Editions and translations

1Manuscripts

As a school text, the Īsāghūjī was copied again and again, very often together with its commentaries or with other short primers in one volume. Hüseyin Sarıoğlu notes that most libraries in Turkey hold several copies; manuscript catalogues in Germany, Princeton, the Wellcome Collection and elsewhere list many more copies of the text and its commentaries, and five copies of the text with six copies of al-Kātī’s commentary are in a single collection in Kazan.

Copies of a text used this much are not all identical. For his critical edition Sarıoğlu based the text on the three oldest manuscripts he could identify.

2The first printing: Rome, 1625

In 1625 the Franciscan Orientalist Tommaso Obicini (1585–1632), known as Thomas Novariensis, published in Rome, through the printer Stephanus Paulinus, a 44-page bilingual book: Isagoge, id est, breve Introductorium Arabicum in Scientiam Logices, the Arabic text with a Latin translation.

Obicini made it as a teaching book for Catholic missionaries being trained in Rome for the Near East. He does not name al-Abharī, and the Latin title, which recalls Porphyry, has led some later writers to describe the book as a commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge.

3Printings in the Muslim world

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Īsāghūjī was printed repeatedly for madrasa students. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records an Istanbul printing of the text in 1312/1894–95 and of al-Fanārī’s commentary under the title Risâle-i Esîriyye in 1304/1886–87; al-Fanārī’s commentary had already been lithographed in Istanbul in 1294/1877. In Cairo, Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s al-Maṭlaʿ was printed by Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, for example in 1933. In India, lithographs included the short commentary known as “Mīr Īsāghūjī” and a Delhi edition of Qul Aḥmad’s gloss on al-Fanārī.

Such printings continue. Editions for students of the Dars-i Niẓāmī print the text with al-Maghnīsāwī’s commentary Mughnī al-ṭullāb in the margin (Maktaba al-Bushra, 1430/2009), and Dār Taḥqīq al-Kitāb has published Mughnī al-ṭullāb as a separate edited volume. The same publisher’s Majmūʿ Īsāghūjī fī l-manṭiq, edited by Māhir Muḥammad ʿUthmān (one volume, 686 pages, fully vocalised), prints the text with five commentaries checked against manuscripts: Muḥammad Fawzī al-Adranī’s Fatḥ al-Rājī, al-Kātī’s commentary with the glosses of Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Ṭālishī and al-Bardaʿī, Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s al-Maṭlaʿ with al-Qalyūbī’s gloss, al-Fanārī’s al-Fawāʾid al-Fanāriyya, and the commentary of al-Kalanbawī (Gelenbevî).

4Critical editions

The first critical edition is Hüseyin Sarıoğlu’s Ebherî, Îsâgûcî – Mantığa Giriş (Istanbul: İz Yayıncılık, 1998), with a Turkish translation and study. A revised second edition, with corrections to both the Arabic text and the translation, was published by the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA, Ankara, 2016) in its series on the Turkish-Islamic scientific heritage.

Ferruh Özpilavcı published another critical edition with a Turkish translation and commentary, Ebherî Îsâgûcî, Şerh (Istanbul: Litera, 2017).

5Translations

English: Edwin E. Calverley’s translation, “Al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī fī ʾl-Manṭiq”, appeared in The Macdonald Presentation Volume (Princeton, 1933), pp. 75–85; it runs to about eight pages and is still cited in English-language scholarship. C. F. Seybold had published a study of the Īsāghūjī and al-Fanārī’s commentary in Der Islam in 1919.

Turkish: the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi lists several translations from the Tanzimat period, among them Ahmed Fuâd’s Miʿyâr al-ʿulûm (Istanbul, 1292/1875–76), ʿAlī Ḥaydar’s Hediyyecik, ʿAlī Remzī’s Hediyyetü’t-tullâb and a translation by Mehmed Fuad, followed by the modern translations of Sarıoğlu (1998, 2016) and Özpilavcı (2017).

Persian: a Persian translation, Mirʾāt al-manṭiq, is attributed to Abū l-Fatḥ Shīrāzī. Uzbek: Mantiq haqida saboqlar (yoki Isagʻoʻjiy sharhi), translated by N. Nabijon oʻgʻli (Tashkent, 2008).

The verse version, al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam, has its own translations, including a French one by J.-D. Luciani (Le Soullam, Algiers, 1921), an Ottoman Turkish translation with commentary by Rifat Efendi, and an Indonesian rendering by Kiai Bisri Mustofa.

Many more school translations and explanations exist in Urdu, Indonesian, Russian and other languages, but the sources consulted for this article do not allow a reliable list; this section will be extended when they have been checked.

6The edition used on The Mantiqi

The Arabic text on The Mantiqi follows the vocalised edition of ʿAlawī Abū Bakr Muḥammad al-Saqqāf, who also added notes: Mutūn al-manṭiq wa-l-ḥikma: Īsāghūjī wa-l-Sullam al-munawraq (Jakarta: Dār al-Kutub al-Islāmiyya, 1434/2013), which prints the Īsāghūjī together with al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam. The page references on the site (pp. 5–19) are to this edition.

The site divides the text into 59 short segments, grouped into the preface and six parts (utterances, the five universals, definition, propositions, syllogism, the five arts), and gives each segment a translation in English, Dutch, Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Indonesian and Russian. Like all explanations on The Mantiqi, this translation is a draft awaiting review by a qualified teacher.