The author: Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī

1Name

His full name is given as Najm al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. ʿUmar b. ʿAlī al-Kātibī al-Qazwīnī. He was also known by the Persian name Dabīrān. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi reports that some authors explain Dabīrān as a place name, but argues that, given the meaning of the word (dabīr is Persian for ‘secretary’ or ‘scribe’), he was more probably called so because he worked as a secretary or as a teacher; the Arabic nisba al-Kātibī, from kātib, ‘secretary’, points the same way. Al-Qazwīnī refers to his home town, Qazvin in north-western Iran.

Older sources sometimes confuse his name. Ḥājjī Khalīfa calls him ‘Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar b. ʿAlī al-Qazwīnī, known as al-Kātibī’, reversing his own and his father’s names, and the same form appears in later lists, among them the curricula reproduced by Francis Robinson. Modern reference works agree on ʿAlī b. ʿUmar.

2Life

According to the TDV and the Egyptian Dār al-Iftāʾ he was born in Qazvin in Rajab 600/March 1204. He first studied in his home town and then travelled to the main centres of learning. His most important teacher was Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 663/1265), the author of the Īsāghūjī: Tony Street notes manuscript evidence that in 1228 and 1229 al-Kātibī was reading al-Abharī’s texts under his supervision, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states plainly that ‘Kātibī was Abharī’s student’.

His relation to Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) is described in different ways. Ḥājjī Khalīfa calls al-Kātibī ‘a pupil of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’, Brockelmann repeats this, and the TDV says that he learned theology, philosophy, astronomy and logic from al-Ṭūsī. Street, on the other hand, treats the two men as contemporaries who had both been trained by al-Abharī, and the Dār al-Iftāʾ notes that some sources say he studied with al-Ṭūsī while others deny it. What is certain is that they worked together and argued with each other: al-Ṭūsī ‘went on’, in Street’s words, with his defence of Ibn Sīnā ‘in a series of exchanges with Kātibī’, and al-Kātibī wrote treatises answering al-Ṭūsī’s objections on the proof of the Necessary Existent.

Al-Kātibī taught in Qazvin, and the TDV says that his lessons there drew many scholars to the town. When the Mongol ruler Hülegü had al-Ṭūsī found an observatory at his new capital Maragha, al-Ṭūsī, according to Street, engaged four scholars in 1259 to help him, and al-Kātibī was one of them. The TDV gives a different and less likely chronology: that he went to Maragha by Hülegü’s order only in 675/1276–77, the year of his death, although Hülegü had been succeeded by Abaqa in 1265; the Dār al-Iftāʾ dates al-Ṭūsī’s invitation to 668/1269–70. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that during the early years of the observatory al-Kātibī was teaching Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Mulakhkhaṣ and al-Khūnajī’s Kashf al-asrār to students.

Most sources date his death to Ramaḍān 675/February 1277; some give 693/1294, the date Ḥājjī Khalīfa has. Street adds that shortly before his death al-Kātibī and his pupil Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī left Maragha to found a school in Juwayn, near Nishapur, and that he most probably died there. His best-known students were al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 726/1325), the great Imāmī scholar, who wrote the first commentary on the Shamsiyya, and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (d. 710/1311), the philosopher and astronomer.

The publisher of Street’s edition describes al-Kātibī as a scholar of the Shāfiʿī school, and the TDV says that in law he moved towards the Shāfiʿī position; it also mentions earlier Shīʿī sympathies, a point the other sources consulted do not discuss. His textbooks were read by Sunnīs and Shīʿīs alike.

3Works on logic

Al-Kātibī taught astronomy, mathematics, theology and philosophy, but he is remembered above all as a logician, and above all for the Shamsiyya (see ‘Al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya: the book’). The TDV lists ten works; the most important for logic are these.

Jāmiʿ al-daqāʾiq fī kashf al-ḥaqāʾiq (‘the summa of subtle points in uncovering the truths’) is a large work on logic and metaphysics whose logical part is much longer than the Shamsiyya (Süleymaniye, Carullah 1351). Street dates it after 1265 and calls it, with the Shamsiyya, one of al-Kātibī’s two major works on logic. Ḥājjī Khalīfa’s list of the standard books of logic includes both, together with his Baḥr al-fawāʾid.

