Al-Sullam al-munawraq: the book

1The title

Sullam means a ladder or a flight of steps. The full title is al-Sullam al-munawraq fī ʿilm al-manṭiq, ‘the embellished ladder into the science of logic’. The second word is written in two ways, munawraq and murawnaq, in manuscripts, catalogues and prints; both are understood as ‘embellished’ or ‘adorned’. In the sources consulted here, the Fez lithographs and the Mauritanian manuscript records mostly write murawnaq, while Egyptian and Indonesian prints and teachers mostly say munawraq. The author’s own commentary, in the Cairo print used for this article, has al-murawnaq and explains it as ‘adorned’ (al-muzayyan), quoting a line of verse about the ‘lustre’ (rawnaq) of a fine handwriting.

The poem names itself near its beginning: ‘I have named it the embellished ladder, by which one climbs to the sky of the science of logic.’ In his commentary al-Akhḍarī explains the image. A ladder, in the physical sense, is something with steps by which one reaches a roof; in the realm of meanings it is anything by which one passes from what is near to what is far. His little book, ‘because of its small size, its nearness and the ease with which it is understood, compared with the difficult and lengthy works on logic’, is like a ladder from the earth to the sky: it helps the student to understand those works and to enter their science. He adds that within logic itself the easy topics are a ladder to the difficult ones. The next lines of the poem say the same thing as a prayer: the author hopes the work will be sincerely for God and ‘of use to the beginner, guiding him to the long books’.

2Date and author

The poem dates itself. In its closing lines al-Akhḍarī asks for the reader’s indulgence: a youth ‘of twenty-one years’ has an excuse that deserves to be accepted, ‘especially in the tenth century, a time of ignorance, corruption and trials’. He then states that ‘the composition of this well-ordered rajaz’ took place at the beginning of Muḥarram in the year 941, that is, in July 1534. In his commentary he explains that ‘the tenth century’ means the tenth century of the Hijra, his own, and adds a long lament on the corruption of his age. Brockelmann likewise dates the poem to 1534, and a Leipzig manuscript catalogue records the date 1 Muḥarram 941 (13 July 1534), although it attaches it to a manuscript of a later commentary.

Al-Akhḍarī, whose life is described on his own page, was a Mālikī scholar from Banṭiyūs near Biskra, in present-day Algeria, who put several sciences into verse. The year of his death is disputed: the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, the University of Biskra and the West African Arabic Manuscript Database give 983/1575–76, while the Leipzig catalogue, the OpenITI corpus and the Damascus edition of al-Damanhūrī’s commentary give 953/1546. The date of the poem does not depend on this question; on either reckoning it is a work of his early twenties. The University of Biskra places it after an astronomy poem and a poem on arithmetic and inheritance, which he wrote at about nineteen and twenty.

3Length and form

The Sullam is an urjūza, a poem in the rajaz metre, the usual metre of Arabic teaching poems; al-Akhḍarī himself calls it ‘the urjūza named al-Sullam al-murawnaq’. Each line rhymes within itself, its two halves ending in the same sound, and the rhyme changes from line to line. A recent prosodic study from UIN Sunan Gunung Djati in Bandung confirms that the whole poem is in rajaz, with the usual licences of the metre.

The fully vocalised text printed at the end of al-Akhḍarī’s commentary, which follows the Cairo edition of Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, has 144 lines. The same number is given by a Turkish master’s thesis (Süleyman Demirel University, 2017), by the Bandung study, which counts 144 lines in 17 headed sections, by Mehmet Salih Geçit and by teachers who record the poem for memorisation; the University of Biskra and one record of the West African Arabic Manuscript Database give 143. Brockelmann, however, describes the poem as ‘94 rajaz lines’, and the same figure appears in a Leipzig catalogue record (‘mostly 94’) and in the editor’s introduction to a 2006 edition of the author’s commentary. Since every complete text consulted has about 144 lines, the figure 94 looks like an error that has been copied from one reference work to the next, but the manuscripts on which it may rest have not been checked.

