Acknowledgements
Praise to God, Lord of the worlds, and blessings upon the messengers.
I have incurred many debts in the course of this translation, which began almost twenty years ago with a small circle of friends eager to unlock Islam’s spiritual treasures in early morning meetings in northern California and, despite many fits and starts, has continued since. Hassan Laidi, then the editor of Aljumuah Magazine, encouraged me to continue translating it and published the installments monthly for several years. Muhammad Eissa, then at the University of Chicago and Editorial Consultant at Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI) at Brigham Young University, encouraged me to complete the project and put me in touch with D. Morgan Davis, who showed great interest and faith in the project. Later when that initiative was acquired by Brill, Teddi Dols showed great interest in the project, and I have since had the pleasure of working with Abdurraouf Oueslati and Cas Van den Hof at Brill, who all have been incredibly supportive. My greatest debt is to my students and friends, Rezart Beka and Tesneem Elkiek, both graduate students at Georgetown University. Rezart painstakingly checked the entire translation against the Arabic text and Tesneem thoroughly read through the translation. As did Basit Iqbal, who is the most competent copyeditor I know. The text would not be the same without their innumerable suggestions and corrections. Over the last several years, I have received almost weekly queries from all corners of the world about the translation. I have not always been punctual about responding to them, but their enthusiasm, prayers, and wishes have kept me going, and without their encouragement, I would not have been able to keep at it for such a long time in the middle of several other projects. My final debt is to the author, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who, unbeknownst to him, has been my spiritual mentor for the last twenty years. Besides, his frequent disagreement with the author of the original treatise, Abū Ismāʿīl al-Harawī, constrained by utmost respect and benevolence, and his outstanding effort to find excuses for those whose intentions he trusted but with whom he profoundly disagreed, serves as my own guide in my intellectual life.
رَبَّنَا تَقَبَّلْ مِنَّا إِنَّكَ أَنتَ السَّمِيعُ الْعَلِيمُ وَتُبْ عَلَيْنَآ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ التَّوَّابُ الرًّحِيمُ