writing
of his, which he calls “our large book on knowing the spirit and the
soul” (kitābunā al-kabīr fī maʿrifat al-rūḥ wal-nafs). Specifically, he
25 Just like the nycthemeron encompasses the entire earth, so also has Islam spread
throughout the world.
26 Ms India Office, Loth, Catalogue, 172, f. 3b.
27 This reticence is the usual practice of the Hyderabad printings. See the wor-
thy efforts of Muhsin Mahdi to identify the manuscripts used for a Hyderabad
printing of al-Fārābī in his Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, New
York 1962, pp. 152–153. Mahdi was able to establish, with a good deal of prob-
ability, that the editors used two manuscripts, one from Rampur and the other
from Lucknow.
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