A Shared Curriculum Across the Sectarian Line: Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī's Tajrīd al-ʿAqāʾid in Shia and Sunni Madrasas

1. The text and its author

Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (1201–1274) was a Twelver Shia philosopher, theologian, and scientist who served the Ilkhanid court and founded the Marāgha observatory. His Tajrīd al-ʿAqāʾid recast Islamic theology (kalām) in the technical vocabulary of Avicennian philosophy — substance and accident, necessary and contingent being, cause and effect — applying that apparatus to the standard topics of Islamic doctrine: God's existence and attributes, prophecy, the imamate, and resurrection. Its terse, condensed style made it a demanding but efficient teaching text, well suited to a commentary tradition built around unpacking its compressed arguments.

2. Two independent commentary traditions

The Shia hawza tradition. Al-Ṭūsī's own student, al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 1325), wrote Kashf al-Murād fī Sharḥ Tajrīd al-Iʿtiqād, a line-by-line commentary that became a standard text in Twelver Shia seminaries. Modern critical editions of Kashf al-Murād exist and are independently catalogued — notably the edition critically edited and annotated by the contemporary Qom scholar Ḥasan Ḥasanzādeh Āmulī, published by the Society of Teachers (Jāmiʿat al-Mudarrisīn) in Qom in 1407 AH/1986 CE, and separately catalogued in international library systems. The commentary's continued use in Shia seminary curricula from Hilla and Najaf through Safavid Isfahan to the present-day hawza of Qom is well established in the scholarly literature on Twelver religious education.

The Sunni imperial tradition. A separate, later commentary — al-Sharḥ al-Jadīd ("The New Commentary"), by the astronomer and theologian ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Qūshjī (d. 1474) — became the standard vehicle for teaching al-Ṭūsī's text in Sunni institutions. Al-Qūshjī's commentary was read in the Ottoman Ṣaḥn-ı Semān madrasas of Istanbul and, through the Dars-i Niẓāmī curriculum established in eighteenth-century Mughal India at Firangi Mahal (Lucknow), remained part of advanced Sunni theological training into the modern period, alongside the glosses of Mīr Sayyid Sharīf al-Jurjānī and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī.

The result is a genuine and well-documented case: a text by an "unapologetic" Twelver Shia author, engaging arguments for the Shia doctrine of the imamate in its own chapters, nonetheless became required reading — via a Sunni commentator's engagement with and rebuttal of those same chapters — in the Ottoman and Mughal institutions that trained Sunni judges and jurists. Neither tradition erased the other's reading of the text; the same base text supported two independent, mutually aware commentary traditions that disagreed about its most contested chapter (on the imamate) while sharing its metaphysical apparatus.

3. A correction: how al-Qūshjī actually reached Ottoman territory

A detail that recurs in popular retellings of this story — that Sultan Mehmed II personally dispatched an embassy to fetch al-Qūshjī to Istanbul, with a lavish daily stipend attached — does not hold up against the standard biographical accounts. Al-Qūshjī left Samarkand and traveled west around 1470 as a delegate sent by the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Ḥasan to the court of Mehmed II; he chose to remain in Ottoman territory afterward because of Mehmed's patronage of scholars, rather than being recruited there directly by an Ottoman mission sent to retrieve him. No independent source could be found for a specific "200 gold ducats" daily stipend, and it should not be repeated without a primary citation. The underlying fact that al-Qūshjī came to enjoy Mehmed II's patronage and became a leading professor in the new Istanbul madrasa system is well documented; the more dramatic embassy narrative is not, and this paper does not repeat it.

Bibliography

1. Ḥasan ibn Yūsuf al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī, Kashf al-Murād fī Sharḥ Tajrīd al-Iʿtiqād, critical edition annotated by Ḥasan Ḥasanzādeh Āmulī (Qom: Jāmiʿat al-Mudarrisīn, 1407 AH/1986).
2. Ali Qushji — biographical entry, MacTutor History of Mathematics (University of St Andrews).
3. Ali Qushji — Wikipedia (used for corroborating the Uzun Ḥasan embassy route; a primary or peer-reviewed biography should replace this citation before formal submission).
4. Francis Robinson, The ʿUlama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2001) — background on the Dars-i Niẓāmī curriculum and Firangi Mahal.
5. Sabine Schmidtke, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology — background on the kalām commentary tradition generally (specific chapter to be identified before submission).