Commentaries, glosses and translations

1ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Khayrābādī’s Sharḥ al-Mirqāt

The first and most important commentary is by the author’s grandson, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq b. Faḍl-i Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d. 1316/1899 or 1318/1900–01). It is a full Arabic commentary in the scholarly style: it quotes the text phrase by phrase, explains it, and discusses the views of earlier logicians. It opens by praising the book as ‘a fine little treatise worthy of being written in liquid gold’.

It was lithographed early: the British Library has a copy printed in [Rampur] in 1866, 384 pages long, only some forty years after the author’s death. The Maṭbaʿ Niẓāmī in Kanpur printed it in Rabīʿ al-ākhir 1333/1915 at the request of a Mawlawī ʿAbd al-Subḥān Bihārī; a facsimile of a Kanpur print was issued in Lahore in 2022, and ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Turkumānī published a critical edition of 816 pages in Amman in 2019. The commentary was still being argued over in 1916, when a report from the Rampur debate challenged the Khayrābādīs to answer an objection to it.

2Classroom glosses of the nineteenth century

Most nineteenth-century prints of al-Mirqāt carry glosses in the margins, compiled by teachers from older works. The British Library holds a Delhi edition of 1886 prepared ‘with marginal notes’ by Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Majīd, a teacher at the Nuʿmāniyya madrasa, and one of 1888 titled Mirqāt muḥashshā (‘al-Mirqāt with glosses’), whose notes Mawlawī Iʿjāz Aḥmad ‘compiled from various sources’.

In 1879 a Persian commentary appeared in Kanpur: Hadiyya-yi Shāhjahāniyya, ḥall-i Mirqāt-i mīzāniyya (‘the Shāhjahānī gift: solving the ladder of the balance’) by Sayyid ʿAlī Ḥasan Bhūpālī. It is the only Persian work on al-Mirqāt found; nothing more about it or its author was found in the sources consulted.

3Twentieth- and twenty-first-century Arabic glosses and a versification

Muḥammad ʿImād al-Dīn al-Shērkōṭī wrote al-Mirʾāt (‘the mirror’), a gloss which, according to its colophon, he finished on Friday 13 Rabīʿ al-awwal 1336 (December 1917) while living in Deoband. It was printed in the margins of a Deoband lithograph by the Kutub Khāna Iʿzāziyya, and it is still printed with the text, for example with the Indian notes Taqwiyat al-Mirqāt by Muḥammad Ilyās b. ʿAbd Allāh and in an edition by Maktaba al-Ghānim (2025).

In Pakistan ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm Sharaf Qādirī (1944–2007) of Lahore wrote al-Mirḍāt, a short gloss in Arabic. Maktabat al-Madīna, the publishing house of Dawat-e-Islami, prints the text with brief explanations between the lines and short notes called al-Mishkāt, built mainly from al-Mirḍāt and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s commentary; according to an Urdu study of the family (Al-Qamar) the notes are by Muḥammad ʿIrfān Madanī and ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Madanī. The copy on archive.org is dated 2015; Al-Qamar cites a printing of December 2019 (93 pages). The same edition names a third Arabic gloss, al-Mirsāt ʿalā al-Mirqāt, by Muftī Muḥammad ʿAlī Iqtidār al-ʿAlawī.

Further Arabic notes for students include al-Taʿlīqāt al-muntaqāt ʿalā al-Mirqāt by Muftī ʿAbd Allāh Moolla. Al-Mirqāt has also been put into verse to help memorisation. An edition published by Maktaba al-Ghānim in 2025 prints with the text and al-Mirʾāt a poem called Sullam al-ruqāt li-naẓm al-Mirqāt (‘the ladder of the climbers: a versification of al-Mirqāt’). The bookseller’s description does not name its author, and no further information on it was found.

4Urdu commentaries

Since the twentieth century, as Asad Q. Ahmed observes for the logic course in general, most new commentaries have been written in Urdu, for a mass readership of students rather than for other scholars. Al-Mirqāt has many of them, usually sold as aids for the second year of the Pakistani course. Book sites list, among others: Tuḥfat al-Manẓūr, based on the lessons of Mawlānā Muḥammad Manẓūr al-Ḥaqq and compiled by Sirāj al-Ḥaqq (Kabirwala); Tawḍīḥāt by Iftikhār Aḥmad (Deoband 2011, and in Pakistan); al-Tashrīḥāt; Shadharāt by Mawlānā Nuʿaym Aḥmad; Dars-i Mirqāt by Muftī Sanāʾ Allāh Qāsmī; and al-Taqrīrāt by Ashraf Ḥusayn ʿAṭṭārī.

These books typically give the Arabic text, a word-for-word or free Urdu translation, and an explanation with tables, questions and model answers. None of them has been studied in the literature consulted for this article.

5Translations

The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that al-Mirqāt was translated into Urdu. An early translation was published by Osmania University in Hyderabad in 1339/1921 for its matriculation course, in its series of Urdu textbooks; the scan catalogue for The Mantiqi gives the translator as Abū al-Fatḥ Sayyid Ḥusaynī. It divides the book into two parts (bāb) and gives Urdu headings for every section.

The first English translation, by Musa Furber, appeared in 2026 under the title Al-Khayrabadi’s Ladder to Logic: al-Mirqat fi ʿilm al-mantiq (Islamosaic, 184 pages), with the Arabic text facing the English. The publisher describes it as meant for students who study with a teacher or with the Arabic commentary tradition.