What is the Shaykh's opinion of the printed book al-Kamil by Ibn 'Adi?
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
The questioner : The book al-Kamil by Ibn 'Adi, al-Kamil fi Asma' al-Rijal, al-Kamil fi al-Du'afa, which has been printed—what is your opinion of this printed edition?
The Shaykh : It is very bad. The people responsible for printing it are a group of merchants with no integrity; they lie and mislead... A committee of specialists and under the supervision of the publisher, may Allah will it, so they are above the specialists. Who are the specialists? Hired student children, so they are the specialists! And he is the one supervising them. Have you seen the index they produced?
The questioner : I have not seen it.
The Shaykh : Ah, if you had seen the index, you would have known that they are merchants, and they are covered by the general meaning of his saying (peace be upon him). They printed the index such that it is of no benefit to one who has the first edition of the book, because the first edition is in seven volumes, as I think I saw it?
The questioner: Yes.
The Shaykh : And the page numbers are not for every volume; the page numbers for each volume are separate from the page numbers of the other volumes, but the numbering is continuous from the first volume to the seventh volume, so the number of pages was two thousand, and so on. When they printed the index in a volume like one of the seven volumes, the total became eight, but this index does not work for this edition, but rather for a new edition in which they corrected the pages, with each volume having its own pages according to the standard followed in all publications. Then, as they say: "The third of the three." They forced us to buy the new edition, but when we requested it, they said it had not arrived yet. So they are publishing the volume that is of no benefit except with the second edition, and the second edition has not been released to the market, and it has gross errors. We seek refuge in Allah, we seek refuge in Allah from greed and material avarice.
The questioner : One of the young men at Imam University... he has a master's thesis on the book of Ibn 'Adi, and he said the same thing in it: terrible misprints. He said, except that it became clear to me that Imam Ibn 'Adi was a non-Arab, and he had...
The Shaykh : No, this is a very easy matter. For example, he makes the nominative case accusative and the accusative case nominative. But for example, he writes Yazid as Bayrid and Bayrid as Yazid, so the biography is lost from its origin. This is true and known about Ibn 'Adi; he was a memorizer and was not cultured like many of the orators we hear today who make grammatical errors while reading the hadith because they do not have complete Arabic culture. But when one prints a book from a manuscript, he prints it as it is and points out the errors present in the manuscript, and there is no harm in this. But they did not print the manuscript as it is because they did not know how to read it.
The Shaykh : It is very bad. The people responsible for printing it are a group of merchants with no integrity; they lie and mislead... A committee of specialists and under the supervision of the publisher, may Allah will it, so they are above the specialists. Who are the specialists? Hired student children, so they are the specialists! And he is the one supervising them. Have you seen the index they produced?
The questioner : I have not seen it.
The Shaykh : Ah, if you had seen the index, you would have known that they are merchants, and they are covered by the general meaning of his saying (peace be upon him)
The merchants are the wicked, except for those who are righteous and truthful
التّجّار هم الفجّار إلاّ من برّ و صدقThe questioner: Yes.
The Shaykh : And the page numbers are not for every volume; the page numbers for each volume are separate from the page numbers of the other volumes, but the numbering is continuous from the first volume to the seventh volume, so the number of pages was two thousand, and so on. When they printed the index in a volume like one of the seven volumes, the total became eight, but this index does not work for this edition, but rather for a new edition in which they corrected the pages, with each volume having its own pages according to the standard followed in all publications. Then, as they say: "The third of the three." They forced us to buy the new edition, but when we requested it, they said it had not arrived yet. So they are publishing the volume that is of no benefit except with the second edition, and the second edition has not been released to the market, and it has gross errors. We seek refuge in Allah, we seek refuge in Allah from greed and material avarice.
The questioner : One of the young men at Imam University... he has a master's thesis on the book of Ibn 'Adi, and he said the same thing in it: terrible misprints. He said, except that it became clear to me that Imam Ibn 'Adi was a non-Arab, and he had...
The Shaykh : No, this is a very easy matter. For example, he makes the nominative case accusative and the accusative case nominative. But for example, he writes Yazid as Bayrid and Bayrid as Yazid, so the biography is lost from its origin. This is true and known about Ibn 'Adi; he was a memorizer and was not cultured like many of the orators we hear today who make grammatical errors while reading the hadith because they do not have complete Arabic culture. But when one prints a book from a manuscript, he prints it as it is and points out the errors present in the manuscript, and there is no harm in this. But they did not print the manuscript as it is because they did not know how to read it.
Source
www.al-albany.com
The Arabic text is copied verbatim from the original source, without any edits.