The book's preface

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

To proceed: this is a book that investigates the doctrines (madhāhib) of the Arabs (aʻrāb) concerning the jinn, and what the philosophers of Islam said about them — a question that has not ceased, and does not cease, to be a subject for investigators in every religious community and every sect. I saw fit to set apart for it a study of its own, in which the conditions such a study requires would be met; so I cleared a span of time, which made it possible for me to carry out the excavation of the profitable volumes, the old of them and the new, until, when the survey and the exhaustive search were complete for me, I gathered its scattered pieces from dozens of compositions, and there came out an essay that had taken in the transmitted legacies of those by whose guidance one is guided among the men of learning, of language and of letters. It was published in issues 1 and 2 of the fifth volume of the journal al-Muqtabas, which comes out in Dimashq; then we wished to publish it as a book on its own, so that its handling might reach all men of merit and nobility. And God is the guide to the straight path.

Dimashq, 3 Rajab al-Fard, the year 1328 Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī