Asad Q. Ahmed

Historian of Islamic thought at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Palimpsests of Themselves (2022) gives the first full English translation of Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm and the main study of its Indian commentaries.

Life

According to his faculty page, Asad Q. Ahmed is Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 2000 and his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 2007. His field is early Islamic social history and premodern Islamic intellectual history, especially the rational disciplines: philosophy, logic, legal theory and astronomy. His current focus is the period from about 1200 to 1900, particularly in the Indian subcontinent.

His work on Arabic logic began with the classical period: a study of Avicenna’s reception of Aristotle’s modal syllogistic (2003) and a translation of the logic of Ibn Sīnā’s Najāt, Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic (Oxford University Press, 2011). He then turned to the later tradition in India: ‘Logic in the Khayrābādī School of India’ (2013), which traces the teacher–student lines behind the commentaries; ‘Post-Classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins’ (Oriens, 2013), which argues that commentaries and glosses were a place of innovation; a chapter on the Sullam al-ʿulūm in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2016); and the Encyclopaedia of Islam THREE articles on Baḥr al-ʿUlūm and the Dars-i Niẓāmī. He co-edited a special issue of Oriens on the ḥāshiya (2013).

Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2022, open access) brings these lines together. It maps more than a hundred commentaries on the Sullam and their networks of teachers and students over some three hundred years, describes the contents and orientation of the Sullam, gives the first complete English translation of it with extended notes (based on the lithograph of Barakat Allāh’s Iṣʿād al-fuhūm and explained chiefly from Mullā Mubīn’s Mirʾāt al-shurūḥ), and develops, from the Rampur debate and the Sullam tradition itself, a theory of the commentary. A review by Yusuf Daşdemir (İslam Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2026) presents the book as a challenge to the view that postclassical Islamic thought was an age of decline.

Works

• Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia — بر Sullam al-ʿulūmUniversity of California Press, 2022 (Berkeley Series in Postclassical Islamic Scholarship 5), open access: study of the Sullam’s commentaries and their networks, full English translation of the Sullam (‘The Ladder of the Sciences’) and a theory of commentary.ترجمه
• Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic — بر ابن سیناTranslation of the logic of Ibn Sīnā’s al-Najāt (Oxford University Press, 2011).ترجمه
• “The Sullam al-ʿulūm of Muḥibballāh al-Bihārī” — بر Sullam al-ʿulūmIn K. El-Rouayheb and S. Schmidtke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2016), 488–508.اثر
• “Logic in the Khayrābādī School of India”In M. Cook et al. (eds.), Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 227–45.اثر
• “Post-Classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins”Oriens 41.3–4 (2013), 317–48.اثر
• “Avicenna’s Reception of Aristotelian Modal Syllogistics”In D. Reisman and A. al-Rahim (eds.), Before and After Avicenna (Brill, 2003), 3–24.اثر

Reception

The articles on the Sullam al-ʿulūm on this site draw throughout on Palimpsests of Themselves, which is the main modern study of the book.