The author: Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī

1Name and origins

His full name, as given by Şükrü Özen in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, is Saʿd al-Dīn Masʿūd b. Fakhr al-Dīn ʿUmar b. Burhān al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh al-Harawī al-Khurāsānī al-Taftāzānī. Saʿd al-Dīn (‘felicity of the religion’) is his honorific; in the madrasas he is simply ‘al-Saʿd’ or ‘al-ʿAllāma al-Taftāzānī’. The nisba refers to Taftāzān, a town in the district of Nasā in Khurasan.

Several regional historians give his birth as Ṣafar 722 (February 1322) in Taftāzān. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī and later authors who follow him give Ṣafar 712 (June 1312); the TDV considers this date inaccurate, but it survives in many catalogues, which write ‘712–793 H’. Little is known of his family. His father, Burhān al-Dīn ʿUmar, bore the title ‘chief judge’ (aqḍā al-quḍāt), and his grandfather Shams al-Dīn al-Ghāzī was a Sufi. His ethnic background is uncertain; some writers call him a Turk.

2Teachers

The sources name two famous teachers. The first is the theologian ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī, whose commentary on Ibn al-Ḥājib’s handbook of legal theory al-Taftāzānī later glossed. The TDV notes, however, that Wilferd Madelung has argued that al-Taftāzānī could not have studied with al-Ījī in person. The second is Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī, the author of the standard commentary on al-Kātibī’s al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya. A third teacher, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh b. Saʿd Allāh al-Qazwīnī, is also named.

The TDV adds a detail of the later biographical tradition: the Shiʿi author al-Khwānsārī identifies this Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī as an Imāmī and distinguishes him from the Sunni Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī. The link with Quṭb al-Dīn matters for the Tahdhīb: the student was later to compress into a few pages the logic of the Shamsiyya on which his teacher had written the classic commentary.

3A scholar on the move

Al-Taftāzānī’s life can be traced through the colophons of his books, which record where and when they were finished. He began very young: his commentary on al-Zanjānī’s morphology, Sharḥ Taṣrīf al-Zanjānī, was completed on 15 Shaʿbān 738 (8 March 1338) at Faryūmad, when he was sixteen. His great commentary on the rhetoric of al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ, al-Muṭawwal, is dated by the Amman edition’s biography to 748 at Herat; its abridgement, al-Mukhtaṣar, was finished in 756/1355 at Ghijduvān and dedicated to the Golden Horde khan Jānī Beg. His commentary on the logic of al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya was written, according to the same biography, at Mazār-i Jām.

The commentary on Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa’s legal theory, al-Talwīḥ, was completed on 29 Dhū al-Qaʿda 758 (13 November 1357) at Gulistān-i Turkistān, a village near Ṭūs; the commentary on al-Nasafī’s creed, Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid, in Shaʿbān 768 (April 1367) in Khwarazm; and the commentary on al-Ījī’s commentary on Ibn al-Ḥājib in Dhū al-Ḥijja 770 (July 1369), also in Khwarazm. He wrote al-Irshād, a short grammar, in 778/1376 for his son Muḥammad, and a Shāfiʿī legal handbook, Miftāḥ al-fiqh, at Sarakhs in 782/1380. The list of places, Herat, Mazār-i Jām, Ghijduvān, Gulistān, Khwarazm and Sarakhs, shows a scholar who moved constantly, and the TDV notes that his prefaces complain of exile and hardship.

4Samarqand and Timur

After Timur took Khwarazm, he brought al-Taftāzānī to Samarqand, where he taught and wrote for several years. The TDV reports that Timur honoured him and reportedly made him chief judge (qāḍī ʿaskar), though his influence later declined. In Samarqand he finished his large theological work al-Maqāṣid with its commentary in Dhū al-Qaʿda 784 (January 1383), and in 789/1387 the Tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām, whose kalām part abridges al-Maqāṣid. The Amman edition’s biography also dates his commentary on al-Sakkākī’s Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm to 789 in Samarqand.

In the same year Timur took Shiraz and brought to Samarqand the other great scholar of the age, al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 816/1413). The two disputed at Timur’s court on a point of rhetoric: the kind of metaphor in the preposition ʿalā in Qurʾān 2:5 (‘they are upon guidance from their Lord’). Al-Taftāzānī held that two kinds of metaphor could be combined there; al-Jurjānī denied it. According to the TDV, al-Jurjānī was judged the winner and Timur ordered that he be seated above al-Taftāzānī, which grieved the older scholar. The story became part of madrasa lore, and generations of students read the books of both men side by side.

