The Shamsiyya in the madrasa: teaching, translations and editions

1Six centuries in the classroom

The publisher of Tony Street’s edition sums up the Shamsiyya’s career in a sentence: it ‘has been used by madrasah students from the early eighth/fourteenth century to the present day’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that the textbooks of al-Abharī and al-Kātibī were used by Sunnīs and Shīʿīs alike, and it cites a legal opinion, one of several in which jurists called the study of logic a communal religious duty, that names ‘the works of al-Kātibī’ and al-Khūnajī, together with the Īsāghūjī and al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb, as logic whose study is permitted without dispute. Street notes that few people have read the book without a teacher, and that it displaced the logic of Ibn Sīnā’s Ishārāt as the standard way into the subject.

In most places the Shamsiyya was the second step. A student first memorised a primer, usually al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī or a version of it, read it again with a commentary, and then turned to the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary (the Quṭbī), al-Jurjānī’s gloss on that, and, at the highest level, superglosses. The pages below show how this pattern looked in different regions. The evidence is uneven, and for several regions only printed editions and scattered remarks are available.

2Mamluk Egypt and Syria

The book was read in the Arab lands within a century of its writing. The Egyptian scholar Jalāl al-Dīn al-Maḥallī (d. 864/1459) began a commentary on it (Ḥājjī Khalīfa), and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī himself spent his last years in Damascus. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records that Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar al-Biqāʿī (d. 885/1480) read ‘al-Kātibī’s al-Shamsiyya’ in 828/1425 with Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan al-Hindī. The Egyptian Dār al-Iftāʾ states that the Shamsiyya was taught ‘at al-Azhar and other institutions for centuries’ and that the biographical dictionary al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ mentions more than forty scholars who read it or commented on it.

3The Ottoman medrese

In the Ottoman lands the Shamsiyya was a core book from the beginning. M. Ali Aynî, writing in 1928, says that the first Ottoman scholars found in front of them al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī, al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya and al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ, and that the Shamsiyya and its commentaries were read ‘for centuries in all our madrasas’; al-Jurjānī’s gloss on the Quṭbī was known there as the Küçük Hâşiye, the ‘small gloss’. The curriculum reconstructed by Francis Robinson lists the Shamsiyya with the commentaries of Quṭb al-Dīn and al-Taftāzānī. Ḥājjī Khalīfa, himself an Ottoman scholar, calls the Quṭbī ‘current among the students’.

A rhymed study plan of 1165/1752, the Tertīb-i ʿulūm of Erzurumlu İbrāhīm Ḥaqqī, shows the place of the book precisely. The logic course begins with the Īsāghūjī, learned by heart, then the commentary of Ḥusām al-Kātī with the gloss of Muḥyī al-Dīn, then al-Fanārī with Qul Aḥmad’s gloss, then the Waladiyya on disputation; then: ‘Read the Shamsiyya and the Quṭb of logic; know Dāwūd and al-Sayyid, that exacting scholar’, that is, presumably, the Shamsiyya with Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary and the glosses of al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī and of Qara Dāwūd on it. Only after that comes al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb, with ‘Jalāl’ (al-Dawānī’s commentary) and ‘Mīr’. Khaled El-Rouayheb cites another eighteenth-century plan, Saçaklızâde’s Tartīb al-ʿulūm, which advised reading al-Fanārī’s commentary on the Īsāghūjī after Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya.

Ottoman scholars produced a large share of the glosses, and Istanbul presses printed the matn (1263, 1279, 1296 and 1308 according to the TDV), the Quṭbī with its glosses (from 1259 onwards) and al-Taftāzānī’s commentary (1272, 1312). In 1307/1889–90 Seyyid Muhammed Fevzi Efendi of Safranbolu published Tercümân-ı Şemsiyye, an Ottoman Turkish translation of the introduction and the part on conceptions, to start work on the book ‘in Turkish as in Arabic’; the TDV notes that no complete Turkish translation existed when it wrote in 2010.

