Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my first Arabic teacher, my mother, for her support and help in my research. She helped by offering several sources strongly related to my work. I relied on her insights during my Ph.D. journey, in addition to her unfailing encouragement. I acknowledge my father Abde-Salam Safri’s extensive and various support throughout my studies to complete my doctoral degree.
I am deeply grateful to Prof. Robert Wisnovsky for his invaluable support and assistance. He deserves sincere gratitude for his trust and encouragement. I am immensely grateful to him for his exceptional guidance and correction of my mistakes. I am indebted to him for inviting me to attend his lectures and participate with his students. This valuable opportunity enabled me to engage with people at McGill University.
Prof. Peter Adamson deserves special thanks for his generous insightful guidance during my time at LMU München. I must thank Prof. Asad Ahmed for his ongoing support and insights. I am fortunate to have benefitted from their suggestions and advice. I wish to thank professors: Abdellah Errachidi, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Ursula Coope, Cecilia Trifogli, Afifi al-Atiki and Ulrich Rudolph for their generous help and useful insights in this field. A special thanks to my friends for generously reading some specific sections of my work.
This monograph is derived from a thesis submitted to Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the degree of “Doctor of Philosophy”. Considering this, my sincere gratitude goes to the generous institutional support of Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium for awarding me a scholarship that supported my doctoral studies. I should also mention the financial support that I received from DAAD to cover my stay at the University of Oxford, and the hospitality of Magdalen College, the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Exeter College.
I would like to express my gratitude to Abdurraouf Oueslati and Mona Saif for being so receptive and facilitating the publishing process, as well as to Ayman Shihadeh, Anna Akasoy, and Emilie Savage-Smith for accepting my proposal in their series IPTS.
This book is dedicated to my family, my parents, my sister, my aunt, my tutors, and my close friends for their unconditional support.
Ibrahim Safri
Munich