4.1 - Manuscripts and Editions of the Leave

There are dozens of manuscripts for this Leave in various international libraries, but they are relatively recent. The reason is that the king of Meyafariqîn, the Triumphant King, requested this Leave from Sheikh Muhyiddin by summoning, through correspondence, because he could not meet him, since the sheikh was then in Damascus. Consequently, the Sheikh wrote it and sent it to the Triumphant King in Mayafian, who was suffering from frequent wars that eventually led to hi martyrdom. This explains the loss of the original copy. Although Osman Yahya says that Koprulu's copy No. 766 is original, since the library catalog determines that this manuscript was written during the life of Sheikh Muhyiddin, and possibly 632 AH, this conclusion cannot be confirmed. Although this collection is old, and certainly some of the treatises in it were read on Sheikh Muhyiddin, but the Leave itself that exist in this collection is written with a different and more recent script than the rest. We have noted that the calligraphy in which this copy of the Leave was written also contained some notes mentioning people in the 9th century AH, such as Obaidullah Muhammad ibn Omar ibn Azm, whose name was repeated at the top of many pages, and he is a well-known Tunisian historian, who lived through his work in binding and trading with books. He was also very keen to collect such books, as Al-Sakhawi noted, that he was keen to collect sheikh Muhyiddin's works and to promote them and their transcribers, until he became an advocate for his field [Al-Alaams for Zirkli ???, v6, p. 315]. All this suggests that he may have written the copy of the Leave in this old collection, and actually the transcriber stated, in the same calligraphy, on page 146a, that this copy was read in Cairo in the month of Shaaban in the year of 870. Therefore, this copy is not old, but we also noticed that it is very similar to Shehid Ali 2796, which appears to be the oldest available version, so it might have been copied from it.

Therefore, we have found, by examining many of the manuscripts in our hands today, that Shehid Ali Pasha No. 2796 is the most important and oldest one, although it is not explicitly dated, but since it was written by Sheikh Ahmed the son of Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Caesar, who died in 721 AH, and he was the director of the library in the mosque of Sheikh Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi. This gives this manuscript a great additional importance, so we will adopt it as a basic manuscript in this investigation, and we will refer to it as the manuscript or copy of "Shehid Ali".

We also found that the Princeton Manuscript No. 4098, and The Dhahiriya No. 4679, also also corresponding to Shehid Ali, and they include statements quoted from Sheikh Muhammad Ibn Caesar. All these manuscripts listed about 265 titles, then other titles were added to them as an appendix to the original Leave, after the end of the text written by Sheikh Muhyiddin, which ended by the book “The Servant and the Lord,” just like the Index as well. Thus we will compare some of the differences with these two manuscripts that we will refer to as "Princeton" and "Dhahiriya".

Despite the slight differences between the number of titles mentioned in the main text of the Leave according to these manuscripts, and the existence of some advance or delay in arranging them, the main features are exactly the same, as they all start and end in the same way, and they are divided into the same paragraphs and in a very similar way to what is found in the Index mentioned in Chapter I above. Actually, most of the titles are also mentioned in the Index, and both of which begin with books of Hadith, then the Interpretation, then the Mysteries, and in similar order. They also end up in the book "al-ʿAbd wa-l-Rabb: The Slave and the Lord". Therefore, there is no doubt about the attribution of this Leave to Sheikh Muhyiddin, but the reason for these minor differences between the copies is nothing more than copying mistakes, especially since some of these copies are just a personal note written by some transcribers, and sometimes they declared that they had copied from a defective origin, as we will see shortly.

4.1.1- The Previous Editions

4.1.2- List of Available Manuscripts