Abstract
This memorial
article was wrote in memory of one of my loved one, Jalāl al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Roḥmān
ibn Abī Bakr al-Suyūṭī, born on Sunday, 1 Rojab 849 AH / 3 October 1445 CE and passed
away on 19 Jumāda al-Ūlā 911 AH / 18 October 1505 CE.
Keywords : al-Suyūṭī;
Islamic studies; scholar;
Jalāl al-Dīn
‘Abd al-Roḥmān ibn Abī Bakr al-Suyūṭī is represented in virtually every genre of
scholarly and literary production that existed during the Salṭonat al-Mamālīk age.
He was recognized as the most prolific author in the Islamic studies, past and present,
nor the most controversial one of his time. His remarkable faith in his own judgments,
his mocking rebuttals, and his personal attacks on those who disagreed with him
all earned him the ire of his fellow scholars. He believed himself to be the most
learned man of his time, and this as well as even bolder claims that he made polarized
his contemporaries into ardent supporters versus vehement adversaries. The controversy
over the value of his contribution to scholarship continues to this day.
Al-Suyūṭī's life
has been described in great detail elsewhere, e.g. his own autobiography entitled
al-Taḥadduts bi-Ni‘mat
Allōh Ta'ālā[1]
and his entry in Ḥusn al-Muḥādhoroh fī Tārikh Miṣro wa al-Qōhiroh[2],
‘Abd al-Qōdir al-Syādzilī’s Bahjat al-‘Ābidīn[3], nor a commentary of his autobiography by Elizabeth Mary Sartain[4]
that reviewed
by Harry T. Norris[5]. Thus,
here it is necessary to give only a brief outline.
‘Abd al-Roḥmān
ibn Abī Bakr ibn Muḥammad ibn Khiḍr ibn Ayyūb ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Humām Jalāl al-Dīn
al-Khuḍayrī al-Suyūṭī was born on Sunday, 1 Rojab 849 AH / 3 October 1445 CE. His
mother, a Circassian woman, was said to have given birth to him in the family library,
where his father had sent her to retrieve a book; hence his prophetic nickname “ibn
al-kutub” (son of books). Al-Suyūṭī's father, Kamāl al-Dīn Abū Bakr, a scholar,
died while al-Suyūṭī was a small child, but guardians made sure that the boy received
the education usual for one of his background, beginning with memorizing the Quran
and proceeding to the various religious sciences, grammar, adab, and Shafi‘i jurisprudence.
He was given his first ijāzah to teach grammar and adab at the age
of sixteen, and by the following year had been given permission to teach Shafi‘i
jurisprudence and issue fatwás by the chief qadi, ‘Alam al-Dīn Ṣāliḥ al-Bulqīnī.
At the age of eighteen al-Suyūṭī inherited his father's former post as professor
of Shafi‘i jurisprudence at the mosque of Shaykhū, and later added the post of teacher
of hadith at the Shaykhūnīyah. He also was appointed to two other positions which
seem to have been administrative rather than instructional: shaykh of sufis at the
mausoleum of Barqūq al-Nāṣirī, and supervisor of the Baybarsīyah khonqōh.
Even as al-Suyūṭī's
scholarly fame began to spread abroad, his career in Egypt became mired in numerous
disputes. Disagreements with other ulama on specific points of theology and law
invariably degenerated into reciprocal personal attacks. There were also a number
of widespread controversies (which involved the entire community of the ulama and
in some cases the amirs and up to the sultan himself) into which al-Suyūṭī waded,
including the question of the orthodoxy of the famous sufis Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Ibn
al-‘Arabī (al-Suyūṭī defended it) and the question as to whether or not women would
see God in the afterlife (al-Suyūṭī denied that possibility). His contentiousness
and irascibility progressed to the point that he refused to pay the customary monthly
courtesy call on the sultan Qōytbāy in order to receive personally his stipend as
shaykh of the Baybarsīyah khonqōh, citing the practice of the early pious
Muslims in refusing to frequent wordly rulers. This incident provides a good
example of al-Suyūṭī's wont to vindicate his actions by writing one or more
books.
