The Sullam in the madrasa

1A first book to learn by heart

The Sullam was written to be memorised. Its rajaz lines rhyme in pairs and pack a definition or a rule into a few words, and al-Akhḍarī says in his commentary that whoever memorises and understands it gains an entry into logic and a help to understanding the long books. The recordings made today for students who memorise it, and the marginal commentaries written by teachers in Mauritania and elsewhere, show the usual pattern: the student learns the verses by heart and reads them with a teacher and a commentary, usually one of the Cairo commentaries or a local one.

The reach of the poem is described in similar terms by very different sources. The University of Biskra writes that it was studied ‘from West Africa to Southeast Asia’; WAAMD calls al-Akhḍarī perhaps the most widely studied logician in West Africa; David Owen of Harvard, in a lecture of 2023, called the Sullam probably the most widely studied work of Arabic logic today. In the regions described below it largely took the place that the Īsāghūjī held in Ottoman and Indian schools, though the two books often stood side by side; see ‘The curriculum’ for the Īsāghūjī.

2The Maghrib

The poem was written in Algeria, and the first commentaries on it came from the Maghrib: the author’s own, that of Saʿīd Qaddūra of Algiers (d. 1066/1656) and that of al-Wallālī, written in Meknes in 1119/1707. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Bīshī, writing for IslamOnline, lists the Algerian zāwiyas, the Moroccan institutes and the Zaytūna mosque in Tunis among the places where it was a standard text. The many Fez lithographs of the late nineteenth century confirm its place in Morocco: al-Bannānī’s commentary was lithographed there at least three times between 1300 and 1315 (1883–1898), with the glosses of Qaṣṣāra and Ibn Sūda, and one volume combined four works on the poem.

Algerian scholars continue to edit the tradition: the author’s commentary was edited in 2006 in a series devoted to Algerian texts, and Saʿīd Qaddūra’s commentary was edited as a master’s thesis at the University of Tlemcen in 2012.

3Mauritania and West Africa

In the maḥaẓra, the nomadic and village schools of Mauritania, the Sullam was the logic text. The large number of local commentaries recorded in WAAMD, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and many of them short marginal commentaries (ṭurra), shows how intensively it was read: teachers’ explanations were written down around the text, and a good ṭurra could itself be copied and glossed. The ṭurra of Ghadīja bint al-ʿĀqil, a woman scholar of the twelfth/eighteenth century, is still glossed and reproduced for study, and a gloss on the ṭurra of Muḥanḍ Bāba (d. 1277/1860–61) circulates today in a digital copy. A curriculum of the Nabbāghiyya maḥaẓra, published online in 2008, lists the Sullam among the books on grammar, morphology, logic and rhetoric, to be read with a commentary called al-Mufhim and with al-Bannānī’s commentary.

The poem was known far to the south and east of Mauritania as well. A commentary by a Fulani scholar, Daraj al-Sullam al-murawnaq, is recorded among the manuscripts of the library of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar at Ségou, and one manuscript survey alone records twenty copies of the poem in West African collections.

4Egypt, al-Azhar and the Ottoman lands

At al-Azhar the Sullam was taught together with the Īsāghūjī, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Azhar commentaries became its standard companions everywhere: al-Mallawī’s small commentary, which according to Egypt’s Dār al-Iftāʾ remained a staple of Azhar teaching for decades, al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham, al-Quwaysinī’s commentary and al-Bājūrī’s gloss. Al-Quwaysinī himself became Shaykh al-Azhar in 1250/1834.

The poem is still part of the Azhar school system. The textbook of logic for the first year of the secondary stage in the Azhar institutes, Taysīr sharḥ al-Mallawī (2016–17), is described in its preface as a simplified selection from two classical books, al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam and al-Mallawī’s commentary on it; the preface notes that the poem’s many commentaries ‘were well received by students and enjoyed the attention of the scholars of al-Azhar’. Its aims include learning the scholars’ views on whether logic may be studied, the difference between conception and assent, the kinds of signification and the five universals. In Jordan, the publisher of Bilāl al-Najjār’s gloss on Īḍāḥ al-mubham presents the Īḍāḥ as a primary text for teaching beginners.

The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that the Sullam was also used as a textbook in Ottoman madrasas, where it was translated into Ottoman Turkish twice. Further east, Bediüzzaman Said Nursi’s Arabic commentary Qızıl Ījāz and the glosses on it show that it was studied in the madrasas of eastern Anatolia. In Dagestan, ʿAlī al-Ghumūqī copied al-Damanhūrī’s commentary in 1311/1894, at the age of fifteen, and Tatar students also read the poem; see ‘The curriculum’.

5The Malay world

In Indonesia the Sullam is by far the most common logic text. In Martin van Bruinessen’s survey of the books used in pesantren (1990), the most widely used textbook of logic is ‘Sullamul Munauraq’, read with al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham, in whose printed edition al-Akhḍarī’s own commentary stands in the margin; the commentaries of al-Quwaysinī and of al-Mallawī with al-Ṣabbān’s glosses are also common. Logic was not taught everywhere: in Mastuhu’s study of six major pesantren in Java and Madura, only Tebuireng taught it, using the Sullam.

