Logic in the madrasa curriculum

1A tool science

Madrasa learning was traditionally divided into the transmitted sciences (manqūlāt: Qurʾān, ḥadīth, law and their auxiliaries) and the rational sciences (maʿqūlāt). Logic (manṭiq) belonged to the rational sciences, together with philosophy (ḥikma), mathematics, astronomy and the art of disputation (ādāb al-baḥth). In the list of subjects that James Heyworth-Dunne drew up for eighteenth-century Cairo, logic heads the rational group, beside arithmetic, algebra, timekeeping, astronomy, philosophy and the rules of debate.

In practice logic was treated less as a branch of philosophy than as an instrument. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi groups it, for the Ottoman madrasa, with the ‘tool sciences’ (âlet ilimleri) such as grammar and rhetoric: subjects that a student mastered early because the advanced books of theology, legal theory and Qurʾānic exegesis presuppose them. Khaled El-Rouayheb sums up the situation around 1800: logic was ‘a staple part of madrasa education in all major centers of Islamic learning’, from Fez and Tunis to Qom and Lucknow; every student learned at least the basics, and advanced students went on to intermediate and advanced handbooks.

Not everyone agreed that this was right. The debate over whether a Muslim may study logic at all is told in the article ‘Scholars on studying logic’; the articles in this section look instead at what was actually read, in what order and with whom.

2Text, commentary, gloss

Everywhere the unit of teaching was the book, not the subject. A student learned a short text (matn), often by heart, then read it again with a teacher and a commentary (sharḥ), and at a higher level with glosses (ḥawāshī) on that commentary. Heyworth-Dunne notes that many Azhar students had memorised several mutūn before they reached Cairo, and that the shaykh’s lesson took the form of a commentary or super-commentary on the text, which students wrote down and checked afterwards; the lessons of successful teachers in turn became the next generation’s textbooks. The Kurdish scholar Zeynelabidin Zinar describes the same rule for his own madrasa in the twentieth century: only the base texts were memorised, never the commentaries.

A student’s progress was therefore measured by the books he had read. The Ottoman scholar Taşköprüzâde (d. 968/1561) recorded that he read the Īsāghūjī with the commentary of Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Kātī and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya with the gloss of al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī. How the layers of commentary were built up is explained in the article ‘The commentary tradition’.

3A shared core

Behind the regional differences stood a small common stock of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century handbooks. Francis Robinson, comparing the sixteenth-century Ottoman course, a seventeenth-century Safavid list and the eighteenth-century Dars-i Niẓāmī of India, found al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya (with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary) in all three, works of al-Jurjānī in all three, the Īsāghūjī in the Ottoman and Indian lists, the commentary on al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār in the Ottoman and Safavid lists, and al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq in the Safavid and Indian ones.

El-Rouayheb adds that the Tahdhīb was the most widely studied of the later handbooks, read with the commentaries of al-Dawānī, al-Khabīṣī and Mullā ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī, and that al-Jurjānī’s glosses on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentaries on the Shamsiyya and the Maṭāliʿ were among the most studied texts of all. Regional sequences differed mainly in two places: the primer with which a student began, and the advanced book with which logic was crowned.

4The regional sequences at a glance

South Asia (Dars-i Niẓāmī). Primers: al-Jurjānī’s Persian Ṣughrā and Kubrā, then the Īsāghūjī and, from the nineteenth century, al-Mirqāt. Middle: the Tahdhīb with Mullā ʿAbd Allāh’s commentary; Quṭbī and Mīr Quṭbī on the Shamsiyya. Summit: Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm with the commentaries of Qāḍī Mubārak, Ḥamd Allāh and Mullā Ḥasan, and Mīr Zāhid’s gloss. Distinctive: the sheer number of logic books (eleven in Robinson’s list) and a local advanced textbook. Today: four books in Deoband and in Pakistan’s largest board. See ‘The Dars-i Niẓāmī’.

Ottoman lands. Primer: the Īsāghūjī, read with al-Kātī’s commentary and al-Tālishī’s gloss, then al-Fanārī with Qul Aḥmad’s gloss. Middle and summit: the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn, al-Jurjānī and further glosses; the Tahdhīb; the commentary on the Maṭāliʿ. Distinctive: very long glosses on short primers, and in the late eighteenth century Gelenbevî’s Burhān. Today: logic left the madrasa with the reforms of 1914–24. See ‘The Ottoman medrese’.

