عودة إلى أبي عمران الجورائي
Two years after the first edition, an unexpected manuscript witness completes the text and corrects a received reading.
The chance of the survey
Moroccan manuscript collections hold surprises for those willing to spend time in them. It was during a survey with no direct connection to the subject that a new witness of al-Ǧawrāʾī's ʿaqīda was identified, copied in a composite volume whose main content belongs to an entirely different discipline.
A passage absent from all other witnesses
This witness preserves a development that the known copies had lost. The passage clarifies the author's position on a question debated among Ašʿarites, and slightly modifies the balance of the text: what had been taken for a deliberate omission was only an accident of transmission.
What this changes
The contribution is modest in volume and considerable in methodological scope. It is a reminder that an edition is never definitive, and that the history of a text continues after its publication. Above all it invites a systematic survey of composite volumes, long neglected because they are difficult to catalogue.
The programme ahead
The identification of this witness belongs to a wider project devoted to surveying the theological sources of the Maghreb. Several texts attributed to masters of Fez and Marrakesh still await their first edition.
