رسالة د. كهلان الخروصي

This is the second Tunisian copy that Ennami used in his edition of Ibn Khalfƒn. He refers to it by the siglum (ب). It came down to me from the private library of shaykh Aˆmad b. ™amad al-Khal‚l‚، the current grand mufti of Oman. As we have seen in E and T1، this is part of a codex of what was thought to be Mudawwanat Ab‚ Gh~nim or al-D‚w~n al-ma`rƒ‡ `ala `ulam~| al-Iba‡iyya. Unfortunately، >th~r al-Rab‚` b. ™ab‚b is the only part available to me. It does not carry the name of the scribe or the date. The only information recorded by a previous possessor of the codex is that it belongs to al-ˆ~jj Mus~ Bash‚r b. Mus~ and he gave it the title “ J~mi` Ab‚ ^ufra `Abd al-Malik b. ^ufra”. But the scribe has not mentioned his name anywhere in this part I obtained nor has he recorded a date of his transcription، let alone his ancestral copy. A careful reading of T2 leads to the conclusion that it is almost identical to T1 except for some minor orthographical differences. And because of the lack of essential information about T2 it is difficult to determine which one was the exemplar of the other. The most likely possibility is that both derive from the last exemplar I have named C. This، of course، does not mean that T2 is not important or that it has not been referred to when it incorporates a reading of the text that appears to have a better basis. It helped to solve some illegible words and phrases from both E and T1 as well as corroborating the reliability of T1.