The commentaries

1A tradition of more than a hundred works

Asad Q. Ahmed counts more than one hundred Indian commentaries and supercommentaries on the Sullam written in about two hundred years, more than on any other complete logic textbook in India. He treats as a commentary any work written on another text, whether it is called sharḥ (commentary), ḥāshiya (gloss) or taʿlīq (notes), complete or partial. Until the first quarter of the twentieth century almost all of them were in Arabic; Persian appears only in anonymous interlinear word glosses, and one commentary was written in Pashto. Ahmed notes that although the Sullam was known outside India by the nineteenth century, only Indian scholars seem to have commented on it.

Ahmed distinguishes first-order commentaries, written on the Sullam itself, from second-order commentaries, written on one of the commentaries. Very soon three first-order commentaries became the ‘gateways’ through which the book was read: those of Qāḍī Mubārak and Mullā Ḥasan for the part on conceptualizations, and that of Ḥamd Allāh for the part on assents.

2The first commentaries

The earliest layer was the author’s own glosses, which every early commentator quotes. The first full commentary may be that of ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Ḥusaynī al-Sāʾinpūrī, dedicated to Nawwāb Khudābanda Khān and finished in the first half of 1119/1707, after the author’s death. Fīrūz b. Maḥabba dedicated his al-Sirāj al-wahhāj to the emperor Shāh ʿĀlam (Bahādur Shāh I, r. 1118/1707–1124/1712); nothing more is known about him, but parts of his commentary appear in the margins of nineteenth-century lithographs, and a Delhi print of 1893 carries it under the title Fayrūz. Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Mubārakī al-Jawnpūrī, born and raised in Dhaka and trained in Delhi, wrote Miʿrāj al-fuhūm after 1121/1709, at the age of eighteen according to Nuzhat al-khawāṭir; he died young. Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Sihālawī, a grandson of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Sihālawī, completed his Suddat al-ʿulūm in 1136/1723–24, starting with the part on assents and only then turning to conceptualizations.

Two more commentaries came from the circle of the Gūpāmaw scholars: one by Muḥammad Ashraf of Bengal, dated 1150 in Nuzhat and 1151/1739 by Ahmed, and above all that of Qāḍī Mubārak. Kamāl al-Dīn al-Sihālawī al-Fatiḥpūrī (d. 1175/1761) wrote a commentary on difficult passages such as the liar paradox. Ahmed sums up this first phase: the commentaries were a North Indian affair, written in Delhi, Lucknow, Gūpāmaw, Sihāla and Sandīla; several were dedicated to imperial figures; and every commentator about whom enough is known was connected with the network of the Farangī Maḥall family. Some, like Mubārak, began their commentaries as students, and Ahmed suggests that writing on the Sullam was partly an exercise in training.

3Qāḍī Mubārak

Qāḍī Mubārak b. Muḥammad Dāʾim al-Gūpāmawī (d. 1162/1749) studied with scholars of Gūpāmaw and Khayrābād and with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shamsābādī, one of al-Bihārī’s own teachers, and then taught in Delhi. He writes that he began the commentary during his studies, stopped after the conjunctive syllogism, and finished it in Delhi under Muḥammad Shāh, with the support of Nawwāb Sharīʿat Allāh Khān, in 1143/1730; Nuzhat gives the day, Thursday 7 Rabīʿ al-awwal 1143, and adds that the scholars ‘received it with acceptance and put it in the programme of teaching’. Ahmed calculates that the work took a quarter of a century.

Mubārak also wrote glosses on his own commentary, which his student ʿAbd al-Rasūl al-Sahāranpūrī collected after his death as the Minhuyāt; a Lucknow print of about 1865 contains them. The commentary covers the whole Sullam but was valued above all for its discussions of knowledge and being. One of its later glossators, Ḥāfiẓ Darāz, wrote that its expressions were hard ‘because most of them are taken from the Ufuq mubīn’ of Mīr Dāmād. Under the name ‘Qāḍī’ or ‘Qāḍī Mubārak’ it became a curriculum book.

4Ḥamd Allāh al-Sandīlawī

Ḥamd Allāh b. Shukr Allāh al-Sandīlawī (d. 1160/1747) was, in the words of Nuzhat, ‘a Ṣiddīqī by descent and a Shīʿī by school’. He studied with Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn and Kamāl al-Dīn al-Sihālawī and taught for a time in Delhi. He received the title Faḍl Allāh Khān and grants of villages; Nuzhat attributes the title to the emperor Aḥmad Shāh, but Ahmed notes that this must have happened before Aḥmad Shāh’s accession in 1748, a year after Ḥamd Allāh’s death. With his income he built a large madrasa at Sandīla, the Madrasa-yi Manṣūriyya.