In the late 890s/1480s,
al-Suyūṭī began to withdraw from public life. He progressively resigned from his
various teaching and administrative posts and stopped delivering fatwás.
In 906/1501 he was dismissed from his post at the Baybarsīyah khonqōh following
acrimonious disputes with the sufis there, and when the sultan Ṭūmānbāy, in support
of the sufis, sought to have him killed he went into hiding. These reached the
point that the sufis “rose up against their shaykh ... and almost killed him,
then they carried him in his clothes and threw him into the fountain.”[6]
Upon the sultan's death al-Suyūṭī reappeared but retreated completely to his house
on Rawḍah Island, announcing that he was devoting himself to God, refusing to leave
the house and receiving visitors only reluctantly. There he remained, writing and
revising his works, until his death on 19 Jumādá I 911/18 October 1505.
There can be
no doubt that he was endowed with an incredibly agile and retentive mind. He claimed
to have memorized 200,000 hadiths, which were all that had come to his attention;
if he had located more, he would have memorized them as well. In speed of writing
and composition al-Suyūṭī was “one of the great signs (āyāt) of God,” and
he was able to edit and dictate several works simultaneously; his pupil Dāwūdī is
reported to have said: “I have seen the shaykh write three quires in one day, both
composing and writing down, as well as dictate hadith and answer opponents.”
Quite early in
his scholarly career al-Suyūṭī claimed special expertise in a number of subjects:
“I was endowed with deep penetration in seven sciences: Quran commentary, hadith,
jurisprudence, grammar, rhetoric (ma‘ānī), rhetoric (bayān), and style
(badī‘) (in the style of Arabs, not in the style of Persians and philosophers);
and I believe that what I attained in these seven sciences (with the exception of
jurisprudence) was never attained by any of my teachers, let alone others. I do
not make this claim for jurisprudence, for there my teacher (that is al-Bulqīnī)
has a wider perspective.” He also claimed mastery, though to a lesser degree, of
uṣūl al-fiqh, polemics, morphology, division of inheritances, elegant prose
writing, letter-writing, Quranic recitation, medicine, and accounting. He consciously
avoided the “sciences of the ancients,” particularly logic.
Al-Suyūṭī came
to feel that he had been born into an age of widespread ignorance and scholarly
decline, and that as the most knowledgeable person of his time he had a special
mission to assemble and transmit the Islamic cultural patrimony before it disappeared
entirely due to the carelessness of his contemporaries. This consciousness of his
own superiority led him to make several very controversial claims.
Al-Suyūṭī's conviction
that “he alone, in an age of increasing ignorance, was a true scholar” first led
him to claim that “. . . the tools of ijtihād have been perfected in me—I
say that praising God and not out of pride.” Al-Suyūṭī noted that one could be a
mujtahid in one field but not necessarily another, acknowledging that “most
people are not aware of ijtihād in hadith and Arabic, but are aware of ijtihād
in shari‘ah only.” Al-Suyūṭī, however, claimed ijtihād in all three of these
fields, a rank unequalled, in his view, by anyone since the time of al-Subkī (d
756/1355).
The rejection
of this claim by most of his contemporaries led al-Suyūṭī to explain himself in
the face of what he felt was their misunderstanding. Their accusation that he had
claimed unrestricted, independent ijtihād like that wielded by the four imams
who had founded the major schools of law was false. Rather, he was entitled to “derivative”
(muntasab) unrestricted ijtihād within his madhhab: “When I
attained the rank of unrestricted ijtihād, I did not depart in giving legal
opinions from the madhhab of al-Shāfi‘ī.”
Al-Suyūṭī set
out his claim to ijtihād at length in his al-Radd ‘alá Man Akhlada ilá
al-Arḍ wa-Jahila anna al-Ijtihād fī Kull ‘Aṣr Farḍ [Refutation of those who
abide on the earth and are ignorant of the fact that ijtihād is a duty in
every age]. As the title implies, al-Suyūṭī believed that anyone who denied the
possibility of ijtihād was ignorant; it is a collective duty (farḍ kifāyah)
which he, as the only qualified person, was discharging on his contemporaries’ behalf.
