Commentaries and glosses

1A text made for commentary

The Shamsiyya is short and dense, and from the beginning it was read with a teacher and a commentary. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that, being ‘a concise and useful text of formal logic’, it attracted commentaries, glosses and notes ‘throughout the Islamic world’; it refers for lists to Ḥājjī Khalīfa’s Kashf al-ẓunūn and to the ten pages that ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥabashī devotes to it in his Jāmiʿ al-shurūḥ wa-l-ḥawāshī. Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur and Robert Wisnovsky’s handlist of post-classical philosophical commentaries (PIPDI), which follows it, record, between them, about twenty-five commentaries on the text itself (PIPDI numbers twenty-five) and dozens of glosses and superglosses; the catalogue of this section collects about ninety works.

The tradition has an unusual shape. One commentary, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s, soon overshadowed all the others, and one gloss on it, al-Jurjānī’s, became nearly as important as the commentary. Tony Street observes that the superglosses on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary outnumber the commentaries on the Shamsiyya itself. Khaled El-Rouayheb adds a striking detail: the glossators concentrated more and more on the opening of the book, the preface, the introduction and the part on conceptions, while the later parts of Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary, on conversion, contraposition, hypothetical propositions and the syllogism, ‘appear not to have elicited a single gloss after the fourteenth century’.

2The first commentaries

The first known commentary may be the author’s own. A short work explaining the difficult passages of the Shamsiyya, Sharḥ al-mawāḍiʿ al-mushkila, survives in one manuscript in Istanbul; its editors, Ferruh Özpilavcı and Abdullah Öztop (2019), argue from its close parallels with al-Kātibī’s other books that he wrote it himself.

The first commentary in the traditional lists is al-Qawāʿid al-jaliyya fī sharḥ al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya (‘the clear rules’) by al-Kātibī’s pupil al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 726/1325), the leading Imāmī scholar of his time. Street notes a copy dated 1280, so it was written in al-Kātibī’s lifetime or very soon after; he finds it ‘often critical of Kātibī’s project’, although in later works al-Ḥillī quietly adopted much of the Shamsiyya’s logic. It was edited by Fāris Ḥassūn (Qom 1412/1991–92).

Other early works are known only from the bibliographers. Ḥājjī Khalīfa names a commentary in two parts, Kharj al-basāla al-saniyya, by Zayn al-Dīn Surayjā al-Malaṭī (d. 788/1386), and a gloss on the part on assents by Khalīl b. Muḥammad al-Riḍawī, who, PIPDI notes, finished his work in 759/1358. Al-Riḍawī explains in his preface that earlier scholars had worked through the conceptions but neglected the assents, and that he had gathered what he learned on them in the lessons of his teacher Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn al-Ardabīlī.

3Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Taḥrīr, ‘the Quṭbī’

The commentary that carried the Shamsiyya through the centuries is Taḥrīr al-qawāʿid al-manṭiqiyya fī sharḥ al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya, ‘the redaction of the rules of logic, a commentary on the Shamsian treatise’, by Quṭb al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Rāzī (d. 766/1365). It is usually called Sharḥ al-Shamsiyya or, after its author, al-Quṭbī. Its author, according to the TDV, was born about 692/1293 in Varāmīn near Rayy, read al-Ḥillī’s Qawāʿid al-aḥkām with him in 713/1313 and studied also with ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī, Shams al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī. He was called al-Taḥtānī, ‘the one downstairs’, because in the Ẓāhiriyya madrasa in Damascus he lived below another Quṭb al-Dīn; he died in Damascus on 16 Dhū al-Qaʿda 766/4 August 1365. Contemporary authors count him as a Shāfiʿī, while Shīʿī sources claim him as one of theirs.

Ḥājjī Khalīfa says he wrote the Taḥrīr for the vizier Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad, son of Rashīd al-Dīn, ‘one of the viziers of Sultan Khudābanda’, and calls it ‘a good commentary, current among the students’. Street gives 1329 as the year of completion; but the University of Pennsylvania holds a copy dated 726/1326, so the date may need revision. The commentary opens with the words inna abhā durarin tunẓam, ‘the most splendid pearls to be strung…’.

Street describes what the Taḥrīr does: it supplies the history behind the disputes that al-Kātibī touches on, expands his formulations, and at times rejects or modifies his conclusions. It is the work of a logician with a programme of his own. Quṭb al-Dīn develops, for example, the distinction between reading a universal proposition ‘according to the real nature’ (ḥaqīqiyya) and ‘according to the external world’ (khārijiyya), and he limits the essentialist reading to possible things, which blocks an argument of al-Khūnajī’s. Like its successors it is uneven: Street calculates that the comments on the first thirty-seven lemmata fill about half the book, those on the last thirty-three less than a quarter. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that it ‘records a great many of the technical debates’ of the thirteenth century, and that al-Kātibī’s text and Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary together formed an ‘impressive preparation’ for the student of logic.

