Kâtip Çelebi

Ottoman bibliographer, historian and geographer whose Kashf al-ẓunūn is the main early catalogue of the commentaries on the logic textbooks, and who taught logic himself while lamenting the decline of the rational sciences.

Life

Muṣṭafā b. ʿAbd Allāh was born in Istanbul in Dhū al-Qaʿda 1017/February 1609. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that he was known among the scholars as Kâtip Çelebi and among the clerks of the imperial council as Ḥājjī Khalīfa (Hacı Halife), and that most of what is known of his life comes from the autobiographical passages in his own books, above all Sullam al-wuṣūl and Mīzān al-ḥaqq. His father, a palace-trained soldier, had him taught the Qurʾān, grammar and calligraphy, and at fourteen took him into the accounting office of the Anatolian treasury, where he learned bookkeeping and the siyāqat script.

As a clerk he went with the army on the eastern campaigns of the 1620s and 1630s (Erzurum, Baghdad, Hamadan), losing his father in Mosul in 1626, and made the pilgrimage during the campaign of 1633–34 when the army withdrew to Aleppo. Between campaigns he attended the lessons of the preacher Qāḍīzāde Meḥmed in Istanbul, reading with him exegesis, al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ and the commentary on the Mawāqif. An inheritance later allowed him to give himself to study for about ten years. According to the TDV he read, among other books, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ and al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya with the muftī of Ermenek, Mollā Veliyyüddin, and he taught students of his own. He left his clerkship after a dispute over a post around 1645, and died on 27 Dhū al-Ḥijja 1067/6 October 1657; he was buried near the Zeyrek mosque.

His own record of what he taught is one of the few dated witnesses to the Ottoman logic course. Fatma Zehra Pattabanoğlu, citing his Mīzān al-ḥaqq, reports that in 1645–47 he taught ‘Fenârî’ (al-Fanārī’s commentary on the Īsāghūjī) and Sharḥ al-Shamsiyya in logic and the commentary on the Maqāṣid in theology, and in 1649–50 ‘Kadîmîr’, Qāḍī Mīr al-Maybudī’s commentary on Hidāyat al-ḥikma, in philosophy. In the same book he complains that the rational sciences were being dropped and that the books once prescribed were no longer read, and he tells how his teacher Qāḍīzāde asked in a sermon who would grieve if a logician died, an attitude he came to reject.

For the history of the logic textbooks his most important work is Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-l-funūn, the great bibliography of Arabic, Persian and Turkish books arranged by title, on which he worked for some twenty years (TDV). Its entries on the Īsāghūjī, the Shamsiyya and the Tahdhīb list the commentaries, glosses and versifications known to him, often with their opening words, form (bi-l-qawl or mamzūj) and date, and many works are known today only from these lines. His other books include the chronicles Fadhlakat al-tawārīkh and Fezleke, the naval history Tuḥfat al-kibār, the geography Cihannümâ, a translation of the Atlas Minor made with the convert Mehmed İhlâsî, and Mīzān al-ḥaqq, his last work, on the disputed questions of his day.

Works

• Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-l-funūn كَشْفُ الظُّنُونِ عَنْ أَسَامِي الكُتُبِ وَالفُنُونِBibliography arranged by title; the standard early source for the commentaries on the Īsāghūjī, the Shamsiyya and the Tahdhīb. Edited by Şerefettin Yaltkaya and Kilisli Rifat (Istanbul 1941–43).karya
• Mīzān al-ḥaqq fī ikhtiyār al-aḥaqqHis last work, in Turkish, on the controversies of his time; it contains his autobiography and his remarks on the teaching of logic and philosophy (printed Istanbul 1306).karya
• Sullam al-wuṣūl ilā ṭabaqāt al-fuḥūl سُلَّمُ الوُصُولِ إِلَى طَبَقَاتِ الفُحُولِBiographical dictionary of scholars, with an autobiography.karya
• CihannümâHis geography (printed by Müteferrika, Istanbul 1145/1732).karya
• Jāmiʿ al-mutūn min jall al-funūnAn anthology of summaries and commentaries of twenty-seven works that he read and taught (TDV).karya

Reception

Kashf al-ẓunūn is cited throughout the background pages of The Mantiqi: for the commentaries on the Īsāghūjī, for the dedication of the Shamsiyya to Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad, and for the commentaries on the Tahdhīb (I, 515–517), whose logic part he judged, in the TDV’s paraphrase, the best work written on the subject.

His complaints about the neglect of the rational sciences are regularly quoted in modern accounts of the Ottoman madrasa, while his own teaching shows that al-Fanārī and the Shamsiyya were still read in his time.