Indian scholar of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth and consort of the ruler of Bhopal, whose encyclopaedia Abjad al-ʿulūm records the classical definition of logic while defending Ibn Taymiyya’s arguments against the logicians.
Life
According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi he was born on 19 Jumādā I 1248 (14 October 1832) in Bāns Bareli in Uttar Pradesh; the nisba al-Qannawjī refers to Kannauj, where he grew up. His father, a scholar, died when he was five, and his mother saw to his education. He studied first with his elder brother Aḥmad Ḥasan ʿArshī and then in Farrukhabad, Kanpur and Delhi, reading the rational and the transmitted sciences and receiving licences (ijāza); in Delhi he also studied with the muftī Ṣadr al-Dīn Āzurda. In 1855 he went to Bhopal, where he worked as a secretary and translator in the state administration.
After the death of his first wife he made the pilgrimage (1285/1868–69) and spent eight months in the Hijaz and Yemen studying hadith. Among his teachers there the TDV names ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq b. Faḍl Allāh Banārasī, a student of al-Shawkānī, and the muftī of Hodeida Ḥusayn b. Muḥsin al-Anṣārī; this period shaped the Shawkānī-centred line of his thought. In 1871 he married Shāh Jahān Begum, the ruler of Bhopal, who shared her authority with him; he took the title Nawwāb. He was removed from office on 28 August 1885 after accusations against him, devoted his last years to scholarship and died in Bhopal on 29 Jumādā II 1307 (20 February 1890).
The TDV counts him among the founders of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth movement in India. He used his position to found printing presses and madrasas in Bhopal and wrote, or published under his name, more than 220 works in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, many of them compilations and abridgements; some, such as the Urdu Qurʾān Tarjumān al-Qurʾān, were prepared by a committee under his supervision. He drew heavily on al-Shawkānī, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya.
For his most important book is Abjad al-ʿulūm (Bhopal 1295/1878), an encyclopaedic survey of the sciences. Its entry on logic is a compilation from older reference works, which it names (Ḥājjī Khalīfa’s Kashf al-ẓunūn and Taşköprüzâde’s Miftāḥ al-saʿāda): logic, also called the science of the balance (ʿilm al-mīzān), is ‘a science from which one learns how to acquire unknown and from known ones’; its is the secondary intelligibles insofar as they lead to the unknown; its aim is ‘protecting the mind from error in thinking’ and its benefit ‘getting things right in all the sciences’. The entry quotes al-Fārābī’s title for logic, ‘chief of the sciences’, Ibn Sīnā’s ‘servant of the sciences’, and al-Ghazālī’s dictum that whoever does not know logic cannot be trusted in any science.
His own view was different. Khaled El-Rouayheb quotes another passage of the same book: whoever looks at Ibn Taymiyya’s books against the will find that all his answers to them are correct, and a person of sound nature, heart and mind has no need of logic, for true comes to him without it. He also praised the Yemeni Ibn al-Wazīr’s books arguing that the Qurʾān and Sunna make kalām unnecessary. El-Rouayheb calls him one of the most influential Salafīs of the nineteenth century, a student of the students of al-Shawkānī, through whom Ibn Taymiyya’s rejection of logic and kalām spread among later Arab Salafīs.
Uncertain or disputed
- Death date: 29 Jumādā II 1307/20 February 1890 (TDV). The Turkish translation of El-Rouayheb’s article prints ‘1208/1889’, evidently a misprint.
- The entry on logic in Abjad al-ʿulūm is compiled from Kashf al-ẓunūn and Miftāḥ al-saʿāda and does not express his own position, which El-Rouayheb takes from another passage of the book (vol. 2, p. 523 in the Beirut edition he used).
- The TDV notes that several works published under his name were prepared by others under his supervision.
Works
- Abjad al-ʿulūm أَبْجَدُ العُلُومِEncyclopaedic survey of the sciences, 3 vols., Bhopal 1295/1878; ed. ʿAbd al-Jabbār Zakkār, Damascus 1978. Contains an entry on ʿilm al-manṭiq and short biographies of scholars, with long entries on al-Shawkānī, Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (TDV).work
- Ḥuṣūl al-maʾmūl min ʿilm al-uṣūl حُصُولُ المَأْمُولِ مِنْ عِلْمِ الأُصُولِAbridgement of al-Shawkānī’s Irshād al-fuḥūl on legal theory (Istanbul 1296).work
- Fatḥ al-bayān fī maqāṣid al-Qurʾān فَتْحُ البَيَانِ فِي مَقَاصِدِ القُرْآنِQurʾān commentary, 15 vols., Bhopal 1290.work
- al-Tāj al-mukallal التَّاجُ المُكَلَّلُBiographical dictionary with 543 entries (Bombay 1963; Beirut 1983).work
Reception
El-Rouayheb treats him as a sign of the shift in the nineteenth century, when the Salafiyya revived Ibn Taymiyya’s rejection of against the mainstream view of the earlier centuries, which had permitted or even required its study.
The TDV notes that contemporaries, foremost the Ḥanafī ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī, criticised him for adopting the views of al-Shawkānī and Ibn Taymiyya without weighing their evidence.
Because the entry on in Abjad al-ʿulūm reproduces the classical definitions, it is still cited as a convenient reference on what logic is.
Sources (3)
- Abdulhamit Birışık and A. Cüneyt Eren, ‘Sıddîk Hasan Han’, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (2009)
- Khaled El-Rouayheb, ‘Sünnî Müslüman Âlimlerin Mantık İlmi Karşısındaki Tavırları (1500–1800)’ (Turkish translation of ‘Sunni Muslim Scholars on the Status of Logic, 1500–1800’, Islamic Law and Society 11, 2004), Mantık Araştırmaları Dergisi 1/1 (2019)
- Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān, Abjad al-ʿulūm, entry ‘ʿIlm al-manṭiq’ (Arabic Lexicon)