The manuscripts show that the poem arrived early. A volume from the Surau Simaung in Sijunjung, West Sumatra, digitised by the DREAMSEA project, contains the Sullam together with logic texts of Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī and others, in a copy dated Muḥarram 1231 (December 1815). Four manuscripts of the poem are recorded at the Dayah Tanoh Abee in Aceh, one with a date of 1277 and with marginal notes that show classroom use.

Indonesian scholars have also written their own aids. Kiai Bisri Mustofa put the poem into Javanese verse; Cholil Bisri Mustofa published an Indonesian translation in 1989; Kiai Sahal Mahfudh wrote two explanatory works as a student at Sarang; and KH Imaduddin Utsman al-Bantanie wrote a Javanese commentary that he later turned into an Arabic one (2023). An Arabic summary of Īḍāḥ al-mubham for beginners, Maʿrifat al-manṭiq li-l-mubtadiʾīn, circulates online. Indonesian universities now study the poem as literature too, with theses on its prosody and on the rhymed prose of its closing lines. In Malaysia the Malay commentary al-Ghayth al-mughdiq records the lessons of a Moroccan teacher to Malay students, and a thesis of 2003 compared the logic of the Sullam with modern logic for mathematics teaching.

6Printing

The Sullam reached print early. Brockelmann records it in the collection Majmūʿ muhimmāt al-mutūn printed at Būlāq in 1241/1825–26, with further Cairo printings in 1280, 1281 and 1295 and a Fez collection of 1317. The commentaries followed in the second half of the nineteenth century: al-Mallawī with al-Ṣabbān’s gloss at Būlāq in 1285/1868, Saʿīd Qaddūra in the same year, al-Bājūrī’s gloss from 1282/1865–66, al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham from 1293/1876, the Fez lithographs of al-Bannānī and his glossators from 1300/1883, and al-Quwaysinī at Fez in 1319/1901.

In the twentieth century the Cairo house of Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī printed al-Quwaysinī’s commentary (1933), Īḍāḥ al-mubham and al-Akhḍarī’s own commentary, and Indonesian publishers reprinted them for the pesantren. Recent critical or carefully set editions include al-Akhḍarī’s commentary (Beirut 2006), Īḍāḥ al-mubham (Damascus 2001, Cairo 2008, Diyarbakır 2014), al-Ṣabbān’s gloss (Cairo 2015, Istanbul 2020) and the commentaries of al-Bājūrī and al-Bannānī with their glosses (Istanbul 2023). The text of the poem is printed together with the Īsāghūjī in the vocalised edition of ʿAlawī al-Saqqāf (Jakarta 2013) that The Mantiqi uses for the Īsāghūjī, and an edition of the poem by Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Buḥayrī and a digital text in the OpenITI corpus are available online.

7Translations

French: J.-D. Luciani published a French translation, Le Soullam, traité de logique, in Algiers in 1921; Brockelmann and the TDV both record it. Ottoman Turkish: Rifʿat Efendi’s Wasīlat al-īqān (Istanbul 1317/1899–1900) and Maḥmūd Nedīm’s al-Sanad al-muḥkam fī tarjamat al-Sullam are translations with commentary. Modern Turkish readers have Nursi’s Qızıl Ījāz in two Turkish versions of 2020.

Javanese and Indonesian: Bisri Mustofa’s Javanese verse translation and Cholil Bisri’s Indonesian translation (1989) were mentioned above. Malay: the commentary al-Ghayth al-mughdiq, rather than a translation, is the work found in the sources consulted.

English: no printed English translation was found. An English rendering of the whole poem, section by section, has been published online by the Indonesian site Terjemahkitab under the supervision of Muhammad Ali Fathomi, and English-language courses refer to the poem as ‘The Ornamented Ladder into the Science of Logic’ or ‘The Ornamental Ladder’. Urdu: no Urdu translation or commentary was found in the sources consulted; in South Asia the logic course is built on the Īsāghūjī and the Indian handbooks instead (see ‘Al-Mirqāt in the madrasa’).

8Studies and online teaching

Academic work on the Sullam is still scattered. In Turkey there are two master’s theses, one on the poem itself and its contribution to teaching logic (Süleyman Demirel University, 2017) and one on verse logic and Maḥmūd Nedīm’s commentary (Marmara University, 2019), and Mehmet Salih Geçit’s articles on Qızıl Ījāz and its glosses (2022, 2024). Indonesian studies treat its metre (UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung, 2024) and its rhymed prose (Tumanurung, 2025), and Ahwan Fanani has placed it in the history of logic in Indonesia. David Owen’s work on Ghadīja bint al-ʿĀqil opens the Mauritanian ṭurra tradition to the study of Arabic logic.

The poem is also taught online. SeekersGuidance published a complete audio recording of the poem by Shaykh Ahmed Saad al-Azhari, of the Ihsan Institute, for students memorising it; the Key to the Garden Institute offers a word-by-word explanation as an online course; and recorded Arabic lesson series by Aḥmad b. ʿUmar al-Ḥāzimī, Walīd al-Munīsī, Bilāl al-Najjār and others, on the poem and on its commentaries, are freely available on archive.org. The Shamela digital library holds a transcript of al-Ḥāzimī’s lessons on al-Quwaysinī’s commentary.