| Work / author / dates | Bayān ʿaqīdat ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa, known as al-ʿAqīda al-Ṭaḥāwiyya (العقيدة الطحاوية), by Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933), the Ḥanafī jurist and hadith scholar of Egypt. |
| Part added | Whole text: the preface and 105 articles (the editor's numbering). 2,170 words. |
| Reader route | /read/tahawiyya · library class Creed |
| Status | working edition, 10–11 Nov 2026 (base and vowels on the owner's machine; word study, English and notes in a cloud session, all by Claude) · reviewed by: — |
1. Witnesses
| Siglum | Witness | Kind | Vowelled? | Licence | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | ed. Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī, al-ʿAqīda al-Ṭaḥāwiyya: sharḥ wa-taʿlīq, al-Maktab al-Islāmī, Beirut 1398/1978, as transcribed by OpenITI (0321Tahawi.MatnCaqida.JK000126-ara1, release 2025.1.9). Details from the OpenITI header; the print was not seen. | modern ed. (digital) | no | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | data/sources/tahawiyya/ |
| K | The matn as lemmata in Ibn Abī l-ʿIzz (d. 792/1390), Sharḥ al-ʿAqīda al-Ṭaḥāwiyya, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūṭ and ʿAbd Allāh al-Turkī, Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 10th ed. 1997 (OpenITI …Shamela0008352-ara1). Has «وفي نسخة» notes. | commentary ed. (digital) | no | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | fetched by scripts/fetch_sources.sh |
| S | The same commentary, ed. Aḥmad Shākir, Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Riyadh 1418 (OpenITI …Shamela0010777-ara1). | commentary ed. (digital) | no | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | fetched by scripts/fetch_sources.sh |
Page references to K and S are OpenITI page marks (PageV01P267): the mark that follows the passage in the OpenITI file.
2. Base and why
A is the only open transcription of the matn on its own. Its editor is an Atharī (Salafī) scholar who also edited Ibn Abī l-ʿIzz's commentary, so A is one witness among three, and every article was compared with the matn as K and S quote it.
3. Collation
K and S were read at every article (lemmata found by قوله: (…)). Where both agree against A, A is corrected (§4). Where they differ among themselves, A is kept and the reading is listed in uncertain (data/sources/tahawiyya.json):
- ¶13 S: «كما كان» (no wāw). ¶14 K: «ليس منذ خلق الخلق»; K and S: «بإحداثه البرية».
- ¶34 K and S: «من أبصر هذا اعتبر … وعلم أن الله بصفاته».
- ¶37 K: «ترك التأويل» (no bāʾ).
- ¶48 (substantive): A «فويل لمن صار لله تعالى في القدر خصيما وأحضر للنظر فيه قلبا سقيما»; K «فويل لمن ضاع له في القدر قلبا سقيما», noting «وفي نسخة: صار قلبه في القدر قلبا سقيما»; S «صار قلبه في القدر قلبا سقيما». A's wording differs from both; shown in a word note.
- ¶59 K «لمسيئيهم». ¶72 K «وندعو». ¶105 K «خالفوا الجماعة» and adds «تعالى»; S «وغيرها».
4. Decisions
Corrections to A, each where K and S agree: ¶0 عبدالله → عبد الله (spacing); ¶2 شي → شيء; ¶18 بعمله → بعلمه; ¶88 مشيئة → مشيئته (also the Maktab Islāmī print of the commentary, JK000146); ¶95 وعثمان علي → وعثمان وعلي; ¶95 أبو عبيدة الجراح → أبو عبيدة بن الجراح. Mechanical: ¶39 «ف صلى» closed. Script: scripts/tahawiyya_base.py.
5. Quotations and vowelling
- No witness is vowelled. The vowels are AI (10 Nov 2026), letters verified identical to the base (
scripts/tahawiyya_edition.pystops otherwise). - 11 Nov 2026, read through against the analyser's readings: three errors corrected (¶88 حِين → حَيْن 'ruin', as in ¶91; ¶94 المَهتدون → المُهتدون; ¶95 بْنُ added with the correction above). The remaining 58 places where CAMeL's vowelling differed from ours were each read: in every case ours is the reading the syntax requires (for instance مُعْتَقِدِينَ, a ḥāl, against CAMeL's dual).
