Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī

Egyptian-born Shāfiʿī jurist of Mecca whose fatwā declared the learning and teaching of logic a collective religious duty.

Life

Ibn Ḥajar was born in the village of Maḥallat Abī al-Haytam in the Gharbiyya province of the Nile Delta; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi takes 909/1503–04 as the correct year of his birth, from a note in his own list of teachers. He lost his father young, studied in Ṭanṭā and from 924/1518 in Cairo, at the Aḥmadiyya madrasa and al-Azhar, with Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Ramlī and others, and received permission to teach and give fatwās before he was twenty. The TDV notes that his studies covered logic among many other sciences. After pilgrimages in 933/1527 and 937/1531 he settled in Mecca in 940/1534, where he taught and gave fatwās in the Ḥaram for the rest of his life; questions came to him from all over the Muslim world. He died in Mecca on 23 Rajab 974 (3 February 1567).

His commentary on al-Nawawī’s Minhāj, Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj, became with that of Shams al-Dīn al-Ramlī one of the two standard works of later Shāfiʿī law, and his collected fatwās, al-Fatāwā al-kubrā al-fiqhiyya, compiled by his student ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Fākihī, carried great authority.

In one of these fatwās, studied by Khaled El-Rouayheb, he set out at length his view of logic. He began by noting that some scholars had forbidden it, then cited al-Ghazālī’s statements in al-Mustaṣfā and al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl that logic is the introduction to all sciences and contains nothing to be accepted or rejected on religious grounds. Since, he argued, whatever serves the religious sciences is to be respected, ‘learning and teaching logic is a collective duty’ (farḍ kifāya). A mujtahid needs it, because every proof has conditions that logic sets out, and without it one cannot answer the doubts raised by philosophers and heretics. Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ and others who forbade logic, he said, meant ‘the logic of the philosophers’, not the logic known among Sunni scholars, which contains nothing of unbelief; and he blamed some later scholars, El-Rouayheb suggests al-Suyūṭī above all, for attacking logic out of ignorance. He closed by quoting Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī: logic is like a sword, with which one person fights in God’s cause and another robs travellers.

Works

• al-Fatāwā al-kubrā al-fiqhiyya الفَتَاوَى الكُبْرَى الفِقْهِيَّةُHis collected fatwās; the fatwā on logic is in vol. 1, pp. 50–51 of the Cairo edition of 1308/1891 used by El-Rouayheb, which also prints the fatwās of Aḥmad al-Ramlī.عَمَل
• Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj bi-sharḥ al-Minhāj تُحْفَةُ المُحْتَاجِ بِشَرْحِ المِنْهَاجِ — عَلَى النَّوَوِيّCommentary on al-Nawawī’s Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, a standard text of Shāfiʿī law.شَرْح

Reception

His distinction between ‘the logic of the philosophers’ and the logic of Sunni scholars became the standard way of reconciling the older prohibitions with the teaching of logic; the eighteenth-century commentators on the Sullam, such as Aḥmad al-Mallawī and Aḥmad al-Damanhūrī, repeated that studying unmixed logic is a collective duty (see ‘Should a Muslim study logic?’).

El-Rouayheb uses his fatwā, with that of his teacher al-Ramlī, to show that mainstream Shāfiʿī jurists of the sixteenth century regarded logic as permitted and even obligatory.