The Epistle of Forgiveness. Abu l-'Ala al-Ma'arri

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In her critical edition of the two epistles Bint al-Shāṭiʾ explains that for Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Epistle she relied on two manuscripts from the Taymūriyyah collection in the National Library (Dār al-Kutub) in Cairo and one printed edition, the one incorporated by Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī in his collection Rasāʾil al-bulaghāʾ.⁵⁵ The older, undated manuscript was apparently the basis for both the later one (copied in 1327/1909) and the edition in Rasāʾil al-bulaghāʾ, and Bint al-Shāṭiʾ took it as the basis for her own edition. We have also benefited from the only other critical edition of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle, part of the unpublished doctoral dissertation by Michel Dechico, which also contains a study and a translation.⁵⁶

      For her edition of Risālat al-Ghufrān, Bint al-Shāṭiʾ used seven manuscripts, as well as Nicholson’s publication and earlier printed editions. The most important manuscript, preserved in Istanbul, seems to date from the seventh/thirteenth century; its copyist remarks that he collated the text with a manuscript corrected by Abū Zakariyyā l-Tibrīzī, mentioned above as a pupil and great admirer of al-Maʿarrī, and an important scholar himself. The other manuscripts used by Bint al-Shāṭiʾ are obviously of less importance, being later, sometimes incomplete, and offering a less reliable text.

Bint al-Shāṭiʾ provides two kinds of footnotes. One supplies textual commentary, including meticulous, detailed information about variant readings in the manuscripts and parallel texts, occasional emendations, and glosses that explain difficult words. At times she cites Nicholson’s readings and interpretations, often with gratuitously scathing remarks when he was wrong. The other set of footnotes gives basic information on persons and places mentioned in the text. Even though her editorial practice has been criticized,⁵⁷ altogether her notes display stupendous learning and she is almost always right. In our own annotation we have relied much on her notes, but we have not slavishly followed her and it would have been impossible simply to translate her annotation. The textual notes to the present Arabic edition only provide the main variants and those instances where we decided to deviate from Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s text; variants that are obviously scribal errors have been ignored. For detailed information about manuscript variants the reader is referred to Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s edition. Where needed, explanations and justifications of our choices are found in the annotation to the English translation.

      The original guidelines of the Library of Arabic Literature recommend that annotation be kept to a minimum. We are grateful to the editors for approving the increased volume of annotations included in the present work. Because of the difficulty of the present text and the plethora of names and allusions it contains, a great deal more explanation was considered essential; there would have been yet more if we had done full justice to the text. Instead, we have limited the annotation to a minimum. A full list of the names of individuals, places, tribes and dynasties which occur in the text is given in the Glossary of Names and Terms.

      الرموز

Notes to the Introduction