- 23 Qurʾān references (20 quotations, 3 allusions), 10 of them marked in OpenITI. Every vowel of every quotation agrees with Tanzil (simple script). Their words take the Quranic Arabic Corpus's analysis (88 words).
- Not checked against a printed vowelled edition: none is held.
6. Word study
CAMeL Tools 1.6 (calima-msa-r13 + MLE), constrained by the vowels (scripts/fusus/analyze.py … tw), installed in the cloud session. One fix to the shared analyser: a weak root is now resolved to the first candidate the root lists know, not the first that matches the lemma's letters (قضاء had come out as the non-root قضأ). Then scripts/tahawiyya_overrides.py: 130 words corrected (108 spellings), each naming CAMeL's error and citing the root in Ibn Fāris's Maqāyīs (line number) and the Quranic corpus (count); 29 words read and left as analysed (proper names, بين, عند). Nothing is left in data/sources/tahawiyya-review.txt. These corrections were made by Claude with the sources opened; a person should check them.
7. Segmentation and word IDs
106 passages: 0 = preface, 1–105 = the articles in A's numbering (the familiar "42 points" are a modern thematic outline, not the text's division). Word ids tw:<article>:<word>.
10. Translation and notes
AI (Claude, 11 Nov 2026), from the Arabic with K at hand: English, a gloss for every word, and 15 notes (scripts/tahawiyya_english.py, data/sources/tahawiyya/english-.tsv and notes.json). No published translation was read. None in the public domain was found, so the English **has not been triangulated*; the copyrighted ones are listed in docs/ACQUISITIONS.md.
The text and its readers
Al-Ṭaḥāwī states that the creed is that of Abū Ḥanīfa and his two companions, Abū Yūsuf and Muḥammad al-Shaybānī (preface). It became the shared short creed of Sunni teaching, and three schools read it as their own:
- Māturīdī readers, the Ḥanafī theologians, read it as the creed of their own school's founders.
- Ashʿarī readers accept it as agreeing with their school in substance.
- Atharī readers read it chiefly through Ibn Abī l-ʿIzz (d. 792/1390), a Ḥanafī who comments on it from the Atharī side and quotes Ibn al-Qayyim by name. In our edition's base, al-Albānī, who edited that commentary, also edited the matn.
The schools part on a handful of clauses: God's names before creation (¶15), the Qurʾān as God's speech (¶33), the vision (¶35), leaving interpretation (¶37), the six directions and God's aboveness (¶38, ¶51), the definition of faith and whether it increases (¶62, ¶64), the servant's acquisition (¶86) and God's anger and pleasure (¶92). At each, a note in the word card gives the readings and takes no side. Ibn Abī l-ʿIzz is cited by page; the Ashʿarī and Māturīdī readings are stated in general terms, because no commentary of those schools on this creed is yet held (docs/ACQUISITIONS.md).
11. Rights
A, K, S: OpenITI transcriptions under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: our edition of the matn is shared under the same licence, with attribution; the commentaries are cited, not hosted.
12. Open questions / to review
- A person to read the vowels, the 130 word corrections and the 15 notes.
- Acquire a Māturīdī and an Ashʿarī commentary on the creed and check the notes against them; acquire the published English translations and triangulate.
- See the printed al-Albānī edition to confirm the header details and the paragraph numbers.
scripts/build_data.pywas not run (it needs the private raw lexica): the Ṭaḥāwiyya's roots enter the root index and usage pages on the owner's next full build.scripts/quran_refs.pyandscripts/resonances.pylikewise.
13. Change log
- 2026-11-10: base cleaned (5 corrections), AI vowelling, variants against K and S (owner's machine, hand-over).
- 2026-11-11: ¶95 correction; vowels read through (3 fixes); CAMeL analysis + Quranic corpus + 130 sourced corrections; AI English, glosses and 15 notes; Creed class; reader wired (cloud session).