4Iran and the Shīʿī world

The Shamsiyya was written in Iran, and its first commentator, al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī, was the leading Imāmī scholar of his age. Robinson’s list of the Safavid curriculum includes ‘Sharḥ-i Shamsiyya’ with Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary. Much of the most subtle glossing was done in Shiraz and Herat in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by Ṣadr al-Dīn and Ghiyāth al-Dīn al-Dashtakī, al-Dawānī, Mīr Abū al-Fatḥ and ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī (see ‘Commentaries and glosses’). Brockelmann records Tehran prints of the Quṭbī and El-Rouayheb one of al-Jurjānī’s gloss (1300/1883). Modern editions have come from Qom: al-Ḥillī’s commentary (1412/1991–92) and Muḥsin Bīdārfar’s edition of the Quṭbī with al-Jurjānī’s gloss (2004). The present place of the Shamsiyya in the curriculum of the Shīʿī seminaries could not be checked for this article.

5India, Pakistan and the Dars-i Niẓāmī

In India the Quṭbī was, as Street puts it, for a long time the main logic book taught. It was printed, with the text, at Fort William in Calcutta in 1815, and later many times in Lucknow, Cawnpore and Delhi, often with glosses in the margins. Al-Taftāzānī’s commentary was known in India as al-Saʿdiyya (TDV), and al-Jurjānī’s gloss as Mīr Quṭbī. The Indian contribution to the glosses was large: al-Siyālkūtī’s gloss on al-Jurjānī, Mīr Zāhid’s gloss with its series of Lucknow superglosses (if Brockelmann has identified it correctly), and works by scholars of Farangī Maḥall and Lucknow.

The Dars-i Niẓāmī, the course associated with Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn of Farangī Maḥall (d. 1748), included the Shamsiyya at several levels. Robinson’s reconstruction of its logic books lists ‘Sharḥ-i Shamsiyya’, the ‘Quṭbī’ and ‘Mīr Quṭbī’ among its eleven logic books, and also ‘Risāla Mīr Zāhid’, which he describes as a gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya (other sources connect Mīr Zāhid’s Risāla with Quṭb al-Dīn’s separate treatise on conception and assent). The Shamsiyya also shaped the newer Indian handbooks: the TDV states that Faḍl-i Imām Khayrābādī’s al-Mirqāt is based mainly on the Shamsiyya and the Tahdhīb, and Brockelmann records an Indian abridgement, Mīzān al-manṭiq, printed in Cawnpore in 1881 and 1889.

Today the Quṭbī is still part of the course. In the eight-year syllabus of Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband the logic books are Taysīr al-manṭiq in the first year, al-Mirqāt in the second, Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb in the third and the Quṭbī in the fourth. Pakistani publishers such as Maktaba al-Bushrā in Karachi print the Quṭbī with marginal glosses, and Urdu aids for students, such as Taysīr-i Quṭbī and Ashraf al-Quṭbī (on the part on conceptions), circulate widely. A Beirut publisher of 2021 also describes the Shamsiyya and its commentaries as part of the Dars-i Niẓāmī course ‘in Iraq and beyond’.

6Al-Azhar and Egypt

In Egypt the Shamsiyya’s Azhari glossators include Aḥmad al-Mallawī (d. 1181/1767), Muḥammad al-Dasūqī (d. 1230/1815), who studied and taught at al-Azhar, and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Shirbīnī (d. 1326/1908). Cairo printed the Quṭbī many times from 1293/1876 onwards; the government press at Bulaq issued the two-volume Shurūḥ al-Shamsiyya in 1323/1905, and the Azhar press (al-Maṭbaʿa al-Azhariyya) the Quṭbī with al-Jurjānī’s gloss in 1328/1910. The Dār al-Iftāʾ’s remark that it was taught at al-Azhar ‘for centuries’ fits these prints; when exactly it left the Azhar syllabus is not documented in the sources consulted.