He admitted, however, that while most of his opposition came from those who mistakenly
denied the possibility of the current existence of any mujtahid, another
group admitted that possibility but considered al-Suyūṭī unworthy of it.
Al-Suyūṭī's conviction
of his intellectual superiority, indeed uniqueness, grew until he was impelled to
make a yet bolder claim: to be the restorer of religion (mujaddid) expected
at the end of every century:
. . . I hope . . . to be the mujaddid at the end
of this ninth (fifteenth) century, just as al-Ghazālī had hoped for himself, because
I alone have mastered all kinds of different disciplines, such as Qur’ānic exegesis
and its principles, Prophetic tradition and its sciences, jurisprudence and its
principles, language and its principles, syntax and morphology and their principles,
polemics, rhetoric and good style, and history. In addition to all this, there are
my outstanding, excellent works, the like of which nobody has written before, and
their number up till now is about 500. I have originated the science of the principles
of language (uṣūl al-lughah) and its study, and nobody has preceded me in
this. It follows the same lines as Prophetic tradition and principles of jurisprudence.
My works and my knowledge have travelled to all countries, and have reached Syria,
Rūm, Persia, the Hijaz, the Yemen, India, Ethiopia, North Africa, and Takrūr, and
have spread from Takrūr to the ocean. In all that I have mentioned, I have no equal,
nobody else living has mastered the number of disciplines that I have, and, as far
as I know, nobody else has reached the rank of unrestricted ijtihād except
for me.
Undaunted by
his contemporaries' reaction to this claim, which will be discussed below, al-Suyūṭī
went on to convince the shadow ‘Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil ‘alá Allāh ‘Abd al-‘Azīz,
to appoint him qadi-in-chief over all qadis in all the lands of Islam, with the
power to appoint and dismiss whomever he liked. When the qadis predictably rose
in outraged protest, the caliph backed down and rescinded the appointment, saying,
“What part did I have in this? It was the shaykh Jalāl al-Dīn who persuaded me that
it was desirable; he said that this was an ancient post, and the caliphs used to
grant it to whomever they chose among the ulama.” Uncharacteristically, al-Suyūṭī
unfortunately does not seem to have left an account of this affair from his point
of view; one can only speculate that it represented another aspect of his attempt
to secure recognition as the foremost scholar of his time.
It appears that
this recognition was more readily granted by those who were separated from al-Suyūṭī
by either distance or time. He was widely revered outside of Egypt, and a great
proportion of his writing consists of the fatwás he issued in response to
requests from abroad. After his death a superstitious awe began to accrue to the
scholar, at least according to his student Ibn Iyās, who reported that upon his
death, some people bought his shirt and cap, hoping to obtain blessing through them.
There were even claims of miracles circulated, which purportedly al-Suyūṭī had requested
be kept secret until after his death. These included the report of a servant that
he and his master had miraculously been transported in an instant to Mecca and then
just as quickly returned to Cairo, and prediction of the Ottoman invasion and subsequent
ruination of Egypt in 923/1517.
Among al-Suyūṭī's
contemporary peers, however, his own pupils seem to have been somewhat isolated
in their great admiration and respect for the man. His arrogance and combative personality
made it virtually impossible for other scholars to appreciate his undeniable accomplishments,
and his more extravagant claims in particular were met with outrage and scorn. His
professional life consisted largely of disputes with other scholars (another large
body of his writing consists of refutations of others' opinions, numerous titles
beginning with Al-Radd ‘alá . . . ).