5Death and burial

Al-Taftāzānī died in Samarqand on 22 Muḥarram 792 (10 January 1390). As he had wished, his body was taken to Sarakhs, where it was buried on 9 Jumādā I 792 (25 April 1390). Other dates circulate: Faṣīḥī gives 787/1385, Ibn ʿArabshāh Muḥarram 791 (January 1389), and a chronogram attributed to al-Jurjānī yields 793/1391. Many library catalogues and printed title pages use 793; the TDV prefers 792.

His learning continued in his family. His son Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad and his grandson Quṭb al-Dīn Yaḥyā were respected scholars, and a later descendant, Shaykh al-Islām Aḥmad of Herat, known as al-Ḥafīd (‘the grandson’), wrote a commentary on the Tahdhīb. Among his students the TDV names Burhān al-Dīn Ḥaydar al-Harawī, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Bukhārī, ʿAlī b. Mūsā al-Rūmī, Kara Dāvud and Luṭf Allāh al-Samarqandī.

6Writings

The works securely attributed to al-Taftāzānī cover most subjects of the madrasa. In Arabic grammar and rhetoric: the commentary on al-Zanjānī’s Taṣrīf, al-Irshād, al-Muṭawwal and al-Mukhtaṣar, and the commentary on the Miftāḥ. In legal theory: al-Talwīḥ and the gloss on al-Ījī’s commentary on Ibn al-Ḥājib’s Mukhtaṣar. In law: Miftāḥ al-fiqh and an unfinished commentary on Talkhīṣ al-Jāmiʿ al-kabīr. In theology: Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafiyya and al-Maqāṣid with its commentary. In Qurʾānic exegesis: an unfinished gloss on al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Kashshāf. In logic: the commentary on the Shamsiyya and the Tahdhīb.

The biography in the Amman edition, following Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn al-Qālish, notes that many further titles have been attributed to him, twenty-three in al-Qālish’s count, but that none of them is referred to in his own surviving books, and no author who studied his works quotes from them. They should be treated with caution.

7His logic

Al-Taftāzānī’s two logic books stand at opposite ends of the scale. His commentary on the Shamsiyya is, according to the TDV, a commentary on its first section, on conceptions; Robinson’s list of the logic books of the Indian Dars-i Niẓāmī notes that the Shamsiyya was studied with the commentaries of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī and al-Taftāzānī. The Tahdhīb, by contrast, condenses most of the questions of the Shamsiyya into a few pages, as al-Khabīṣī observed. Kâtib Çelebi, in the TDV’s paraphrase, considered its logic part the best work written on the subject.

The Tahdhīb is not a neutral summary. It takes positions in a word, as when it says that ‘the truth is that the natural universal exists in the sense that its individuals exist’. Its rule (ḍābiṭa) of the conditions of the four syllogistic figures, which states all the conditions in a single formula, is described by the editor of the Amman edition as one of al-Taftāzānī’s innovations, and became a topic of its own in the commentaries. His logic belongs to the tradition of the thirteenth-century handbooks of al-Khūnajī, al-Abharī and al-Kātibī; a later fatwa on the permissibility of logic, translated by El-Rouayheb and quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, places ‘Saʿd al-Dīn’ alongside these authors as an example of logic ‘not mixed with philosophy’.

8His place in the curriculum

Few authors were read as widely in the madrasas. The TDV notes that al-Muṭawwal and al-Mukhtaṣar remained core textbooks of rhetoric, some of them still taught today, and that Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid became one of the basic texts of the Ottoman madrasa. Ibn Khaldūn praised him as the most authoritative scholar of his time; the Ottoman scholar Molla Fenârî is said to have urged his students to read his books, even extending their holidays so that they could copy them; and the TDV records that Ottoman writers used the Turkish phrase ‘Saʿdeyn gibi’ (‘like the two Saʿds’) to praise a scholar’s rank. The TDV also warns against concluding that Ottoman thought was built only on his Ashʿarī theology: the madrasas taught authors of other schools as well.

Francis Robinson’s comparison of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal curricula shows how far his books travelled. In his Ottoman list al-Taftāzānī appears as a commentator on the Shamsiyya, on the Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ and, with al-Talwīḥ, in legal theory. In the Safavid list the Talkhīṣ is studied with al-Muṭawwal and al-Mukhtaṣar, and logic includes ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī’s commentary on the Tahdhīb. In the Indian Dars-i Niẓāmī the logic books include the Shamsiyya, studied with the commentaries of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī and al-Taftāzānī, the Tahdhīb itself, al-Yazdī’s ‘Sharḥ-i Tahdhīb’ and ‘Mullā Jalāl’, a gloss on al-Dawānī’s commentary on the Tahdhīb. A student in Istanbul, Isfahan or Lucknow could thus spend a large part of his education with al-Taftāzānī’s books.