al-Yūsī

Moroccan Mālikī scholar, regarded as the greatest Maghribī scholar of the seventeenth century, who glossed al-Sanūsī’s logic and theology and answered al-Suyūṭī’s case against logic.

Life

Al-Yūsī was born in 1040/1631 in a village of the Upper Moulouya valley in the Middle Atlas, into the Āyt Yūsī, a branch of the Berber Ṣanhāja. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi he studied grammar, rhetoric, logic, theology, law, legal theory, exegesis, Sufism, mathematics and astronomy with teachers in Sijilmāsa, Marrakesh, Īligh and Fez, joined the Sufi master Ibn Nāṣir al-Darʿī at Tamgrūt, and at about twenty attached himself to the zāwiya of al-Dilāʾ in the Middle Atlas, where he studied, received licences and began to teach and write.

When Mawlāy al-Rashīd destroyed al-Dilāʾ in 1079/1668, al-Yūsī was sent to Fez, where he taught at the Qarawiyyīn and became famous. Under Mawlāy Ismāʿīl he was moved between Fez, a zāwiya he founded at Khalfūn, Marrakesh and Meknes, and in 1095/1684 was exiled for a time to the site of al-Dilāʾ; in his letters to the sultan, above all the one known as ‘al-Yūsī’s declaration’, he criticised the harshness of his rule. He settled at Tamzīzit near Sefrou in 1100/1689, made the pilgrimage, and died soon after his return, on 15 Dhū al-Ḥijja 1102 (9 September 1691). His students included al-Misnāwī, Ibn Zākūr, Abū Sālim al-ʿAyyāshī and the logician Aḥmad b. Yaʿqūb al-Wallālī.

In logic he wrote Nafāʾis al-durar, a gloss on al-Sanūsī’s commentary on his own Mukhtaṣar fī l-manṭiq. Khaled El-Rouayheb shows that in his large gloss on al-Sanūsī’s commentary on the creed, al-ʿAqīda al-kubrā, he devoted much space to refuting those who held logic and kalām to be disliked or forbidden. Their two grounds, he wrote, are that these sciences are innovations and that they discuss non-Muslim views. But all the sciences, exegesis, hadith, law and grammar included, took shape after the first generations; and when the need arose to distinguish valid from invalid inference, logic was composed and translated into Arabic, for it is ‘the scale of the intellect and the chief of all the sciences’. In his al-Qānūn he held all knowledge permissible, the intention deciding its use.

He also answered al-Suyūṭī’s claim that logic is useless because its universals have no existence outside the mind. Such a claim, he wrote, showed that al-Suyūṭī had no grasp of the rational sciences, since universal propositions are the basis of every science, legal, theological or grammatical; he had meant to refute it in a separate work but decided that this would be a waste of time. El-Rouayheb notes that he seems not to have known Ibn Taymiyya’s far larger attack on logic.

Works

• Nafāʾis al-durar ʿalā sharḥ al-Mukhtaṣar نَفَائِسُ الدُّرَرِ عَلَى شَرْحِ المُخْتَصَرِ — بر سنوسیGloss on al-Sanūsī’s commentary on his Mukhtaṣar fī l-manṭiq; ed. Jumʿa al-Fayṭūrī, Beirut 2003 (TDV). Brockelmann lists manuscripts of al-Yūsī’s commentary on the Mukhtaṣar in Paris, Rabat, Algiers and Fez (GAL S II 355).حاشیہ
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā ʿUmdat ahl al-tawfīq (al-Ḥawāshī al-kubrā) — بر سنوسیGloss on al-Sanūsī’s commentary on his al-ʿAqīda al-kubrā, with his defence of logic and kalām; manuscripts in Berlin, Rabat, al-Azhar and Çorum (TDV; El-Rouayheb). His passage against al-Suyūṭī is quoted in al-Zabīdī’s Itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn (Cairo 1311, vol. 1, p. 178).حاشیہ
• al-Qānūn fī aḥkām al-ʿilm wa-l-ʿālim wa-l-mutaʿallim القَانُونُ فِي أَحْكَامِ العِلْمِ وَالعَالِمِ وَالمُتَعَلِّمِOn the classification of the sciences and the conduct of scholars and students; ed. Ḥamīd Ḥammānī, Rabat 1998.تصنیف
• al-Budūr al-lawāmiʿ fī sharḥ Jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ — بر Tāj al-Dīn al-SubkīUnfinished commentary on Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī’s legal theory; 4 vols., Casablanca 2002–03.شرح
• al-Muḥāḍarāt fī l-adab wa-l-lughaLiterary miscellany with autobiographical material, begun 1095/1684.تصنیف

Reception

El-Rouayheb notes that the many manuscripts in the national libraries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia show his logic and theology were widely read in the Maghrib, and that some of their readers taught them in Egypt to students who included Aḥmad al-Mallawī and Aḥmad al-Damanhūrī, later authors of much-read commentaries on al-Akhḍarī’s Sullam.

In Cairo Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī quoted his reply to al-Suyūṭī but judged that he and other Maghribīs went too far in their enthusiasm for logic.

Jacques Berque devoted a book to him, Al-Yousi: problèmes de la culture marocaine au XVIIème siècle (1958).