al-Akhḍarī | The Mantiqi

Algerian Mālikī scholar and poet who turned the Īsāghūjī into the rajaz poem al-Sullam al-munawraq, the most widely memorised logic primer in North Africa, Egypt and South-East Asia.

Life

Al-Akhḍarī came from a scholarly family of Banṭiyūs, a village south-west of Biskra in present-day Algeria. His first teacher was his father, Muḥammad al-Ṣaghīr, who taught him law, grammar and Sufism; a bio-bibliography published by the University of Biskra adds that he studied at the Zaytūna mosque in Tunis before returning home. His birth year is usually estimated at 918/1512.

He wrote mostly in verse, and very young. According to the Biskra bio-bibliography he composed an astronomy poem (al-Sirāj) at about nineteen, a poem on arithmetic and inheritance (al-Durra al-bayḍāʾ) at about twenty, and the poem al-Sullam al-munawraq at about twenty-one, that is, around 940–941/1533–34. He also wrote a poem (al-Jawhar al-maknūn), a Sufi poem (al-Qudsiyya) that criticises innovations, and the short Mālikī handbook of worship known as Mukhtaṣar al-Akhḍarī.

He was buried in the zāwiya at Banṭiyūs beside his father and grandfather, and his tomb is still visited. The year of his death is disputed (see below).

Uncertain or disputed

Year of death: 983/1575–76 according to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, the British Library Endangered Archives catalogue and the University of Biskra; 953/1546 according to the Leipzig manuscript catalogue and Khaled El-Rouayheb (The Development of Arabic Logic); a Russian study (Salakhov 2024) gives 1512–1545.
Place of death: the Biskra bio-bibliography mentions al-Kef; other sources only give his burial at Banṭiyūs.
Date of the Sullam: a manuscript of al-Damanhūrī’s commentary Īḍāḥ al-mubham in Leipzig contains the date 1 Muḥarram 941 (13 July 1534), which the catalogue takes as the completion date of the commentary; since al-Damanhūrī lived in the eighteenth century, the date more likely belongs to the poem quoted in it. This agrees with the report that al-Akhḍarī wrote the Sullam at about twenty-one, but the sources consulted do not state the poem’s date directly.
Spelling of the title: al-munawraq and al-murawnaq both occur (both mean “embellished”).
Number of lines: 143 (Biskra bio-bibliography) or 144 (other descriptions); a Leipzig catalogue note on a commentary manuscript counts about 94 rajaz lines.

Works

al-Sullam al-munawraq (also: al-murawnaq) fī ʿilm al-manṭiq السُّلَّمُ المُنَوْرَقُ فِي عِلْمِ المَنْطِقِ — on ĪsāghūjīA rajaz poem of about 143–144 lines that versifies the Īsāghūjī, adding an introduction on the ruling of studying logic and a closing section; composed around 941/1534. Printed many times, alone and with commentaries.verse
Sharḥ al-Sullam شَرْحُ السُّلَّمِ — on al-AkhḍarīHis own prose commentary on the poem, the first commentary on it.commentary
al-Jawhar al-maknūn fī ṣadaf al-thalāthat funūn الجَوْهَرُ المَكْنُونُ فِي صَدَفِ الثَّلَاثَةِ فُنُونٍVerse version of al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ on rhetoric (balāgha).work
al-Durra al-bayḍāʾ الدُّرَّةُ البَيْضَاءُVerse on arithmetic and the law of inheritance.work
al-Mukhtaṣar fī l-ʿibādāt (Mukhtaṣar al-Akhḍarī) المُخْتَصَرُ فِي العِبَادَاتِShort Mālikī handbook on purification, prayer and fasting.work

Reception

The Sullam became a standard first text in the Maghrib, in Egypt (al-Azhar) and in Indonesia, and it was also read by Tatar students and copied in Dagestan; Ottoman madrasas used it as well.

The best-known is Aḥmad al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham min maʿānī al-Sullam; others were written by Aḥmad al-Mallawī, Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī and al-Shinqīṭī, with glosses by al-Ṣabbān and others.

Its section on whether may be studied (three positions, with permission for the well-grounded student as the correct view) became the standard way of presenting the question in later primers.

Translations include a Turkish translation and by Rifat Efendi (Vesîletü'l-îkān), a French translation by J.-D. Luciani (Le Soullam, Algiers 1921) and a translation by the Indonesian scholar Kiai Bisri Mustofa.

Sources (8)