Perhaps the most
powerful individual with whom al-Suyūṭī was in conflict was Ibn al-Karakī, a favorite
of the sultan Qōytbāy—a conflict that caused him serious difficulties. His bitterest
rival, however, appears to have been al-Sakhāwī. Al-Sakhāwī's entry on al-Suyūṭī
in his biographical dictionary, Al-Ḍaw’ al-Lāmi’ li-Ahl al-Qarn al-Tāsi’,
drips with vitriol. He accused al-Suyūṭī firstly of plagiarism: “. . . he would
take . . . a lot of earlier works in various fields which were not well known to
his contemporaries, change a little bit, and then present them attributed to himself,
and make a great fuss in presenting them such that the ignorant would suppose them
to be something unequalled.” He added sarcastically, “If he were going to steal
them, I wish at least he had not distorted them—if he had just copied them it would
have been more useful.”
Al-Sakhāwī went
on to denigrate al-Suyūṭī's mastery of grammar (of which, we may recall, al-Suyūṭī
was particularly proud) by accusing him of phonetic corruption (taḥrīf) and
misspelling or misplacement of diacritics (tasḥīf). This he attributed to
al-Suyūṭī's faulty education which resulted from his having acquired much of his
learning by reading independently rather than receiving it orally from a teacher.
Al-Sakhāwī was particularly scornful of al-Suyūṭī's claim to ijtihād; and
not al-Sakhāwī alone but, he claims, “Everybody rose against him when he claimed
ijtihād.” In fact, al-Sakhāwī said, the claim was made “to cover up his mistakes.”
In sum, al-Sakhāwī admitted grudgingly that al-al-Suyūṭī was “quick at writing,”
but his truly distinguishing feature was his “folly and excessive arrogance, even
to his mother, so that she continually complained of him.”
As noted before,
al-Suyūṭī seems to have been appreciated best at a distance. The sufi writer al-Sha‘rānī
(d. 973/1565), for instance, venerated al-Suyūṭī and wrote of him, “He was the most
knowledgeable person of his time in the sciences and arts of hadith.” Complimentary
entries on him appear in many later biographical dictionaries and histories, from
that of his pupil Ibn Iyās (d. ca. 930/1524) through al-Ghazzī (d. 1061/1651) and
Ibn al-‘Imād (d. 1089/1679). The centuries following al-Suyūṭī's death are replete
with abridgements, commentaries, and supercommentaries on his works (the pre-modern
counterpart to our secondary literature).
With the rise
of European interest in Islamic history and literature, al-Suyūṭī came in for his
share of the disdain generally heaped on all authors post-dating the “golden” Abbasid
period. Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921), for instance dismissed a lifetime of work with
the scathing comment: “. . . our ingenious al-Suyūṭī did not shrink from drawing
up treatises which, at a cursory glance, purport to have no other end than the elucidation
of the subject set down on the title page, but which, on closer examination, prove
to be nothing other than polemical works whose sole purpose is to serve as an exaggerated
advertisement for their author and as instruction to his contemporaries in his unsurpassed
and unsurpassable greatness and erudition.”
Goldziher apparently
shared al-Suyūṭī's contemporaries' outrage at his daring to claim the right of ijtihād
as well as the status of the most learned man of the time:
Even if a not
inconsiderable degree of vanity and self-esteem is required to list the description
of his own life and scholarly labors among the biographies of the mujtahidūn—a vanity
which is best illustrated by the pompous style and manner in which al-Suyūṭī speaks
of his own works and refers to his own academic career—this is to a large extent
overshadowed by the almost nauseating kind of self-adulation we find in his lesser
works.
Despite his ability
and diligence, and despite the value of his achievement, he must naturally have
become an insufferable figure to many of his learned contemporaries, to whom the
circumstance of his laying claim to all merit for himself seemed to detract from
their own worth.
Many earlier
modern Arab scholars, and some up till the present, share this assessment, though
without Goldziher's venomous and curiously personal dislike. They tend to dismiss
al-Suyūṭī as a mere compiler. Sa‘dī Abū Jīb, for instance, while titling his article
“Al-Suyūṭī: Allāmat ‘Aṣrih” [al-Suyūṭī: the most erudite of his age], opined that
al-Suyūṭī's writings are not innovative nor do they show creative thought; this
is only to be expected as that was the style for scholarly writing in his day. His
value lies in the fact that he preserved for us earlier writings that were otherwise
destroyed by the Mongol invasions and the fall of Spain.
