The Ottoman medrese

1How we know what was read

No official Ottoman syllabus of logic survives. Fatma Zehra Pattabanoğlu notes that the most reliable record would have been the certificates (temessük) that teachers gave students as they rose from the lowest medrese to the highest, and that none of these is known to survive. What we have instead are descriptions: the anonymous Kevâkib-i sebʿa, written in 1741 at the request of the French ambassador, the Marquis de Villeneuve; İshak b. Hasan el-Tokadî’s (d. 1689) Naẓm al-ʿulūm; Saçaklızâde’s Tartīb al-ʿulūm; Erzurumlu İbrâhim Hakkı’s rhymed Tertîb-i ulûm; the autobiographies in Taşköprüzâde’s al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya and Kâtip Çelebi’s Mīzān al-ḥaqq; and the memoirs of later scholars such as Cevdet Paşa.

The medreses themselves were ranked by the daily stipend of their teachers, from the Ḥāshiya-yi Tajrīd medreses (the ‘twenties’) and the Miftāḥ medreses (the ‘thirties’), through the ‘forties’, the ‘fifties’ and the Ṣaḥn-ı Semān founded by Mehmed II, to the ‘sixties’ and the Süleymaniye. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, in its article on the medrese, counts logic among the ‘tool sciences’ read early in this ladder, but does not tie particular logic books to particular ranks. The scheme below is therefore a reconstruction from the reports, not a timetable.

2The earliest evidence

According to İbrahim Emiroğlu in the TDV article on logic, a curriculum regulation of the late fifteenth century prescribed, after grammar, the Īsāghūjī, the Shamsiyya and the commentary on the Maṭāliʿ. Francis Robinson’s reconstruction of the sixteenth-century course has the same backbone: the Īsāghūjī with many commentaries; al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya with the commentaries of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī and al-Taftāzānī and the notes of al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī; al-Ghurra fī l-manṭiq of al-Jurjānī’s son Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad; and al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār with Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary and al-Jurjānī’s gloss.

Taşköprüzâde Ahmed Efendi (d. 968/1561) describes the books he read as a student. In logic he read the short Īsāghūjī with Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Kātī’s commentary and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya with al-Jurjānī’s gloss; in the neighbouring subjects he read the Ādāb al-baḥth of Masʿūd al-Rūmī, al-Abharī’s Hidāyat al-ḥikma in the commentary of Mawlānāzāde with Hocazâde’s gloss, and the theological handbooks with al-Jurjānī’s commentaries. This is already the characteristic Ottoman pattern: a short primer through a short commentary, then a classic handbook through its most famous commentary and gloss.

3The eighteenth-century sequence

The fullest list is that of the Kevâkib-i sebʿa (1741), as summarised by Ülker Öktem and Pattabanoğlu. It gives the order of the logic books as: 1. the Īsāghūjī with its commentaries and glosses; 2. Ḥusām al-Kātī’s commentary with its gloss; 3. the ‘Risāla of Muḥyī al-Dīn’, that is, Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Tālishī’s gloss on al-Kātī; 4. al-Fanārī’s commentary with its gloss (Qul Aḥmad’s); 5. the Shamsiyya; 6. the Tahdhīb; 7. the commentary on the Shamsiyya, with the glosses of al-Sayyid (al-Jurjānī) and Qara Dāwūd; 8. Saʿd al-Dīn (al-Taftāzānī’s commentary); 9. the commentary on the Maṭāliʿ. The list names ‘Quṭb al-Dīn-i Shīrāzī’ for the Shamsiyya commentary, but the glosses it pairs with it are those on Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary.

Erzurumlu İbrâhim Hakkı’s Tertîb-i ulûm of 1165/1752 gives almost the same ladder, with the Waladiyya on disputation inserted before the Shamsiyya and the Tahdhīb, read with al-Dawānī’s commentary and Mīr’s gloss, at the end; it is set out in the article ‘The Īsāghūjī in the madrasa’.

Two features stand out. First, the Īsāghūjī was read several times over, through three or four commentaries and glosses of increasing difficulty, before a student touched a fuller handbook; El-Rouayheb notes that glosses and super-glosses on al-Fanārī’s commentary were written by Ottoman, Tatar and Azeri scholars. Second, the summit of the course was not a new handbook but al-Jurjānī’s glosses on Quṭb al-Dīn, which, El-Rouayheb writes, were themselves glossed heavily by Ottoman scholars.

