Rethinking of the Debate between Abū Bishr Mattā and Abū Saīd Sirāfī about Logic in Abū Ḥayyān’s Report

An important part of the opposition to the Greek sciences in the history of Islamic thought is devoted to logic. Abū Saīd al-Sīrāfī’s (d. 368/979) dispute with Abū Bishr Mattā (d. 328/940) is among the earliest manifestations of this opposition. In the researches focused on this debate, it has mostly been tried to shed light on al-Sīrāfī’s attempt to show the superiority of grammar over logic. This has automatically given the debate a grammatical look which, in turn, made it hard to see other aspects of it. In what follows, it will be shown that there lurks an important methodological and epistemological point of view in al-Sīrāfī’s discussions, which seems ironically to have been at the core of the debate, and which appears to be adopted by later Islamic philosophers as an independent cognitive avenue to knowledge.