al-Khūnajī | The Mantiqi

Logician, physician and Shāfiʿī judge in Cairo whose Kashf al-asrār reshaped the logic of Ibn Sīnā and set the agenda for al-Abharī, al-Kātibī and the later madrasa handbooks.

Life

According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, al-Khūnajī was born in 590/1194 in Khūnaj, an old town of Azerbaijan between Maragha and Zanjan. Little is known about his life. He went to Egypt, taught at the Ṣalāḥiyya and other madrasas of Cairo, and towards the end of his life became a judge and then chief judge (qāḍī al-quḍāt) of Egypt. He died in Cairo on 5 Ramaḍān 646/22 December 1248 and was buried at the foot of the Muqaṭṭam hills.

He was also a physician: his student Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, who praised him as ‘the master of the scholars and philosophers’, read with him the general part (Kulliyyāt) of Ibn Sīnā’s Canon, and he wrote on the pulse and on fevers. His appointment as a judge was not welcomed by all: al-Suyūṭī later lamented that a ‘philosopher’ had replaced ʿIzz al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Salām. Ibn Taymiyya relates an anecdote that on his deathbed he said he was dying without truly knowing anything. Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī, author of Maṭāliʿ al-anwār, is named by the TDV as his pupil or protégé.

His importance lies in logic. Ibn Khaldūn named him, after Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, as the scholar ‘on whom Eastern scholars rely even now’, and complained that with them ‘the books and ways of the ancients have been abandoned’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy judges that he made more, and more substantive, changes to Avicennan logic than al-Rāzī, ‘often taking a strong stand against both Rāzī’s position and Avicenna’s’, and that both the North African and the Eastern traditions of logic are strongly influenced by him. A quarter of the four hundred pages of his Kashf al-asrār is given to syllogisms with conditional and disjunctive premises, developed far beyond Ibn Sīnā. He also held that the subject matter of logic is conceptions and assents, not Ibn Sīnā’s secondary intelligibles; al-Abharī and al-Kātibī followed him on this, while al-Ṭūsī defended Ibn Sīnā.

His influence came through his readers. In Maragha al-Kātibī taught the Kashf to students and wrote a large commentary on it, and al-Abharī adopted several of its positions. In North Africa his short handbook al-Jumal became a school text: Ibn Khaldūn read it as a student, and it was commented on by Ibn Khaldūn’s teacher al-Sharīf al-Tilimsānī, by Ibn Marzūq al-Ḥafīd, who also versified it, and by al-Sanūsī.

Uncertain or disputed

Year of death: 5 Ramaḍān 646/22 December 1248 (TDV); the Stanford Encyclopedia gives 1248 in one place and 1249 in another; Kashf al-ẓunūn (entry ‘Kashf al-asrār’) and the Dār al-Iftāʾ list of Shamsiyya commentators give 649.
Whether he was a student of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī: he is described as such, ‘probably pretty loosely’ in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia, which suggests at most an indirect link through al-Rāzī’s students.
His father’s name is given as Nāmāwar or Tāmūr (TDV).
Kashf al-ẓunūn presents al-Jumal as an abridgement of Ibn Marzūq’s Nihāyat al-amal; the TDV shows that the relation is the reverse (Ibn Marzūq commented on al-Jumal).

Works

Kashf al-asrār ʿan ghawāmiḍ al-afkār كَشْفُ الأَسْرَارِ عَنْ غَوَامِضِ الأَفْكَارِHis largest work on logic; commented on by al-Kātibī. Edited by Khaled El-Rouayheb (Tehran: Iranian Institute of Philosophy and Free University of Berlin, 2010), with a long introduction on the author.karya
al-Jumal (Mukhtaṣar al-Jumal) الجُمَلُA short handbook of the principles of logic, much read in North Africa; commented on by al-Sharīf al-Tilimsānī, Ibn Marzūq al-Ḥafīd (Nihāyat al-amal), al-Nadrūmī (Kifāyat al-ʿamal) and al-Sanūsī, and versified by Ibn Marzūq. Edited by Saʿd Ghurāb in Risālatān fī al-manṭiq (TDV).matan
al-Mūjaz fī al-manṭiq المُوجَزُ فِي المَنْطِقِA short work on logic, praised by Ibn Khaldūn; commented on by ʿĪsā b. Dāwūd al-Manṭiqī (al-Īḍāḥ).karya
Mukhtaṣar al-Maṭālib al-ʿāliyaAn abridgement of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s theological al-Maṭālib al-ʿāliya.karya
Medical worksA commentary on what Ibn Sīnā says on the pulse, a commentary on the Kulliyyāt, a treatise on swellings and a book on the periods of fevers (Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, via the TDV).karya

Reception

Ibn Khaldūn saw him as one of the two founders of the ‘new way’ of logic, and also blamed the habit of abridging and memorising textbooks, which he thought harmed learning, partly on al-Khūnajī’s handbooks.

A legal opinion quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy names al-Khūnajī’s Jumal, beside the , the Shamsiyya and the Tahdhīb, as logic ‘not mixed with philosophy’ whose study is permitted.

Buṭrus al-Tūlāwī’s introduction to logic of 1688 gives al-Khūnajī’s definition of the syllogism (Stanford Encyclopedia).

Sources (4)