Kurdish madrasas and the Shīʿī ḥawza

1A Persianate core

Kurdistan and Iran drew on the same eastern stock of handbooks as the Ottomans and the Mughals. Al-Jurjānī’s two Persian primers, the Ṣughrā and the Kubrā, were, according to Khaled El-Rouayheb, popular throughout the Persian-speaking world, and the Kubrā attracted commentaries and versifications of its own. Above them stood al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq, al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya and al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ, read with the commentaries of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī, al-Dawānī and Mullā ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī and the glosses of al-Jurjānī. What distinguished the regions was the order of these books, the language in which they were explained, and what came after logic: kalām and law for the Sunni Kurds, philosophy (ḥikma) and uṣūl al-fiqh for the Shīʿī scholars of Iran and Iraq.

2The Kurdish madrasa

Martin van Bruinessen describes the madrasas founded under the Kurdish emirates as distinct from the Ottoman ones, mainly because the Kurds followed the Shāfiʿī school of law, and as places where the Kurdish language was cultivated beside Arabic and Persian. After the emirates disappeared, village madrasas went on training mullas for the villages and towns, and Kurdish scholars settled as teachers as far away as Mecca and Medina.

The fullest description of the course is by Zeynelabidin Zinar, who studied in the madrasas of northern Kurdistan and wrote an account of them in Kurdish (Xwendina medresê, 1993), abridged in English by van Bruinessen. A boy began as a feqî, studying law, grammar and logic; when he had completed the grammar of Jāmī he counted as a ṭalib, roughly the equivalent of a university student; and when he had finished Jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ, the summit of the standard course (rêz), his teacher gave him a licence (ijāza) and he was a mela. About twenty basic texts had to be memorised, but only the base texts, never the commentaries. Each student read his text aloud to the teacher, who explained it word by word in Kurdish; students questioned each other on what they had read (muzakere) and studied silently in the evenings (mitale).

In Zinar’s list the logic books come in this order: 1. Mughnī al-ṭullāb, a commentary on the Īsāghūjī by Maḥmūd al-Maghnīsāwī, which Zinar calls a logic text in difficult Arabic; 2. the Īsāghūjī with the commentary of Mele Xelîlê Sêrtî (Khalīl al-Siʿirtī), a Kurdish scholar; 3. Qewlehmed, which Zinar describes as an extensive commentary on Mughnī al-ṭullāb (the name recalls the gloss of Qul Aḥmad, known in the Ottoman course as a gloss on al-Fanārī; which work Kurdish teachers mean should be checked); 4. later, Şerha Şemsî, a commentary on the Shamsiyya, which Zinar attributes to al-Taftāzānī. Beside logic stood short texts on metaphor, disputation and the theory of word-meaning (waḍʿ).

Michiel Leezenberg, discussing the curriculum lists of Mela Mehmûdê Bayazîdî (1857) and Zinar, names a commentary on the Shamsiyya among the logic texts and notes, after Dehqan, that Kurdish glosses on the logical texts exist. Kurdish itself became a language of madrasa textbooks: Elî Teremaxî’s Kurmanji treatise on Arabic morphology (Tesrîfa Kurmancî) is among the first works of Kurdish prose. Kurdish scholars also wrote in Arabic on the Ottoman logic books: the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records a commentary on Gelenbevî’s Burhān by the Iraqi scholar Ibn al-Qaradāghī, and the Diyarbakır scholar ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Āmidī wrote the commentary on Saçaklızâde’s Waladiyya that was printed in Cairo in 1331/1912–13.

3Kurdish madrasas today

In Turkey the madrasas lost their legal basis in 1924, but in the Kurdish south-east individual teachers kept the old course alive. Abdulmuttalip Arpa, who interviewed teachers of the Cizre region for a study published in 2012, records a seven-class programme in which the logic books are read in the fifth class: the Sullam, a logic work he calls ‘Mağnifullah’ (perhaps Mughnī al-ṭullāb; the reading is uncertain) and ‘Kavlu Ahmet’ (Qawl Aḥmad). In his account of the Arabic course, the student reads a short logic book, the Īsāghūjī, after the grammar of Jāmī, then the Risāla on waḍʿ with its commentary, and memorises the Waladiyya on disputation with ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Āmidī’s commentary.