The headings divide the poem into an introduction (muqaddima), a section on whether one may study logic, and then sections (faṣl) and chapters (bāb) on the kinds of knowledge, the kinds of conventional signification, words, the relations of words to meanings, whole and part, definitions, propositions, contradiction, conversion, the syllogism, the figures, the exceptive syllogism, the ‘appendages’ of the syllogism, the kinds of argument, and a conclusion (khātima). The sections are short. In the text consulted the longest are those on the figures of the syllogism (about eighteen lines), on propositions (about thirteen) and the conclusion (about twenty-three, including the author’s apology and closing prayers); the section on signification has only two lines.

4The opening

The poem begins, like most Arabic books, with praise of God, here worded in the language of the subject: God ‘has brought forth the results of thought (natāʾij al-fikr) for those who have understanding’ and removed from the sky of their reason ‘every veil of the cloud of ignorance’, until ‘the suns of knowledge’ appeared to them. In his commentary al-Akhḍarī points out that this first line is a barāʿat al-istihlāl, an opening that hints at the subject of the book: the ‘results’ of thought are the conclusions that logic teaches one to reach. Blessings on the Prophet and on his family and Companions, ‘who were likened to stars in giving guidance’, follow.

Then comes a short statement of what logic is for: ‘logic is to the mind as grammar is to the tongue: it protects thoughts from the error of mistakes and lifts the veil from subtle understanding.’ The commentary gives the two current definitions, logic as ‘a rule-governed instrument whose observance protects the mind from error in thinking’ and logic as ‘a science by which one knows how to pass from what is present in the mind to what is sought’, and calls the difference between them merely verbal. It adds that logic protects only those who observe it: a logician can still err through inattention, just as a grammarian can make a mistake in speech. The verses that follow offer the reader ‘rules from its principles that gather benefits from its branches’, give the title and end with the author’s hope that the book will lead beginners to the longer works.

5The three views on studying logic

Before any logic is taught, a short section of four lines sets out the dispute over whether logic may be studied at all. The poem names three positions: Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ and al-Nawawī declared it forbidden; others said that it ought to be known; and the ‘well-known and correct’ view permits it to a person of complete natural ability who is practised in the Sunna and the Book, so that it guides him to what is right. The wording of these lines and the later discussion of them are treated in the article ‘Views on logic’; here it is enough to note what the author himself says about them.

His commentary explains that he placed the section at the start ‘so that the beginner may see clearly what he is aiming at’. It names al-Ghazālī and his followers as the holders of the second view, with the saying attributed to them that ‘whoever does not know logic, his knowledge cannot be trusted’. It also explains the condition attached to the third view. The student must be quick-witted, sound of mind and steeped in the Book and the Sunna, so that logic does not lead him into fanciful methods that spoil his premises and arguments, as happened, the author says, to the Muʿtazila, the Qadariyya and other innovating groups, who changed the Sunna and the religion of Muḥammad. Al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī does not raise the question at all. In the Sullam it became part of the first lesson: the Azhar textbook of 2016–17 based on the poem, for example, lists among its aims that the pupil can recount the scholars’ views on the ruling of studying logic.

6Following the Īsāghūjī

The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi and most other reference works describe the Sullam as the verse form of al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī; the Indonesian scholar Ahwan Fanani puts it more cautiously, as a practical poem ‘derived presumably’ from it. The order of topics bears the description out. After the opening sections the poem follows the Īsāghūjī step by step: the three kinds of verbal signification (by correspondence, inclusion and implication); simple and composite words, and the simple word as noun, verb or particle; universal and particular, essential and accidental; the five universals, with the three kinds of genus (remote, intermediate and proximate); the complete and incomplete essential and descriptive definitions, to which the poem adds the merely verbal definition; categorical and conditional propositions with their parts and quantities; contradiction; simple conversion; the conjunctive and exceptive syllogisms; and finally the kinds of argument according to their matter, with demonstration and its certain premises.

