Chapter 1 introduced the seven manuscripts of the Kitāb al-futūḥ currently known and available to us for analysis and demonstrated that the editors of the Kitāb alfutūḥ’ s standard edition had excluded three of them: MSs Ankara, Milan, and Patna. Other problems emerge from the lacunae in the Arabic text, which the Ḥaydarābād editors filled with Mustawfī's Persian text. In general, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that despite important previous studies of the Kitāb al-futūḥ and more than one attempt to publish its text in parts or in full, the understanding of the process of its textual transmission remains insufficient. To be sure, the present work alone cannot fill this major gap by itself, not least because its focus is restricted to a selected part of the book. Although the present analysis is written with an eye on the entire work and thus attempts to consider parallel phenomena scattered throughout the book while studying certain features, detailed scrutiny of them remains a desideratum for further research. In any case, my main aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the issues selected for study in the first place and, thusly, the lessons to be learned from the remaining five manuscripts (that is, MSs Milan, Istanbul, Dublin, Birmingham, and Ankara) will be explored primarily to strengthen my conclusions and avoid misinterpretation as far as possible.

Although the book's main focus is the study of the ridda narrative preserved in two Arabic manuscripts, examining the remaining five copies is inevitable for more than one reason. First, the place of MSs Patna and Gotha within the Kitāb al-futūḥ's textual tradition cannot be ascertained without seeing its other components. Critical issues, such as the handling of poems in MSs Patna and Gotha, cannot be resolved without knowing the practices of the scribes who produced the other manuscripts. As we shall see, in this case, relying solely on MSs Patna and Gotha could lead to misjudgment, for which the conclusions can only be valid if they are based on the entire known corpus. Secondly, the study of the manuscript material can also give further pieces of information on the reception history of the text, which can hardly be explored solely on the basis of other, in this case, secondary sources.