The Quṭbī should not be confused with another short work of Quṭb al-Dīn’s that Indian students also read, his treatise on conception and assent (al-Risāla al-maʿmūla fī al-taṣawwur wa-l-taṣdīq, often called al-Risāla al-Quṭbiyya), on which Mīr Zāhid al-Harawī wrote a famous gloss (TDV). Brockelmann and PIPDI list a gloss by Mīr Zāhid on the Taḥrīr itself, with a long series of Indian superglosses, and Robinson describes ‘Risāla Mīr Zāhid’ as a gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya; the two works seem to have been confused, and the question needs checking.

The Taḥrīr was printed in Calcutta as early as 1815 and many times since, in Istanbul, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Cairo, Tehran, Temir-Khan-Shura in Dagestan (1915) and Karachi; a corrected edition by Muḥsin Bīdārfar appeared in Qom in 2004. The prints are listed in the catalogue.

4Al-Jurjānī’s ‘small gloss’ and the glosses on it

Al-Sayyid al-Sharīf ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Jurjānī (740–816/1340–1413) learned the Taḥrīr from its author. The TDV relates that he went to Herat, probably before 1362, to read Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentaries on the Shamsiyya and on al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ with Quṭb al-Dīn himself, who, too old to teach, sent him on to his pupil Mubārakshāh in Egypt. His gloss on the Taḥrīr became the standard companion to it. Ḥājjī Khalīfa calls it Ḥāshiya-yi kūchak, ‘the small gloss’, and El-Rouayheb explains that it was called the minor gloss (al-ḥāshiya al-ṣughrā) to distinguish it from al-Jurjānī’s longer gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Maṭāliʿ. In Ottoman madrasas it was known as the Küçük Hâşiye (M. Ali Aynî), in India as Mīr Quṭbī: the Kanpur lithograph of 1327 is simply titled Meer Qutbi.

The small gloss deals mainly with the beginning of the book: about three quarters of it, El-Rouayheb calculates, treat conceptions and only a quarter assents, the reverse of the proportions of the Taḥrīr itself. This is one reason why the later tradition grew so lopsided. It has been printed in Calcutta, Istanbul, Kazan, Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Tehran and Cairo, usually in the margins of the Taḥrīr.

Ḥājjī Khalīfa says that there are ‘many glosses’ on the small gloss, and the lists of Brockelmann and PIPDI give more than twenty. Among the Ottoman ones are those of Qaraja Aḥmad (d. 854/1450); ʿAlī al-ʿAjamī (d. 860/1456), whose gloss, El-Rouayheb notes, is divided into roughly equal parts on the preliminaries, the five universals and the assents; Shujāʿ al-Dīn Ilyās al-Rūmī (d. 929/1523); and Qara Dāwūd, whose gloss was printed in Istanbul in 1285/1868. The author of the last is disputed: the TDV and Brockelmann identify him with Kara Dâvud of İzmit (d. 948/1541), while Ḥājjī Khalīfa insists that he was an earlier Qara Dāwūd, a pupil of al-Taftāzānī, and that the ascription to Dāwūd b. Kamāl al-Qūjawī is a mistake. ʿImād b. Muḥammad al-Fārisī finished his gloss in Herat in 850/1446; it covers only the conceptions, was printed in Istanbul in 1287/1870 (El-Rouayheb), and was nicknamed Qara Ḥāshiya, ‘the black gloss’, because of its obscurity (Brockelmann).

In Iran the small gloss provoked a long debate. Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Dashtakī (d. 903/1498) glossed it as far as the discussion of definition; Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī (d. 907/1501) wrote a gloss on the opening part that was printed several times in Istanbul and Cairo; Ghiyāth al-Dīn Manṣūr al-Dashtakī (d. 949/1542) wrote a gloss refuting al-Dawānī; and Mīr Abū al-Fatḥ al-Ḥusaynī (d. 950/1543), who also glossed a standard commentary on al-Ījī’s treatise on disputation, wrote a supergloss on al-Dawānī’s (Brockelmann, PIPDI). ʿIṣām al-Dīn al-Isfarāʾīnī (d. 944/1537) and ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī (d. 1015/1606) also wrote on it.

In India ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm al-Siyālkūtī (d. 1067/1656–57) wrote the gloss on al-Jurjānī’s gloss that became standard there and in the Ottoman lands; it was printed in Istanbul in 1259 and 1310 and in Lucknow, among others by Nawal Kishore in 1308/1890–91. In turn ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kharpūtī wrote a ‘new gloss’ on al-Siyālkūtī’s gloss on the conceptions (Istanbul 1287/1870), and the Egyptian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Shirbīnī (d. 1326/1908) a set of notes (taqrīr). By then the Quṭbī stood at the bottom of four or five layers of commentary.

