Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī

Indian-born lexicographer and hadith scholar of Cairo, author of the dictionary Tāj al-ʿarūs, who in his commentary on al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ judged logic disliked (makrūh) and lamented its hold on the scholars of Egypt.

Life

Al-Zabīdī was born in 1145/1732 at Bilgram, near Kannauj in northern India, into a family of sayyids who traced their descent through Wāsiṭ to Zayd b. ʿAlī. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Kattānī described him as a Ḥanafī in law, an Ashʿarī in creed, a Qādirī by affiliation and a Naqshbandī by path. Until sixteen he studied in India, among others with Shāh Walī Allāh al-Dihlawī; in 1162/1749 he went to Zabīd in Yemen, after which he is named, and spent some five years there, travelling each year to the Hijaz. At Ṭāʾif the Sufi ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-ʿAydarūs advised him to go to Egypt, and he arrived in Cairo on 9 Ṣafar 1167 (6 December 1753), where he spent the remaining thirty-eight years of his life.

In Cairo he studied with Mālikī, Shāfiʿī and Ḥanafī scholars, among them Aḥmad al-Dardīr, ʿAlī al-ʿAdawī and Ḥasan al-Jabartī, and soon became famous. His dictionary Tāj al-ʿarūs, a on al-Fīrūzābādī’s al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ begun in 1174/1761 and completed on 2 Rajab 1188 (8 September 1774), is the largest Arabic dictionary known, with some 120,000 entries. He revived the public dictation of hadith, received letters and gifts from rulers across the Ottoman world and gave a hadith licence to Sultan ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd I. From 1195/1781 he withdrew from public life, and he died of plague in Shaʿbān 1205 (April 1791). Sultan Selim III bought his library and endowed it for students in Egypt.

His view of is set out in his great on al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, Itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn, completed in 1201/1786–87. Khaled El-Rouayheb shows that he collected there the opinions of earlier scholars, including al-Suyūṭī’s attack on logic and al-Yūsī’s reply. Without going as far as prohibition, he held logic to be disliked (makrūh): the basics might help in other sciences, but Maghribī scholars like al-Yūsī went far beyond them, and their zeal had recently led Egyptian scholars to neglect hadith. Logic, he argued, fosters pride, quarrelling and contempt for others; in the logicians’ books, he wrote, one finds no mention of God or His Messenger except in the introductions, and in their classes nothing but dispute, accusation and contempt.

El-Rouayheb links this stance to his Naqshbandī Sufism, but notes that other Sufis of the time, such as ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī and Aḥmad al-Dardīr, wrote on , and that his Ḥanafism explains nothing either, since many Ḥanafīs of his day, such as Ḥasan al-Jabartī, were experts in the rational sciences. His view had little effect: three later rectors of al-Azhar, Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār, Ḥasan al-Quwaysinī and Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī, wrote on logic.

Uncertain or disputed

His discussion of logic is known here through El-Rouayheb’s summary and quotations (in Turkish translation); the passage in the Itḥāf has not been checked.
He should not be confused with ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar al-Khalīl al-Zabīdī (d. 1196/1782), a scholar of Zabīd who versified the Īsāghūjī (see the catalogue of the Īsāghūjī).

Works

Itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn bi-sharḥ asrār Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn إِتْحَافُ السَّادَةِ المُتَّقِينَ بِشَرْحِ أَسْرَارِ إِحْيَاءِ عُلُومِ الدِّينِ — on al-GhazālīCommentary on al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ, eleven years in the writing, completed 1201; Fez 1302–04, Cairo 1311 (TDV). The discussion of logic is in vol. 1, pp. 178–181 of the Cairo edition (El-Rouayheb).commentary
Tāj al-ʿarūs min jawāhir al-Qāmūs تَاجُ العَرُوسِ مِنْ جَوَاهِرِ القَامُوسِCommentary on al-Fīrūzābādī’s dictionary, 1174–1188/1761–1774.commentary
al-Muʿjam al-mukhtaṣṣDictionary of his teachers and contemporaries (ed. Beirut 2006).work

Reception

El-Rouayheb treats him as the main eighteenth-century Egyptian dissenter from the mainstream view that was permitted or even a collective duty, and concludes that his criticism did not affect the leading Azhar scholars of the next generations.

Sources (2)