Saʿīd Qaddūra

Mālikī muftī of Algiers and administrator of the endowments of its Great Mosque, whose commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam was the first major Maghribī commentary after the author’s own and was printed in Cairo and Fez.

Life

According to the edition of his commentary prepared by Muḥammad Hawwārī at the University of Tlemcen (2012), which draws on Abū l-Qāsim Saʿd Allāh’s cultural history of Algeria and on an autobiographical note by Qaddūra himself, his family came from a town called Qaddūra near the island of Djerba on the Tunisian coast and settled in Algiers in the tenth/sixteenth century; hence the nisbas al-Tūnisī and al-Jazāʾirī found in the catalogues. His kunya was Abū ʿUthmān. The year and place of his birth are not recorded.

He studied first in Algiers with Muḥammad b. Abī l-Qāsim al-Muṭmāṭī, then for about three years at the zāwiya of Abū ʿAlī b. Abhalūl al-Majājī near Ténès, whose two sons he describes as devoted to exegesis, ḥadīth, legal theory, logic, rhetoric, law and theology. When a man who resented a fatwā killed Muḥammad b. Abhalūl in 1008/1599–1600, Qaddūra was with him; he mourned him in a poem and later returned to al-Muṭmāṭī, with whom he read the Mukhtaṣar of Khalīl and Ibn al-Ḥājib, inheritance law and theology. Around 1012/1603–4 he went to Tlemcen to study ḥadīth, letters and rhetoric with Saʿīd al-Maqqarī, who licensed him to transmit the six books of ḥadīth, and there began his friendship with Aḥmad al-Maqqarī. He then travelled through the Sahara (Figuig, Tafilalt, Sijilmāsa, Tuwāt) and spent more than seven years in Fez, studying with Ibn Abī Maḥallī, before returning to Algiers around 1019; Ibrāhīm al-Laqānī also licensed him.

On his return he succeeded al-Muṭmāṭī as teacher at the Great Mosque of Algiers and administrator of its endowments, which were among the richest in the city, and from 1028/1619 he was Mālikī muftī, an office he held until his death. He was wealthy, paid the preachers of the city’s mosques from his own means, enlarged the Great Mosque, bought books for its library and built a zāwiya and a madrasa beside it for poor and foreign students. He taught the two Ṣaḥīḥs and the Muwaṭṭaʾ, and students came for licences from all over Algeria and beyond. He died in 1066/1656; the pasha of Algiers led his funeral. His sons Muḥammad and Aḥmad, and later his grandson Saʿīd b. Aḥmad, held the office of muftī after him.

His works, as listed in the Tlemcen edition, are a commentary on the preface of Khalīl’s Mukhtaṣar and a gloss on al-Laqānī’s commentary on it, the Nawāzil Tilimsāniyya, a work on al-Murādī’s grammar, a commentary on the Khazrajiyya on prosody, a gloss on al-Sanūsī’s commentary on his Ṣughrā, and his commentary on the Sullam.

Works

• Sharḥ al-Sullam al-murawnaq (Sharḥ Saʿīd Qaddūra ʿalā al-Sullam) شَرْحُ السُّلَّمِ المُرَوْنَقِ — к al-Sullam al-munawraqPrinted at Būlāq in 1285/1868 and in Cairo in 1318/1900 (Brockelmann, as cited in the catalogue), in a Fez lithograph with the notes (taqrīrāt) of Muḥammad al-Sijilmāsī, and in the modern collection Majmūʿ al-Sullam al-murawnaq; edited by Muḥammad Hawwārī (MA thesis, Tlemcen, 2012).комментарий
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā Sharḥ al-Ṣughrā li-l-Sanūsī — к ас-СанусиGloss on al-Sanūsī’s commentary on his short creed.глосса
• Sharḥ khuṭbat Mukhtaṣar KhalīlOn the preface of the Mālikī legal handbook; with a gloss on al-Laqānī’s commentary on the same preface.комментарий
• Sharḥ al-Manẓūma al-KhazrajiyyaOn prosody.комментарий

Reception

His commentary was, with al-Akhḍarī’s own and al-Wallālī’s, one of the first through which the poem was read in the Maghrib, and it is still printed with al-Bannānī’s and al-Sijilmāsī’s works in the Fez collections and in modern compilations (see ‘The Sullam in the madrasa’).