Acknowledgments
In 2001, my colleague and friend Sebastian Günther and I started work on a unique manuscript that has been preserved in the Dār al-Kutub al-Ẓāhiriyya Library in Damascus, listed there under the title Kitāb Sharḥ al-sunna by Ghulām Khalīl. We were strongly encouraged by my Doktorvater and mentor, Professor Josef van Ess, University of Tübingen, to edit critically and translate this important Arabic text, as it appears to contain one of the earliest Muslim creeds, dating back to the second half of the second/eighth century.
It was a particularly fortunate coincidence that we also had the privilege of reading parts of the Arabic manuscript with my late mentor, Professor Ihsan Abbas, during a short visit he paid to Beirut in 2001, and it was a real pleasure to enjoy his company and benefit from his precious comments and insights.
The preliminary outcome of this research was an article in German published in 2003.1 Since then, we have intermittently continued pursuing this research project, unfortunately subject to frequent interruptions by other academic and administrative obligations, and to the unstable political situation in Lebanon and the wider Middle East region.
In 2008, with the help of a grant awarded to us by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, we were able to concentrate once again our academic efforts on this research project. We gratefully acknowledge this financial support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation here, as it enabled us to meet in person in Göttingen twice, in the summers of 2008 and 2010, in order to revamp our project ideas and continue our collaboration and academic conversation.
The importance of this research project also found new affirmation in 2014, when I was asked by Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, to write the entry on Ghulām Khalīl. Furthermore, my sabbatical leave from the American University of Beirut in 2017 considerably helped me to do the necessary groundwork and reading for this research project, which turned out to be more complex the more primary sources were discovered and compared.
It is my pleasure to acknowledge Sebastian Günther’s comprehensive commitment to this project, his valuable advice and intellectual stimulation, and most of all his inestimable support in bringing this project to fruition. This study is the rewarding outcome of our joint collaboration and ongoing conversation.
I owe my sincere thanks also to a number of colleagues and friends for their help at various stages of the project. First of all, I wish to sincerely thank Professor Tarif Khalidi, mentor and dear colleague at the American University of Beirut, for agreeing to take a critical look at the English translation of the text of Kitāb Sharḥ al-sunna. I am deeply grateful to him for his most valuable advice in revising this translation.
Likewise, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my colleague and friend at the American University of Beirut, Mahmoud Youness, for his unremitting faith in this project. Mahmoud painstakingly read and revised a first draft of the English translation and made a number of very helpful suggestions to improve its language and style. I also wish to thank Hussein Abdulsater, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in whose judiciousness I have complete confidence.
I am indebted to my former student Ali Rida Rizek, Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Göttingen, for his insightful comments and his thoughtful proofreading of the Arabic text.
Special thanks are due to Amina al-Hasan, Hiba al-Malih, and Hisham Ahmad, from the Manuscript Division at the Asad National Library, Damascus, for their kind and generous help. At the American University of Beirut’s Jafet Library, I greatly benefited from the assistance of Samar Mikati-Kaissi, Archives and Special Collections Librarian, and Carla Chalhoub, Head of Access Services.
Mention needs to be made of the invaluable technical assistance offered by Dorothee Lauer and Jana Newiger, Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Göttingen, especially in the final stages of preparing this book manuscript for publication. Elizabeth Crawford, Göttingen deserves my sincere gratitude for her thorough editorial help and her patience in fine-tuning the English text of this book.
A warm and very cordial word of thanks goes to Teddi Dols, Brill’s Islamic History and Civilization (IHC) Series Editor, and to Daniel Sentance, freelance copy editor with Brill, for their invaluable support in bringing this book to fruition.
Finally, I would like to express genuine thanks to the anonymous assessor for her most detailed, helpful, and inspiring comments. It is also my great pleasure to record a sincere expression of gratitude to Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bochum, for accepting this publication in Brill’s IHC series.
Maher Jarrar
Beirut, August 2019
Jarrar and Günther, Ġulām Ḫalīl.