al-Bannānī | The Mantiqi

Moroccan scholar of Fez, author of the most widely used Maghribi commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam, lithographed repeatedly in Fez and still read in Mauritania; who exactly he was is not settled.

Life

The commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam known as Sharḥ al-Bannānī became the standard Moroccan explanation of the poem. It was lithographed in Fez in 1300, 1313 and 1315 (1883–1898) and printed in Cairo in 1318/1900, and it attracted two printed glosses: by ʿAlī b. Idrīs Qaṣṣāra (d. 1259/1843) and by al-Mahdī b. al-Ṭālib Ibn Sūda (1805/06–1877/78), whose two-volume gloss was lithographed in Fez in 1310/1893. A Mauritanian maḥaẓra curriculum published in 2008 still prescribes it with the Sullam.

The author’s identity is a puzzle. Brockelmann lists the commentary under ‘Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad … b. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Bannānī’ and dates him ‘around 1211/1796’. The Fez lithograph of Ibn Sūda’s gloss names him on the title page of the first volume as ‘Abū ʿAbd Allāh Sayyidī Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Salām Bannānī’, but on that of the second volume as ‘Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. …’; the University of Pennsylvania catalogues the work under Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Bannānī (1720/21–1780). Both names belong to known scholars of Fez. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi has an entry on Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Salām b. Ḥamdūn al-Bannānī, a ḥadīth scholar and jurist who taught at the Qarawiyyīn and in Tetouan and died in Fez on 16 Dhū al-Qaʿda 1163 (17 October 1750), but it lists no work on logic. Brockelmann, elsewhere, records a gloss on al-Sanūsī’s logic handbook by a Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Bannānī, for whom he gives the death dates 1163/1749 (al-Qādirī) and 1194/1780 (al-Kattānī). The question is left open here.

Uncertain or disputed

Name: Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Salām (Brockelmann; first volume of the Ibn Sūda lithograph) or Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan (Penn; second volume of the same lithograph).
Death date: about 1211/1796 (Brockelmann, for the commentator), 1194/1780 (Penn, for Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan), or 1163/1750 if he is the ḥadīth scholar Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Salām b. Ḥamdūn of the TDV, whose works as listed there include no logic.
Brockelmann’s ‘around 1211/1796’ is an estimate, not a recorded date.

Works

Sharḥ al-Bannānī ʿalā al-Sullam شَرْحُ البَنَّانِيِّ عَلَى السُّلَّمِ — بر al-Sullam al-munawraqLithographed Fez 1300, 1313, 1315; Cairo 1318 (Brockelmann); in a Fez volume of four works on the Sullam; ed. Māhir Muḥammad ʿAdnān ʿUthmān with Qaṣṣāra’s gloss (Istanbul: Dār Taḥqīq al-Kitāb, 2023).شرح

Reception

The commentary and its glosses dominate the Fez lithographs of the Sullam in the late nineteenth century, and it is still prescribed in the Mauritanian maḥaẓra.

Sources (3)