Only two passages of the 24-chapter encyclopedia exist in English. (1) Arsenius Mikhail (ed./trans.), Guides to the Eucharist in Medieval Egypt: Three Arabic Commentaries on the Coptic Liturgy (Fordham UP, 2022) prints 'excerpts from three key texts', one of them Ibn Kabar's Miṣbāḥ; the HOLLIS record's contents note lists 'Container of (expression): Ibn Kubr ... Miṣbāḥ al-ẓulmah ... English. (Mikhail). 2022' and the publisher description says 'Presented for the first time in English': https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Guides%20to%20the%20Eucharist%20in%20Medieval%20Egypt&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 (record 99156572870203941). (2) Graf II 439-441 records the only substantial edition/translation as Louis Villecourt - Eugène Tisserant - Gaston Wiet, 'Livre de la Lampe des Ténèbres...', Patrologia Orientalis XX/4 (1928), which covers the introduction and chapters 1-2 only, in French: https://archive.org/details/GGrafGeschichte . HOLLIS query 'Misbah al-zulmah' returns four records only: three Arabic editions (Cairo 1971- [two records] and Cairo 2003) and the 2022 English excerpts; there is no complete English version and no complete critical edition: https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Misbah%20al-zulmah&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 . CCE entry CE:1634b-1635a likewise says the work is 'most easily accessible in Villecourt's French translation (1928)': https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/1349 .
The single most important Copto-Arabic ecclesiastical encyclopedia: dogma, biblical canon, canon law, liturgy, church furnishings, feasts and calendar, plus a unique catalogue of Arabic Christian writers (ch. 7) that is a primary bibliographic source for the whole tradition. Only chs 1-2 were ever edited (in a French Patrologia Orientalis fascicle) and only liturgical excerpts are in English, so the encyclopedia's liturgical, canonical and bibliographic chapters remain untranslated. CCE CE:1634b-1635a.
| Scan / witness | Format | Pages | Rights | OCR | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Patrologia Orientalis tome 20, fasc. 4 (begins at p. 579): Livre de la Lampe de… | 702 | public-domain | poor | Tome XX table of contents inside the _djvu.txt reads 'Fasc. IV. — LIVRE DE LA LAMPE DES TÉNÈBRES ... Texte arabe et traduction française des deux premiers chapitres ... 619'. Text derivative https://archive.org/download… | |
| Livre de la lampe des ténèbres et de l'exposition (lumineuse) du service (de l'… | iiif | — | restricted | none | BnF SRU record cb35845658f (dublincore: ara+fre, 1926, 'Reprod. en fac-sim') carries UNIMARC 856$u = http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k39427w (record fetched with recordSchema=unimarcxchange, HTTP 200). Direct GET o… |