A concrete look at the witnesses, translation, terminology, cross-work study, apparatus, and review process behind Tabsirah’s edition of Risālat al-Manāmāt wa-l-Nubuwwāt.
01Witnesses
The starting point
A text carried by more than one witness
The Arabic reading text was first established from the Balāgh printing, then checked and corrected against the complete manuscript facsimile; the Rasāʾil Sabʿa and Rabīʿī printings were consulted where a reading remained in question. The facsimile’s editors identify the manuscript as being in ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s hand; Tabsirah reports that attribution without making a new handwriting-authentication claim.
A substantive Arabic reading had to be supported by one of the edition’s witnesses. Two direct inspections changed the established text; each correction then required the translation and its checks to be repeated.
01
Chapter 3
فعلم ما لاستيناب فعلها
A phrase omitted in an earlier version of Tabsirah’s text was restored after direct inspection confirmed it in the handwritten witness.
Thus it becomes known what pertains to the resumption of its act.
02
Chapter 11
وأما المسلك الآخر … ويشيرون إليه بالبنان
A complete sentence silently absent from an earlier version of the Arabic text was restored from the handwritten witness and translated in full.
As for the other path, it is that which is naturally distinguished, beyond the reach of the majority, whose hands fall short of it through domination and superiority over them; so they submit, in some fashion, to its possessor and point him out with their fingers.
103 / 103 passages witness-attested
03Source → translation
Translating the text—twice
Every claim checked in both directions
Arabic → English asked whether every substantive Arabic claim reached the translation. English → Arabic asked whether every English claim was licensed by the source. Difficult phrases were sometimes left deliberately cautious rather than smoothed into doctrinal certainty.
Chapter 1 §1 · Arabic
من المعلوم أن كل نوع حقيقي له كمال يَخُصّهُ ويكون كمال النوع وتمامه بوجدانه. وأنه إذا كان ذا كمال تدريجي كان حصول الغاية له بعد وجود أمورٍ أُخرى مُقَدَمَة مُتَقَدِّمَة له، سواء كانت من جنسه أو من غير جنسه، وتكون كلُّ مُقدمةٍ سبباً لتهيؤ النوع واستعداده لما هو بعدَ هذا.
→←
Reviewed English
It is well known that every real species (nawʿ) has a perfection (kamāl) proper to it, and that the perfection and completeness (tamām) of the species consist in its possessing that perfection. It is also well known that, if it has a gradual perfection, it attains its end (ghāya) only after other antecedent preparatory factors have come to exist, whether these be of its own genus (jins) or of another genus. Every such preparatory factor is a cause of the species’ readiness and of its disposition (istiʿdād) for what comes after it.
A source-and-translation sample from the published edition. The final fidelity review covered 103 of 103 passages.
04Technical Glossary
Building one entry
A difficult word is not automatically a term
Termكمالkamāl · Perfection
General technical meaning
Perfection is either primary, through which a species becomes that species in actuality, or secondary, consisting in the acts and passive states that follow from that species.
Local occurrence
Chapter 1 §1 pairs kamāl with tamām while describing the proper perfection of a real species.
05Reading the Passage
The minimum useful explanation
Clarify the immediate text, then stop
Chapter 2 §1
Here ‘purely notional’ does not mean nonexistent: existence is treated as real in its own right, while other aspects have reality only derivatively from it. This lets the passage affirm both the matterless imaginal world and the higher world of pure light as real. The passage asks that these metaphysical theses be granted here rather than proving them; their exposition, it says, lies outside this inquiry. ‘Inner reality’ (bāṭin) here does not mean something spatially inside another thing: it names a deeper, inward level of reality in relation to the lower, outward level — the imaginal world is the inward of the world of nature, and the world of immateriality is the inward of the imaginal world. Ṭabāṭabāʾī treats both theses in Nihāyat al-Ḥikmah: the fully immaterial world above the imaginal world, and the causal intermediaries between the Creator and the world of nature. The nesting of one world as the inward of another receives only related discussion there.
06Across works
Reading across ʿAllāmah’s corpus
The same word was never enough
Concrete example
Chapter 1 §1
“Every real species has a perfection proper to it.”
nawʿ
jins
ghāya
istiʿdād
kamāl
tamām
Conceptual parallel
Nihāyat al-Ḥikmah
Stage 8 · Chapter 11 · pp. 230–237
In Nihāyat al-Ḥikmah, ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī develops the same goal-directed structure: the perfection a moving thing gains through its motion — what he calls its “second perfection” — is the end that completes the motion.
This conceptual parallel clarifies the compressed coordination of gradual perfection, end, and completion; it does not make perfection and completion interchangeable, nor does it by itself establish everything Chapter 1 goes on to say about the human being.Terminological clarification
al-Mīzān fī Tafsīr al-Qurʾān
al-Baqarah 2:196
In al-Mīzān, ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī distinguishes tamām as constitutive completion from kamāl as a further state or attribute with an added effect, and confirms the distinction a second way by how effects follow: all at once upon completion, or part by part as perfection accrues.
The distinction prevents the two coordinated terms from being flattened; al-Mīzān itself allows qualified metaphorical overlap, so it is not a rigid rule for every occurrence.
07Notes / apparatus
Apparatus, not a second Study
A Note records what the edition needs to disclose
Editorial · Chapter 3 §3
The phrase «فعلم ما لاستيناب فعلها» stands in the manuscript and in both printed editions. It is genuinely hard to construe — it does not attach cleanly to the sentence on either side of it — and this edition prints it and translates it, ‘Thus it becomes known what pertains to the resumption of its act’, keeping that difficulty rather than smoothing it away.