This book offers for the first time a complete scholarly translation, commentary, and glossary in a modern European language of the logic section of Ibn Sīnā's (d. 1037 CE) very important compendium Ial-Najāt (The Deliverance). The original, written in Arabic, is the product of the middle period of the most renowned Muslim philosopher and physician, known in the Latin West as Avicenna. Avicenna's logic system took as its starting point the Aristotelian and the Peripatetic tradition, but diverged from these in fascinating and original ways. The system presented by him becaume the standard reference and focus of further elaboration, debate, and innovation in the Islamic scholarly tradition, deeply influencing both the 'traditional religious' sciences (such as theology and law) and the naturalized Greek system (such as metaphysics). Because the Najāt is both comprehensive and relatively terse, this translation, which has been the diachronic subject of study in various madāris and has a number of attached commentaries and glosses, will be extremely useful to those who do not read Arabic, but who wish to gain an overview of Avicenna's logic.
Readership: This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of classical and medieval logic and philosophy in the Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions. Also students of modern logic.
Asad Q. Ahmed, Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Washington University, St. Louis
Asad Q. Ahmed is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and the Program in Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He graduated in 2000 from Yale University with an AB from the Departments of Literature and Philosophy and in 2006 with a PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University. His research interests include early Islamic history and historiography, classical Arabic poetry and poetics, Arabo-Islamic philosophy, theology, and logic, and the post-classical rationalist Islamic scholarly tradition, with a special focus on South Asia.