ʿAyn al-qawāʿid fī al-manṭiq wa-l-ḥikma is a shorter work on logic and philosophy. According to the TDV the author wrote a commentary on it, Baḥr al-fawāʾid sharḥ ʿAyn al-qawāʿid (Istanbul University Library, AY 4182); a recent Marmara University thesis that edits Baḥr al-fawāʾid argues instead that it is an independent work, not a commentary.

Two large commentaries continue the work of his predecessors. Sharḥ Kashf al-asrār ʿan ghawāmiḍ al-afkār comments on the logic of Afḍal al-Dīn al-Khūnajī (d. 646/1248) (Süleymaniye, Laleli 2664). Street notes that studying al-Khūnajī ‘led’ al-Kātibī ‘to adopt non-Avicennan positions’. Al-Munaṣṣaṣ fī sharḥ al-Mulakhkhaṣ comments on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s work on logic and philosophy; the author’s own copy survives in the Köprülü library (Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 887–889).

A short commentary on the difficult passages of the Shamsiyya, Sharḥ al-mawāḍiʿ al-mushkila min al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya, preserved in a single manuscript (Süleymaniye, Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 1612), has recently been edited by Ferruh Özpilavcı and Abdullah Öztop, who argue that al-Kātibī wrote it himself. Their evidence is a series of close parallels with his other books, such as the remark, found also in them, that al-Abharī added three subtypes to the fourth figure of the syllogism. If they are right, the first commentator on the Shamsiyya was its author.

His exchanges with al-Ṭūsī on logic were published by ʿAbd Allāh Nūrānī as Muṭāraḥāt manṭiqiyya (Tehran 1370), those on the proof of the Necessary Existent by Muḥammad Ḥasan Āl Yāsīn as Muṭāraḥāt falsafiyya (Baghdad 1956), and his questions to al-Ṭūsī on medicine were collected as Muṭāraḥāt ṭibbiyya (TDV).

4Works on philosophy and theology

Ḥikmat al-ʿayn, ‘the wisdom of the source’, adds physics and metaphysics to the ʿAyn al-qawāʿid (TDV). Like the Shamsiyya it became a school text with its own commentaries: that of al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī was edited by ʿAlī Naqī Munzawī (Tehran 1378/1959), and that of Mīrak Muḥammad b. Mubārakshāh al-Bukhārī was printed with al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī’s gloss in Calcutta (1845) and Kazan (1319, 1324). In theology al-Kātibī wrote al-Mufaṣṣal fī sharḥ al-Muḥaṣṣal, a commentary on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Muḥaṣṣal, and short treatises on the proof of the Necessary Existent, including replies to al-Ṭūsī. The Dār al-Iftāʾ adds a few more titles, among them a treatise discussing al-Ṭūsī’s notes.

5His place in the logic after Ibn Sīnā

Al-Kātibī belongs to the generation that settled the form of Arabic logic for the following six centuries. The Stanford Encyclopedia describes how Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and then al-Khūnajī challenged and reshaped the logic of Ibn Sīnā, and how in Maragha al-Abharī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Kātibī debated these changes: al-Ṭūsī defended Ibn Sīnā’s logic against the changes al-Khūnajī had proposed, while al-Abharī and al-Kātibī followed al-Khūnajī on several questions, for instance on what the subject matter of logic is. Al-Kātibī’s logical works were written after these discussions and draw on their arguments.

Street calls him ‘fundamentally an Avicennan logician’, who keeps Ibn Sīnā’s framework but follows al-Khūnajī on a number of points: the subject matter of logic, conversion with negative terms, and above all the theory of modal propositions, where he declares the conversion of possibility propositions ‘unknown’. Khaled El-Rouayheb describes him as a logician ‘keenly interested in the conversion and contraposition of modality propositions’. His interest in the formal side of logic, in the exact conditions of each mood and conversion, is what gives the Shamsiyya its character.

His influence came through teaching rather than through doctrine. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that two members of the Maragha circle, al-Kātibī and al-Abharī, ‘produced the two texts which became mainstays of the madrasa teaching of logic’, the Shamsiyya and the Īsāghūjī, and that both were used by Sunnīs and Shīʿīs. Through the Shamsiyya and its commentaries, Street observes, later readers came to know as ‘Avicenna’s logic’ what was in fact al-Kātibī’s version of it.