The Sullam today: print, teaching and scholarship

1Into print

Like most Indian madrasa books, the Sullam reached print through lithography, which reproduced the handwritten page with its margins of glosses. The earliest prints found in the sources consulted are of the commentaries. A copy of Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary with the Sullam in the Digital Library of India is dated 1265/1848–49; Turāb ʿAlī’s glosses on Mullā Ḥasan were lithographed in the same year, and his notes on Mubārak in 1262/1846. Ḥamd Allāh’s commentary was printed in Kanpur at the Maṭbaʿ-yi Muṣṭafāʾī in 1278/1861–62 and in a second edition with Ilāhī Bakhsh al-Fayḍābādī’s gloss al-Intibāh in 1862; Mullā Ḥasan’s commentary appeared at the Maṭbaʿ-yi Niẓāmī in Kanpur in 1286/1869–70 and, with ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm’s al-Qawl al-aslam, in 1870; Mullā Mubīn’s Mirʾāt al-shurūḥ was printed in Lucknow in 1871.

Delhi, Lahore and Kanpur presses followed with further combinations: Mullā Ṣarīkh’s gloss on Mubārak (Delhi, 1877), the bare text of the Sullam (Lahore, 1880, and at the Maṭbaʿ Rifāh-i ʿĀmm in Lahore in 1317/1899–1900), the part on conceptualizations with Mubārak’s commentary and Turāb ʿAlī’s al-Bayān al-wāfī (Kanpur, 1881), Saʿd Allāh al-Qandahārī’s al-Kāshifāt (Delhi, 1883), Baḥr al-ʿUlūm’s commentary (Delhi: Maṭbaʿ-yi Mujtabāʾī, 1309/1892), Ḥamd Allāh with ʿAbd Allāh al-Tūnkī’s notes (Lahore, 1892), Fīrūz b. Maḥabba’s commentary (Delhi, 1893), and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Khayrābādī’s Khātam al-ḥawāshī (Delhi, 1324/1906–07). Many of these lithographs survive in the British Library and are now catalogued and digitized in its series Early Arabic Printed Books; the Digital Library of India scanned copies from the Maulana Azad Library of Aligarh Muslim University.

Ahmed shows that print changed the tradition. It revived Baḥr al-ʿUlūm’s commentary, which teachers had hardly glossed: the glosses in the 1892 Delhi print were added by Muḥammad Ilyās al-Pishāwarī, who edited books for that press, and by Khalīl Aḥmad al-Sanbhalī, scholars outside the old networks. Some new commentaries were written for the press itself, such as Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Bahāʾ’s Inṭāq al-fuhūm, which, according to a note in the print, was composed to accompany the Mujtabāʾī edition of the Sullam (1322/1904).

2In the madrasa

For two centuries the Sullam was the most advanced logic book of the Indian madrasa course. Francis Robinson’s reconstruction of the Dars-i Niẓāmī lists it among the eleven logic books of the course, and Ahmed calls it ‘long considered to be the most advanced logic textbook in the Indian Niẓāmī curriculum’. It was read through its commentaries. In the Deobandi version of the course recorded by Zubair Zafar Khan, the logic sequence ends with the commentaries of Mullā Ḥasan, Ḥamd Allāh and Qāḍī Mubārak, followed only by Mīr Zāhid’s gloss.

Its place is less secure today. The eight-year syllabus currently published by the Dār al-ʿUlūm at Deoband teaches logic only in its first four years, with Taysīr al-manṭiq, Mirqāt, Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb and Quṭbī, and does not list the Sullam. Other evidence shows that it is still taught in some places. Ahmed chose the lithograph of Barakat Allāh’s Iṣʿād al-fuhūm as the basis of his translation because it is ‘pervasively used by various South Asian madāris’, and he describes Muḥammad Ibrāhīm al-Balyāwī’s commentary Ḍiyāʾ al-nujūm as ‘regularly used’ in them. Pakistani publishers in Karachi, Multan and Quetta, and Indian publishers in Deoband, have kept the text, the main commentaries and the Urdu aids in print. Recordings of a full course of lessons on Sharḥ al-Sullam (both parts) by Mawlānā Tāj Muḥammad of Lakki Marwat in Pakistan were posted online in 2021, and in 2023 handwritten notes were posted from a teacher’s lessons on Hidāyat al-ḥikma and the introduction of Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary in a final-year (takmīl) class.

