Modern study of Arabic logic

1The first studies and the ‘decline’ thesis

Modern study of Arabic logic began with general surveys. Ibrahim Madkour’s L’Organon d’Aristote dans le monde arabe (1934; second edition 1969) was, in Khaled El-Rouayheb’s words, the first major study; it assumed that the tradition declined after Ibn Sīnā and gave only a few pages to later developments. Nicholas Rescher’s Studies in the History of Arabic Logic (1963) and his bio-bibliographical survey The Development of Arabic Logic (1964), covering the eighth to the sixteenth century. Rescher held that the tradition declined steeply after the thirteenth century and had sunk by the sixteenth into ‘commentary-mongering’. He also reconstructed the temporal modal logic of al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya, working partly from Aloys Sprenger’s English translation of that text, published in Calcutta in 1854.

Alongside the surveys came editions. Between 1948 and 1952 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī published the medieval Arabic translation of Aristotle’s logical works (Manṭiq Arisṭū); a second edition by Jabre followed in 1999. From 1952 the logic of Ibn Sīnā’s Healing (al-Shifāʾ) was published in Cairo in several volumes, the Syllogism (al-Qiyās) in 1964 under the editorship of S. Zayed and Ibrahim Madkour. Nabil Shehaby’s Avicenna’s Propositional Logic (1973) is one of the major studies of Ibn Sīnā’s syllogistic with conditional and disjunctive premises.

The religious side of the story was shaped by Ignaz Goldziher’s article of 1916 on ‘the attitude of orthodox Islam towards the ancient sciences’, which claimed that after the thirteenth century the study of logic was more or less forbidden among Sunnis (see ‘Should a Muslim study logic?’).

2Rethinking the later tradition

From the 1990s the picture changed. Joep Lameer’s Al-Fārābī and Aristotelian Syllogistics (1994) studied al-Fārābī’s logic in relation to its Greek sources and Islamic practice. Dimitri Gutas’s Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (1988) and his Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998), on the translation movement, are widely used points of reference. Tony Street published, from 2000 onwards, a series of articles that El-Rouayheb calls seminal, a chapter on logic in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (2005) built around the Shamsiyya, and, with Nadja Germann, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry ‘Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Language and Logic’ (2008, revised 2013), which deliberately pays attention to logicians after the twelfth century. John Walbridge asked what role logic played in later Islamic scholarly culture, and Robert Wisnovsky pressed for a re-evaluation of the whole later tradition of philosophy and philosophical theology; see especially his ‘The nature and scope of Arabic philosophical commentary in post-classical (ca. 1100–1900 AD) Islamic intellectual history’ (2004).

Khaled El-Rouayheb (Harvard) has mapped much of the later tradition. His article on Sunni scholars and the status of logic (Islamic Law and Society, 2004) challenged Goldziher; he asked ‘Was there a revival of logical studies in eighteenth-century Egypt?’ (Die Welt des Islams, 2005); Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900–1900 (2010) followed one problem through a thousand years; he edited al-Khūnajī’s Kashf al-asrār (Tehran, 2010); and he wrote on the subject matter of logic among post-Avicennan logicians (Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 2012). His The Development of Arabic Logic (1200–1800) (Schwabe, 2019) is explicitly a corrective to Rescher’s book of the same title: organised by period and region, it introduces the main figures and works, while still recognising a real shift of emphasis in the Islamic East after the fourteenth century.

Asad Q. Ahmed (Berkeley) translated the logic of Ibn Sīnā’s Najāt (Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic, 2011), studied the later reading of Ibn Sīnā’s propositions by al-Urmawī and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Taḥtānī (2010) and logic in the Khayrābādī school of India (2012), and published Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (2022), the first full English translation of Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm with a study of its commentaries and a theory of commentary drawn from the tradition itself. It is freely available online.

3Logicians reading logicians

Another line of research, often by logicians and philosophers of logic, analyses the arguments themselves. Wilfrid Hodges (a model theorist) has translated sections of Ibn Sīnā’s logic, published draft books such as Mathematical Background to the Logic of Ibn Sina on his website, and written the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on al-Fārābī’s philosophy of logic and language with Therese-Anne Druart. With Ahmad Hasnawi, author of studies such as ‘Avicenna on the quantification of the predicate’ (2008) and on the Topics and syllogistic in al-Fārābī and Ibn Rushd (2009), he wrote ‘Arabic Logic up to Avicenna’ for The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (2016), in which El-Rouayheb wrote the companion chapter ‘Arabic Logic after Avicenna’.

Saloua Chatti (University of Tunis) has written Arabic Logic from al-Fārābī to Averroes (Birkhäuser, 2019), a study of the categorical, modal and hypothetical syllogistic of the early Arabic logicians, and has collaborated with Hodges. Riccardo Strobino (Tufts) works on Ibn Sīnā’s theory of demonstration and definition and wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia entry ‘Ibn Sina’s Logic’ (2018). Paul Thom’s Medieval Modal Systems (2003) discusses Ibn Sīnā’s and Ibn Rushd’s modal syllogistic.