His commentary covers only the part on assents. It is undated, but Ahmed shows that it was written after Mubārak’s and in conversation with it. Nuzhat calls it his most famous work, which the scholars ‘put into the programme of teaching’. It became the gateway to the second half of the Sullam and received more second-order commentaries than any other: first in Sandīla among Ḥamd Allāh’s Shīʿī students, then in Lucknow among Shīʿī and Sunnī scholars connected with Farangī Maḥall, and in the later nineteenth century in Rampur, Tonk, Lahore and Aligarh.

5Mullā Ḥasan, Baḥr al-ʿUlūm and Mullā Mubīn

Mullā Ḥasan (Muḥammad Ḥasan b. Ghulām Muṣṭafā, d. 1199/1784), of the Farangī Maḥall family, studied with Niẓām al-Dīn and Kamāl al-Dīn and taught in Lucknow; Nuzhat tells how sectarian violence drove him from the city to Fayḍābād, Shāhjahānpūr, a madrasa at Dārānagar, Delhi and finally Rampur, where he stayed. His commentary, dated 1177/1763–64, covers the part on conceptualizations and is, after Mubārak and Ḥamd Allāh, the most glossed. He also wrote his own logic handbook, Maʿārij al-ʿulūm, which Ahmed describes as critical of the Sullam.

ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm (1143/1731–1225/1810), son of Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn, wrote his commentary in his youth, probably before he left Lucknow around 1167/1754, and collected his glosses on it in Rampur. He tells his readers not to rely on the commentary ‘except after going over these glosses’. Although he was among the greatest teachers of his age, his commentary received practically no glosses before the press brought it out: the Maṭbaʿ-yi Mujtabāʾī in Delhi printed it in 1309/1892 with notes by Muḥammad Ilyās al-Pishāwarī and Khalīl Aḥmad al-Sanbhalī, and a modern edition appeared in Kuwait in 2012.

Mullā Mubīn b. Muḥibb Allāh (d. 1225/1810), a student of Mullā Ḥasan, completed Mirʾāt al-shurūḥ (‘the mirror of the commentaries’) in 1200/1786. It covers the whole Sullam and the debates around it, and Ahmed calls it ‘arguably the most lucid and extended exposition’ of the tradition. That clarity was its weakness in the classroom, where the aim was to sharpen the student’s mind on a difficult text. Students were warned with a Persian pun: ‘Mubīnrā mabīn chūn mubīn!’ (‘Do not look at Mubīn, because it is clear!’).

6The teachers behind the commentaries

Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn of Farangī Maḥall, after whom the Dars-i Niẓāmī is named, taught Ḥamd Allāh, Mullā Ḥasan and his brother Muḥammad Walī (who also commented on the Sullam, in 1155/1742), Kamāl al-Dīn and his own son Baḥr al-ʿUlūm. Nuzhat lists two commentaries by him on al-Bihārī’s Musallam al-thubūt but none on the Sullam, and no source consulted credits him with one. His death date is given as 1153/1740 by Ahmed and as 8 Jumādā al-ūlā 1161/1748 by Nuzhat; Francis Robinson also gives 1748.

For Ahmed the central figure is Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fatiḥpūrī, related to the Farangī Maḥall family through his ancestors. Three of the seven identifiable commentators of the second phase were his students, and of the commentaries that received most later attention all except Mubārak’s were written by his students.

7Glosses on the glosses

On Ḥamd Allāh the first glosses came from his students in Sandīla, Bāballāh Jawnpūrī and Ghulām Yaḥyā (d. 1180/1767), and from his son Ḥaydar ʿAlī (d. 1225/1810), who also completed his father’s commentary. The great Shīʿī scholar Dildār ʿAlī al-Naṣīrābādī (d. 1235/1820) and his sons continued this line. In nineteenth-century Lucknow four students of Muftī Ẓuhūr Allāh of Farangī Maḥall (d. 1256/1840) wrote on it, among them Turāb ʿAlī and ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm al-Laknawī. Later contributions include al-Intibāh by Ilāhī Bakhsh al-Fayḍābādī, printed in Kanpur in 1862, a gloss by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Khayrābādī, and the notes of ʿAbd Allāh al-Tūnkī, printed in Lahore in 1892.

