ʿAlī al-ʿAjamī

Eastern scholar, reportedly a student of al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī, who settled in the Ottoman lands under Murād II and wrote a gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya and al-Jurjānī’s gloss on it.

Life

Little is known about his life. Khaled El-Rouayheb, drawing on Ṭāşköprüzāde’s biographies of Ottoman scholars, reports that he was said to be a student of al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī, that he moved to the Ottoman lands in the reign of Murād II, and that he was given a teaching post at a college in Bursa. He died in 860/1456, the date also given by Kâtib Çelebi in Kashf al-ẓunūn. El-Rouayheb suggests that the prestige of such incoming Eastern pupils of al-Jurjānī helps explain why al-Jurjānī’s gloss overshadowed the earlier Anatolian gloss of Ḥājjī Pāşā.

His gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya and on al-Jurjānī’s glosses is, according to El-Rouayheb, divided into three parts of roughly equal length, each with its own preamble: on the preliminaries, on the five universals and on the assents; not all manuscripts contain all three. Kashf al-ẓunūn and the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi list it among the many glosses on al-Jurjānī’s ‘small gloss’. El-Rouayheb also records a gloss by him on al-Jurjānī’s gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār, completed in 849/1445.

Works

• Gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya and al-Jurjānī’s gloss — atas al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-JurjānīIn three parts of roughly equal length (preliminaries, five universals, assents), each with its own preamble (El-Rouayheb). Manuscript.hasyiyah
• Gloss on al-Jurjānī’s gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the MaṭāliʿCompleted 849/1445 (El-Rouayheb); Kashf al-ẓunūn also names him among the glossators in its entry on the Maṭāliʿ.hasyiyah

Reception

His gloss is one of the earliest of the Ottoman glosses on al-Jurjānī’s gloss on the Quṭbī, which became one of the most studied texts of later Ottoman logic.