Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī

Tatar scholar, historian and reformer of Kazan who taught logic in his madrasa and wrote a commentary on the introduction of the Shamsiyya.

Life

According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, Marjānī was born in 1818 in the village of Yabıncı near Kazan; the nisba comes from his forebears’ village of Marjān. He began his studies in his father’s madrasa, reading Arabic, Persian, theology, logic and legal theory, and in 1838 left for Central Asia. He studied in Bukhara and, from 1844, in Samarqand, where the judge Abū Saʿīd b. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Samarqandī gave him a licence and opened his library to him; there, he later wrote, he came to appreciate the reformist ideas of the Tatar scholar ʿAbd al-Naṣīr al-Qūrṣāwī.

Back in Kazan in 1849, he was examined by the council of scholars, where he showed himself more at home in logic, theology and philosophy than some of the examiners, and became imām and teacher at the First Mosque, serving there for twenty-two years. He was later made ākhūnd and muḥtasib, taught Islamic subjects at the new Tatar Teachers’ School from 1876 to 1884, and from 1881 taught in the Marjānī (or ʿĀliya) madrasa built for him by Tatar merchants, which the TDV calls the best madrasa in Kazan of its time. His views on independent reasoning, the timing of prayers and fasting, and the teaching of Russian made him enemies among the Kazan mullās. He made the pilgrimage in 1880, meeting Ottoman scholars and statesmen in Istanbul, and died in Kazan on 28 April 1889.

Marjānī is best known as a historian of the Volga Bulgars and of Kazan and as a reformer, later claimed as a forerunner by the Jadīd movement. His programme, as the TDV summarises it, included removing ‘useless scholastic books’ from the madrasa course in favour of Qurʾān, ḥadīth, history and the sciences. Yet, the TDV adds, he could not carry this out in his own madrasa and, perhaps so as not to lose students, came to give weight to the logic and theology lessons he had criticised. Among his works the TDV lists a commentary on the introduction of the Shamsiyya, and A. M. Salakhov cites this commentary, with ʿAbd Allāh Maqṣūdī’s logic book Mīzān al-afkār (Kazan 1903), as evidence of the attention Tatar scholars paid to logic and its teaching.

Works

• Sharḥ muqaddimat al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya شَرْحُ مُقَدِّمَةِ الرِّسَالَةِ الشَّمْسِيَّةِ — بر al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaA commentary on the introduction of the Shamsiyya (TDV; Salakhov). No printed edition or manuscript is named in the sources consulted.شرح
• Wafiyyat al-aslāf wa-taḥiyyat al-akhlāfA seven-volume Arabic chronological history and biographical dictionary of 6,057 persons, including his autobiography; the introduction printed Kazan 1883 (TDV).تصنیف
• Mustafād al-akhbār fī aḥwāl Qazān wa-BulghārHistory of Kazan and the Bulghārs in Tatar (Kazan 1885–1900) (TDV).تصنیف
• Nāẓūrat al-ḥaqq fī farḍiyyat al-ʿishāʾ wa-in lam yaghib al-shafaqOn the night prayer in northern latitudes, with criticism of the theologians (Kazan 1287/1870) (TDV).تصنیف

Reception

Through his commentary Marjānī is one of the few witnesses to the Shamsiyya in the Volga-Ural region, where, according to Salakhov, the Īsāghūjī with al-Kātī’s commentary, the Sullam and Sullam al-ʿulūm were also read (see ‘The Shamsiyya in teaching’).

Later reformers presented him as the leader of a religious renewal among the Turks (Yusuf Akçura) or ‘the Luther of Islam’ (Hādī Atlāsī) (TDV).