• Prayers and Charms [IO Bijapur 423] Anthology including شمس الآفاق فی علم الحروف و اوفاق

Prayers and Charms.

This manuscript is now IO Bijapur 423 in the India Office collections.

[metadata: Otto Loth, A Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office, (volume 1), no. 349 here with notations and hyperlinks].

349

B 423. Size 9 in. by 41/2 in.; foll. 65. Twenty-one and nineteen lines in a page.

1. Foll. 1-28. Extracts from a cabbalistic treatise called شمس الآفاق فی علم الحروف و اوفاق, newly arranged in four sections (فصل), and entitled کتاب الجواهر فی الحروف و الاسماء و الاوفاق. They are ascribed here to Abu'l-Abbâs BÛNÎ (d. A.H. 622 [=1225 CE]), but unless we have in the treatise itself a work of Bûnî hitherto unknown, this statement cannot be true. The only work with the title شمس الافاق الخ, that is known, was written more than two centuries after the death of Bûnî, by ‘Abd al-raḥmân b. Muḥammad Bisṭâmî (d. A.H. 858 [ed note: now thought to be no earlier than Sha‘ban 859, 1455 CE]; cf. Ḥ. Kh. iv. 73, Cat. Mus. Brit. 344 [ed note = p. 344, DCCLX, MS Add. 7494. Rich], and Cat. Lugd.[=Catalogus codicum orientalium Bibliothecae Academiae Lugduno-Batavae] iii. 176). Perhaps the statement of the present MS. is founded upon a confusion of the treatise in question with a work of Bûnî, called شمس المعارف (see Ḥ. Kh. iv. 75, and Cat. Lugd. iii. 171), from which the author himself made similar extracts under the title فصول شمس المعارف. Cf. Ḥ. Kh. iv. 440.

Beginning:

الحمدلله...قال الشیخ ابو العباس البونی قدس الله روحه اما بعد فهذه نبذة منقوله من شمس الافاق فی علم الحروف و الاوفاق و فصّلته اربعة فصول لیحصل به المفقود

The four sections are described as follows:

I. فی معرفة الحروف

II. فی جواهر الاسماء و معانیها

III. فی ترکیب الاوفاق علی الحروف

IV. فی تصریفات الحروف و الاسماء و ترکیباتها

Plainly written, but incomplete. There are defects after foll. 16, 18, 20, and at the end.

2. Foll. 29-65. The concluding portion of a treatise on the properties of the letters of the Abujad. The author is not known, but he quotes Bûnî and Shâdhilî (d. A.H. 656 [=1258 CE]).

This fragment begins in the seventeenth section, which is devoted to the letter ف; the first words are: لا تعلمون. The twenty-eighth section, on the letter غ, is followed by other sections, not numbered, and the treatise concludes with the words تمت الرسالة. Then follow some magic squares.

[ed note: Quick link to other works by Bisṭāmī]