Mullā Ḥasan

Logician of the Farangī Maḥall family of Lucknow whose commentary on Sullam al-ʿulūm became one of the three standard ways into the book and a set text of the Dars-i Niẓāmī.

Life

ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī’s Nuzhat al-khawāṭir gives his name as Muḥammad Ḥasan b. Ghulām Muṣṭafā b. Muḥammad Asʿad b. Quṭb al-Dīn al-Anṣārī al-Sihālawī, then al-Laknawī, a great-grandson of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Sihālawī, the founder of the Farangī Maḥall family, and calls him ‘one of the cleverest men in the world’, without equal in his time for intelligence, quickness and memory. He was born and grew up in Lucknow and read some of the madrasa books with his maternal uncle Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fatiḥpūrī and most of them with his father’s uncle Niẓām al-Dīn al-Sihālawī, after whom the Dars-i Niẓāmī is named. When ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm left Lucknow for Shāhjahānpūr, Mullā Ḥasan became the leading teacher of the city and taught there for about twenty years.

Nuzhat relates that a quarrel between two of his students in his madrasa grew into sectarian violence between Sunnīs and Shīʿīs in Lucknow, in which lives were lost and Mullā Ḥasan himself was threatened. He went with his relatives to Fayḍābād to seek redress from the Nawwāb of Awadh, Shujāʿ al-Dawla, without success, and then moved on: to Shāhjahānpūr, to a madrasa at Dārānagar founded by Nawwāb Ḍābiṭa Khān, where he taught for some time, to Delhi, and finally to Rampur, where Nawwāb Fayḍ Allāh Khān received him with honour and where he stayed for the rest of his life. He died on 3 Ṣafar 1199 in the reign of Shāh ʿĀlam. Other entries of Nuzhat name students of his from Rampur, Delhi and Lucknow, among them Mullā Mubīn.

His fame rests on his commentary on al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm, which, Nuzhat says, ‘the scholars received with acceptance’. According to Asad Q. Ahmed’s study, as summarised in ‘The commentaries on Sullam al-ʿulūm’, it is dated 1177/1763–64, covers the part on conceptualizations, and is, after those of Qāḍī Mubārak and Ḥamd Allāh, the most glossed of the commentaries, its glossators coming almost entirely from the Farangī Maḥall circle. He also wrote a commentary on part of al-Bihārī’s Musallam al-thubūt, glosses on Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī’s commentary on Hidāyat al-ḥikma and on Maḥmūd al-Jawnpūrī’s al-Shams al-bāzigha, commentaries and glosses on Mīr Zāhid’s three glosses, and two handbooks of his own: Maʿārij al-ʿulūm in logic and Ghāyat al-ʿulūm in natural philosophy.

Works

• Sharḥ Sullam al-ʿulūm (‘Mullā Ḥasan’) شَرْحُ سُلَّمِ العُلُومِ — بر Sullam al-ʿulūmOn the conceptualizations; dated 1177/1763–64 (Ahmed). Printed Kanpur 1286/1869–70 and with ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm al-Laknawī’s gloss al-Qawl al-aslam in 1870. A set text of the Dars-i Niẓāmī, in the Deobandi course as ‘Mullā Ḥasan’.شرح
• Maʿārij al-ʿulūm مَعَارِجُ العُلُومِ‘A solid text in logic’ (Nuzhat); Ahmed describes it as critical of the Sullam. Commented on by Walī Allāh al-Laknawī.متن
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā Ḥāshiyat Mīr Zāhid ʿalā Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb li-l-Dawānī — بر Mīr ZāhidOne of his commentaries and glosses on ‘Mīr Zāhid Mullā Jalāl’ (Nuzhat; al-Turkmānī, who calls him ‘author of the famous commentary on Sullam al-ʿulūm’).حاشیہ
• Glosses on Mīr Zāhid Risāla and Mīr Zāhid Sharḥ al-Mawāqif — بر Mīr ZāhidNuzhat.حاشیہ
• Sharḥ Musallam al-thubūt (to the end of the principles of rulings) — بر al-BihārīOn al-Bihārī’s legal theory (Nuzhat).شرح
• Ghāyat al-ʿulūmA text on natural philosophy (Nuzhat).تصنیف

Reception

With the commentaries of Qāḍī Mubārak and Ḥamd Allāh, ‘Mullā Ḥasan’ became one of the three gateways through which the Sullam was taught, and it still appears among the last logic books of the Deobandi version of the Dars-i Niẓāmī (see ‘The Dars-i Niẓāmī’).

His student Mullā Mubīn wrote Mirʾāt al-shurūḥ, the fullest commentary on the Sullam; his own commentary was glossed in turn, mostly by scholars of Lucknow (see ‘The commentaries on Sullam al-ʿulūm’ and its catalogue).