Mauritanian woman scholar and teacher whose marginal commentary (ṭurra) on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam is still glossed and studied in Mauritania.
Life
Ghadīja (in classical spelling Khadīja) bint al-ʿĀqil belonged to the Daymān, one of the scholarly lineages of the south-western Sahara, in the Gebla region of present-day Mauritania. An article on IslamOnline gives her name as Khadīja bint al-ʿĀqil b. Muḥammaḍ b. al-Māḥī al-Daymāniyya al-Shinqīṭiyya and makes her a granddaughter of the shaykh Muḥammaḍ b. al-Māḥī; it says that she learned from her father and directed a maḥaẓra, a Saharan school, of her own.
Her fame rests on her teaching. The same article names among her students her brother Aḥmad b. al-ʿĀqil (d. 1244/1828–29), Ḥurma b. ʿAbd al-Jalīl, and al-Mukhtār b. Būna al-Jakanī (d. 1220/1805), whom it calls ‘the Sībawayh of Shinqīṭ’ and the master of a school of grammar and logic, and quotes her brother as saying, when he had set out what the books contain, that ‘what our sister Khadīja holds is more correct and preferable’. She is remembered for her saying that something easy was ‘like logic with us’, which the article reports from al-Khalīl al-Naḥwī and from her family.
Her best-known work is a ṭurra, a short commentary written in the margins of the text, on al-Akhḍarī’s logic poem al-Sullam al-murawnaq. David Owen of Harvard, who works on her and on the logic manuscripts of West Africa, describes it as ‘the best known, and most reliably preserved, textual record of her teaching across the intellectual sciences’ of the core curriculum of Islamic West Africa, and notes that it is ‘still being glossed and reproduced for study in Mauritania’. He counts her as one of only two women authors on logic before Frege whose work is still extant. The IslamOnline article adds a commentary on al-Sanūsī’s creed Umm al-barāhīn and several didactic poems, among them one in Ḥassāniyya verse on the relation between rational existence and permanence; it notes that her logic work had not been printed.
Uncertain or disputed
- Dates: the IslamOnline article places her in the twelfth Hijri century (eighteenth century CE), which fits the death of her student al-Mukhtār b. Būna in 1220/1805; David Owen dates her death to about 1835 and her activity to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
- The vocalisation of her grandfather’s name Muḥammaḍ (محمض) follows the usual transliteration of this Mauritanian name and was not checked against a vocalised source.
- The list of her students and works rests on a popular article and a lecture announcement; a scholarly biography was not available.
Works
- Ṭurra ʿalā al-Sullam طُرَّةٌ عَلَى السُّلَّمِ — к al-Sullam al-munawraqMarginal commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s al-Sullam al-murawnaq; still glossed and copied for study in Mauritania (Owen). Unpublished (IslamOnline); Owen has announced a digital archive of Arabic logic texts with it as a centrepiece.комментарий
- Sharḥ Umm al-barāhīn شَرْحُ أُمِّ البَرَاهِينِ — к ас-СанусиCommentary on al-Sanūsī’s short creed (IslamOnline).комментарий
Reception
In Mauritanian memory she is the type of the learned woman of the Ahl al-ʿĀqil, and the saying ‘easy as logic with us’ is attributed to the women of the family.
David Owen’s lecture at the University of Bayreuth (13 November 2023), ‘Ghadīja Mint al-ʿĀqil and the Logic Manuscripts of Islamicate West Africa’, compared her treatment in the sources with that of her brother and student Aḥmad and introduced a digital archive of Arabic logic texts.
Sources (2)