Asad Q. Ahmed

Post-Classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins

This article investigates the nature of the post-classical (ca. 600–1300/1200–900) commentary/gloss genre in the maʿqūlāt (rationalist disciplines). It does so by looking closely at the process of philosophical growth in the tradition of a celebrated text on logic, the Sullam al-ʿulūm of Muḥibballāh al-Bihārī (d. 1118/1707), that inspired more than ninety commentaries, glosses, and notes in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu in the course of two centuries. Among other things, the article concludes that, from the very beginning, the authors of the main text and of its commentaries/glosses posited the lemmata as sites of philosophical conflict and dispute (masāʾil)—though these lemmata were also seamlessly interwoven into the larger aims of philosophical works. These open spaces of philosophical dialectic stood in place of a vibrant culture of debate that was responsible for the diachronic and synchronic dynamism of post-classical philosophy. In this article, the detailed analysis of a minor lemma and its fate in the hands of some prominent commentators and glossators sheds light on the complex layers of the intertextuality of commentaries and glosses, on structures of textual authority, on the nature of the self-gloss, on the fine line between commentarial critique and defense, and on the meaning of verification (taḥqīq). Finally, the technical assessment of the philosophical arguments also reveals how the mode of argumentation required by the very framework of the commentary/gloss genre resulted in the production of novel philosophical theories.

The Ḥāshiya and Islamic Intellectual History

Modern students of Islamicate societies have long acknowledged that scholarly production in the post-classical period (ca. 6th–13th/12th–19th) was overwhelmingly carried out within the framework of multi-layered commentaries.1 Every discipline of learning—ranging from poetry and poetics, to grammar and morphology, to philosophy and exegesis—is represented by this genre of writing. Indeed in sifting through the manuscript evidence preserved in many parts of the world, one gets the clear sense that commentary of some form dominated the spheres of public and private learning, formal and informal curricula, literary and even documentary texts. Since by their very nature, commentaries are invested in some textual tradition (the matn), until rather recently, they were considered to be no more than stale expositions of the works of revered masters of a bygone age. This assessment was especially endorsed in Orientalist scholarship in view of the observation that commentaries constituted the greater portion of the curricula of the madāris, which were presumably devoted to perpetuating existing interpretations and structures of authority. And so this genre of scholarship was almost entirely neglected by generations of scholars, since it was seen a priori to offer nothing original or innovative.This negative judgment of a pervasive scholarly genre was, in turn, commonly deployed as suitable evidence for the colonial meta-narrative of the pre-modern stagnancy and decline of Islamic intellectual traditions: the commentary was the representative genre of the long and tenacious Dark Age of Islam.

Underdetermination in Late Postclassical Ḥanafī Legal Theories

This article argues that Ḥanafī uṣūlī s of the later phases of the postclassical period understood uṣūl to be universal propositions that were underdetermined with respect to their evidentiary bases. Though the purpose of such propositions was to confer actionable certainty to particular legal effects, the later tradition imagined the main charge of uṣūl al-fiqh on a meta-theoretic level, i.e., to determine how such propositions could themselves be suitably grounded. In casting the discourse within the framework of naturalized technical methods and distinctions from fields of logic and philosophy, the tradition generally granted the relational and systemic validity of each proposition in terms of the grounding it received from another underdetermined proposition. This second-order perspective of the tradition reveals that uṣūl were systemically and relationally valid, but individually underdetermined. Thus the application of the attribute of relational validity to them and to the effects for which they are serviceable is apt.

Logic in the Khayrābādī School of India: A Preliminary Exploration

This chapter presents, in an exploratory fashion, the history of Arabo-Islamic logic in India1 between the tenth/sixteenth and fourteenth/twentieth centuries, with special focus on the formation of the Khayrabadi School in this discipline. Given its exploratory nature, the chapter does not promote any thesis that elaborates on the causes behind historical developments; however, it does point out that the study of logic passed through India in four distinct stages via Multan, Delhi, Lahore, the Awadh (generally), and Tonk. The aim of the chapter is simply to chart the trajectory of the scholars and works associated with logical studies in the specified period and region, so as to lay the groundwork for further technical research in Arabo-Islamic logical texts of the subcontinent.