al-Sīrāfī

Grammarian of the Basran school and Ḥanafī jurist of Baghdad, remembered in the history of logic for his debate with the logician Abū Bishr Mattā on whether speakers of Arabic need Greek logic.

Life

Al-Sīrāfī was born in 284/897 in Sīrāf, a port on the Persian Gulf. His father, Bihzād, was a Zoroastrian who took the name ʿAbd Allāh on becoming a Muslim. After his first studies in Sīrāf he went to Oman at about twenty to study Ḥanafī law, and then to ʿAskar Mukram, where he read law and kalām with the Muʿtazilī Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-Ṣaymarī, together with astronomy and mathematics. In Baghdad he read the Qurʾān readings with Ibn Mujāhid and language with Ibn al-Sarrāj, Abū Bakr Ibn al-Anbārī, Ibn Durayd and Mabramān, and continued to study geometry and astronomy from the works of Euclid and Ptolemy.

The chief judge Ibn Maʿrūf made him his deputy as judge in Baghdad, and for fifty years he gave Ḥanafī fatwas in the Ruṣāfa mosque. He taught grammar above all, but also readings, hadith, law, kalām, logic and mathematics; his students included Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, al-Jawharī, Ibn Khālawayh, al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād and his own son Yūsuf. He took no pay for his teaching or his judgeship and lived by copying books. He died in Baghdad on 2 Rajab 368 (3 February 979). His fame as a grammarian rests on his very large commentary on Sībawayh’s Kitāb.

In the history of logic he is known for one event. In a disputation held before a vizier, he attacked the claim of the Christian logician Abū Bishr Mattā that speakers of Arabic needed Greek logic. Tony Street and Nadja Germann, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, describe how al-Sīrāfī ‘confounds him with a series of grammatical subtleties’, to which Abū Bishr could only answer that he had not studied grammar, that the logician deals with meaning and the grammarian with expression, and that meaning is the more exalted. In their judgement Abū Bishr’s position ‘weathered Sîrâfî’s storm of criticism badly’; at the least the debate shows that some scholars were sceptical of Aristotelian logic. The account is preserved by al-Sīrāfī’s student al-Tawḥīdī in al-Imtāʿ wa-l-muʾānasa.

The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi reads the debate as a contest between Arabic and Islamic learning, represented by language and law, and Greek learning, represented by philosophy and logic; its article on logic adds that the vizier’s approval of al-Sīrāfī shows the general mood against the logicians at the time. It also notes that al-Sīrāfī seems to have concluded that logic applies only to the language from which it came, and so confined Aristotle’s logic to Greek. Al-Sīrāfī later debated the philosopher Abū l-Ḥasan al-ʿĀmirī (364/974) on the meanings of the preposition bi-.

Works

• Sharḥ Kitāb Sībawayh شَرْحُ كِتَابِ سِيبَوَيْهِHis largest and most famous work; according to al-Tawḥīdī the autograph ran to 3,000 leaves. Partial ed. Damascus 1983; Cairo 1986.commentaar
• Akhbār al-naḥwiyyīn al-Baṣriyyīn أَخْبَارُ النَّحْوِيِّينَ البَصْرِيِّينَShort biographies of the Basran grammarians (ed. Krenkow, Beirut 1936).werk
• al-Iqnāʿ fī l-naḥw الإِقْنَاعُ فِي النَّحْوِGrammar left unfinished at his death and completed by his son Yūsuf.werk

Reception

Street and Germann show that the debate prompted al-Fārābī to give a more careful account of how logic, grammar and language are related.

According to the TDV, the grammarians’ challenge influenced later logicians, who gave the ‘discussions of expressions’ (mabāḥith al-alfāẓ) a place in their books.