For this reason apologies should be given in advance to our...

For this reason apologies should be given in advance to our noble Sunni and Shi‘i brethren in case they come across any- thing which may offend them in Professor ‘Irfan's book; for none of us, praise be to Allah, have had anything to do with these misfortunes.

We ask nothing more of Allah than that He bestows a beneficial life of brotherhood on all Muslims, so that those who come to write the history of our own times will not have to describe it in the same way as the history of that previous age. There are, however, in what Professor ‘Irfan mentions some defects which it will do no harm to point out. What we cite here will suffice to explain our criticisms.

Some comments on Professor ‘Irfan's introduction (a) Professor ‘Irfan says[^3] that the Shaykh al-Mufid 'was proud of his purely (as-sarih) Arab ancestry.' He does not give any source for this statement, but what may have led him to this conclusion about al-Mufid was the discovery he made about the latter's ancestry in an-Najashi[^4] who traces al-Mufid's lineage back to Ya‘rub ibn Qahtan.

Now this was the kind of activity in which an-Najashi revelled as a result of his meticulous concern for genealogies.

He wrote a work on the science of genealogy, which he mentioned when he gave his own biography in his Fihrist.[^5] His concern for lineage is also apparent in many of the biographies, which he included, and the ancestries of his subjects will be found traced back to the original tribes from which their clans arose.[^6] Apart from an-Najashi, others, such as the Shaykhu 't-Taifah at-Tusi in his al-Fihrist and ar-Rijal, wrote biographies of these people, but they lack the chains of ancestry which an-Najashi mentions.

Our Shaykh al-Mufid – in common with other Muslim scholars and jurists, and even with the devout among the Muslims who are not scholars or jurists – was more excellent in his faith, knowledge, and understanding of the Islamic shari‘ah, and nobler in character than that he should console himself by comparison with the pre-Islamic period, or boast about what Allah and His Prophet, may Allah bless him and his Family and grant them peace, had kept the believers away from: they had been warned not to boast of it, nor even to rely on it.