Mukhtasar al-Sawa'iq al-Mursala (Ibn al-Mawsili)

Mukhtasar al-Sawa'iq al-Mursala is an abridgement of Ibn al-Qayyim's al-Sawa'iq al-Mursala 'ala al-Jahmiyya wa'l-Mu'attila made by Shams al-Din Muhammad Ibn al-Mawsili (d. 774 AH). The editors of the Dar Ata'at al-'Ilm printing describe it as the older, better known, larger and more useful of the book's two abridgements, printed several times and widely spread both before and after any part of the original itself came to light. ¹

The abridger did not state his method; he said only in his preface that he had "selected" it from Ibn al-Qayyim's words, and then began. The editors judge that he kept the spirit and style of the original. ¹ As an example of the scale of abridgement they note that Ibn al-Qayyim answered the second "idol" – preferring reason over revelation – in 242 aspects, of which the abridgement keeps fifty-two, some of them shortened. ²

The abridgement matters because it contains the abridgement of the lost part of the Sawa'iq, a large section that by the editors' reckoning runs from the middle of p. 570 to the end of p. 1648 in the pagination of the edition they refer to, including the discussion of the third and fourth idols not found in the original. ^{2 3} The abridgement itself has a large lacuna in all the manuscripts the editors saw, corresponding to the original between pp. 255 and 422. ² To establish the original's text the editors relied on the finest of the nine manuscripts of the abridgement they found, copied in 758 AH and held in the library of Dar al-'Ulum of Nadwat al-'Ulama' in Lucknow, which they call "M". ²

The edition the editors refer to is that of al-Hasan ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Alawi in four volumes, Maktabat Adwa' al-Salaf, Riyadh, first edition 1425 AH / 2004. ²

The book has a second abridgement by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1206 AH), a small selection of 254 pages including introduction and indexes, edited by Daghsh ibn Shabib al-Ajmi and published by Maktabat Ahl al-Athar in Kuwait in 1437 AH / 2016. ⁴