Ahmed describes how the teaching changed. From the late nineteenth century the tradition was carried mainly by Deoband and its students, in Urdu and through print; commentaries were written to help students follow a fixed course, and most of them, like many before them, go only as far as the section on conditional propositions. The book that had once been a starting point for debate became a set text.

3Beyond South Asia

Whether the Sullam had readers outside the subcontinent is not fully clear. Francis Robinson, following Peter Gran’s study of Egypt between 1760 and 1840, writes that the Egyptian scholar Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār, who studied the rational sciences in the Ottoman lands after 1802, ‘wrote a commentary on Muhib Allah Bihari’s’ major work on logic, the Sullam al-ʿulūm. Ahmed, citing Khaled El-Rouayheb’s article questioning the supposed eighteenth-century revival of logic in Egypt, concludes that although the Sullam had become known outside India by the nineteenth century, only Indian scholars appear to have commented on it. A commentary by al-ʿAṭṭār was not found in the sources consulted here, so the question remains open.

Modern Arabic publishing has taken some interest. An edition of Baḥr al-ʿUlūm’s commentary by ʿAbd al-Naṣīr Aḥmad al-Malībārī was published in Kuwait in 2012, and a logic textbook published in Cairo in 2021, Khulāṣat al-qawāʿid al-manṭiqiyya by ʿAbd al-Ghaffār ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Ḥasan, has notes drawn from Baḥr al-ʿUlūm’s commentary and Mirʾāt al-shurūḥ as well as from the classic commentaries on the Shamsiyya, the Tahdhīb and al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam.

4Modern scholarship

For a long time the Sullam was studied only within the madrasa. The social history of its milieu was written first. Jamal Malik’s Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien (Brill, 1997) studies the learned culture of Lucknow from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, and Francis Robinson’s The ʿUlama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (2001) the family to whose network almost every early commentator belonged. Ahmed uses both for the careers of the Farangī Maḥall scholars.

The book itself has been studied mainly by Asad Q. Ahmed of the University of California, Berkeley. His article ‘Logic in the Khayrābādī School of India’ (2013) traced the teacher–student lines behind the commentaries; ‘Post-Classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins’ (Oriens, 2013) argued, partly from the Sullam tradition, that commentaries and glosses were a place of innovation; his chapter ‘The Sullam al-ʿulūm of Muḥibballāh al-Bihārī’ in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2016) surveyed the book; and he wrote the Encyclopaedia of Islam THREE articles on Baḥr al-ʿUlūm and on the Dars-i Niẓāmī. His Palimpsests of Themselves (2022), published open access, gives the first full English translation of the Sullam with extended notes, maps the commentary tradition and its networks over three hundred years, and develops a theory of the commentary drawn from the tradition itself. A review by Yusuf Daşdemir (2026) presents it as a challenge to the old view that post-classical Islamic thought was an age of decline.

Other scholars have worked on particular threads. Hassan Rezakhany studied al-Dawānī’s solution to the liar paradox and its reception by Qāḍī Mubārak and Mullā Mubīn (Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, 2018). Khaled El-Rouayheb’s The Development of Arabic Logic (1200–1800) (2019) discusses the background of Mubārak and Mullā Ḥasan’s defence of al-Dawānī on the liar, and David Sanson’s survey of the liar paradox in Arabic and Islamic philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2026) notes how widely it was discussed in the Indo-Muslim tradition. In Urdu, Muḥammad Raḍā wrote on Qāḍī Mubārak and his commentary in the journal Maʿārif (1964).

5What remains to be done

There is no critical edition of the Sullam, and most of its commentaries exist only in manuscripts or old lithographs. Ahmed’s bibliography shows how much of the tradition lies in Indian libraries, above all the Raza Library in Rampur, the library of the Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ in Lucknow, the Maulana Azad Library in Aligarh and the Arabic and Persian Research Institute in Tonk. Ahmed suggests that an edition should show how the wording of the text grew and shrank through the commentaries rather than only reconstruct the author’s autograph. The catalogue of this section lists the printed and manuscript works found so far.