Views on al-Mirqāt and on logic in India

1Praise for the book

The earliest judgement comes from the author’s grandson ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Khayrābādī, who opened his commentary by calling al-Mirqāt ‘a fine little treatise, worthy of being written in liquid gold on the tablets of the hearts of men of understanding’. In Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, the biographical dictionary of Indian scholars by ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī, it is ‘a solid text’ (matn matīn).

ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm Sharaf Qādirī gave his reasons for glossing it: the book is ‘well known among people and accepted by both the learned and the ordinary’, contains important questions in a smooth style, is part of the curriculum of the Islamic madrasas, summarises the aims of the great books, and is ‘approved by every opponent and supporter’, so that ‘no one denies its benefits’. A recent Urdu study (Al-Qamar, 2023) explains its success by its design: the author wrote it with the abilities of beginners in mind, short and yet comprehensive.

2Read across the divides

The Khayrābādīs were deeply involved in the religious controversies of nineteenth-century India. Faḍl-i Ḥaqq’s polemic against Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl set him against the reformist heirs of Shāh Walī Allāh, and Jamal Malik notes that Barelwi scholars later claimed him as a forebear while Ahl-i Ḥadīth writers criticised him.

The book of his father nevertheless crossed these lines. Malik observes that al-Mirqāt ‘was taught approvingly for long years at Deoband’, and it is still a second-year text of the Deoband course. It is equally established in Barelwi madrasas: Barelwi scholars have written a modern Arabic gloss on it (al-Mirḍāt) and published an annotated edition, and Urdu commentaries come from both sides. The book itself takes no side in the theological disputes of its time; it is a textbook of logic, which may explain why both sides could keep it.

3The author’s own view of logic

Al-Mirqāt opens without a defence of logic. It simply explains that knowledge is either self-evident or reached by reasoning, that reasoning can go wrong, as the disagreements and contradictions among reasoners show, and that a set of rules is therefore needed to protect the mind from error. The only polemical passage is directed at other logicians: the ‘later’ scholars who, in the author’s view, spent too much effort on the forms of syllogisms and too little on the matter of arguments.

Modern editors have supplied the defence. The Karachi edition of 2015 opens with the saying attributed to al-Ghazālī that ‘whoever does not know logic, his knowledge cannot be trusted at all’, quoted from Aḥmad Riḍā Khān’s al-Fatāwā al-riḍawiyya. Its introduction argues that logic is the tool of all the sciences, that the great commentaries on ḥadīth and tafsīr and the works of theology are full of its terms, and that it cannot be called forbidden, since al-Ghazālī named it ‘the standard of knowledge’ and Ibn al-Humām used it in his work on legal theory. At the same time, quoting Sharaf Qādirī, it warns that logic is only a tool: the higher aims are tafsīr, ḥadīth, fiqh, theology and Sufism, and whoever spends his whole life on logic ‘has stopped on the bridge and never turned to the goal’.

4Rational sciences in India: the debate

The weight of logic and philosophy in Indian madrasas has long been criticised. Francis Robinson notes that the Dars-i Niẓāmī owed part of its popularity to its emphasis on the rational sciences. Yoginder Sikand, summarising Urdu histories of the madrasa, writes that Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762) insisted that the transmitted sciences form the core of the syllabus and opposed what he saw as excessive attention to Greek philosophy and logic, with little success at the time.

The Khayrābādīs stood on the other side. Malik describes them as heirs of the rational sciences and of the doctrine of the unity of being, in tension with the Delhi reformers. Criticism of them was often personal as well as intellectual: Nuzhat al-khawāṭir remarks that Faḍl-i Imām had ‘little expertise in fiqh and ḥadīth’, quotes Nawwāb Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s judgement that Faḍl-i Ḥaqq, though the master of philosophy of his time, lacked knowledge of the ways of the early Muslims, and reports ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Khayrābādī’s scorn for most Indian scholars and his harsh words about Shāh Walī Allāh.

According to Sikand, the madrasa at Deoband kept the basic structure of the Dars-i Niẓāmī but reduced the number of books on philosophy and logic in favour of ḥadīth, fiqh and tafsīr. Shiblī Nuʿmānī, rector of the Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ founded in Lucknow in 1892, argued that the early Muslims had learned from the Greeks and Iranians and that the rational sciences had always been open to new developments, and tried to bring English and the modern sciences into the course. Asad Q. Ahmed notes that from the late nineteenth century commentary on logic moved largely to Deoband and into Urdu, written for mass distribution among students rather than for other scholars.

5Today

Modern reformers in India and Pakistan often name ‘Greek’ logic and philosophy as material that should be cut from the course, and Sikand reports that many madrasas have drastically reduced the number of such books. The current Deoband course keeps four logic books in its first four years, among them al-Mirqāt.

That al-Mirqāt has survived these reductions says something about its place in the course. It is the book from which students learn, in Arabic, the terms they will meet again in the commentaries on law, theology and Qurʾānic exegesis: concept and assent, the five universals, the kinds of proposition and argument. Its newest readers include students outside South Asia, for whom an English translation appeared in 2026.