Arpa stresses that the modern programme is narrower than the old one: apart from one or two courses on logic and literature, everything in it belongs to the religious and linguistic sciences, and the further back one goes, the broader and more varied the curricula become. Starting Jāmī remains a rite of passage: until then a student is a faqī; once he begins it he becomes a ṭālib, receives his lessons from the head teacher and starts teaching the beginners himself.

4Safavid and Qajar Iran

Francis Robinson reconstructs a seventeenth-century Safavid course with four logic books, which by level run: 1. al-Jurjānī’s Risāla-yi Kubrā; 2. Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb, Mullā ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī’s commentary on al-Taftāzānī; 3. Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya; 4. the commentary on al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār with al-Jurjānī’s gloss. Philosophy followed: Ibn Sīnā’s Ishārāt with the commentaries of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and Quṭb al-Dīn; al-Ṭūsī’s Tajrīd with al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī’s commentary; al-Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-ishrāq; and Ibn Sīnā’s Shifāʾ. Compared with the Ottoman course, the Īsāghūjī is missing and the Tahdhīb with al-Yazdī stands near the start.

Al-Yazdī’s commentary, known simply as the Ḥāshiya of Mullā ʿAbd Allāh, was, according to El-Rouayheb, widely studied in Safavid and Qajar Iran, and it remained part of the Shīʿī curriculum in Iran and India in the nineteenth century. Its author’s death date is uncertain: Asad Q. Ahmed lists 982/1574, 989/1581, 1015/1606 and 1050/1640, all recorded in the sources; Robinson gives 1606, and other accounts 981/1573. Through Indian students who studied in Iran and the line of al-Dawānī, the same book became the ‘Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb’ of the Dars-i Niẓāmī, still read today at Deoband and in the Pakistani madrasas (see ‘The Dars-i Niẓāmī’).

In the nineteenth century Mullā Hādī Sabzawārī (d. 1289/1873; Britannica gives 1878) wrote the Manẓūma, an Arabic poem with his own commentary, completed around 1845. Britannica describes it as a treatise on logic in verse; other accounts stress that it is a versified summary of Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophy. Either way, Sharḥ al-Manẓūma has remained one of the main textbooks of ḥikma in Iran and is still taught in the seminaries; Sabzawārī’s own madrasa in Sabzavār is said to have produced more than a thousand graduates in his lifetime.

5The ḥawza of Najaf and Qom

The modern Shīʿī seminary (ḥawza) has three stages: the preliminaries (muqaddamāt), the intermediate ‘surfaces’ (suṭūḥ) read from set texts, and the advanced course (baḥth al-khārij), taught without a set book. Logic belongs to the first stage only, beside Arabic, elementary law and legal theory.

The great change of the twentieth century was a new textbook. Muḥammad Riḍā al-Muẓaffar (1322–1383/1904–1964) of Najaf founded the reformist society Muntadā al-Nashr (licensed in 1353/1934–35) and its college, where from 1357/1938–39 he lectured on logic; the lectures became al-Manṭiq, written in a clearer and simpler style than the older books and now taught in seminaries and universities alike. Roy Mottahedeh, describing the Najaf curriculum, calls the addition of ‘the very popular work on logic’ of al-Muẓaffar one of its innovations, and notes that some students then go on to commentaries on ‘the long favoured traditional logic’, the Shamsiyya. Lists of ḥawza textbooks accordingly name al-Muẓaffar’s al-Manṭiq and Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya for logic.

The present-day logic course of the ḥawza can thus be summarised as: 1. al-Muẓaffar’s al-Manṭiq, in the preliminary stage; 2. for those who continue, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya; 3. for students of philosophy, Sabzawārī’s Sharḥ al-Manẓūma. Where the Ḥāshiya of Mullā ʿAbd Allāh now stands, whether it is still read in Qom and Najaf or survives mainly in South Asia, the sources consulted do not say; a teacher from the ḥawza should check this.