Mullā Fīrūz | The Mantiqi

Author of al-Sirāj al-wahhāj, one of the earliest commentaries on Sullam al-ʿulūm, dedicated to the Mughal emperor Bahādur Shāh I.

Life

Almost nothing is known of Fīrūz b. Maḥabba beyond his commentary. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī’s Nuzhat al-khawāṭir gives him a two-line entry: ‘one of the well-known learned men’, the author of a commentary on Sullam al-ʿulūm of Muḥibb Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Shakūr al-Bihārī, which begins Laka al-ḥamd yā man ʿalā al-akwān bi-aṣnāf al-iḥsān. Asad Q. Ahmed, who used a manuscript of the work, likewise found ‘no further information about the author’.

The commentary, al-Sirāj al-wahhāj (‘the blazing lamp’), is dedicated to Quṭb al-Dīn Muḥammad Shāh ʿĀlam Bādshāh. Ahmed identifies him as Bahādur Shāh I and, from the titles used and the prayer for the continuance of his reign, concludes that the work was written during his rule, between 1118/1707 and 1124/1712. A catalogue that dates Fīrūz to the reign of Shāh ʿĀlam II (r. 1173/1759–1221/1806) has, he shows, confused the two emperors. Fīrūz thus belongs to the first generation of commentators, writing within a few years of al-Bihārī’s death; with al-Sāʾinpūrī’s commentary, dedicated to Nawwāb Khudābanda Khān, his is one of the two earliest commentaries addressed to imperial figures.

Ahmed uses Fīrūz as a representative early voice in two debates. On the liar paradox, where al-Dawānī had required a distinction ‘in virtue of their very selves’ between a report and what it reports about, Fīrūz read al-Bihārī as arguing that a distinction made by the mind (bi-l-iʿtibār) is enough, and accepted it; later commentators dismissed this reading. On existence, Fīrūz quotes al-Dawānī’s rejection of the principle that the affirmation of something of something is ‘derivative’ of the existence of the subject, and sets out the position of al-Bihārī. Ahmed also shows how lemmata of the author’s self-commentary reappear without attribution in the commentaries of al-Sāʾinpūrī, Fīrūz and Ḥamd Allāh.

Uncertain or disputed

Name: Nuzhat al-khawāṭir and Ahmed write Fīrūz b. Maḥabba; the British Library record of the Delhi print (via the Penn Libraries catalogue) has Muḥammad Fayrūz ibn Muḥibbah.
His dates of birth and death, his teachers and his place of work are unknown; the dedication gives only the period in which he wrote.

Works

al-Sirāj al-wahhāj (Sharḥ Sullam al-ʿulūm) السِّرَاجُ الوَهَّاجُ — عَلَى Sullam al-ʿulūmDedicated to Bahādur Shāh I, so written 1118–1124/1707–1712. Manuscripts survive, and fragments appear in the margins of nineteenth-century lithographs of the Sullam (Ahmed). A Delhi lithograph of 1893 (248 pp.), ‘Kitāb al-mashhūr bi-hi Fayrūz’, prints the commentary on the conceptualizations with marginal glosses by Asʿad b. Maḥmūd (Ṣāḥibzāda Ūtmānzai, 1854/55–1928/29).شَرْح

Reception

An image of al-Sirāj al-wahhāj is the cover illustration of Asad Q. Ahmed’s Palimpsests of Themselves (2022), the main modern study of the Sullam and its commentaries.

Sources (3)