al-Suyūṭī

Egyptian Shāfiʿī polymath of the late Mamluk period, the most prolific author of his age, who abridged Ibn Taymiyya’s refutation of the logicians and declared the study of logic forbidden.

Life

Al-Suyūṭī was born in Cairo on 1 Rajab 849 (3 October 1445) into a family from Asyūṭ in Upper Egypt. His father, a Shāfiʿī scholar who had studied with Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, died when he was about five. He memorised the standard texts, studied law with the chief judge Ṣāliḥ al-Bulqīnī, who licensed him to teach and give fatwas in 866/1462, and studied for fourteen years with Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Kāfiyajī, whom he called his ‘second father’; his hadith teachers number 195 in his own list. Apart from the pilgrimage of 869/1465 and a short journey to Damietta and Alexandria he never left Egypt. He taught hadith at the Shaykhūniyya from 877/1472 and was head of the Baybarsiyya khānqāh from about 1486 to 1500, a post that brought him into conflict with its members and the authorities. He spent his last years in seclusion on the island of Rawḍa in the Nile, where he died on 19 Jumādā I 911 (18 October 1505).

He wrote several hundred books and treatises, on Qurʾān, hadith, law, grammar, rhetoric and history. He regarded himself as the renewer of his century and as an absolute mujtahid in law, hadith and language, and argued that a mujtahid needs neither logic nor kalām. When his teacher al-Kāfiyajī urged him to write a commentary on a theological work, he declined for lack of interest in the subject (TDV).

Against logic he wrote, according to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, four works. The first, al-Qawl al-mushriq fī taḥrīm al-ishtighāl bi-l-manṭiq (‘The radiant word on the prohibition of occupying oneself with logic’), dates from 867 or 868 (1463–64), when he was about eighteen. He abridged Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Radd ʿalā al-manṭiqiyyīn as Jahd al-qarīḥa fī tajrīd al-Naṣīḥa, and with additions made of it Ṣawn al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām ʿan fannay al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām, which argues that a mujtahid does not need logic and that kalām had grown out of the ancient philosophy. The TDV concludes that these views show plainly the influence of Ibn Taymiyya. In rhetoric too he avoided logic: his versification of al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ, ʿUqūd al-jumān, leaves out its logical definitions and divisions.

Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that al-Suyūṭī’s view was not typical of his age. His most influential Shāfiʿī contemporaries and successors, Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, Shams al-Dīn al-Ramlī and Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, regarded logic as permitted or even a collective duty, and El-Rouayheb notes that al-Suyūṭī was not counted their equal in law; al-Suyūṭī himself thought he surpassed his peers in hadith, exegesis and grammar, but not in law. His argument that logic is useless because universals do not exist outside the mind was answered two centuries later by the Moroccan al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī.

Works

• al-Qawl al-mushriq fī taḥrīm al-ishtighāl bi-l-manṭiq القَوْلُ المُشْرِقُ فِي تَحْرِيمِ الاشْتِغَالِ بِالمَنْطِقِFatwa against the study of logic, written in 867 or 868 (1463–64); ed. Cairo 1959, Beirut 1996 (TDV).труд
• Jahd al-qarīḥa fī tajrīd al-Naṣīḥa جَهْدُ القَرِيحَةِ فِي تَجْرِيدِ النَّصِيحَةِ — к Ибн ТаймийяAbridgement of Ibn Taymiyya’s refutation of the logicians; translated into English by Wael B. Hallaq as Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians (Oxford 1993).труд
• Ṣawn al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām ʿan fannay al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām صَوْنُ المَنْطِقِ وَالكَلَامِ عَنْ فَنَّيِ المَنْطِقِ وَالكَلَامِExpanded form of Jahd al-qarīḥa; ed. ʿAlī Sāmī al-Nashshār, Cairo 1947 and later. Studied by Mufti Ali in Hamdard Islamicus 28/2 (2005) (TDV).труд
• ʿUqūd al-jumān fī l-maʿānī wa-l-bayān عُقُودُ الجُمَانِ فِي المَعَانِي وَالبَيَانِVerse version of al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ on rhetoric, omitting its logical definitions and divisions (TDV).стихотворное переложение

Reception

Ignaz Goldziher’s influential account of ‘orthodox’ hostility to the ancient sciences ends its list of opponents of logic with al-Suyūṭī; El-Rouayheb’s study was written to show that this line of opponents did not represent the mainstream between 1500 and 1800.

Through Hallaq’s translation of his abridgement, much of the modern English-speaking world has read Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of logic in al-Suyūṭī’s arrangement.

Al-Yūsī answered him in the seventeenth century; in the eighteenth, Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī quoted both his view and al-Yūsī’s reply in his commentary on al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ.