Al-Mirqāt among the logic handbooks

1The books it was written among

By the time Faḍl-i Imām wrote, the Indian logic course was long established. Asad Q. Ahmed names the three handbooks that held most sway before Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm: al-Kātibī’s al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya, read with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary; al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq, read with the commentaries of ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī and al-Dawānī; and al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār. Beside them stood Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s treatise on conception and assent, Mīzān al-manṭiq with al-Tulanbī’s commentary, al-Jurjānī’s primers Ṣughrā and Kubrā, and al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī with a commentary attributed in India to al-Jurjānī. Francis Robinson’s list of the logic books of the early Dars-i Niẓāmī is much the same.

Al-Mirqāt does not appear in these lists; it was written about a century after Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn (d. 1748) and found its place in the course later (see ‘Al-Mirqāt in the madrasa’).

2What the book says about its sources

Faḍl-i Imām does not cite his sources by title. At the end he says only that he gathered the book ‘from the books of the ancients and the words of the later scholars’ (min kutub al-aqdamīn wa-kalimāt al-mutaʾakhkhirīn). Inside the text he refers to positions rather than books: ‘the philosophers’ and ‘the Imām’ (Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī) on the nature of assent, ‘the earlier’ and ‘the later’ logicians on contraposition, and ‘the ancients, even al-Shaykh al-Raʾīs’ (Ibn Sīnā) on the matter of syllogisms.

The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi states that the book is mainly based on al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya and al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb. The order of topics is indeed the common one of those works: knowledge and the need for logic, words, universals, definition, propositions, contradiction and conversion, syllogisms, the matter of arguments. The questions the book raises in its opening (the meanings of ‘knowledge’, the dispute between the philosophers and al-Rāzī on assent) are those of the commentaries on the Shamsiyya and of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s treatise on conception and assent, which Indian students read in the same years. A detailed study of the book’s sources has not been found.

3Compared with the Īsāghūjī

Al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī and al-Mirqāt are both first books in logic, and in today’s Pakistani and Indian madrasas they are often read in the same year or one after the other. They cover the same ground in the same order, from signification to the five arts. But al-Mirqāt is several times longer and fills many of the gaps the Īsāghūjī leaves.

It adds an opening on knowledge itself; discussions of how logic relates to words and of the logicians’ ‘word’ (kalima) against the grammarians’ verb; the four relations between universals; the ordering of genera and species and the ten categories, which the Īsāghūjī leaves out; verbal definition; the fifteen modal propositions and their contradictories (though not their conversion, which it leaves to longer books); contraposition; the conditions under which the second and third figures produce a conclusion (the Īsāghūjī gives only the moods of the first, and al-Mirqāt itself refers the fourth to longer works); induction, analogy and the reductio, which the Īsāghūjī does not treat; a long section on fallacies; and the eight headings. The Īsāghūjī closes its short section on the five arts with a single sentence on demonstration; al-Mirqāt treats the five arts at length and follows them with chapters on the causes of error and the parts of a science.

The tone differs too. The Īsāghūjī gives definitions and divisions almost without comment. Al-Mirqāt explains why each topic is needed, warns against common confusions, names disputed positions and speaks to the student directly. It is not a commentary on the Īsāghūjī, and the sources consulted do not show that Faḍl-i Imām used it as a model, but a student who has learned the Īsāghūjī finds most of its terms again in al-Mirqāt, with more discussion around them.

4The ancients and the moderns

The most personal passage in the book is its complaint about the ‘later’ logicians (mutaʾakhkhirūn), who in its view spent too much space on the forms of syllogisms, especially conditional syllogisms, and too little on their matter: the kinds of premises that make an argument certain, plausible, persuasive, imaginative or deceptive. Faḍl-i Imām sets against them ‘the ancients, even al-Shaykh al-Raʾīs’, and gives the five arts and the causes of error correspondingly more room. His commentator ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq explains that the later logicians thought the need for logic lay only in the arrangement of premises, and cites al-Ṭūsī’s commentary on Ibn Sīnā’s al-Ishārāt for the point.

The English translator Musa Furber accordingly describes the book as written ‘in the Avicennan tradition’. Faḍl-i Imām’s other works point the same way: he made an abridgement of Ibn Sīnā’s al-Shifāʾ, and his family were known for their study of the philosophical works behind the logic course. His inclusion of the ten categories, which his commentators say the early logicians placed at the start of logic ‘by way of assumption’, belongs to the same preference for the older, fuller form of the discipline.

5Al-Mirqāt and Sullam al-ʿulūm

The Khayrābādīs were among the most important commentators on al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm and on Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary on it; Faḍl-i Imām himself is reported to have commented on Mubārak. Al-Mirqāt is nevertheless not a simplified Sullam. It does not take up the Sullam’s characteristic problems, such as the Liar paradox or the difficult questions of the semantics of propositions that Ahmed discusses, and it keeps to the topics and order of the older handbooks.

In the course the two books stand at opposite ends: al-Mirqāt near the beginning, the Sullam commentaries near the end. A student in a Deobandi madrasa of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries would read al-Mirqāt after the Īsāghūjī, then Mīzān al-manṭiq, the Tahdhīb, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya, and finally the Sullam with the commentaries of Mullā Ḥasan, Ḥamd Allāh and Qāḍī Mubārak.