The Īsāghūjī in the madrasa

1The first step in logic

The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi describes the Īsāghūjī as the first textbook of logic in the madrasas. The pattern was much the same everywhere: the student memorised or read the short text with a teacher, then read it again with a commentary, sometimes with glosses on that commentary, and then went on to longer handbooks such as al-Kātibī’s al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya or al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq.

Which commentary was used, and what came next, differed from region to region. Ottoman students read al-Fanārī, Egyptian students Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī; in North Africa, Egypt and Indonesia al-Akhḍarī’s verse version, al-Sullam al-munawraq, often took the Īsāghūjī’s place. The sections below give only what the sources consulted support; for several regions the evidence is thin, and this is said where it applies.

2Ottoman madrasas

In the Ottoman lands the Īsāghūjī was taught until the end of the empire. It was usually read with Shams al-Dīn al-Fanārī’s commentary (al-Fawāʾid al-Fanāriyya) and the gloss of Qul Aḥmad on it; later super-glosses on this pair could run to hundreds of folios, so that an elementary primer became the setting for very advanced debate. Al-Fanārī’s commentary was still taught with Qul Aḥmad’s gloss in recent times, and it was lithographed in Istanbul in 1294/1877. Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Kātī’s commentary, with glosses by Qaraja Aḥmad and Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Ṭālishī, was the other main route.

A rhymed study plan in Turkish, the Tertîb-i ulûm written in 1165/1752 by Erzurumlu İbrâhim Hakkı (1115–1194/1703–1780), gives the order of logic texts as it was understood in the eighteenth century: first the Īsāghūjī; then the commentary of Ḥusām (al-Kātī) and the gloss of Muḥyī al-Dīn; then al-Fanārī with Qul Aḥmad; then the Waladiyya; then the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary and the glosses of Dāwūd and al-Sayyid (al-Jurjānī); and finally the Tahdhīb with the commentary of Jalāl (al-Dawānī) and the gloss of Mīr.

Not everyone was happy with this system. Saçaklızâde Mehmed Efendi (d. 1145/1732), in his Tartīb al-ʿulūm (1128/1716), criticised the practice of making students work through abstruse glosses before they had grasped the basics; he himself wrote a short commentary (taʿlīq) on the Īsāghūjī. His contemporary Dāwūd Qārṣī went further and wrote a “New Īsāghūjī” (1162/1748–49). Neither rejected logic or the commentary tradition; their complaint was pedagogical.

New Ottoman commentaries continued to appear, among them one by Ismāʿīl Gelenbevî (al-Kalanbawī, d. 1205/1791), and in the Tanzimat period the Īsāghūjī was translated into Turkish several times. The text itself was printed in Istanbul in 1312/1894–95.

3Egypt, al-Azhar and North Africa

In Egypt the standard commentary was al-Maṭlaʿ of the Shāfiʿī judge Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (d. 926/1520), read with glosses such as those of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qalyūbī and Yūsuf al-Ḥifnī. Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 1250/1834), later shaykh of al-Azhar, also wrote on the Īsāghūjī. Al-Maṭlaʿ was printed in Cairo, for example by Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī in 1933, and according to the Egyptian scholar al-Ahwānī the Īsāghūjī was still taught at al-Azhar until the 1950s.

Beside it stood al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam. When Dāwūd Qārṣī was in Cairo in the late 1730s, El-Rouayheb notes, the handbooks of al-Sanūsī and al-Akhḍarī were standard there, part of a distinct logical tradition of Egypt and the Maghrib. The most famous commentary on the Sullam, Īḍāḥ al-mubham, is by the Azhar shaykh Aḥmad al-Damanhūrī (1690–1778); al-Mallawī and al-Bājūrī also wrote on it. At a more advanced level, al-Khabīṣī’s commentary on al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb became a standard Azhar text.

The Sullam itself was written in Algeria (ca. 941/1534), and from there it spread throughout North Africa. A North African commentary on the Īsāghūjī by Dāwūd al-Jarbī is also recorded. In the Horn of Africa, a survey of Islamic manuscripts lists copies of al-Anṣārī’s commentary with al-Ḥifnī’s gloss.

