About
The author and the book
Short, and sourced. Each statement names where it comes from; nothing here is drawn from outside the two supplied editions.
Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah
Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr ibn Ayyūb al-Zarʿī al-Dimashqī, known as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (691–751 AH). He was born in Ṣafar 691 AH near Damascus and studied Qur’anic exegesis, jurisprudence and hadith; his most prominent teacher was Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah, with whom he remained close until the latter’s death in 728 AH.
Among his students were Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī (d. 795 AH), Ibn Kathīr (d. 774 AH) and Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (d. 744 AH). He died on 23 Rajab 751 AH; the funeral prayer was held in the grand mosque of Damascus.
In the book itself he refers to his teacher Ibn Taymiyyah, quoting his positions in several places, and to others of his own works.
Ad-Dāʾ wa-d-Dawāʾ
The book is Ibn al-Qayyim’s answer to a request for a legal-spiritual verdict (istiftāʾ). A man afflicted by a trial he feared would ruin both his worldly life and his hereafter — and which only grew stronger the more he resisted it — asked how to repel it. Read the question in the Arabic edition, p. 3.
The questioner does not name the affliction, and neither does the author. The answer opens with the hadith that Allah sent down no disease without also sending down its cure, and goes on to supplication, the effects of sins, the major sins, the gateways through which sin enters (glances, thoughts, words and steps), and — at length — love, and the passionate infatuation (ʿishq) that corrupts it.
The author gave the work no title. His student Ibn Rajab called it al-Dāʾ wa-l-Dawāʾ; it is also known as الجواب الكافي لمن سأل عن الدواء الشافي (al-Jawāb al-Kāfī), a name attached later.
The editions used here
The authoritative text is the critical edition by Muḥammad Ajmal al-Iṣlāḥī, published in the series of Ibn al-Qayyim’s works under the supervision of Bakr ibn ʿAbd Allāh Abū Zayd (Dār ʿAṭāʾāt al-ʿIlm / Dār Ibn Ḥazm). The English reference is The Disease and The Cure, translated by Osman Hamid (Hikmah Publications, 2020), which its translators describe as based on a printed Arabic edition drawing on four 8th-century manuscripts.