Al-Azhar and Egypt

1A distinct tradition

Egypt shared the eastern handbooks (the Shamsiyya, the Tahdhīb, the Maṭāliʿ) with the Ottoman and Persian lands, but its elementary logic came from the west. Khaled El-Rouayheb speaks of ‘the distinct logical tradition of Egypt and the Maghreb’ and notes that the North African handbooks of Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (d. 895/1490) and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Akhḍarī were ‘standard handbooks in Cairo’ when the Ottoman scholar Dāwūd Qārṣī lived there in the late 1730s. Qārṣī, trained in the central Ottoman tradition, seems not to have known them, and El-Rouayheb contrasts the Turkish-speaking teachers resident in Cairo with ‘an ethnically Egyptian specialist on logic such as Aḥmad al-Mallawī (d. 1181/1767)’.

At the more advanced level El-Rouayheb singles out a book from the east: al-Khabīṣī’s commentary on al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq, which ‘became a standard commentary at the Azhar College in Cairo’.

2What an Azhar student read in the eighteenth century

There was no fixed syllabus. Al-Azhar was organised by residential colleges (riwāq) according to the students’ origin rather than by classes. James Heyworth-Dunne, working mainly from the chronicle of al-Jabartī, compiled a list of the principal works ‘studied during the first years of a student’s career in al-Azhar’ in the eighteenth century. Under logic it names:

1. al-Akhḍarī’s al-Sullam al-murawnaq, with the author’s own commentary and the commentary of Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Mujīrī al-Mallawī; 2. al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī, with the commentaries of Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, Shams al-Dīn al-Fanārī (al-Fawāʾid al-Fanāriyya) and Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Kātī; 3. al-Sanūsī’s Mukhtaṣar fī l-manṭiq; 4. al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq with al-Khabīṣī’s commentary; 5. al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary; 6. al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār with Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary Lawāmiʿ al-asrār. Heyworth-Dunne’s list is not a ladder, but its order matches what other sources say: the verse Sullam and the Īsāghūjī first, the Shamsiyya and the Maṭāliʿ last.

Teaching took the familiar form. Many students, especially those from small towns and villages, had memorised several mutūn before they came to Cairo; the shaykh then gave his lesson as a commentary or super-commentary on the text, the students took down his words and checked their notes with his assistant and with each other, and the teacher’s prepared lessons often became textbooks in their own right. Al-Jabartī describes the full day of one teacher who read al-Bukhārī and a law book before the dawn prayer, Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya in the forenoon, grammar (al-Ushmūnī and Ibn ʿAqīl on the Alfiyya) in the afternoon, and another text after sunset.

3The Egyptian commentators

The eighteenth century was the great age of Egyptian commentary on the Sullam. Heyworth-Dunne lists among the most prominent writers of the period Aḥmad al-Mallawī (d. 1181/1767), whose commentary on the Sullam was ‘still in use’ in his own day; Aḥmad al-Damanhūrī (d. 1192/1778), whose Īḍāḥ al-mubham min maʿānī al-Sullam was likewise still in use; and Muḥammad al-Ṣabbān (d. 1206/1791), whose gloss on al-Mallawī’s commentary on the Sullam was still read. Al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham became the best-known commentary on the poem; the TDV article on al-Akhḍarī singles it out.

Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1276/1860) wrote both a commentary and a gloss on the Sullam, and al-Quwaysinī a gloss; both are among the logic books that reached the Indonesian pesantren. The Īsāghūjī had its own Egyptian line: Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s commentary al-Maṭlaʿ, with glosses by Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qalyūbī (d. 1069/1659), Yūsuf al-Ḥifnī and Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 1250/1834), who became Shaykh al-Azhar in 1830; these are treated in ‘The Īsāghūjī in the madrasa’ and ‘The commentary tradition’.

A modern collection of commentaries on the Sullam published by Dār Taḥqīq al-Kitāb gathers seven of them: al-Akhḍarī’s own, al-Damanhūrī’s, al-Quwaysinī’s, and those of al-Walālī, al-Darwī, Saʿīd Qaddūra and al-Sijilmāsī, whose name points to Sijilmāsa in Morocco. Egyptian and North African commentaries were, and are, read side by side.

4A typical sequence

Combining Heyworth-Dunne’s list with El-Rouayheb’s remarks and the commentaries that were printed and reprinted in Cairo, an Azhar student of the eighteenth or nineteenth century who went the whole way in logic would typically have read: 1. the Sullam, memorised, then read with al-Akhḍarī’s own commentary or with al-Mallawī or al-Damanhūrī; 2. the Īsāghūjī with Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s al-Maṭlaʿ (or the Sullam with the glosses of al-Ṣabbān or al-Bājūrī); 3. al-Sanūsī’s Mukhtaṣar with his own commentary; 4. the Tahdhīb with al-Khabīṣī; 5. the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī; 6. for the few, the Maṭāliʿ with Lawāmiʿ al-asrār. The sources say nothing about how many students completed the whole sequence.

Printing in Cairo fixed these combinations. Al-Sanūsī’s commentary on his Mukhtaṣar was printed in 1292/1875 and again in 1321/1903–4; al-Akhḍarī’s own commentary on the Sullam was printed with al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham by al-Maṭbaʿa al-Wahbiyya in 1293/1876; al-Maṭlaʿ with al-Ḥifnī’s gloss appeared around 1879 and again from Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī in 1933; and al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī also printed Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya (1948). The Azhar press itself printed Saçaklızâde’s Waladiyya on disputation with the commentaries of the Diyarbakır scholar ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Āmidī and of Mehmed Behisnī in 1331/1912–13.

5Reform

The Egyptian reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regulated examinations and added subjects rather than removing logic. According to the TDV article on al-Azhar, the first reform law, of 1287/1871, set a final examination whose subjects included logic beside law, legal theory, theology, ḥadīth, exegesis, grammar and rhetoric. The law of 1312/1895 added arithmetic, geometry, algebra, geography, history and calligraphy and set the course at twelve years; that of 1314/1896, drafted by Muḥammad ʿAbduh, regulated admission, length of study, syllabuses and examinations. Later laws (1907, 1911) introduced stages of study, the 1930 law created faculties of Sharīʿa, Uṣūl al-Dīn and Arabic, and the 1961 law turned al-Azhar into a modern university with secular faculties.

The reformers’ complaint was about method. Heyworth-Dunne quotes the report that Muḥammad ʿAbduh, after about a year of study at the Aḥmadī mosque, had understood nothing, ‘just as every beginner who studies according to the accepted system in that mosque and in the mosque of al-Azhar’. The sources consulted do not document how the logic books themselves were changed by each law.

6Logic at al-Azhar today

The classical texts did not disappear. The TDV article on al-Sanūsī notes that some of his works are still taught at al-Azhar, and the commentaries of al-Damanhūrī and al-Anṣārī are still reprinted (al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham, for instance, by Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya in Beirut). In a fatwa, ʿAlī Jumʿa, former Grand Mufti of Egypt, quotes the Sullam’s three positions on the study of logic and holds that pure logic is a neutral and recommended tool for students of the religious sciences (see ‘Scholars on studying logic’).

The sources consulted for this article do not give a current, dated syllabus of logic in the Azhar institutes (maʿāhid) or faculties, so the present place of the Sullam, the Īsāghūjī and al-Khabīṣī in the official course cannot be stated here with confidence. This is a point a teacher familiar with the present Azhar syllabus should check.