Shāfiʿī jurist and logician of Mosul, Egypt and Seljuk Konya, author of Maṭāliʿ al-anwār, which with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary became an advanced logic text of the Ottoman, Safavid and Indian madrasas.
Life
Al-Urmawī was born in 594/1198 in Urmia in Azerbaijan. He began his studies there and continued them in Mosul, where the only teacher named in the sources is Kamāl al-Dīn Ibn Yūnus, famous for the religious and the rational sciences and an expert on the works of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi suggests that al-Urmawī’s many abridgements of and commentaries on al-Rāzī owe something to this teacher. He went to Malatya, where the Seljuk sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Kayqubād I received him and gave him a madrasa, and then to Damascus and Egypt. The Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ Ayyūb sent him as envoy to the ‘Emperor’, to whom, according to Ibn Wāṣil, he dedicated a book on logic, and in 647/1250 he was among the scholars summoned to a disputation before Tūrān Shāh at al-Manṣūra.
He reached his greatest fame in Konya. In the preface to his Persian philosophical work Laṭāʾif al-ḥikma he says that he wrote it late in 655/1257 in the service of the Seljuk sultan ʿIzz al-Dīn Kaykāwūs II. He was qāḍī of Konya before 664/1266; in 675/1277, when rebels led by the Karamanid Meḥmed Bey attacked the city, he issued a fatwa calling on its people to defend it and is said to have shot arrows from the walls himself, for which Ghiyāth al-Dīn Kaykhusraw III made him chief judge of Rūm. Aflākī tells anecdotes of his dealings with Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, and he led the funeral prayer for Rūmī. He died in Konya in 682/1283. Only two students are named: Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Hindī, who studied the rational sciences with him, and Tāj al-Dīn al-Kurdī, later a teacher at Orhan Gazi’s madrasa in İznik.
The TDV article on logic calls him ‘without doubt the most important logician of the seventh/thirteenth century’. His logic works are al-Manāhij, the Maṭāliʿ al-anwār, a commentary on al-Khūnajī’s al-Mūjaz, and the logic part of Bayān al-ḥaqq. The Maṭāliʿ, a compact survey of the whole of logic, became a madrasa textbook; it was translated into Persian with additions by Khiḍr Bey at the request of Meḥmed II, and its best-known commentary is Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Lawāmiʿ al-asrār, printed with al-Jurjānī’s gloss in Istanbul in 1303. Asad Q. Ahmed places al-Urmawī with al-Abharī, al-Kātibī and al-Ṭūsī in the network that produced the great logic books of the thirteenth century, which were later read through ‘gateway commentaries’ such as Quṭb al-Dīn’s; in India the Maṭāliʿ with Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary entered the core of the logic course in the sixteenth century, beside the Shamsiyya and the Tahdhīb, and al-Siyālkūtī glossed it in the seventeenth.
Uncertain or disputed
- The ‘Emperor’ to whom he was sent and to whom he dedicated a logic book: the TDV identifies him with Louis IX, leader of the Seventh Crusade; the identification is not discussed further in the sources consulted.
- The TDV article on logic gives his name as ‘Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr’; the TDV article on him, Maḥmūd b. Abī Bakr.
- The nisba al-Tanūkhī given in some sources is doubted by his modern editor, who found no link with the Arab tribe of Tanūkh (TDV).
- Ismāʿīl Bāshā al-Baghdādī’s Hadiyyat al-ʿārifīn confuses him with the Egyptian Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawī (d. 723/1323) and gives him some of the latter’s books (TDV).
Works
- Maṭāliʿ al-anwār مَطَالِعُ الأَنْوَارِHandbook of logic (with a part on philosophy); commentary Lawāmiʿ al-asrār by Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī, printed with al-Jurjānī’s gloss (Istanbul 1303); Persian version by Khiḍr Bey (TDV).مَتْن
- Bayān al-ḥaqq بَيَانُ الحَقِّOn logic and philosophy.عَمَل
- al-Manāhij المَنَاهِجُOn logic and philosophy; Taşköprüzâde notes that this and the two preceding works were widely studied (TDV).عَمَل
- Sharḥ al-Mūjaz fī l-manṭiq — عَلَى al-KhūnajīCommentary on al-Khūnajī’s short logic al-Mūjaz (TDV, after GAL S I 838).شَرْح
- Laṭāʾif al-ḥikma لَطَائِفُ الحِكْمَةِPersian work on theoretical and practical philosophy, written in 655/1257 for Kaykāwūs II; ed. Ghulām Ḥusayn Yūsufī, Tehran 1340 Sh.عَمَل
- al-Taḥṣīl min al-Maḥṣūl التَّحْصِيلُ مِنَ المَحْصُولِ — عَلَى Fakhr al-Dīn al-RāzīAbridgement of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s work on legal theory; ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Abū Zunayd, Beirut 1408/1988.عَمَل
- Sharḥ al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt — عَلَى ابْنُ سِيناCommentary on Ibn Sīnā’s Ishārāt (TDV).شَرْح
Reception
The TDV article on logic lists the Maṭāliʿ, with the Īsāghūjī, al-Samarqandī’s Qisṭās al-afkār and Molla Fenârî’s commentary on the Shamsiyya, among the basic books of the Ottoman logic course, on which countless commentaries and glosses were written; among those who glossed the Maṭāliʿ or Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on it, it names Qāḍīzāde al-Rūmī and Kara Dâvud of İzmit.
Pattabanoğlu counts the Maṭāliʿ with the Īsāghūjī and the Shamsiyya among the pre-Ottoman logic books that remained in use in the Ottoman medrese.
In India it was one of the three handbooks that held most sway before Sullam al-ʿulūm (Ahmed).
Sources (4)
- Mustafa Çağrıcı, ‘Sirâceddin el-Urmevî’, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (2009)
- İbrahim Emiroğlu, ‘Mantık’, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (2003)
- Asad Q. Ahmed, Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2022), introduction (open access PDF)
- Fatma Zehra Pattabanoğlu, ‘Medreselerde Okutulan Mantık ve Felsefe Derslerinin Osmanlı Düşüncesindeki Yeri ve Önemi’, SDÜ İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 32 (2014)