Al-Suyūṭī's modern
Western biographer, Elizabeth Sartain, cautiously agreed, at least partially, with
this negative evaluation of scholarship in the Mamluk age and, by extension, that
produced by al-Suyūṭī. While defending al-Suyūṭī against al-Sakhāwī's charges of
plagiarism, Sartain deferred final judgment as to the “originality” of his work
to “specialists in the fields of Muslim learning in which he wrote.” She did note
that the age's emphasis on oral transmission and memorization helped to discourage
original thought, and concluded that despite the favorable conditions, and “in spite
of the great activity of scholars, few outstanding contributions to knowledge were
made, and by al-Suyūṭī's time there was evidence of steady decline in academic standards.”
In contrast,
and perhaps in reaction to this, in recent times there has been what might be termed
a revival of interest in al-Suyūṭī and his work. An only moderately intensive search
for books and articles dealing exclusively or substantially with the subject of
al-Suyūṭī yielded a total of 192 titles, the vast majority written within the last
thirty years. Following the traditional path, many of these are commentaries (s.
sharḥ) on specific works. Others discuss al-Suyūṭī's sources and methodology
in his endeavors in such fields as Quran commentary, philology, jurisprudence, and
history, while still others attempt to evaluate his contributions and his significance
as a scholar to those fields.
Two international
conferences devoted solely to al-Suyūṭī have been held in Egypt, one in 1976 and
a second in 1993, the latter commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of al-Suyūṭī's
death. (That same year an entire issue of the journal Al-Turāth al-‘Arabī
was devoted to articles treating various aspects of his life and work.) While the
first conference was attended only by Egyptian participants, the second widened
its scope to include contributors from a wide range of Muslim countries: Egypt,
Syria, Jordan, Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Azerbaijan,
Morocco, Kuwait, Pakistan, Senegal, Malaysia, Qatar, Iraq, and Tunisia. Neither,
however, included any Western participants, and the papers published in the proceedings
of both conferences (which treated basically the same themes as other literature
on al-Suyūṭī) showed virtually no awareness of, or perhaps interest in, Western
contributions to al-Suyūṭī studies.
Spokesmen for
both conferences expressly stated that their purpose was to "revive" the
memory of al-Suyūṭī, which had been unfairly allowed to lapse. The second conference
went on to lay out a number of ambitious goals in this regard. These included, among
others, organizing competitions (with prizes) for students carrying out al-Suyūṭī
studies; production of a film on al-Suyūṭī; translating some of his works into world
languages; urging journalists and other disseminators of information in all Islamic
countries to educate the people about al-Suyūṭī's contributions to Islamic culture;
and enlisting the cooperation of various Muslim institutions to revive al-Suyūṭī's
beloved ijtihād.
Some Western
scholars as well have become more appreciative of the value of al-Suyūṭī's work.
For instance, Éric Geoffroy's 1997 Encyclopaedia of Islam article on al-Suyūṭī
disputes the widespread condemnation of al-Suyūṭī as merely a compiler. No doubt
he did do a great deal of compiling, extracting, summarizing, and commenting on
earlier works (including his own) in keeping with his perceived mission of preserving
the Islamic scholarly heritage. Yet he went beyond that, according to Geoffroy:
“. . . he prefigures the modern period by certain aspects, such as being partly
an autodidact, presenting to a public, which he wanted to be widened, manuals which
were centered around precise themes. . . . He indeed takes up themes which were
usually neglected in Islamic literature. . . . As for form, al-Suyūṭī's procedure
is scientific in so far as he quotes his sources with precision and presents them
in a critical way. In the introduction to a work, he often defines the method which
he is going to follow. His works benefit from a clear structure, and he often broke
new ground by expounding his material according to its alphabetical order.”
