How to Arrange Your Studies: The Author
This is the first in a series of articles on how a student ought to arrange their studies, drawn from a seminar delivered by Shaykh Talal al-Azem. You can watch the full seminar here: How to Arrange Your Studies of Islamic Sciences
Why does one’s learning journey require structure?
A Scholar Raised Inside a Family of Knowledge
Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Marʿashi al-Hanafi, famously known as Imam Sajaqlizada, was born into a family already given to learning. His father served as an imam and teacher in Maraş, in southern Turkey. The young Sajaqlizada studied first in Malatya and Sivas. He then made repeated journeys to Damascus, one of the great capitals of Islamic learning at the time.
There, he studied Quranic exegesis (tafsir) and hadith. He also studied purification of the heart (tasawwuf) under Imam Abdul Ghani al-Nabulsi (Allah have mercy on him). Imam Nabulsi granted him authorisation to guide others in two spiritual orders: the Qadiri and the Naqshbandi schools.
A Life Spent Teaching
Despite this formation, Imam Sajaqlizada never held an official post in the Ottoman religious-education hierarchy. There is also no evidence he ever traveled to Istanbul at all.
He did what his father had done. He served as an imam, taught both the traditional and the rational sciences, and gave spiritual guidance. Above all, he was prolific. He authored at least 30 works across exegesis, theology (kalam), logic, disputation, jurisprudence, purification of the heart, and ethics.
He also wrote on how to classify and order the sciences.
Historians dispute his date of death, somewhere between 1145 and 1155 in the Hijri calendar, or 1732 to 1742 CE. Later generations remembered him as Taj al-Murshidin, the Crown of the Spiritual Guides.
A Significant Book
This article is centered on Imam Sajaqlizada’s book Tartib al-ʿUlum, The Ordering of the Sciences, completed in 1128 AH, or 1715/1716 CE. It was read widely enough that it was translated into Turkish more than 150 years later, during the Young Turk era, as an argument for reforming Ottoman education.
The title carries dual significance, and both matter to the book’s purpose. First, a hierarchy: some sciences supply the first principles that other sciences build on, a relationship the Avicennan and Latin traditions alike call subalternation.
Second, an order of study: given that hierarchy, in what sequence should a student actually proceed? The book pursues this second question through a preface, an introduction, two main parts, a conclusion, and a short epilogue.
A Direct Word to the Student
Imam Sajaqlizada opens by naming exactly whom he is addressing—those already on the path of seeking knowledge. He reminds them that in every age there has been a group set apart for the pursuit of knowledge, fulfilling the Quran’s command that a group remain in every community to gain understanding of the religion [Quran 9:122].
That group, he laments, has nearly vanished in his own time. In its place stand those he compares to rabbits among lions: present, moving, but nowhere near the stature of those who came before them.
He therefore reminds every student, then and now, that a desire for knowledge means little without a method for pursuing it. Having set that reminder, Imam Sajaqlizada turns next to the bond between knowledge and morality—the subject of the next article in this series.