4The Indian subcontinent

In India logic was a major subject. The Dars-i Niẓāmī, the course associated with Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn of Firangi Mahall in Lucknow (d. 1748), which became the basic curriculum of most madrasas in the subcontinent until the twentieth century, contained eleven logic books in Francis Robinson’s reconstruction of its early form: among them al-Jurjānī’s primers Ṣughrā and Kubrā, al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī, al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb with its commentaries, the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary (Quṭbī) and glosses, Mīr Zāhid’s gloss, and Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm.

In the version adopted by Deobandi madrasas the logic sequence runs: Ṣughrā, Kubrā, Īsāghūjī, Mirqāt, Mīzān al-manṭiq, Tahdhīb, Quṭbī, Mīr Quṭbī, and commentaries on Sullam al-ʿulūm (Mullā Ḥasan, Ḥamd Allāh, Qāḍī Mubārak), with Mīr Zāhid’s gloss at the end. Here the Īsāghūjī is the third book, after al-Jurjānī’s two primers.

Indian lithographs also show the book’s use: a short commentary printed as “Mīr Īsāghūjī” and attributed to al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (an attribution El-Rouayheb considers doubtful), and a Delhi lithograph of Qul Aḥmad’s gloss on al-Fanārī. Editions sold today for Dars-i Niẓāmī students print the Īsāghūjī with al-Maghnīsāwī’s commentary Mughnī al-ṭullāb in the margin (for example Maktaba al-Bushra, 1430/2009).

5The Malay world

In Indonesia logic reached the pesantren mainly through scholars who had studied in Mecca, Medina and possibly Cairo. Ahwan Fanani and Mohammad Syifa Amin Widigdo, who have studied this transmission, find that the Īsāghūjī was taught at the Pesantren Sumber Anyar in Pamekasan, Madura, where manuscripts point to teaching in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century; it is no longer taught there. Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s commentary reached Indonesia through his students’ networks.

Far more widespread was the Sullam, read with commentaries such as al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham and the works of al-Bājūrī. Four manuscripts of the Sullam survive at Dayah Tanoh Abee in Aceh, one dated 1277 AH (1860–61), with marginal notes showing classroom use; in Mastuhu’s study of six pesantren in Java and Madura, only Tebuireng taught logic, using the Sullam. Lists of books taught in traditional (salafiyya) pesantren still include the Sullam and Īḍāḥ al-mubham.

The sources consulted say nothing specific about the teaching of the Īsāghūjī in Malaysia or southern Thailand.

6Tatars, Dagestan and Central Asia

Among the Volga Tatars the Īsāghūjī was a popular text in the confessional schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A. M. Salakhov found five copies of it and six copies of al-Kātī’s commentary in the manuscript collection of the Institute of Language, Literature and Art in Kazan. Tatar students also read the Sullam, Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm and al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya, on which Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī wrote a commentary; ʿAbd Allāh Maqṣūdī’s large logic book Mīzān al-afkār was printed in Kazan in 1903.

According to El-Rouayheb, glosses and super-glosses on al-Fanārī’s commentary were written not only by Ottoman but also by Tatar and Azeri scholars. Among the best-known glosses on it is al-Fawāʾid al-Burhāniyya of Burhān al-Dīn al-Bulghārī.

In Dagestan, the scholar ʿAlī al-Ghumūqī (1878–1943) copied a commentary on the Īsāghūjī in 1310/1892 and al-Damanhūrī’s commentary on the Sullam in 1311/1894, at the age of fourteen and fifteen; the volume survives in his library, digitised by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. In Uzbekistan an Uzbek version, Mantiq haqida saboqlar (yoki Isagʻoʻjiy sharhi), appeared in Tashkent in 2008.

7Iran

The sources consulted give little evidence that the Īsāghūjī was a regular part of teaching in Safavid and Qajar Iran. What is documented is al-Abharī’s other textbook, Hidāyat al-ḥikma, read with the commentaries of Mīr Ḥusayn al-Maybudī and Mullā Ṣadrā, and, for logic, al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb with the commentary of Mullā ʿAbd Allāh Yazdī, which was widely studied in Safavid and Qajar Iran.

The Īsāghūjī was nevertheless known in the Persian-speaking world. ʿImād al-Fārisī completed a commentary on it in Herat in 869/1464, and a Persian translation, Mirʾāt al-manṭiq, is attributed to Abū l-Fatḥ Shīrāzī.