Sa’d al-Din al-Taftazani

Works

• c. 1367Commentary on the Creed of al-Nasafi

  Commentary on the short creed of Najm al-Din Umar al-Nasafi, written in the Maturidi tradition: knowledge and its sources, the createdness of the world, God’s attributes, human acts, faith and the imamate; translated by E. E. Elder as A Commentary on the Creed of Islam (1950), it was commented on many times and taught across the Sunni world.

• 1383Commentary on the Aims

  Al-Taftazani’s commentary, completed in January 1383, on his own summa of theology, the Aims (al-Maqāṣid): knowledge, being, substance and accident, God, prophecy and the imamate; here he answers Ibn Sina and rejects the identification of God with absolute being in the school of Ibn Arabi.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• 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