Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fatiḥpūrī

North Indian master of logic and philosophy, the leading pupil of Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn, who taught most of the great eighteenth-century commentators on Sullam al-ʿulūm and wrote a commentary on its difficult passages.

Life

ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī’s Nuzhat al-khawāṭir gives his name as Kamāl al-Dīn b. Muḥammad Dawlat b. Muḥammad Yaʿqūb al-Anṣārī al-Sihālawī, then al-Fatiḥpūrī, and counts him among the paternal cousins of Quṭb al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm al-Sihālawī, the ancestor of the Farangī Maḥall family of Lucknow. Asad Q. Ahmed adds the family background: Quṭb al-Dīn had taught Kamāl al-Dīn’s father, Muḥammad Dawlat, and taken him into his household as a son; after Quṭb al-Dīn was murdered in 1103/1692, Muḥammad Dawlat moved from Sihāla to Fatiḥpūr and then to Delhi, where he joined the scholars compiling the Mughal law collection known as al-Fatāwā al-Hindiyya (al-Fatāwā al-ʿĀlamgīriyya). Through his ancestors Kamāl al-Dīn was thus tied both to the Sihālawī line and to that of Muḥibb Allāh al-Ilāhābādī.

He was born and grew up in Fatiḥpūr. According to Nuzhat he read some of the school books with al-Sayyid Kamāl al-Dīn al-ʿAẓīmābādī and the rest with Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn b. Quṭb al-Dīn al-Sihālawī of Lucknow, the teacher after whom the Dars-i Niẓāmī is named. He stayed with Niẓām al-Dīn for a long time and reached ‘a rank that none of his companions reached’; he began to teach while his master was still alive, and became known above all for theology (kalām), logic and philosophy. Nuzhat describes him as exceptionally intelligent and the author of ‘subtle works’. It dates his death to 14 Muḥarram 1175 (1761), after the age of seventy, following the genealogical work Aghṣān al-ansāb.

His importance for the history of logic lies mainly in his students. Nuzhat names Muḥammad Baraka b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ilāhābādī, Mullā Ḥasan (Muḥammad Ḥasan b. Ghulām Muṣṭafā) and his brother Muḥammad Walī, Muḥammad Aʿlam al-Sandīlawī, ʿAbd Allāh b. Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn al-Sandīlawī and Aḥmad Allāh b. Ṣifat Allāh al-Khayrābādī; its entry on Ḥamd Allāh al-Sandīlawī names Kamāl al-Dīn as one of Ḥamd Allāh’s two teachers. Ahmed adds ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm and his own paternal nephew, Qāḍī Nūr al-Ḥaqq al-Kirānawī (d. 1180/1767), through whom a further line of scholars was founded at Kirāna.

In Ahmed’s reconstruction of the commentary tradition on Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm, Kamāl al-Dīn is ‘perhaps the most significant node’ of its second phase. Of the seven identifiable first-order commentators of that phase, three were his direct students and two or three more were taught by his students; and of the commentaries that received most later glosses, all except Qāḍī Mubārak’s were written by his students: Ḥamd Allāh’s on the assents and Mullā Ḥasan’s on the conceptualizations. He himself wrote a partial commentary on difficult parts of the Sullam, among them the passage on the liar paradox, which Ahmed knows from the catalogue of the Rampur library.

Works

• Commentary on difficult passages of Sullam al-ʿulūm — عَلَى Sullam al-ʿulūmA partial commentary on difficult parts of the Sullam, such as the liar paradox; known to Ahmed from ʿArshī’s catalogue of the Rampur Raza Library (4:390–91). Manuscript.شَرْح
• Sharḥ al-Kibrīt al-aḥmar شَرْحُ الكِبْرِيتِ الأَحْمَرِNamed first among his ‘subtle works’ in Nuzhat al-khawāṭir; the work commented on is not identified there.شَرْح
• al-ʿUrwa al-wuthqā العُرْوَةُ الوُثْقَىNamed in Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, which adds that he also wrote other glosses and treatises (ḥawāshī wa-rasāʾil).عَمَل

Reception

Through Ḥamd Allāh, Mullā Ḥasan and Baḥr al-ʿUlūm his teaching shaped the commentaries on the Sullam that became curriculum books of the Dars-i Niẓāmī.

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Khayrābādī, who disdained most Indian scholars, is reported in Nuzhat al-khawāṭir to have spared only a few, among them Niẓām al-Dīn, Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fatiḥpūrī and Baḥr al-ʿUlūm (see ‘The Khayrābādī school’).