The earliest traceable copy

Baghdadi, Majd al-Din Abu Sa'id Sharaf bin al-Mu'ayyad bin Abi al-Fath al-. A Tuhfat Al Barara fil Masail Al Ashara [The Gift of the Pious in Answers to the Ten Questions].

€ 35,000.00

The earliest traceable copy: a 13th-century Arabic manuscript of Majd al-Din al-Baghdadi's principal work, copied scarcely a generation after the death of the author.

Structured around ten questions, the treatise condenses al-Baghdadi's teaching into a compact didactic form intended for instruction, recollection, and repeated consultation. Records trace one later copy in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, dated 993 H, one undated copy in the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco, one copy in the Majlis Library, Tehran, dated 709 H, and ten further copies in Turkey, including dated examples from 767 H, 826 H, 839 H, and 898 H. On this evidence, the present 651 H manuscript is the earliest traceable witness to the work. It belongs to the earliest phase of the text's transmission, when Kubrawi teaching was being fixed and circulated in manuscript form across the eastern Islamic world.