المَناهِج
Curricula
Which logic books were read, in which order, in the madrasas of the Ottoman lands, al-Azhar, the Maghrib, South Asia, Iran and Kurdistan, and the Malay world.
- 1Logic in the madrasa curriculumFrom Fez to Lucknow and from Istanbul to Java, logic was one of the ‘tool sciences’ that every madrasa student was expected to learn before the higher subjects. This article explains where logic sat in the course of study, what the regional sequences of logic books had in common, how they differed, and how they changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- 2The Dars-i NiẓāmīThe Dars-i Niẓāmī, the course associated with Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn of Farangī Maḥall in Lucknow, gave logic more room than any other madrasa curriculum, crowned by an Indian textbook, Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm. This article follows its logic books from the eighteenth century to the shortened courses of Deoband and the Pakistani boards today.
- 3The Ottoman medreseIn the Ottoman medrese logic began with the Īsāghūjī and its commentaries and rose through the Shamsiyya and its glosses to the commentary on the Maṭāliʿ. This article reconstructs the sequence from the reports of Taşköprüzâde, Kâtip Çelebi and an anonymous survey of 1741, introduces Gelenbevî’s Burhān, and follows logic through the late Ottoman reforms to the closing of the medreses in 1924.
- 4Al-Azhar and EgyptAt al-Azhar the beginner’s logic was North African in origin: al-Akhḍarī’s verse Sullam and al-Sanūsī’s handbook, read with commentaries by Egyptian shaykhs such as al-Mallawī, al-Damanhūrī, al-Ṣabbān and al-Bājūrī, beside the Īsāghūjī with Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī. This article reconstructs the eighteenth-century sequence and follows it through the reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- 5The Maghrib and MauritaniaNorth Africa produced the two short logic texts that dominated the western Islamic world: al-Sanūsī’s Mukhtaṣar and al-Akhḍarī’s verse Sullam. This article describes the distinctive Maghribī tradition, the local commentaries on the Sullam, the teaching institutions from the Zaytūna to the Mauritanian maḥẓara, and the limits of what the sources consulted can tell us.
- 6Kurdish madrasas and the Shīʿī ḥawzaKurdish madrasas kept a demanding logic course, taught from Arabic texts explained in Kurdish, into the twentieth century and in places until today. In Safavid and Qajar Iran the backbone was al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb with Mullā ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī’s commentary, and in the modern ḥawza of Najaf and Qom al-Muẓaffar’s al-Manṭiq has become the standard first book. This article describes both traditions.
- 7The pesantren and the Malay worldIn the pesantren of Java and Madura and the dayah of Aceh, logic arrived late and remained optional: where it is taught, the course is built on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam and its Egyptian commentaries, with the Īsāghūjī as an older and rarer alternative. This article traces how logic reached the archipelago, which books are read, and closes with a short note on the Volga-Ural region, Dagestan and Central Asia.