al-Ṣabbān

Cairo scholar of grammar, rhetoric and the sciences whose gloss on al-Mallawī’s small commentary on the Sullam was printed at Būlāq in 1868 and became one of the standard companions of the poem in Egypt and Indonesia.

Life

Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Ṣabbān was born and educated in Cairo; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives no year of birth. His kunya Abū l-ʿIrfān was given to him by the Sufi Muḥammad al-Sādāt b. Wafāʾ. He studied the outward and inward sciences and the Shādhilī way with ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-ʿAfīfī, and was closely associated with Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Jabartī, the father of the historian, with whom he studied Arabic, astronomy and mathematics. He served as timekeeper (muwaqqit) at the mausoleum of al-Shāfiʿī and then at the mosque that Muḥammad Bey Abū l-Dhahab built opposite al-Azhar. He died of plague in Jumādā I 1206/January 1792 and was buried in the Bustān cemetery.

His works range over grammar, rhetoric, prosody, ḥadīth terminology, astronomy and the life of the Prophet. The best known is his large gloss on al-Ushmūnī’s commentary on Ibn Mālik’s Alfiyya (Ḥāshiyat al-Ṣabbān), still a standard work of advanced grammar. For logic and its neighbours he wrote a gloss on Aḥmad al-Mallawī’s small commentary on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam, a gloss on the commentary on the Samarqandiyya on metaphor, and a gloss on Mullā Ḥanafī’s commentary on al-Ījī’s ʿAḍudiyya on the etiquette of debate.

His gloss on the Sullam was printed with al-Mallawī’s commentary in the margin at Būlāq in 1285/1868 and often afterwards; Heyworth-Dunne still lists it among the books in use in the nineteenth century, and a Munich manuscript copied in 1249/1834 calls it ‘a gloss on the small commentary of al-Mallawī on the Sullam’ (see ‘Al-Azhar and Egypt’ and ‘Commentaries, glosses and translations’ in the Sullam section).

Works

• Ḥāshiya ʿalā al-sharḥ al-ṣaghīr li-l-Mallawī ʿalā al-Sullam حَاشِيَةُ الصَّبَّانِ عَلَى شَرْحِ المَلَّوِيِّ عَلَى السُّلَّمِ — üzerine al-Sullam al-munawraqPrinted Būlāq 1285/1868, Cairo 1305/1887 and 1325/1907; modern editions Cairo 2015 and Istanbul 2020 (as recorded in the Sullam catalogue). El-Rouayheb cites an Azhar print in which al-Mallawī’s commentary appears within al-Ṣabbān’s gloss, dated ‘1219/1901’.hâşiye
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā Sharḥ al-Ushmūnī ʿalā Alfiyyat Ibn Mālik حَاشِيَةُ الصَّبَّانِ عَلَى شَرْحِ الأُشْمُونِيِّHis most extensive work, on grammar.hâşiye
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā Sharḥ al-SamarqandiyyaOn the treatise on metaphor (istiʿāra) known as the Samarqandiyya (TDV).hâşiye
• Isʿāf al-rāghibīn fī sīrat al-Muṣṭafā wa-faḍāʾil ahl baytihi al-ṭāhirīn إِسْعَافُ الرَّاغِبِينَOn the life of the Prophet and the virtues of his family.eser
• al-Kāfiya al-shāfiya fī ʿilmay al-ʿarūḍ wa-l-qāfiyaOn prosody and rhyme.eser

Reception

Through the Egyptian prints his gloss reached the Indonesian pesantren, where Martin van Bruinessen found al-Mallawī’s commentary with al-Ṣabbān’s gloss among the common logic books (see ‘The pesantren and the Malay world’).

Muṣṭafā al-Būlāqī’s glosses on al-Quwaysinī’s commentary follow al-Ṣabbān’s, according to Brockelmann (as reported in the Sullam section).