سعد الدين التفتازاني

الأعمال

• نحو 1367شرح العقائد النسفية

  شرح على العقيدة القصيرة لنجم الدين عمر النسفي في التقليد الماتريدي: العلم ومصادره، وحدوث العالم، وصفات الله، وأفعال العباد، والإيمان والإمامة؛ ترجمه إ. إ. إلدر بعنوان A Commentary on the Creed of Islam (1950)، وكثرت حواشيه ودُرّس في العالم السني كله.

• 1383شرح المقاصد

  شرح أتمّه التفتازاني في يناير 1383 على موسوعته الكلامية «المقاصد»: العلم والوجود والجوهر والعرض والإلهيات والنبوة والإمامة؛ وفيه يرد على ابن سينا ويرفض القول في مدرسة ابن عربي بأن الله هو الوجود المطلق.

الموقف

Al-Taftazani is on the map as one of the scholars whose commentaries defined what students learned in the madrasas from the Ottoman lands to India and Central Asia for centuries. In rhetoric his long and short commentaries on al-Qazwini’s abridgement of al-Sakkaki’s Key were standard; in logic he commented on al-Katibi’s Shamsiyya and wrote the textbook Refinement of Logic (Tahdhīb al-manṭiq). His Commentary on the Creed of al-Nasafi, a Maturidi creed, became a standard text of Sunni theology and shows his readiness to move between the Ashʿari and Maturidi schools. His summa is the commentary on his own Aims (al-Maqāṣid), completed in 1383, which treats knowledge, being, substance and accident, God, prophecy and the imamate. In it he replies to Ibn Sina’s argument that essences cannot be made by an agent, distinguishing two kinds of negation, and he attacks the metaphysics of the school of Ibn Arabi: if absolute being were God, nothing else could be said to be; absolute being is rather a concept formed in the mind, a “secondary intelligible” with no reality outside it. Alexander Knysh has shown how strongly this argument shaped the later polemic around Ibn Arabi. Al-Taftazani also gave the Liar paradox its later name, “the paradox of the irrational root”. Al-Sanusi in the Maghrib drew on him, and al-Jurjani argued with his readings in rhetoric and theology.

الحياة والسياق

Saʿd al-Din Masʿud ibn ʿUmar al-Taftazani was born in 1322 in Taftazan, a village in Khorasan. He studied in several cities of eastern Iran and Central Asia, and later sources name ʿAdud al-Din al-Iji as his most important teacher. At sixteen he wrote his first commentary, on an Arabic morphology primer. He taught and wrote in Herat, in Khwarazm and in Sarakhs, where he mainly lived, and from the 1380s was attached to the court of Timur, who brought him to Samarqand. There he met al-Sharif al-Jurjani, whom Timur had taken from Shiraz in 1387; later biographers report disputations between the two in Timur’s presence. He died in Samarqand in 1390 and was buried in Sarakhs. Ibn Khaldun wrote in his Muqaddima that he had found in Egypt many works of al-Taftazani on theology, legal theory and rhetoric that showed a profound command of the rational sciences.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Commentary on the Aims (Sharḥ al-Maqāṣid, 1383)
• Commentary on the Creed of al-Nasafi (Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid al-Nasafiyya)
• The Long Commentary (al-Muṭawwal) and The Short Commentary (al-Mukhtaṣar) on the Abridgement of the Key, on rhetoric
• Refinement of Logic and Theology (Tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām)
• Commentary on al-Katibi’s Shamsiyya