al-Bājūrī

Shaykh al-Azhar from 1847, whose much-printed gloss on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam made the poem’s Azhar reading the standard one from Egypt to Indonesia.

Life

Al-Bājūrī was born in 1198/1783 in the village of Bājūr in the Minūfiyya province of Egypt. After studying with his father he went to al-Azhar in 1797; when the French occupied Cairo a year later he withdrew to Giza, returning when the occupation ended. His teachers included Muḥammad al-Amīr al-Kabīr, ʿAbd Allāh al-Sharqāwī, Muḥammad al-Faḍālī and Ḥasan al-Quwaysinī, himself a commentator on the Sullam. He taught at al-Azhar and in 1847 became its Shaykh, an office he held until his death; the viceroy ʿAbbās Pasha is said to have attended his lessons. His students included Muḥammad al-Anbābī, later Shaykh al-Azhar, and the Indonesian ḥadīth scholar Maḥfūẓ al-Tarmasī.

The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that his learning shows less in independent works than in his commentaries and glosses on books of creed, law, logic, the Prophet’s life, grammar and rhetoric, many of which were long taught at al-Azhar: Tuḥfat al-murīd on al-Laqānī’s Jawharat al-tawḥīd, glosses on al-Sanūsī’s creeds, on Ibn Qāsim al-Ghazzī’s commentary on Abū Shujāʿ, on al-Tirmidhī’s Shamāʾil and on al-Būṣīrī’s Burda.

In logic he wrote a gloss on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam and one on al-Sanūsī’s Mukhtaṣar. The Sullam gloss is usually printed with the poem in its margin and catalogued as a gloss on the matn; Brockelmann lists it among the glosses on al-Akhḍarī’s own commentary, and a modern edition prints it as glosses on that commentary. It appeared in Cairo from 1282/1865–66 and at Būlāq in 1297/1880 with notes by his student al-Anbābī, so that a single page shows text, gloss and notes on the gloss. Brockelmann also records a gloss by him on al-Quwaysinī’s commentary on the Sullam (Cairo 1275).

Works

• Ḥāshiya ʿalā matn al-Sullam حَاشِيَةٌ عَلَى مَتْنِ السُّلَّمِ — on al-Sullam al-munawraqPrinted Cairo 1282, 1286, 1306, 1308; Būlāq 1297 with al-Anbābī’s notes; Cairo 1324/1906 with al-Anbābī’s taqrīr; modern editions Diyarbakır 2014 and Istanbul 2023.gloss
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā sharḥ al-Quwaysinī ʿalā al-Sullam — on al-QuwaysinīCairo 1275 (Brockelmann only; not verified elsewhere).gloss
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā Mukhtaṣar al-Sanūsī — on al-SanūsīGloss on al-Sanūsī’s short handbook of logic (Cairo 1292, TDV).gloss
• Tuḥfat al-murīd ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd تُحْفَةُ المُرِيدِ عَلَى جَوْهَرَةِ التَّوْحِيدِHis best-known work, on al-Laqānī’s creed in verse.work

Reception

Van Bruinessen’s survey of pesantren books (1990) and later Indonesian studies list al-Bājūrī’s commentary and gloss on the Sullam among the most widely used logic books in Indonesia.

His gloss is one of the four Azhar companions of the Sullam, with the commentaries of al-Mallawī, al-Damanhūrī and al-Quwaysinī.