al-Maghīlī

Mālikī jurist of the Maghrib and the Sahara who, in al-Suyūṭī’s lifetime, disputed his prohibition of logic in verse and in a treatise widely read in West Africa.

Life

According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, al-Maghīlī was born in Tlemcen, probably around 844/1440, into the Berber tribe of Maghīla. He studied in Tlemcen, among others with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Thaʿālibī and Yaḥyā b. Yadīr al-Tadallisī, and completed his studies in Bijāya. As a jurist he settled at Tamanṭīṭ in the oasis of Tuwāt (Touat) in south-western Algeria. There he wrote a treatise arguing that the local Jews had broken the terms of their protected status, which caused a long controversy among the jurists of Fez, Tunis and Tlemcen; supported by some of them, among them the theologian al-Sanūsī, he led an attack on the Jews of Tuwāt in which many were killed and the synagogue of Tamanṭīṭ was destroyed, probably shortly before 895/1490.

He then left for the lands south of the Sahara, teaching and preaching in Aïr, Takedda, Katsina and Kano, where he advised Sultan Muḥammad Rumfa (897/1492) and wrote for him a treatise on government, and in Gao, where he answered the questions of the Songhay ruler Askia Muḥammad. He returned to Tuwāt and died at his zāwiya there in 909/1503 or 910/1504. The TDV counts some thirty works, mostly on law and theology; his answers to Askia Muḥammad and his treatise for the ruler of Kano were influential among the West African reformers of the nineteenth century, and the Kunta revere him as a renewer of his century.

His place in the history of logic rests on his opposition to al-Suyūṭī, who had written a treatise forbidding the study of logic. According to the TDV, al-Maghīlī debated with al-Suyūṭī in an exchange of poems and defended the opposite view in a treatise widely read in West Africa, Minaḥ al-Wahhāb fī radd al-fikr ʿalā al-ṣawāb. Khaled El-Rouayheb, citing Aḥmad Bābā al-Tinbuktī’s Nayl al-ibtihāj, uses this dispute to show that al-Suyūṭī’s hostility to logic was not typical of his time: it was contradicted while al-Suyūṭī was still alive, and his contemporaries al-Sanūsī and Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī wrote and taught logic.

Works

• Minaḥ al-Wahhāb fī radd al-fikr ʿalā al-ṣawāb مِنَحُ الوَهَّابِ فِي رَدِّ الفِكْرِ عَلَى الصَّوَابِA treatise defending the study of logic against al-Suyūṭī, widely read in West Africa (TDV). Whether it is in verse or prose is not stated in the sources consulted.عَمَل
• Verse exchange with al-Suyūṭī on logicPoems exchanged with al-Suyūṭī on the permissibility of logic (TDV; Aḥmad Bābā, Nayl al-ibtihāj, cited by El-Rouayheb).عَمَل
• Ajwiba ʿan asʾilat al-Amīr Askiyā al-Ḥājj MuḥammadAnswers to the questions of the Songhay ruler; edited and translated by John O. Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay (1985).عَمَل
• Risāla fī umūr al-salṭana (Tāj al-dīn fīmā yajib ʿalā al-mulūk)Treatise on government for Muḥammad Rumfa of Kano; translated by T. H. Baldwin as The Obligation of Princes (Beirut 1932).عَمَل

Reception

El-Rouayheb’s study of Sunni scholars on the status of logic (Islamic Law and Society, 2004; Turkish translation 2019) cites the dispute between al-Maghīlī and al-Suyūṭī as evidence that opposition to logic was a minority view between 1500 and 1800. See ‘The debate over logic’.