Like the Īsāghūjī, the Sullam has nothing on modal propositions or modal syllogisms and does not treat contraposition. Its definitions are often close to al-Abharī’s, but it does not translate him line by line: it rearranges, shortens and, above all, adds.

7What the Sullam adds

The additions are of two kinds. Some fill gaps that later commentators on the Īsāghūjī also noticed. The poem opens with knowledge itself, dividing it into conception (taṣawwur) and assent (taṣdīq) and into necessary and acquired knowledge, and it explains why conception comes first. It has a section on the five relations of a word to its meanings (univocal, graded, distinct, homonymous and synonymous words) and on commands, requests and statements, and another on the four technical terms ‘whole’, ‘universality’, ‘part’ and ‘particularity’. Where the Īsāghūjī gives the productive moods of the first figure only, the Sullam states that the first and second figures have four productive moods each, the third six and the fourth five, that the conclusion follows the weaker premise, and that a premise or the conclusion may be left unstated when it is obvious. A section on the ‘appendages’ of the syllogism adds the compound syllogism, induction and analogy, with the remark that neither induction nor analogy yields certainty.

Other additions reflect the author’s background in theology and legal theory. The section on the kinds of argument begins by dividing arguments into transmitted (naqliyya) and rational ones before listing the five rational kinds, and it records four views on how the premises yield their conclusion: by rational necessity, the view the poem calls the best supported; by God’s customary course, as al-Ashʿarī held; by ‘generation’ (tawallud), as the Muʿtazila said; or by necessitation, the view of the philosophers. The commentary names Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī as the holder of the first view. The conclusion (khātima) is a short treatment of errors in demonstration. An error lies either in the matter or in the form. In the matter it comes from words, as when a homonym is used or two different words are treated as synonyms, or from meanings, as when a false premise is confused with a true one, what holds of a species is said of its genus, an accidental attribute is treated as essential, or a premise is merely the conclusion restated. In the form, an argument fails when it leaves the four figures or misses one of their conditions.

The commentary shows where the young author’s reading lay. Besides the logicians, he quotes al-Qarāfī, al-Ghazālī’s al-Mustaṣfā, Imām al-Ḥaramayn, Ibn al-Ḥājib and Ibn Abī Zayd, authorities of legal theory, Mālikī law and kalām, and he says that induction and analogy ‘are suitable only for the inquiry of the jurists’.

8Style and closing lines

Each line packs a definition, a division or a rule into two short half-lines, with few examples. The rajaz form also forces compressions, which the author unpacks himself in his commentary: a letter is dropped ‘for the metre’, a word loses its ending ‘out of necessity’, a conjunction is omitted. The poem is made to be learned by heart and explained by a teacher, and the examples (‘every human is an animal’, ‘the world changes, and whatever changes is originated’) are supplied by the commentaries rather than by the verses.

The closing lines are more personal. ‘This completes the aim’, al-Akhḍarī writes, ‘the principal questions of praiseworthy logic.’ He asks God to accept the work, then asks the reader to forgive a youth of twenty-one, gives the date of composition and ends with blessings on the Prophet ‘as long as the sun crosses the zodiac signs and the full moon rises in the darkness’. In his commentary he grants anyone qualified permission to correct mistakes in the poem after careful thought, warns against ‘the devils among students’ who declare sound things faulty, and even explains the astronomy of the last line: twelve signs of thirty degrees each, crossed by the sun one degree a day. A study published in Makassar in 2025 examines the rhymed prose (sajʿ) of these closing lines and the feelings they express, from the plea for forgiveness to the moral advice.

For the commentaries the poem received, see ‘Commentaries, glosses and translations’; for where and how it was memorised and taught, see ‘The Sullam in the madrasa’.