Egypt and al-Azhar. Primers: al-Akhḍarī’s verse Sullam (with the commentaries of al-Mallawī, al-Damanhūrī and al-Bājūrī), the Īsāghūjī with Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, al-Sanūsī’s Mukhtaṣar. Middle and summit: the Tahdhīb with al-Khabīṣī, the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn. Distinctive: a shared North African and Egyptian tradition. See ‘Al-Azhar and Egypt’.

Maghrib and Mauritania. Primers: the Sullam and al-Sanūsī. Distinctive: verse texts learned by heart, a tradition El-Rouayheb describes as having its own features, and local commentaries on the Sullam. See ‘The Maghrib and Mauritania’.

Kurdish madrasas and Iran. Kurdish course: al-Maghnīsāwī’s Mughnī al-ṭullāb, the Īsāghūjī, then a commentary on the Shamsiyya, with the Waladiyya on disputation memorised afterwards; explanation in Kurdish. Iran and the Shīʿī ḥawza: al-Jurjānī’s Kubrā, the Tahdhīb with Mullā ʿAbd Allāh, Sharḥ al-Shamsiyya, and in the twentieth century al-Muẓaffar’s al-Manṭiq. See ‘Kurdish madrasas and the Shīʿī ḥawza’.

Southeast Asia and the north. Pesantren: the Sullam with al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham and al-Bājūrī, occasionally the Īsāghūjī; logic is taught in some pesantren and not in others. Volga-Ural, Dagestan and Central Asia: the Īsāghūjī with al-Kātī, the Sullam, the Shamsiyya and Sullam al-ʿulūm are attested. See ‘The pesantren and the Malay world’.

5A common pattern

Put together, the sources show a broadly similar ladder of four steps, even where the books on each step differ: 1. a short primer, in prose or verse, often memorised (Īsāghūjī, Sullam, Ṣughrā and Kubrā, Mughnī al-ṭullāb); 2. the same primer read again with a commentary (al-Kātī, al-Fanārī, al-Anṣārī, al-Damanhūrī), or a second short handbook such as al-Mirqāt; 3. an intermediate handbook with its commentary (the Tahdhīb with Mullā ʿAbd Allāh, al-Khabīṣī or al-Dawānī; the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn); 4. glosses on that commentary, or a regional advanced text (al-Jurjānī and his glossators, Sullam al-ʿulūm, Gelenbevî’s Burhān). Disputation (ādāb al-baḥth), with texts such as Saçaklızâde’s Waladiyya, usually followed logic.

6Criticism and change

Complaints about the logic course are old. In the seventeenth century Kâtip Çelebi lamented that Ottoman scholars had turned away from the rational sciences, although he himself taught al-Fanārī and the Shamsiyya; in the eighteenth Saçaklızâde and Dāwūd Qārṣī objected to students being made to wade through glosses before they understood the basics. In India Shiblī Nuʿmānī, the moving spirit of the Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ, argued that logic was only an aid, yet logic books outnumbered those of the subjects it was meant to serve.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the setting more than the books. Print made glosses and super-glosses cheap; El-Rouayheb notes that commentaries on madrasa handbooks were among the first books printed in the nineteenth century. New institutions (Deoband, the reformed Azhar, the late Ottoman Dârülhilâfe) fixed the course in years and examinations. Asad Q. Ahmed shows, for the Sullam al-ʿulūm, how commentary shifted from Arabic super-glosses written between teacher and student to Urdu explanations written for printed classroom use. Shorter modern primers entered the course: Taysīr al-manṭiq in South Asia, al-Muẓaffar’s al-Manṭiq in Najaf and Qom, Turkish textbooks after Cevdet Paşa’s Miʿyār-ı sedād (1877).

Where the classical course survives today it is usually shorter than before. The Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband and the Pakistani Wifāq al-Madāris now prescribe four logic books; many pesantren teach none; in Turkey logic left the madrasa altogether in 1924 and lives on in faculties of theology and in informal Kurdish madrasas. The individual articles give the details, region by region.