In any discussion
of al-Suyūṭī, one is bound to express admiration, whether frank or grudging, and
astonishment at the sheer massive quantity of his literary output. Al-Suyūṭī incorporated
lists of his own works in other works on several occasions, and the biographies
written by his students al-Shādhilī and al-Dāwūdī contained such lists approved
by him. These lists differ from one another, ranging in size from 282 to 561 titles.
Later biographical descriptions of al-Suyūṭī almost always include a count of his
works if not a list; these range up to the nearly one thousand titles claimed (but
not listed) by Ibn al-Qōḍī (d. 1025/1616).
The first modern
Western attempt to compose a list of al-Suyūṭī's works, drawing from various sources,
was carried out by Gustav Flügel in 1832, and named more than 500 titles. Carl Brockelmann
(who was concerned only with extant manuscripts) listed 415. Since then a number
of works have been devoted to the question of al-Suyūṭī's production and to attempting
to pin the list down. Each list contains, and omits, works respectively omitted
and contained in other lists.
Elizabeth Sartain,
in her work on al-Suyūṭī's autobiography, detailed the difficulties that preparing
a definitive list of his works would entail:
At one stage
of my research, I had hoped to be able to prepare a complete list of al-Suyūṭī's
works. Regrettably, this turned out to be impossible. Al-Suyūṭī's works number altogether
some 600; one could conceivably prepare an accurate and complete list even of so
large a number of works, were it not for the obscurity and confusion concerning
the exact titles and subjects of many of them. Some of these problems can be solved
by reference to existing MSS, other obscurities cannot be clarified because the
works concerned have been lost. This confusion has several causes: firstly, many
of the works have more than one title, for instance, a book referred to in one context
by its proper title, may be mentioned in another context merely as "Commentary
on such-and-such a work" or "Treatise on such-and-such a subject".
These titles then become recorded in lists of al-Suyūṭī's works as if they are separate
works. I suspect that al-Suyūṭī himself occasionally made this mistake in his own
lists of his works, and certainly Brockelmann's list has several examples of such
confusion. Secondly, it was al-Suyūṭī's habit to rewrite his works, to abridge them,
sometimes more than once, to issue parts of a larger work separately, and sometimes
to join short works together in a larger one. This means that there may be two or
more works on exactly the same subject, sometimes with very similar titles; once
the titles are misrecorded by copyist or cataloguer, it becomes impossible to distinguish
between them except by reading them, if copies have survived and are accessible.
The task of drawing up a list of al-Suyūṭī's works would be easier if he had written
less; as it is, anyone who embarks on this task will be obliged to consult many
of those MSS of al-Suyūṭī's works which have survived, and these probably run into
thousands, scattered in libraries all over the world.
Although valiant
efforts have been made in this direction, notably by Aḥmad al-Sharqōwī Iqbāl and
Muḥammad Ibrāhīm al-Shaybānī with Ahmad Sa‘īd al-Khāzindār in their identifications
of extant manuscripts, it appears that for the matter to be solved (to the extent
possible given the survival or lack thereof of any given work) it would require
implementation of the primary recommendation set forth at the 1993 conference. This
called on ISESCO (the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization)
to appoint a committee of experts to prepare a detailed, indexed list of al-Suyūṭī's
works, indicating manuscript locations of extant works, and date and place of publication
of published titles.
How was it possible
for one man to produce such a huge quantity of work? ‘Iṣām al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Ra’ūf
admonished us not to dismiss this as impossible; after all, al-Suyūṭī began writing
at the age of seventeen and spent the last years of his life in seclusion, totally
devoted to his work of composing and editing. Moreover, as Sartain and others have
noted, al-Suyūṭī often divided single works into sections, giving each section a
separate title. Al-Sakhāwī sniffed, “He [al-Suyūṭī] mentioned that his compositions
exceed three hundred books. I saw of them what consisted of a single sheet of paper
[e.g., a fatwá]; as for those that are less than one quire, they are many.”
To be fair to al-Suyūṭī, though, we must note that conversely a number of his works
consist of many volumes. Clearly there is no getting around the fact that the man
was extraordinarily productive.
