İbrâhim Hakkı

Ottoman Sufi scholar and poet, author of the encyclopaedic Mârifetnâme, whose rhymed Turkish study plan Tertîb-i ulûm (1165/1752) records the eighteenth-century order of the logic books.

Life

İbrâhim Hakkı was born at Hasankale near Erzurum on 2 Muḥarram 1115 (18 May 1703). According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi his father, Derviş Osman, settled at Tillo near Siirt as a disciple of the Sufi İsmâil Fakîrullah, and the boy was brought there at nine; he learned from his father and from Fakîrullah, and after his father’s death in 1132/1720 continued his studies in Erzurum for about eight years. He then lived as a disciple at Tillo until his shaykh’s death in 1147/1734, served as imam in Erzurum, and visited Istanbul in 1160/1747, where Sultan Maḥmūd I received him, allowed him to work in the palace library and gave him a teaching rank (müderrislik pâyesi). He returned to Erzurum and Hasankale, made several pilgrimages, and in his last years settled again at Tillo, where he died on 19 Jumādā II 1194 (22 June 1780) and was buried in his shaykh’s tomb.

His best-known book, the Mârifetnâme (completed 1170/1757), is a Turkish encyclopaedia of religious and natural knowledge, notable for its interest in the new astronomy. The TDV sees in his writing a wish to make learning accessible in Turkish and a hidden criticism of the teaching of his time.

For the history of logic his importance is a short poem. In 1165/1752 he wrote the Tertîb-i ulûm, ‘the order of the sciences’, a Turkish poem of about 125 couplets that lists thirty-one sciences a student must study to become a ‘complete efendi’, that is, a scholar, with the books to be read in each. Şükran Fazlıoğlu, who edited it, shows that it gives first-hand evidence of the texts in common use in Ottoman learning. Its seventh chapter, on logic, prescribes: memorise the Īsāghūjī first; then read the commentary of Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Kātī and Muḥyī al-Dīn’s gloss on it; then al-Fanārī with Qul Aḥmad’s gloss; then the Waladiyya; then ‘read the Shamsiyya and the Quṭb of logic; know Dāwūd and al-Sayyid, that exacting scholar’, that is, the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary and the glosses of Kara Dâvud and al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī; and finally ‘memorise the Tahdhīb, read Jalāl’, that is, al-Dawānī’s commentary, so that ‘with Mīr logic finds its perfection’, Mīr being Mīr Abū al-Fatḥ’s gloss on al-Dawānī (Fazlıoğlu). The TDV adds that the programme set beside the traditional religious sciences philosophy, mathematics, geography, astronomy, anatomy and medicine.

Works

• Tertîb-i ulûmRhymed Turkish study plan of 1165/1752 listing the books of thirty-one sciences, logic among them; critical text with commentary by Şükran Fazlıoğlu. A shorter 25-couplet ‘Tertîbü’l-ulûm’ section also appears in his Dîvân (1168/1755) (TDV).عَمَل
• MârifetnâmeEncyclopaedic Turkish work on religion, Sufism and the natural sciences, completed in Dhū al-Ḥijja 1170/August 1757 (TDV).عَمَل

Reception

Historians of the Ottoman madrasa use the Tertîb-i ulûm, with the anonymous Kevâkib-i sebʿa of 1741, Saçaklızâde’s Tartīb al-ʿulūm and the autobiographies of Taşköprüzâde and Kâtip Çelebi, as a substitute for the lost official syllabi; Fatma Zehra Pattabanoğlu lists it among these sources.

Its sequence for logic, from the memorised Īsāghūjī to the Shamsiyya with its glosses and the Tahdhīb, is the basis of the site’s account of the Ottoman logic course (see ‘The Ottoman medrese’ and ‘The Īsāghūjī in the madrasa’).