The Maghrib and Mauritania

1A western tradition

Logic was taught in the great mosque-colleges of the Maghrib as it was in the east. Khaled El-Rouayheb names Fez and Tunis, beside Qom and Lucknow, among the centres where logic was ‘a staple part of madrasa education’ by the early nineteenth century. But the North African tradition had its own character. In his history of Arabic logic El-Rouayheb notes that the turn away from modal and hypothetical syllogistic, which marks the eastern commentaries from the fourteenth century on, was ‘much less marked in North Africa’, where interest in semantics, rhetoric and philosophical theology was weaker, at least until the seventeenth century, and he devotes a separate chapter to the distinctive features of the North African tradition.

A small example shows what this meant in practice. The conditions for the fourth syllogistic figure given in the eastern handbooks yield eight productive moods, three of which hold only for certain modal premises. The North Africans al-Sanūsī and al-Akhḍarī, El-Rouayheb observes, held that it has only five, and accordingly ‘set out a different set of conditions for productivity’. Students who learned their logic from these two authors therefore learned a slightly different system from students in Istanbul or Isfahan.

2Al-Sanūsī’s handbook

Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sanūsī of Tlemcen (d. 895/1490) is remembered above all for his short creeds, which became standard teaching texts across North and West Africa and as far as Southeast Asia. He also wrote on logic: a short handbook, al-Mukhtaṣar fī ʿilm al-manṭiq, with his own commentary; a commentary on al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī, preserved in a manuscript in the National Library of Tunis (no. 4157); and, according to the Timbuktu scholar Aḥmad Bābā, a commentary on al-Khūnajī’s logical primer al-Jumal.

El-Rouayheb describes al-Sanūsī as an author who ‘eschewed lengthy philosophical preliminaries’ and kept to the topics that mattered for theology. His commentary on the Mukhtaṣar was printed in Cairo in 1292/1875 and again in 1321/1903–4, a sign that it was in demand in Egypt as well; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that some of his works are still taught in Morocco and at al-Azhar.

3Al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam

The most influential North African logic text, however, was a poem. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Akhḍarī, a Mālikī scholar from the region of Biskra in present-day Algeria who had studied at the Zaytūna in Tunis, put the content of the Īsāghūjī into rajaz verse as al-Sullam al-murawnaq (or al-munawraq, ‘the embellished ladder’). According to the bio-bibliography published by the University of Biskra he wrote it around 1533, at about twenty-one; it has some 143 or 144 lines. The year of his death is disputed: 983/1575–76 according to the TDV and the University of Biskra, 953/1546 according to El-Rouayheb and a Leipzig manuscript catalogue.

Its form suited the way the Maghrib taught. A rajaz poem of this length could be learned by heart in the first years of study and then explained line by line; al-Akhḍarī himself wrote the first commentary on it, and he put rhetoric (al-Jawhar al-maknūn), astronomy and arithmetic into verse in the same way. The poem’s opening section, which sets out three positions on whether logic may be studied and declares permission for the well-grounded student the correct one, became the standard way of presenting the question (see ‘Scholars on studying logic’).

The Biskra bio-bibliography calls it a standard text studied ‘from West Africa to Southeast Asia’; in Egypt, El-Rouayheb notes, it was already a standard handbook in Cairo in the 1730s. A French translation by J.-D. Luciani, Le Soullam, was published in Algiers in 1921.

4Maghribī commentaries

Commentaries on the Sullam were written on both sides of the Egyptian border. The Egyptian ones (al-Mallawī, al-Damanhūrī, al-Ṣabbān, al-Bājūrī) are discussed in ‘Al-Azhar and Egypt’. A modern collection published by Dār Taḥqīq al-Kitāb, which brings together seven commentaries, includes besides al-Akhḍarī’s own and al-Damanhūrī’s those of Saʿīd Qaddūra, al-Walālī, al-Darwī and al-Sijilmāsī, whose name points to Sijilmāsa in southern Morocco. A commentary by Muḥammad Maḥfūẓ al-Shinqīṭī, whose name points to Shinqīṭ in Mauritania, al-Ḍawʾ al-mushriq ʿalā Sullam al-manṭiq li-l-Akhḍarī, was published in Beirut in 2007.

The sources consulted for this article do not give the dates or careers of the Maghribī commentators, nor do they say which commentary was preferred in which city. That the collection places them beside the Egyptian commentaries suggests that, for the Sullam at least, there was one tradition shared by Egypt and the Maghrib rather than two separate ones; El-Rouayheb’s phrase ‘the distinct logical tradition of Egypt and the Maghreb’ points the same way.

5A probable sequence

No Maghribī syllabus of logic has been found in the sources consulted. What they do show is the stock of texts available to a North African student, which in order of difficulty would have been: 1. al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam, memorised; 2. the Sullam read with a commentary, al-Akhḍarī’s own or a later one; 3. al-Sanūsī’s Mukhtaṣar with his own commentary; 4. for the advanced, al-Sanūsī’s commentary on the Īsāghūjī or on al-Khūnajī’s Jumal, and the eastern handbooks read at al-Azhar. This ordering is a reconstruction from the texts and their level of difficulty, not a documented course, and should be checked against Maghribī sources such as teachers’ certificates (ijāzāt) and the catalogues of the great libraries.

The Mauritanian maḥẓara (plural maḥāẓir), the traditional school of the region of Shinqīṭ, is famous for teaching by memorisation, and the general description of Islam in Mauritania confirms that Qurʾānic schools of this kind remain widespread and that memorisation is their method. The sources consulted do not, however, describe how logic is taught there: which logic texts a maḥẓara reads, at what stage, and whether the Sullam is memorised as part of a fixed sequence. Al-Shinqīṭī’s commentary shows that Mauritanian scholars wrote on the Sullam; a fuller account must wait for sources on the maḥẓara curriculum itself.

6The Zaytūna and the Qarawiyyīn in modern times

The two great mosque-universities were reorganised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the Zaytūna in Tunis, according to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, a council of Ḥanafī and Mālikī scholars was set up in 1842 to organise teaching; a decree of 1876, issued under Khayr al-Dīn Pasha, divided the course into three stages and prescribed the books and the examinations, although his plan to add modern sciences was blocked by conservative scholars. Further councils followed under the French protectorate (1898), a three-level system was adopted in 1912, and from 1932 Muḥammad al-Ṭāhir Ibn ʿĀshūr directed a reform that in 1946 added mathematics, natural sciences, history, geography and philosophy. After independence teaching passed to the new Zaytūna University (1956).

The Qarawiyyīn in Fez, a Mālikī institution whose public lessons were famous, became a modern university after Moroccan independence in 1956, with faculties beyond Fez. The TDV articles on both institutions say nothing specific about logic, and the sources consulted for this article do not show how the Sullam and al-Sanūsī fared in the reformed syllabuses. This is a gap that a teacher with access to Tunisian or Moroccan sources should fill.