The pesantren and the Malay world

1How logic reached the archipelago

Ahwan Fanani and Mohammad Syifa Amin Widigdo, the authors of the most detailed study of logic in Indonesian Islamic scholarship, argue that manṭiq came to the archipelago through the networks of scholars who studied in Mecca and Medina, networks that Azyumardi Azra has traced back to the seventeenth century, and possibly also through Cairo. The books that reached Indonesia were those of the Shāfiʿī scholars of Egypt and the Ḥaramayn: Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, whose commentary on the Īsāghūjī travelled with his legal works, and the Azhar commentators on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam.

The transmission was uneven. The great Javanese scholar Maḥfūẓ al-Tarmasī (d. 1338 H), lists in his record of teachers and books, Kifāyat al-mustafīd, works of law, exegesis, ḥadīth and Arabic, but no logic at all; Fanani and Widigdo conclude that logic was not a standard subject. By contrast, Muḥammad Yāsīn al-Fādānī (d. 1410/1990), born in Mecca to a family from West Sumatra, records in his al-Musnad al-jalī an extensive training in logic: al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya with the commentaries of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī and al-Taftāzānī and al-Jurjānī’s glosses, Ibn Sīnā’s Ishārāt with its commentators, and the Sullam with the commentaries of al-Damanhūrī and al-Mallawī. What a scholar could read in Mecca was thus much more than what most pesantren taught.

2The earliest evidence

The oldest traces are manuscripts. At the Pesantren Sumber Anyar in Pamekasan, Madura, one of the oldest pesantren on the island, a manuscript of the Īsāghūjī survives among others from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, beside al-Sanūsī’s creed, al-Faḍālī’s Kifāyat al-ʿawāmm and al-Rāfiʿī’s al-Muḥarrar; Fanani and Widigdo date the teaching of the Īsāghūjī there to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It is no longer taught at Sumber Anyar, which they attribute to a later shift in the pesantren’s choice of books.

In Aceh the catalogue of the Dayah Tanoh Abee records four manuscripts of al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam, one of them dated 1277 H, with marginal notes that show classroom use. (Fanani and Widigdo convert the date to 1812; 1277 H corresponds to 1860–61.) On the other hand, a nineteenth-century survey of the books used in Javanese pesantren, by van den Berg, did not mention logic at all, and Rosidin and his co-authors, summarising the history of the ‘yellow books’ (kitab kuning), date the spread of logic among the pesantren subjects to the twentieth century.

3The books of the pesantren

Martin van Bruinessen’s surveys of the kitab kuning, as summarised by Fanani and Widigdo, give the fullest list of logic books used in Indonesian pesantren: al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam al-munawraq; Aḥmad al-Damanhūrī’s commentary Īḍāḥ al-mubham fī maʿānī al-Sullam; Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī’s commentary and gloss on the Sullam; the glosses of al-Quwaysinī and of Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Ṣabbān (the latter on al-Mallawī’s commentary); a translation of the Sullam by Kiai Bisri Mustofa; and al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī. His earlier classified list (1988) also includes Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Taḥrīr al-qawāʿid al-manṭiqiyya, the commentary on the Shamsiyya. A more recent encyclopaedia of the kitab kuning lists Īḍāḥ al-mubham and the Sullam (as Naẓm al-Sullam al-munawraq) among the books of the traditional (salafiyya) pesantren.

Almost all of these books are Egyptian. The pesantren took over the Azhar tradition of the Sullam as a whole (see ‘Al-Azhar and Egypt’): the verse primer, al-Damanhūrī’s explanation, and the glosses of al-Ṣabbān, al-Quwaysinī and al-Bājūrī. Al-Bājūrī (d. 1276/1860) is the latest author in the list.

Put in order of difficulty, the books named in these lists suggest the following sequence for a pesantren that teaches logic: 1. the Sullam, memorised as a poem (naẓm); 2. the Sullam read with al-Damanhūrī’s Īḍāḥ al-mubham; 3. the Sullam with al-Bājūrī’s commentary or gloss, or with the glosses of al-Ṣabbān or al-Quwaysinī; 4. rarely, Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya. The Īsāghūjī appears as an alternative primer in a few pesantren. This ordering is inferred from the books and their level; the sources consulted do not give a dated pesantren timetable for logic.

4Some pesantren and not others

Logic has never been a universal subject. In Mastuhu’s study of six leading pesantren in East Java and Madura (Guluk-Guluk, Sukorejo, Blok Agung, Tebuireng, Paciran and Gontor), only Tebuireng included logic in its curriculum, using the Sullam. Fanani and Widigdo suggest two reasons. Pesantren specialise: some are known for grammar, memorisation of the Qurʾān, law or Sufism, and those with a strong interest in the rational sciences, such as Sumber Anyar and Tebuireng, are more likely to teach logic. And logic remained an optional and sometimes contested subject, since a line of scholars from Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ to al-Suyūṭī had opposed it (see ‘Scholars on studying logic’).

The sources consulted for this article say nothing specific about the teaching of logic in the pondok of Malaysia or southern Thailand, and nothing about Jawi or Javanese (pegon) commentaries on the Sullam. Both are gaps that further research in local manuscript collections and publishers’ lists could fill.

5Indonesian textbooks and editions

Indonesian scholars also wrote their own textbooks. Muḥammad Nūr al-Ibrāhīmī’s ʿIlm al-manṭiq li-l-madāris al-ʿarabiyya wa-l-maʿāhid al-dīniyya bi-Indūnīsiyā (1927) was an Arabic manual written for Indonesian madrasas and religious institutes; Joesoef Sou’yb’s Logika: Kaidah Berpikir secara Tepat (1997) presents traditional logic in Indonesian, with an appendix matching Indonesian terms to their English and Arabic equivalents. The Arabic texts are also printed in Indonesia: an edition of the Īsāghūjī together with the Sullam, edited by al-Saqqāf, was published in Jakarta in 2013 and is the edition used on The Mantiqi.

6In the north: Volga-Ural, Dagestan and Central Asia

Beyond the Malay world, the Sullam and the Īsāghūjī also reached the Muslims of the Russian empire. The evidence is set out in ‘The Īsāghūjī in the madrasa’ and need only be summarised here. In the Tatar schools of the Volga-Ural region the Īsāghūjī was a popular text, read with Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Kātī’s commentary, of which A. M. Salakhov found six copies in the manuscript collection of the Institute of Language, Literature and Art in Kazan; al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam and Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Indian Sullam al-ʿulūm served as introductory texts, and Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī wrote a commentary on the Shamsiyya. The Sullam al-ʿulūm was even printed in Kazan in 1906, a sign that the Indian textbook travelled well beyond South Asia. El-Rouayheb notes that Tatar and Azeri scholars wrote glosses on al-Fanārī’s commentary on the Īsāghūjī, as Ottoman scholars did.

In Dagestan the young scholar ʿAlī al-Ghumūqī copied a commentary on the Īsāghūjī and al-Damanhūrī’s commentary on the Sullam in 1310–11/1892–94; the volume has been digitised by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. For Central Asia, the sources consulted show mainly the modern revival of the Īsāghūjī as a subject of study, with an Uzbek commentary published in Tashkent in 2008 and a Russian study of the book as a logic textbook in 2024. A full account of the logic course in the madrasas of Bukhara and the Volga-Ural region before 1917 would need Russian- and Tatar-language sources not consulted here.