al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī

The leading Imāmī scholar of his age, a pupil of al-Ṭūsī and al-Kātibī, who wrote the first commentary on the Shamsiyya, al-Qawāʿid al-jaliyya, and taught Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī.

Life

Al-Ḥasan b. Yūsuf b. al-Muṭahhar was born in al-Ḥilla in Iraq in Ramaḍān 648 (December 1250). The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi reports that he began with his father Sadīd al-Dīn Yūsuf, read legal theory with his maternal uncle al-Muḥaqqiq al-Ḥillī and the rational sciences with Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, who influenced him most among his teachers; he also studied philosophy with Shams al-Dīn al-Kīshī and dialectic with Burhān al-Dīn al-Nasafī. Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī, the author of the Shamsiyya, counted him with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī as his best-known pupils; Tony Street dates this teaching to the years after the Maragha observatory was founded, and notes that al-Ḥillī thus received his logic from two masters with different views of how the subject should develop.

He spent much of his mature life in Baghdad and, after meeting the Ilkhan Öljeitü, at the Mongol capital Sulṭāniyya, where he arrived in 705/1305. Shīʿī sources credit his debates at court with the ruler’s turn to Twelver Shīʿism. After Öljeitü’s death he returned to al-Ḥilla in 716/1316, where he died in Muḥarram 726 (December 1325); he was buried in Najaf. His students included his son Fakhr al-Muḥaqqiqīn, his nephews ʿAmīd al-Dīn and Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn al-Aʿrajī, and the logician Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī, who read al-Ḥillī’s Qawāʿid al-aḥkām with him at Varāmīn in 713/1313.

He was above all a theologian and jurist, the figure who brought the Uṣūlī school of Imāmī law to its height; the TDV counts some 125 works known by title. In logic he wrote two commentaries that became school texts. Al-Qawāʿid al-jaliyya fī sharḥ al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya is the first commentary on the Shamsiyya in the traditional lists. Street notes a manuscript dated 1280, so that al-Ḥillī wrote it while al-Kātibī was alive or soon after his death, and calls it ‘often critical of Kātibī’s project’, adding that in his later commentary on al-Ṭūsī’s Tajrīd al-Ḥillī quietly adopted much of the Shamsiyya’s logic. That commentary on the logic of the Tajrīd, al-Jawhar al-naḍīd, discusses, for example, why the categories are treated in logic although they do not belong to it (SEP). He also commented on al-Kātibī’s Ḥikmat al-ʿayn and on al-Ṭūsī’s Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād (Kashf al-murād).

Works

• al-Qawāʿid al-jaliyya fī sharḥ al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya القَوَاعِدُ الجَلِيَّةُ فِي شَرْحِ الرِّسَالَةِ الشَّمْسِيَّةِ — بر al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaThe first commentary on the Shamsiyya; a manuscript is dated 1280 (Street). Edited by Fāris Ḥassūn (Qom 1412/1991–92; TDV) and by Ḥ. Tabrīziyān (Qom 1432/2012; Street).شرح
• al-Jawhar al-naḍīd fī sharḥ manṭiq al-Tajrīd الجَوْهَرُ النَّضِيدُ فِي شَرْحِ مَنْطِقِ التَّجْرِيدِCommentary on the logic of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’s Tajrīd (Tehran 1311, 1363; Bombay 1311; Qom 1369 sh.; TDV). Printed in the late nineteenth century and then used to introduce logic in Shīʿī seminaries (SEP).شرح
• Īḍāḥ al-maqāṣid (commentary on Ḥikmat al-ʿayn) إِيضَاحُ المَقَاصِدِ — بر al-KātibīCommentary on al-Kātibī’s Ḥikmat al-ʿayn on metaphysics and natural philosophy, ed. ʿAlī Naqī Munzawī (Tehran 1378/1959).شرح
• Kashf al-murād fī sharḥ Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād كَشْفُ المُرَادِ فِي شَرْحِ تَجْرِيدِ الاعْتِقَادِHis commentary on al-Ṭūsī’s theological handbook, printed many times.شرح

Reception

His Qawāʿid jaliyya was soon overshadowed by the commentary of his student Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī, with which, as Street notes, the Shamsiyya was most commonly read; but it is the first link in the long chain of Shamsiyya commentaries and now has two modern editions.

Through al-Jawhar al-naḍīd and Kashf al-murād his name remained central to the teaching of logic and theology in the Shīʿī seminaries, where the texts of al-Ṭūsī and al-Ḥillī came into use in the nineteenth century (SEP).