al-Wallālī | The Mantiqi

Moroccan logician, a student of al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī, who wrote the first commentary on al-Sanūsī’s logic compendium after the author’s own and a commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam (Meknes 1119/1707).

Life

Brockelmann, citing al-Qādirī’s Nashr al-mathānī, gives his name as Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Yaʿqūb al-Dilāʾī al-Wallālī and the date of his death as 1128/1716; he is usually called simply Aḥmad b. Yaʿqūb al-Wallālī. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi lists him among the students of the great Moroccan scholar al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī, himself a commentator on al-Sanūsī’s logic.

His main work in logic is Lawāmiʿ al-naẓar fī taḥqīq maʿānī al-Mukhtaṣar, a commentary on the Mukhtaṣar fī l-manṭiq of Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (d. 895/1490). In the description of his critical edition (Brill, 2022), Ibrahim Safri calls al-Wallālī the first commentator on al-Sanūsī’s compendium after the author’s own commentary and notes that his contemporaries regarded him as a master of the rational sciences on the strength of his writings on logic and philosophical theology; Safri uses the work to trace the indirect influence of Ibn Sīnā on logic in the Maghrib in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

His commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s verse primer, al-Qawl al-musallam fī taḥqīq maʿānī al-Sullam, was written, according to Brockelmann, in Meknes in 1119/1707; manuscripts are in London, Algiers and Rabat. It is one of the seven works printed together in the modern compilation Majmūʿ al-Sullam al-murawnaq, beside the commentaries of al-Damanhūrī, al-Quwaysinī, al-Akhḍarī himself and Saʿīd Qaddūra.

Uncertain or disputed

Form of the name: Brockelmann’s full form with the nisba al-Dilāʾī; the TDV and the modern edition call him Aḥmad b. Yaʿqūb al-Wallālī. His year of birth is not given in the sources consulted.
His studies with al-Yūsī are known here only from the TDV’s list of al-Yūsī’s students; Safri’s study of his life has not been consulted.

Works

Lawāmiʿ al-naẓar fī taḥqīq maʿānī al-Mukhtaṣar لَوَامِعُ النَّظَرِ فِي تَحْقِيقِ مَعَانِي المُخْتَصَرِ — atas al-SanūsīCommentary on al-Sanūsī’s Mukhtaṣar fī l-manṭiq; manuscripts in Rabat and Tlemcen (GAL S II 355–356); critical edition and study by Ibrahim Safri, Leiden: Brill, 2022 (Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science 120).syarah
al-Qawl al-musallam fī taḥqīq maʿānī al-Sullam القَوْلُ المُسَلَّمُ فِي تَحْقِيقِ مَعَانِي السُّلَّمِ — atas al-Sullam al-munawraqCommentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam, written in Meknes in 1119/1707 (GAL S II 705); printed in Majmūʿ al-Sullam al-murawnaq.syarah

Reception

With Saʿīd Qaddūra’s commentary, his is one of the two early Maghribī commentaries on the Sullam that are still printed today in the collected volume of seven works on the poem.

Sources (4)