Assalammu Alaikum Brother TripolySunni. I have yet to complete a full and comprehensive reading of the book, but with your permission I would like to make some preliminary remarks on what I have seen of the manuscript to date.
First, congratulations on the intention and actualisation of the project itself. May Allah reward you and everyone involved. The depth, research required, carefulness of scrutiny, proofreading, editing and accuracy of such a work is magnifying and mind boggling and needs years of responsible planning and attention. The magnitude of the work is therefore inspiring and amazing in itself and worthy of commendation and a grand achievement.
In respect to the work itself, I will concentrate initially on the following areas; layout, presentation, typeface, font size and style, colour coding, last structural arrangement of ideas and I will end my critique with some concluding remarks. I will leave content for a later post if that is fine with yourself.
Layout
I thought the manner in which the introduction, contents page, first few chapters and outline of information was neatly and finely organised; it attracted the reader's attention, made viewing and interest in the book captivating and combined with the Arabic writing made the piece engaging.
Presentation
The information was well organised, collated with care and comprehensively constructed with due relevance and the respect each item deserved.
Typeface, Font Style and Size
While it is not usually necessary in a serious work of scholarship, I would advise for a twenty-first century audience some differences in typeface and font size/style throughout the book would be an advantage to help retain and preserve interest. This is especially true for those with a limitation of scholarly knowledge, existing factual data about aspects of history and biography and 'generational disparity'; that is a vast ocean of personal and collective dissimilarities in how we are today and what the Saahaba were, lived, thought and evaluated things.
Colour Coding
In this manner, the reader is likely to be stirred and invigorated time and time again through bright colours, shading, small highlighted passages that you want readers to take a few minutes to ponder over and reflect.
Structural Arrangement of Ideas
I thought you made all your points in order, were clear in your approach and outlined each argument and detail with a good degree of accuracy. I felt you could have added perhaps two or three additional examples to 'drive the idea home' when defending a particular point or idea so to speak, but that is just an afterthought.
The inclusion of the words, 'that' and 'the' in many of the titles throughout the index is unnecessary and likely to make the reader a little apprehensive in looking at it further. You should consider trying a host of interesting selection of synonyms and vocabulary to keep readers enticed and eager to see what the rest of the book must be like.
Concluding remarks
The title, genre, length of work, language features, simplicity of style, ease of understanding and responsible manner of adapting and articulating complex and challenging contexts to contemporary characterisation is both gratifying and rewarding for the modern reader. While there is room for improvement, adjustments need only be cosmetic and can be restricted to eye catching appeals to the senses, encapsulating finer points for later analysis and ensuring everyone feels enamoured by its overall textual and graphical presentation and ideas.