Glosses on Mubārak began a generation later, in Lucknow among the Farangī Maḥallīs and in Rampur among the Khayrābādīs, whose own teachers stood in Mubārak’s line. Faḍl-i Imām and his son Faḍl-i Ḥaqq wrote on it (Faḍl-i Ḥaqq’s gloss was printed in Delhi in 1899), and Faḍl-i Ḥaqq’s son ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq wrote Khātam al-ḥawāshī (‘the seal of the glosses’). Mubārak was also popular with Pashtun and Afghan scholars outside these circles: Ḥāfiẓ Darāz of Peshawar (d. 1263/1847), Mullā Ṣarīkh (Muzammil b. Fidāʾ, d. 1292/1875), who dedicated his gloss to the Afghan ruler Dūst Muḥammad Khān, and Saʿd Allāh al-Qandahārī, whose al-Kāshifāt on Mubārak’s own glosses was printed in the early 1880s. Commentaries on Mubārak were still being written in 1398/1978, by the Deoband-trained Manẓūr Aḥmad Nuʿmānī, and in 1424/2003, by ʿUbayd Allāh al-Qandahārī.

Mullā Ḥasan was glossed almost entirely within the Farangī Maḥall circle of Lucknow, from his student Mubīn’s nephew Walī Allāh (d. 1270/1854) and ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm’s al-Qawl al-aslam (printed in Kanpur in 1870) to Barakat Allāh (d. 1343/1925), and later also by Shīʿī scholars of the city. Single problems of the Sullam received treatises of their own: Khalīl al-Raḥmān al-Muṣṭafābādī wrote on the liar paradox, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī on the absolutely unknown, and Muḥammad Aḥsan al-Bihārī on copular existence in Ḥamd Allāh’s commentary. The catalogue lists these works with their prints.

8From commentary to curriculum book

How a commentary became a school book is described by ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī, whom Ahmed quotes: ‘The students of Mubārak would study their master’s commentary on the Sullam, the students of Ḥamd Allāh would study his commentary, and the students of Baḥr al-ʿUlūm would teach his commentary to their students. When their students met, they would mention the writings of their masters and criticize those of the others’ masters. Thus all the commentaries on the Sullam became the subject of discussion, and students and teachers had to keep up with all of them. The outcome was that mastery of logic required knowledge of all these commentaries and glosses.’

The commentaries took the place of the book in the syllabus and even in its vocabulary. In the Deobandi version of the Dars-i Niẓāmī recorded by Zubair Zafar Khan, the most advanced logic books are ‘Sharh Sullam al-Ulum or Mulla Hasan’, ‘Sharh Sullam Hamid Ullah’ and ‘Sharh Sullam Qadi Mubarak or al-Munhiya’; the commentators’ names had become book titles. Ahmed adds that the commentaries were built to keep this role: each gateway commentary came with its author’s own glosses, which guided the reader through passages left deliberately allusive, so that the text still called for further work.

9Print, Deoband and Urdu

In the later nineteenth century the old networks broke up. New commentaries were tied to the printing press: Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Bahāʾ wrote Inṭāq al-fuhūm, printed by the Maṭbaʿ-yi Mujtabāʾī in 1322/1904, precisely so that it could accompany a print of the Sullam. Most new first-order commentaries now came from scholars connected with the Dār al-ʿUlūm at Deoband, several of them Pashtuns: ʿUbayd Allāh al-Pishāwarī (d. 1344/1924), Muḥammad Ibrāhīm al-Balyāwī (d. 1387/1967), whose Ḍiyāʾ al-nujūm Ahmed calls highly influential and still regularly used, Muḥammad Isḥāq al-Hazārawī, Sayyid Anwār al-Ḥaqq al-Pishāwarī and Mumtāz al-Dīn, whose Urdu commentary Ḍumām al-fuhūm was published in Dhaka between 1947 and 1961.

Since the late twentieth century commentaries have been written in Urdu: Badr al-nujūm by Muftī ʿAṭāʾ al-Raḥmān Multānī (2002), Irshād al-fuhūm based on the lessons of Muftī Saʿīd Aḥmad Pālanpūrī of Deoband (2012), Mīzān al-ʿulūm by Muftī Shakīl Aḥmad Sītāpūrī, Kashf al-ʿulūm by Sayyid Ḥamīd al-Raḥmān and Isʿād al-fuhūm by Ṣiddīq Aḥmad Bāndawī. Ahmed judges that these works, written for students of a fixed curriculum and spread by print, no longer show the dialectical engagement of the earlier tradition: the commentary had come to serve the teaching of a set course rather than to carry on a debate from master to student.