ʿIṣām al-Dīn

Khurasanian master of grammar, rhetoric, logic and theology, whose glosses on standard madrasa texts, among them Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya, were printed in Istanbul and Cairo.

Life

ʿIṣām al-Dīn was born in 873/1468 at Isfarāyin near Nishapur, into a family of scholars and officials that traced its descent to the Ashʿarī theologian Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī (d. 418/1027); his father was qāḍī of Isfarāyin and his mother a daughter of ʿIṣām al-Dīn Dāwūd al-Khwāfī. After his first studies at home he read language, rhetoric and literature with the poet and scholar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, through whom he joined the Naqshbandī shaykh ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi his lessons on language, logic, philosophy and theology made him famous in Khurasan and Transoxania. He taught in Herat at the Sulṭāniyya and ʿĀdiliyya madrasas, until a fatwā of the qāḍī Abū al-Maʿālī al-Harawī declaring the study and teaching of logic and philosophy impermissible turned the authorities against him and he was expelled. In 926/1520 he went to Bukhara, where he was honoured by the ruler, and he died at Samarqand, where he had gone to visit the tomb of ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār, and was buried near it.

The sources disagree about the year of his death (see below), and some say that he moved to Anatolia; the TDV points out that he dedicated a gloss on al-Bayḍāwī’s commentary on the last part of the Qurʾān to Sultan Süleymān, but notes that he may have presented it during the sultan’s campaign in Iran. His students included his son Ṣadr al-Dīn Ismāʿīl, his grandsons, and Mīr Abū al-Fatḥ al-Ḥusaynī.

He was famous for ‘solving fine and intricate problems’, and the biographers call him ‘the unique among the verifiers’. His glosses on standard texts were read for centuries: in grammar his gloss on Jāmī’s commentary on Ibn al-Ḥājib’s Kāfiya, printed dozens of times from Calcutta to Kazan, and in rhetoric al-Aṭwal, ‘the longest’, a commentary on al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ that answers al-Taftāzānī’s al-Muṭawwal. In logic and the related arts he wrote a gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Shamsiyya, printed in Istanbul, with its two parts also issued separately; a commentary on al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq that survives in manuscript; commentaries on al-Ījī’s treatises on disputation (al-Ādāb al-ʿAḍudiyya) and on semantics (al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya); a commentary on al-Jurjānī’s Persian logic treatise; and short treatises on quantified propositions, on the relations between propositions and on the division of the proposition.

Works

• Ḥāshiyat al-ʿIṣām ʿalā Sharḥ al-Quṭb ʿalā al-Shamsiyya حَاشِيَةُ العِصَامِ عَلَى شَرْحِ القُطْبِ عَلَى الشَّمْسِيَّةِ — üzerine Quṭb al-Dīn al-RāzīPrinted Istanbul 1266; the parts on conceptions (Istanbul 1289) and assents (Istanbul 1259) were also printed separately (TDV); a lithograph of 1275 (Brockelmann). The site’s catalogue also lists it in the Bulaq collection Shurūḥ al-Shamsiyya (1323/1905). Brockelmann and PIPDI list it among the glosses on al-Jurjānī’s gloss; PIPDI records a supergloss by Dallālzāde al-Kharpūtī.hâşiye
• Sharḥ Tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām شَرْحُ تَهْذِيبِ المَنْطِقِ وَالكَلَامِ — üzerine Tahdhīb al-manṭiqManuscript; PIPDI notes a gloss on it by al-Shirānishī (TDV; PIPDI).şerh
• Sharḥ al-Ādāb al-ʿAḍudiyya شَرْحُ الآدَابِ العَضُدِيَّةِ — üzerine al-ʿAḍudOn al-Ījī’s short treatise on the rules of disputation (TDV; PIPDI).şerh
• Sharḥ al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya شَرْحُ الرِّسَالَةِ الوَضْعِيَّةِ — üzerine al-ʿAḍudOn al-Ījī’s treatise on the semantics of imposition (waḍʿ); printed Istanbul 1274 (TDV).şerh
• Sharḥ al-Ghurra fī al-manṭiq — üzerine al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-JurjānīPersian commentary on al-Jurjānī’s logic treatise (also called Sharḥ al-Risāla al-kubrā fī al-manṭiq), glossed by his student Abū al-Fatḥ (TDV).şerh
• al-Aṭwal الأَطْوَلُCommentary on al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ on rhetoric, critical of al-Taftāzānī (Istanbul 1284; TDV).şerh

Reception

The TDV names his gloss on the Quṭbī with those of al-Jurjānī, al-Taftāzānī, al-Dawānī, al-Dasūqī and Dede Cöngî as the main glosses on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya.

His glosses on Jāmī’s commentary on the Kāfiya and on al-Taftāzānī’s commentary on al-Nasafī’s creed remained school books in the Ottoman lands and India, as their many prints show (TDV).