al-Taftāzānī

Khurasanī scholar of the eighth/fourteenth century whose Tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām became a standard logic primer, and whose books on rhetoric, theology and legal theory were read in madrasas from Istanbul to India.

Life

According to the regional historians cited by the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, al-Taftāzānī was born in Ṣafar 722 (February 1322) in Taftāzān, in the district of Nasā in Khurasan; the date 712 given by Ibn Ḥajar is regarded by the TDV as wrong. His father bore the title of a deputy chief judge. The sources name as his teachers ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī, the author of the classic commentary on the Shamsiyya, and Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh al-Qazwīnī, though Wilferd Madelung has argued that he cannot have studied with al-Ījī in person.

He began writing very young: his commentary on al-Zanjānī’s morphology was finished on 15 Shaʿbān 738 (8 March 1338), when he was sixteen. The colophons of his books show him moving constantly between Herat, Mazār-i Jām, Ghijduvān, a village near Ṭūs, Khwarazm and Sarakhs, under the Ilkhanids, the Golden Horde, the Kart rulers and Timur, and his prefaces complain of exile and hardship. After Timur took Khwarazm he brought al-Taftāzānī to Samarqand, where he taught and wrote in honour for some years; Timur is said to have made him chief judge. When Timur, having taken Shiraz in 789/1387, brought al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī to Samarqand and, after a debate between the two, gave al-Jurjānī precedence, al-Taftāzānī was deeply grieved. He died in Samarqand on 22 Muḥarram 792 (10 January 1390) and, as he had asked, was buried in Sarakhs.

His works became core textbooks in several subjects: in rhetoric the commentaries on al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ, al-Muṭawwal and al-Mukhtaṣar; in legal theory al-Talwīḥ; in theology the commentary on al-Nasafī’s creed and al-Maqāṣid with its own commentary. Ibn Khaldūn, who read his books in Egypt, wrote that no scholar of the East was more authoritative, and the TDV notes that Ottoman writers praised a scholar by comparing him to ‘the two Saʿds’, al-Taftāzānī and al-Jurjānī. Whether he was a Shāfiʿī or a Ḥanafī was long debated; the TDV concludes, mainly from his Shāfiʿī handbook Miftāḥ al-fiqh, that he was a Shāfiʿī.

In logic he wrote three works. His commentary on al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya covers its first part, on conceptions, and was known in India as al-Saʿdiyya. The Tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām, completed in Samarqand in 789/1387, has two parts, a short logic and an abridgement of his theology; in the preface he says that he wrote it for the young, and especially for his son, and Kâtib Çelebi judged its logic part the best book ever written on the subject. A short rule on the conditions under which the syllogistic figures yield a conclusion, the Ḍābiṭat intāj al-ashkāl, was commented on separately. The TDV counts some fifty commentaries and glosses on the Tahdhīb in library records, of which al-Dawānī’s is the most important; with al-Dawānī’s and ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī’s commentaries it became, in Asad Q. Ahmed’s account, one of the three handbooks at the core of the Indian logic course from the sixteenth century.

Works

• Tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām تَهْذِيبُ المَنْطِقِ وَالكَلَامِ — بر Tahdhīb al-manṭiqCompleted in Samarqand, 789/1387 (Kashf al-ẓunūn, after the TDV). Logic in one part, kalām in the other; written ‘for the young’. Cairo 1330/1912 and many other printings.متن
• Sharḥ al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya (al-Saʿdiyya) شَرْحُ الرِّسَالَةِ الشَّمْسِيَّةِ — بر al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaCommentary on the first part (conceptions); Istanbul 1272, 1312. Glossed by al-Siyālkūtī (Istanbul 1238); the preface was glossed by Khiḍr Shāh al-Menteşevī, Walī al-Dīn al-Qaramānī and Kemalpaşazâde (TDV).شرح
• Ḍābiṭat intāj al-ashkāl ضَابِطَةُ إِنْتَاجِ الأَشْكَالِRule stating the conditions under which the syllogistic figures yield a conclusion; printed in India in 1324 with ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī’s commentary al-Bayān al-ʿajīb (TDV).تصنیف
• al-Muṭawwal and al-Mukhtaṣar المُطَوَّلُ وَالمُخْتَصَرُLong and short commentaries on al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (rhetoric), still taught today.شرح
• Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafiyya شَرْحُ العَقَائِدِ النَّسَفِيَّةِCommentary on al-Nasafī’s creed, finished in Khwarazm in 768/1367; a basic text of the Ottoman madrasa.شرح
• al-Maqāṣid and Sharḥ al-Maqāṣid المَقَاصِدُ وَشَرْحُ المَقَاصِدِHis large work on theology with his own commentary, completed in Samarqand in 784/1383.تصنیف
• al-Talwīḥ ilā kashf ḥaqāʾiq al-Tanqīḥ التَّلْوِيحُ إِلَى كَشْفِ حَقَائِقِ التَّنْقِيحِOn Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa’s legal theory; finished in 758/1357.حاشیہ

Reception

Ibn Ḥajar wrote that he reached the summit of rhetoric and the rational sciences in the East; Ibn Khaldūn that none was more authoritative (TDV).

Al-Jurjānī attacked his view that a religious science could draw its principles from logic: ‘only a philosopher, or one living on the philosophers’ leftovers, would dare say this’ (TDV).

A later fatwa on the permissibility of logic, quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, lists the work of ‘Saʿd al-Dīn’ with the Īsāghūjī, the Shamsiyya and al-Khūnajī as logic ‘not mixed with philosophy’, which no one rejects ‘but he who has no inkling of the rational sciences’.

In India his Tahdhīb, with the commentaries of al-Dawānī and al-Yazdī, belonged to the core of the logic course from the sixteenth century (Ahmed); it is the text of level 4 on this site.