The range of
subjects which al-Suyūṭī covered is equally impressive. Lists of al-Suyūṭī's works
are typically divided by subject. His student al-Shādhilī's list, approved by the
master himself in the year 904/1498-99, for instance, is classified as follows:
Quran commentary and what relates to it, 37 titles; hadith and what relates to it,
207 titles; what is related to the terminology (muṣṭalaḥ) of hadith, 24 titles;
jurisprudence, 73 titles; principles of jurisprudence, principles of religion, and
sufism, 17 titles; philology, grammar, and morphology, 57 titles; rhetoric, 7 titles;
works combining various subjects, 10 titles; literature, anecdotes, prose composition,
and poetry, 97 titles; and history, 32 titles. This is virtually a syllabus of classical
Islamic scholarship.
What, then can
be said about the true value, the quality as opposed to quantity of this vast corpus?
Al-Suyūṭī clearly considered his work qualitatively and not just quantitatively
superior to that of any of his peers: “It is my wont to write only on matters in
which I have no precursor and then to exhaust the subject completely.” Yet he never
claimed to have authored four or five or six hundred weighty tomes. He was well
aware of the different levels of significance of his various works (one might quibble
with his decision to award a title to a one-page fatwá and list it as a “work”).
A valuable glimpse into his thinking is provided by his list of his own works that
appears in his autobiography Al-Taḥadduth bi-Ni’mat Allāh. This list, unlike
all others including those drawn up by him, is divided not by subject matter, but
into seven classes delineated by worth and degree of originality.
Al-Suyūṭī described
the first class of his works as follows: “Those for which I claim uniqueness. The
meaning of this is that nothing comparable has been composed in the world, as far
as I know. This is not due to the incapability of those who came before—God forbid—but
it simply did not happen that they undertook anything like it. As for the people
of this age, they cannot produce its like due to what that would require of breadth
of vision, abundance of information, effort, and diligence.”
This section
consists of 18 titles:
Eight in the
field of philology and grammar:
“Jam‘ al-Jawāmi‘
fī al-‘Arabīyah”
Its commentary,
entitled “Ham’ al-Hawāmi’”
“Al-Ashbāh wa-al-Naẓā’ir
fī al-Qawā’id al-‘Arabīyah,” also entitled
“Al-Maṣā’id al-‘Alīyah
fī al-Qawā’id al-‘Arabīyah”
“Al-Silsilah fī al-Naḥw”“Al-Nukat ‘alá
‘Al-Alfīyah’ wa-‘Al-Kāfiyah’ wa-‘Al-Shāfiyah’ wa-‘Al-Shudhūr’ wa-‘Al-Nuzhah’"
in one composition
“Al-Fatḥ al-Qarīb
‘alá ‘Mughnī al-Labīb’”
“Sharḥ Shawāhid
‘Al-Mughnī’”
“Al-Iqtirāh fī
Uṣūl al-Naḥw wa-Jadaluh”
Six in the field
of Quran and its commentary:
“Al-Itqōn fī
‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān”
“Al-Durr al-Manthūr
fī al-Tafsīr bi-al-Ma’thūr”
“Tarjumān al-Qur’ān”
“Asrār al-Tanzīl”
“Al-Iklīl fī
Istinbāṭ al-Tanzīl”
Tanāsuq al-Durar
fī Tanāsub al-Āyāt wa-al-Suwar
One each in hadith,
biography, jurisprudence, and a rebuttal of logic and scholastic theology:
“Nukat al-Badī’āt
‘alá ‘Al-Mawḍū’āt’”
“Ṭabaqōt al-Nuḥāh
al-Kubrá,” entitled “Bughyat al-Wu’āh”
“Al-Jāmi‘ fī
al-Farā’iḍ,” incomplete
“Ṣawn al-Manṭiq
wa-al-Kalām ‘an Fann al-Manṭiq wa-al-Kalām”
Subsequent generations
have agreed with al-Suyūṭī's esteem for these 18 works. All of them were valued
enough to be represented by extant manuscripts; the value accorded to them in more
recent times can be gauged by the fact that all but 3 of them have been published
(some many times).