7Central Asia, the Volga, the Caucasus and Southeast Asia

Scattered evidence shows the book further afield. The matn was printed in Tashkent in 1894 (TDV) and al-Jurjānī’s gloss in Kazan in 1888 (Brockelmann). The Tatar scholar Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī wrote a commentary on its introduction, which A. M. Salakhov cites as evidence of the Tatar scholars’ attention to logic and its teaching. In Dagestan the Islamic press of M. Mavraev in Temir-Khan-Shura printed the Quṭbī in 1915, in a second edition ‘with notes and remarks by the scholars of Dagestan’. In Java a living scholar, Miftāḥ b. Maʾmūn al-Shanjūrī, has written a set of notes on the Shamsiyya, al-Ḥāshiya al-Martiyya.

8Translations

The first European translation recorded is a Latin version, ‘Logica Solana’, by Dominicus Germanus de Silesia (d. 1670), which Brockelmann lists from a manuscript in the Escorial. The first printed translation is Aloys Sprenger’s English one, published in Calcutta in 1854 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal as the ‘First appendix to the Dictionary of the technical terms used in the sciences of the Mussalmans, containing the Logic of the Arabians, in the original Arabic, with an English translation’. Library catalogues and the scanned copy show the Arabic text and the translation together; the TDV, however, states that this issue has no Arabic text, and that the text and translation appear at the end of the first edition of al-Tahānawī’s Kashshāf iṣṭilāḥāt al-funūn (Calcutta 1862), edited under the supervision of Sprenger and W. Nassau Lees. Sprenger published a correction to his translation in 1857. Brockelmann also records a French translation by Abderrazzak Lacheref (Algiers 1905), which has not been seen.

A complete modern translation came only in the twenty-first century. Tony Street’s edition and translation with commentary appeared in the Library of Arabic Literature (NYU Press, 2024), and an English-only paperback, The Rules of Logic, followed in 2025. In Turkish, Ferruh Özpilavcı published an edition with translation and commentary (Istanbul: Litera, 2017). The sources consulted name no complete Persian or Urdu translation of the matn; the Urdu literature serves the Quṭbī.

9Editions and modern study

Until recently the Shamsiyya and its commentaries were known in print only from lithographs and early typeset editions. The TDV observed in 2010 that no critical edition of the text or its commentaries had yet been made. Mahdī Faḍl Allāh’s edition (Casablanca 1998) was based on three printed copies, not on manuscripts; Street’s edition of 2024 is the first to be accompanied by a full scholarly apparatus. Several commentaries now have modern editions: al-Ḥillī’s (Qom 1412/1991–92), Quṭb al-Dīn’s with al-Jurjānī’s gloss (Qom 2004), al-Taftāzānī’s (Amman 2011), al-Maybudī’s (Beirut 2021) and the short commentary attributed to al-Kātibī himself (2019).

Modern logicians discovered the book through Sprenger. Nicholas Rescher used his translation for his studies of temporal modal logic in Arabic, beginning with Temporal Modalities in Arabic Logic (Dordrecht; the TDV gives 1987, Street dates Rescher’s work on the Shamsiyya to 1967–1975), and El-Rouayheb credits him with reconstructing from the Shamsiyya ‘a sophisticated system of temporal and modal logic’. Street built his chapter on logic in the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (2005) on the Shamsiyya and later wrote a chapter on al-Kātibī, Quṭb al-Dīn and the Shamsiyya for the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2016). El-Rouayheb’s The Development of Arabic Logic (1200–1800) (2019) places its commentaries in the history of later Arabic logic. In Turkey Hüseyin Çaldak published a study of al-Kātibī and the Shamsiyya (1999), Ali Durusoy wrote the TDV article on the book (2010), and a Marmara University thesis compares the Shamsiyya with al-Kātibī’s other logic books. The works are listed in the catalogue of this section.