Adab al-Bahth wa al-Munazara
- Author died
- 1393 AH
- Editions
- Dār ‘Aṭā’āt al-‘Ilm
Adab al-Bahth wa al-Munazara (The Etiquette of Inquiry and Disputation) is a treatise on Islamic dialectic, argumentation, and formal logic by the Mauritanian scholar Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti (1325–1393 AH / 1905–1973 CE) .
Background and Purpose
The work was originally composed as a course manual (mudhakkira) when the Islamic University of Madinah tasked al-Shinqiti with teaching the discipline of dialectic and debate (adab al-bahth wa al-munazara) . Al-Shinqiti observed that students could not properly understand the rules of disputation—such as directing challenges against major or minor premises, spotting omitted middle terms, or identifying defects in syllogistic production—without a foundational grounding in formal logic (mantiq) . He aimed to present logic stripped of speculative philosophical obscurities and purely restricted to what Islamic scholars had purified and adapted for legal and dialectical reasoning, citing the verses of his Mauritanian predecessor al-Mukhtar ibn Buna on the legitimacy of purified logic .
Structure and Contents
The book is arranged into two main divisions designed across academic levels:
- Logical Preliminaries (al-Muqaddimat al-Mantiqiyya): Originally taught in the first year curriculum, this section covers the necessary rules of logic required for debate, including conceptualization (tasawwur), assent (tasdiq), terms, propositions, and categorical and conditional syllogisms (qiyas) .
- Rules of Inquiry and Disputation (al-Bahth wa al-Munazara): Taught in the second year curriculum, this section addresses the definition of debate, its scriptural basis in Quranic injunctions such as وَجَادِلْهُمْ بِالَّتِي هِيَ أَحْسَنُ ("and debate with them in the best manner"), and the procedural etiquette governing the interlocutors . It outlines the sequence of debate regarding claims and judgments, including requests for clarification (istifsar) when encountering obscurity or ambiguity, direct denial of premises (man'), invalidation via counter-example (naqd), and counter-argumentation (mu'arada) .
Publication History
The work was first published in 1388 AH in Medina under the oversight of al-Shinqiti's student Atiyya Muhammad Salim, who supplied the section headings for that printing . It was subsequently re-edited by Sa'ud ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Urayfi under the general supervision of Bakr ibn Abd Allah Abu Zayd as part of the collected works project of al-Shinqiti, published jointly by Dar 'Ata'at al-Ilm and Dar Ibn Hazm .
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