5Other glosses on the Quṭbī

Many scholars glossed Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary directly. Ḥājjī Khalīfa names Muḥammad b. Ḥamza al-Fanārī (d. 834/1431), Shaykh Muḥammad al-Badakhshī (d. 922/1516), Fāḍil al-Samarqandī and ʿIṣām al-Dīn Dāwūd, both of Herat, and Burhān al-Dīn b. Kamāl al-Dīn, who glossed its opening; he also mentions glosses limited to the assents, among them one that Khayr al-Dīn al-ʿAṭūfī (d. 948/1541) wrote for Sultan Süleymān and finished in 930/1523–24. The TDV adds the Ottoman Dede Cöngî and the Azhar scholar Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Dasūqī (d. 1230/1815), whose gloss was printed. PIPDI lists Aḥmad al-Mallawī (d. 1181/1767) in Egypt and Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn al-Andijānī in Central Asia. The Ottoman Khwājazāda ʿAbd Allāh al-Kilīsī wrote a ‘new gloss’ on the assents meant, he says, for students learning to set out and derive syllogisms.

In 1323/1905 the government press at Bulaq brought much of this material together in two volumes, Shurūḥ al-Shamsiyya: Quṭb al-Dīn’s and al-Taftāzānī’s commentaries with the glosses of al-Jurjānī, al-Dawānī, ʿIṣām al-Dīn, al-Siyālkūtī, al-Dasūqī and al-Shirbīnī. The TDV describes a Cairo edition of 1327–28 with the matn at the end of the second volume; whether these are two printings has not been checked.

6Al-Taftāzānī’s commentary

The great rival of the Quṭbī was the commentary of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390), which Ḥājjī Khalīfa says was finished in 753/1352 in the town of Jām in Khurasan; it begins al-ḥamdu li-llāhi alladhī baṣṣaranā bi-nūr al-hidāya wa-l-tawfīq. Al-Taftāzānī had himself studied with Quṭb al-Dīn, according to some of his biographers (TDV). El-Rouayheb reports that he wrote at the request of someone who wanted Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary reviewed and, where necessary, corrected or supplemented; he defends al-Kātibī’s view of the subject matter of logic against al-Ṭūsī, but argues for a nominalist view of universals against al-Kātibī’s more Aristotelian one. The TDV describes it as a commentary on the first part, on conceptions, and says it was known in India as al-Saʿdiyya.

Brockelmann notes that it ‘was very popular at first, until it was displaced by al-Jurjānī’s gloss on the Quṭbī’. It nevertheless kept readers and glossators: al-Siyālkūtī wrote a gloss on it (Istanbul 1238/1822–23), Qaraja Aḥmad a short one, Rawnaq ʿAlī one printed in Lucknow in 1905, and Walī al-Dīn al-Qaramānī, Khiḍr Shāh al-Menteşevī and Kemalpaşazâde glossed its preface (TDV). It was printed in Istanbul (1272 and 1312/1894–95) and Lucknow (1317/1899), and edited by Jādallāh Bassām Ṣāliḥ (Amman: Dār al-Nūr al-Mubīn, 2011).

7Other commentaries on the text

Besides these two, many scholars wrote their own commentaries on the Shamsiyya. Ḥājjī Khalīfa lists a Persian one by Muṣannifak (d. 875/1470), a descendant of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī who studied in Herat and taught in Konya, Bursa and Istanbul; an unfinished one by the Egyptian Jalāl al-Dīn al-Maḥallī (d. 864/1459); others by Aḥmad b. ʿUthmān al-Jūzjānī (d. 844/1440–41) and Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿAynī; and a commentary interwoven with the text (sharḥ mamzūj) by the Bosnian Muḥammad b. Mūsā al-Busnawī (d. 1045/1635–36). Qāḍī Mīr Ḥusayn al-Maybudī’s commentary was printed in Istanbul (1289, 1327) and again in Beirut in 2021.

Later Ottoman scholars kept writing new ones: Ayyūbīzāda Muṣṭafā of Mostar (d. 1101/1689–90) called his ‘the new commentary’; Dāwūd al-Qārisī (d. 1169/1756) wrote a voluminous one; Aḥmad Ṣidqī al-Brūsawī (d. 1312/1894–95) one called Mīzān al-intiẓām. Some commentators took only one difficult part: al-Suwaydī of Baghdad (d. 1230/1815) and ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm al-Laknawī in Lucknow wrote on the mixed modal syllogisms, and the Tatar scholar Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī on the introduction. Brockelmann also records an Indian abridgement, Mīzān al-manṭiq, printed in Cawnpore in 1881 and 1889, with commentaries of its own.

The tradition is still alive. In Java, the contemporary scholar Abū al-Baḥr Miftāḥ b. Maʾmūn al-Shanjūrī al-Jāwī has written al-Ḥāshiya al-Martiyya, notes on the Shamsiyya gathered, he says, from the books of scholars and the lessons of his teachers. Pakistani publishers print the Quṭbī with marginal glosses and sell Urdu aids such as Taysīr-i Quṭbī and Ashraf al-Quṭbī for the students who read it. In Turkey Ferruh Özpilavcı has published an edition with Turkish translation and commentary (2017), in Morocco Mahdī Faḍl Allāh an edition with explanatory notes (1998), and in the United States Tony Street an English translation with a commentary that runs to nearly two hundred pages (2024).