Cairo scholar of grammar, rhetoric and the sciences whose gloss on al-Mallawī’s small commentary on the Sullam was printed at Būlāq in 1868 and became one of the standard companions of the poem in Egypt and Indonesia.
Life
Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Ṣabbān was born and educated in Cairo; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives no year of birth. His kunya Abū l-ʿIrfān was given to him by the Sufi Muḥammad al-Sādāt b. Wafāʾ. He studied the outward and inward sciences and the Shādhilī way with ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-ʿAfīfī, and was closely associated with Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Jabartī, the father of the historian, with whom he studied Arabic, astronomy and mathematics. He served as timekeeper (muwaqqit) at the mausoleum of al-Shāfiʿī and then at the mosque that Muḥammad Bey Abū l-Dhahab built opposite al-Azhar. He died of plague in Jumādā I 1206/January 1792 and was buried in the Bustān cemetery.
His works range over grammar, , prosody, ḥadīth terminology, astronomy and the life of the Prophet. The best known is his large gloss on al-Ushmūnī’s on Ibn Mālik’s Alfiyya (Ḥāshiyat al-Ṣabbān), still a standard work of advanced grammar. For and its neighbours he wrote a gloss on Aḥmad al-Mallawī’s small commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam, a gloss on the commentary on the Samarqandiyya on metaphor, and a gloss on Mullā Ḥanafī’s commentary on al-Ījī’s ʿAḍudiyya on the etiquette of debate.
His gloss on the Sullam was printed with al-Mallawī’s in the margin at Būlāq in 1285/1868 and often afterwards; Heyworth-Dunne still lists it among the books in use in the nineteenth century, and a Munich manuscript copied in 1249/1834 calls it ‘a gloss on the small commentary of al-Mallawī on the Sullam’ (see ‘Al-Azhar and Egypt’ and ‘Commentaries, glosses and translations’ in the Sullam section).
Uncertain or disputed
- Year of birth is not recorded in the TDV.
- The El-Rouayheb article cites the Azhar print of the gloss as ‘1219/1901’; the Hijri year must be 1319.
Works
- Ḥāshiya ʿalā al-sharḥ al-ṣaghīr li-l-Mallawī ʿalā al-Sullam حَاشِيَةُ الصَّبَّانِ عَلَى شَرْحِ المَلَّوِيِّ عَلَى السُّلَّمِ — on al-Sullam al-munawraqPrinted Būlāq 1285/1868, Cairo 1305/1887 and 1325/1907; modern editions Cairo 2015 and Istanbul 2020 (as recorded in the Sullam catalogue). El-Rouayheb cites an Azhar print in which al-Mallawī’s commentary appears within al-Ṣabbān’s gloss, dated ‘1219/1901’.gloss
- Ḥāshiya ʿalā Sharḥ al-Ushmūnī ʿalā Alfiyyat Ibn Mālik حَاشِيَةُ الصَّبَّانِ عَلَى شَرْحِ الأُشْمُونِيِّHis most extensive work, on grammar.gloss
- Ḥāshiya ʿalā Sharḥ al-SamarqandiyyaOn the treatise on metaphor (istiʿāra) known as the Samarqandiyya (TDV).gloss
- Isʿāf al-rāghibīn fī sīrat al-Muṣṭafā wa-faḍāʾil ahl baytihi al-ṭāhirīn إِسْعَافُ الرَّاغِبِينَOn the life of the Prophet and the virtues of his family.work
- al-Kāfiya al-shāfiya fī ʿilmay al-ʿarūḍ wa-l-qāfiyaOn prosody and rhyme.work
Reception
Through the Egyptian prints his gloss reached the Indonesian pesantren, where Martin van Bruinessen found al-Mallawī’s with al-Ṣabbān’s gloss among the common books (see ‘The pesantren and the Malay world’).
Muṣṭafā al-Būlāqī’s glosses on al-Quwaysinī’s follow al-Ṣabbān’s, according to Brockelmann (as reported in the Sullam section).
Sources (2)