Scholars still disagree about how original the later logicians were. Reviewing the Cambridge Companion, Allan Bäck questioned some of the priority claims made for thirteenth-century logicians and argued that their originality is hard to judge without a fuller account of Ibn Sīnā; Street, for his part, remarks in the Stanford Encyclopedia that he has never seen a later logician develop or even use some of Ibn Sīnā’s most impressive results, such as his work on proof theory.

4Editions, catalogues and tools

Many texts of the later tradition are still available only in manuscripts and nineteenth-century prints, and there are, as the TDV notes of the Shamsiyya, few critical editions. Some important modern editions: al-Khūnajī’s Kashf al-asrār (ed. El-Rouayheb, Tehran: Iranian Institute of Philosophy and Free University of Berlin, 2010); a reconstructed text of the Shamsiyya by Mahdī Faḍl Allāh (Casablanca, 1998); and Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on it with al-Jurjānī’s gloss, edited by Muḥsin Bīdārfar (Qum, 2004). In Turkey the Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) publishes classical texts with Turkish translations in its series Türk-İslam Bilim Kültür Mirası; its third volume is al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī, edited and translated by Hüseyin Sarıoğlu (2016).

For finding works, Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur is the basic bibliography, and Wisnovsky’s Post-classical Islamic Philosophy Database Initiative (PIPDI) at McGill has published a handlist, drawn from Brockelmann, of major post-classical works and their commentaries. For terminology there are the Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum, a lexicon of the medieval Arabic translations from Greek, and the Arabic and Latin Glossary edited by Dag Nikolaus Hasse and his team at Würzburg; the Avicenn@ project gathers resources on Ibn Sīnā.

5Journals

Much of the research appears in a handful of journals: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), Oriens (Brill), Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale and History and Philosophy of Logic, alongside Islamic studies journals such as Islamic Law and Society and Die Welt des Islams. In Turkey, Nazariyat (Istanbul) publishes in Turkish and English on Islamic philosophy and science, and Mantık Araştırmaları Dergisi (Journal of Logical Studies, Erciyes University, since 2019) is devoted to logic, including the classical tradition; its first issue carried a Turkish translation of El-Rouayheb’s 2004 article.

6Where to start reading: English

For a first overview: Tony Street and Nadja Germann’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry (free online), then Riccardo Strobino’s entry on Ibn Sīnā’s logic and Hodges and Druart’s on al-Fārābī. For the whole later history: El-Rouayheb’s The Development of Arabic Logic (1200–1800) (2019), read alongside his chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic. For how commentaries worked and how logic was taught in India: Ahmed’s Palimpsests of Themselves (free online). For the debate about logic: El-Rouayheb’s 2004 article and Wael Hallaq’s translation Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians (1993). For a text to read with a teacher: Ahmed’s translation of the logic of Ibn Sīnā’s Najāt (2011).

7Where to start reading: other languages

Turkish: İbrahim Emiroğlu’s article ‘Mantık’ in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, with the TDV’s articles on individual works such as the Shamsiyya; Sarıoğlu’s edition and translation of the Īsāghūjī (TÜBA, 2016, free online); and the journal Mantık Araştırmaları Dergisi.

Arabic: the classical reference entries, such as al-Tahānawī’s Kashshāf iṣṭilāḥāt al-funūn and Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s Abjad al-ʿulūm on ʿilm al-manṭiq; al-Azhar’s secondary-school textbook ʿIlm al-manṭiq (2024–25, free online), a clear modern introduction based on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam and al-Mallawī’s commentary; and Badawī’s edition of the Arabic Organon.

Persian and the Iranian tradition: the scholarly editions published in Iran, such as al-Khūnajī’s Kashf al-asrār (Tehran, 2010) and Bīdārfar’s edition of the Shamsiyya commentary (Qum, 2004). A general introduction in Persian could not be verified for this article.

Urdu: the madrasas of South Asia begin logic with the primer Taysīr al-manṭiq, which booksellers issue in one volume with the Īsāghūjī and al-Mirqāt, and Urdu commentaries on the standard texts are numerous (see the articles on al-Mirqāt); one example is Iftikhār Aḥmad’s Tawḍīḥāt, sharḥ-i Urdū Mirqāt, available in the Rekhta digital library.

Indonesian and Malay: Ahwan Fanani and Mohammad Syifa Amin Widigdo’s survey of the transmission of manṭiq to Indonesia (Afkar, 2022, in English with a Malay abstract) is the best starting point; it points to Muḥammad Nūr al-Ibrāhīmī’s Arabic handbook ʿIlm al-manṭiq li-l-madāris al-ʿarabiyya wa-l-maʿāhid al-dīniyya bi-Indūnīsiyā (1927), to Joesoef Sou’yb’s Logika: Kaidah Berpikir secara Tepat (Jakarta, 1997), which gives Indonesian, English and Arabic equivalents of logical terms, and to Zainun Kamal’s study of Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of Aristotelian logic (Jakarta, 1995).