THE TEXT PRESENTED HERE first came to my attention while working on my Ph.D. thesis, which concerned the Patriarchate of .Jerusalem during the early Muslim period (638- 1099). The paucity of material concerning the state, during this period, of the Christians in particular and the non-Muslim inhabitants of Palestine in general, obliged me to search for new and as yet unknown material on the subject. I discovered that a relevant part of the Samaritan chronicle of Abū 1-Fatl) was being cited by scholars from a Latin summary published by Edward Vilmar in 1865. A new edition of the Chroniclerecently made by Father Paul Stenhouse only extended to the time of Mul)ammad and did not include this later part, which he believed to be a continuation of the Chmniclerather than an integral part of the original work of Abū 1-FatḤ).

My curiosity was aroused. I ordered a copy of the manuscript from the Bibliothèque Nationale, and discovered a document rich in information concerning not only the situation of the Samaritans in Palestine during the early Muslim period, but in fact much more than that: an interesting and unusually colourful and detailed portrait of Palestine and its environs in early Islamic times until the reign of the ‘Abbāsid caliph ai-Rādī (d. :322/934). The text was especially interesting because it described events as seen by the local population living in Palestine at the time. I therefore made extensive use of the manuscript for a chapter describing the state of the dhimmīs in Palestine during the said period.

After completing my Ph.D. thesis, I contemplated the idea of publishing the text. Examination of all the manuscripts of the chronicle that I suspected might contain this continuation revealed that it is unique to the Paris manuscript. This, coupled with the fact that the language of the text is very irregular even as Middle Arabic texts go, thus making it difficult to understand in certain places, and in many others difficult to translate, was cause for hesitation. I was encouraged to carry on , first and foremost, by IllY friend and colleague Dr. Amikam Elad of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Hebrew University of .Jerusalem.