4Teachers and critics

The course was carried by individual teachers. El-Rouayheb takes the many glosses and commentaries of Qaraja Aḥmad (d. 854/1450) on standard handbooks as evidence of his role as a logic teacher in Bursa. Two centuries later Kâtip Çelebi (d. 1067/1657) records in his Mīzān al-ḥaqq that he taught al-Fanārī and Sharḥ al-Shamsiyya in logic in 1645–47, and al-Maybudī’s commentary on Hidāyat al-ḥikma in philosophy in 1649–50, while complaining that later generations had dropped the books Mehmed II had prescribed, such as the gloss on the Tajrīd and the commentary on the Mawāqif, as mere ‘philosophy’. His teacher Kadızâde Mehmed, he reports, mocked the logicians; Pattabanoğlu names Birgivî Mehmed Efendi (d. 1573) and Kadızâde (d. 1635) as Ottoman opponents of the rational sciences.

Eighteenth-century critics attacked the method rather than the subject. Saçaklızâde Mehmed Efendi (d. 1145/1732) and Dāwūd Qārṣī objected to students being made to work through abstruse glosses before they understood the basics; their views, and Qārṣī’s ‘New Īsāghūjī’, are discussed in ‘The Īsāghūjī in the madrasa’ and ‘Scholars on studying logic’. Saçaklızâde’s own short Waladiyya on the rules of debate became a standard text of the course and was still printed in Cairo in 1331/1912–13 with the commentaries of ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Āmidī and Mehmed Behisnī.

5Gelenbevî and the Burhān

The one new Ottoman textbook of the period was the work of İsmâil Gelenbevî (al-Kalanbawī, 1143–1205/1730–1791). The TDV article on logic calls him the only notable original Ottoman author on logic between the fifteenth century and the Tanzimat, and his al-Burhān fī ʿilm al-mīzān, also known as Burhân-ı Gelenbevî or Mîzân-ı Gelenbevî, one of the rare works of classical logic written in the eighteenth century. Pattabanoğlu, following Abdülkuddüs Bingöl, describes it as the most important logic work of that century.

The Burhān soon gathered its own apparatus: Gelenbevî’s own gloss, Yûsuf Şükrü Harpûtî’s Nāmūs al-īqān (printed Istanbul 1274/1857–58), Hasan Hüsnî el-Mevsılî’s Tanwīr al-Burhān (Istanbul 1307/1889–90), a commentary on its preface by Ebü’l-Fuzalâ Mustafa el-Kutb er-Rizevî, and a commentary by the Iraqi scholar Ibn al-Qaradāghī. It was printed in Istanbul in 1253, 1289, 1306 and 1310 with the author’s gloss, and translated into Turkish with a commentary by Abdünnâfi İffet Efendi as Fenn-i Mantık (1295, 1297 and 1307). Gelenbevî also wrote a commentary on the Īsāghūjī (printed 1275 and 1283) and a treatise on disputation (printed 1281). The sources consulted do not say at which rank of the medrese the Burhān was read; its many printings and its Turkish translation show that it was a living textbook in the nineteenth century.

6Tanzimat and the last medreses

The Tanzimat reforms kept logic in the medrese, and from the second half of the nineteenth century, according to both Emiroğlu and Pattabanoğlu, a large number of logic textbooks were written in Turkish, most of them translations, commentaries or reworkings of the Īsāghūjī. Ahmed Cevdet Paşa’s Miʿyār-ı sedād (1877) is singled out as the best of them; his son Ali Sedad’s Mîzânü’l-ukūl fi’l-mantık ve’l-usûl (1885) was the first Turkish textbook to take in recent European logic, and after it Western models replaced the old one in the schools.

The reforms of the Second Constitutional period reorganised the medreses on the model of modern schools. After the 1914 Islāḥ-ı Medāris regulation, the Medresetü’l-mütehassısîn (opened 1915) had a branch of theology and philosophy in which, in the programmes of the early 1920s, logic was taught two hours a week in each year; the Dârülhilâfe medreses gave logic four hours a week in 1922 and three in 1923; and the Medresetü’l-vâizîn taught logic beside psychology and the history of philosophy. The 1921 regulation for the ordinary (ilmiye) medreses still named its courses after books in the old way: Zeki Salih Zengin notes ‘Isagoji ve Alâka’ (two hours) and ‘Mantık’ (five hours in each of two years) among them.

The Law on the Unification of Education of 3 March 1924 closed the medreses. Logic continued in schools and universities in a new form; Emiroğlu dates the arrival of modern logic in Turkish universities to Hans Reichenbach’s courses in Istanbul in 1938. The classical sequence survived outside the state system, in the informal madrasas of the Kurdish south-east, which are discussed in ‘Kurdish madrasas and the Shīʿī ḥawza’.