Al-Suyūṭī described
his second class as one “for which comparable works have been composed, and a very
learned person could produce its like. This class includes works of which at least
a volume, more or less, was completed,” though some of them are labeled “unfinished.”
This class comprises 50 titles; many of these are abridgements of Suyūṭī 's or others'
works, abridgements of abridgements, and commentaries on commentaries. Of these,
38 titles are extant, and 30 of these titles have been published.
Class three consists
of 60 works of small size, ranging from 2 to 10 quires (s. kurrāsah). Of
these, 55 are extant, and only 17 of them remain unpublished.
Class four comprises
quire-length works, excluding fatwás. al-Suyūṭī listed here 102 works, including
59 extant works of which 32 have been published. This section includes, among other
things, his many maqōmāt, which are not here listed individually under their
separate titles but have often been so listed and so published.
Fatwás are gathered into a class of their own. Al-Suyūṭī characterizes
them as being of the size of “quires—more or less,” though as we have seen they
could be “less” than a quire to the extent of being a single page. There are 80
titles here; of these, a surprising 67 are extant and 60 have been published (though
most often in compilations, not separately).
Al-Suyūṭī's class
six is quite interesting. These, he said, are “compositions that I do not count
because they are of the type done by idlers who are interested merely in transmitting,
which I composed at the time I was studying and seeking ijāzahs—although
they contain good points compared to what other people write.” Most of these 40
titles are “muntaqás” [selected extracts] of other works; indeed, they appear
to be little more than al-Suyūṭī's study notes. Not surprisingly, only 8 are extant,
none of them published.
The final class
consists of works “which I started then lost interest in, having written only a
little.” These 83 titles again seem mainly to consist of notes and study aids: abridgements,
marginal notes on commentaries and supercommentaries, versifications, no doubt to
aid in memorization. Of these 15 still exist and 6, all on the subject of hadith,
have even been published.
This gives us
a snapshot, based on one listing, of the place of al-Suyūṭī's works in Islamic scholarship.
We can attempt to judge the value placed on a given work by succeeding generations
by seeing whether or not that work was copied and has left surviving manuscripts.
As mentioned earlier, a number of attempts have been made to identify the existence
and location of manuscripts of all of al-Suyūṭī's works.
In turn the judgment
of more modern times on the worth of a certain work is evidenced by publication
or lack thereof. I have come up with a list of 392 works written by al-Suyūṭī that
have been published at least once, without counting additional editions of the same
title. Surely the production of such a huge number of works judged worthy of publication
is a tremendous achievement.
It is an interesting
though probably ultimately futile exercise to seek a definitive enumeration of the
individual works within the corpus of al-Suyūṭī's literary production and to trace
the existence and location of their manuscripts and history of publication. However,
stepping back now to focus on the forest instead of the trees, al-Suyūṭī gave the
world an enormous quantity of scholarly material, saving and transmitting treasures
of the Islamic cultural heritage but also adding his own valuable contribution to
it.
Acknowledgment
This
work is dedicated to my great academic’s advisor Surotul Ilmiyah, of her
amazing inspiring, motivating, and guiding my research, nor for her endless
shaping my mindset and developing my skill.
[1] (السيوطي، 1975)
[2] (السيوطي، 1967، الصفحات 335-44)
[3] (الشاذلي، 1998)
[4] (Sartain, 1975)
[5] (Norris, 1976)
[6] (الحنفي، 2011، صفحة 378)
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Sartain: Jalāl al-dīn al-Suyūṭī. (University of Cambridge Oriental
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University Press, 1975. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies, 39(3), 653-5.
Sartain, E. M. (1975). Jalāl
al-dīn al-Suyūṭī. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
جلال الدين عبد الرحمن بن أبي بكر بن محمد الخضيري السيوطي. (1975). التحدث بنعمة الله تعالى. القدس الشرقية:
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