The Growth of Arabic Biographical Writing in South Asia from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

This essay surveys the Arabic biographical writing of select South Asian Muslim scholars from the late Mughal to the colonial period to argue that, for scholars participating in transregional networks of hadith scholarship, Arabic biographical writing served purposes distinct from Indo-Persianate biographical writing. South Asian scholars chose to write Arabic histories to access pasts and construct communities that centered the ʿulama’ as a distinct class of Muslims who represented the continuity of Islamicate discursive traditions across time and space. Arabic biographical histories indicate a different sense of temporality and geography than Indo-Persianate histories by both marking the passage of time through the transmission of religious knowledge over generations and mapping transregional scholarly networks.¹ However, this did not necessarily entail a disavowal of Indo-Persianate histories that placed greater emphasis on saintly miracles, blessings, and shrines.² This productive tension between Indo-Arabic and Indo-Persianate writing is missed when only Indo-Persianate texts are examined.

In juxtaposing the tendency to memorialize figures as ʿulama’ in Arabic biographical histories and sufis in Indo-Persianate histories, I am not claiming that the two historiographical traditions were necessarily opposed to one another. Indeed, Shahab Ahmed has asserted that balancing between the juristic tradition that defined ʿulama’ and the mystical tradition that defined sufis represented a “prominent and permanent thread of the history of Muslims … a balance, at different times and places in history, and in different social and discursive spaces in society, often weighted more to one side than to the other.”³ The notion of balance is helpful insofar as it reminds us that the differences between Indo-Persianate biographies and their Arabic counterparts are not absolute.

The following pages build on previous scholarship on the role of hadith scholars in the construction of an early modern “Arabic cosmopolis.” From the fifteenth century, according to Ronit Ricci, an Arabic cosmopolis “defined by language, literature, and religion” produced a “translocal Islamic sphere” across the Indian Ocean.⁴ Jyoti Gulati Balachandran's contribution to this roundtable reinforces the importance of broadening the study of Arabic historical works beyond their local contexts and situating them within an Arabic cosmopolis. Engseng Ho's exploration of Indian Ocean communities built by Yemeni Sayyids, Joel Blecher's examination of the emergence of hadith studies in Gujarat, and Christopher Bahl's recent study of references to Indians in Egyptian and Hijazi Arabic biographical dictionaries and the increasing circulation of Arabic biographical works in India, all cumulatively demonstrate that hadith scholars had played a crucial role in writing Arabic histories connecting Muslims across the Indian Ocean since the sixteenth century.⁵

The above studies focused on historical works produced in either the Arab world or the coastal areas of Sindh, Gujarat, and Malabar. However, the writings of two eighteenth-century Indian hadith scholars further inland indicate some scholars believed that knowledge of Arabic historical works was still lacking among South Asian Muslims.

The north Indian polymath Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) considered Arabic histories a crucial component of his project to establish hadith studies in Delhi. In a pedagogical treatise, he expressed that Indian Muslims spent too much time reading Persian histories, to the detriment of subjects such as Arabic historical works that could aid in the study of canonical hadith compilations.⁶ Shah Wali Allah also authored an Arabic history of the first four centuries of Islamic law to explain juristic disagreements. In al-Insaf fi Bayan Sabab al-Ikhtilaf (The Correct Explanation of the Cause of Juristic Disagreements), he argued that people's ignorance of hadith literature and the biographies of early Islamic scholars led to forgetting the developmental history of Islamic juristic traditions. He averred that historical amnesia of Islamic law had contributed to a partisan bigotry (taʿassub) almost as bad as the first civil war (fitna), when Muslims fought and killed each other.⁷

Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAziz (d. 1824), Wali Allah's elder son, compiled a biographical history of hadith scholars in Persian to help students learn the history of the discipline of hadith studies. In the introduction to Bustan al-Muḥaddithin (The Garden of Hadith Scholars), he stated that the book was meant to help address Indians’ ignorance around the main hadith compilations and scholars.⁸ The Persian biographical history thus functioned as a steppingstone to access Arabic biographical histories, underscoring Persian's dominance in South Asia's historical discourse.

The biographical works of Ghulam ʿAli “Azad” Bilgrami (d. 1786), a contemporary of Shah Wali Allah from southern India, reveal differing logics in classifying how Indo-Persianate and Arabic histories memorialized exemplary Muslims. Indo-Persianate biographical works tended to represent Muslim exemplars as sufis and downplay their role as transmitters of religious learning.⁹ Thus, Bilgrami gave preference to sufis in his Ma'athir al-Kiram (Virtues of the Noble), a Persian biographical work (tadhkira), dividing it into two sections: the first devoted to sufis and the second to ʿulama’. However, in his Arabic Subhat al-Marjan fi Athar Hindustan (The Coral Rosary of Indian Traditions), Bilgrami criticized Indian biographical works’ focus on sufis, and went on to provide “a survey of Islamic learning in South Asia in the eighteenth century.”¹⁰ In this book, Bilgrami asserted that South Asian Muslims were overly preoccupied with recording the states and statements of sufis while ignoring the history of Indian ʿulama'. Consequently, the authors of some famous books produced in South Asia remained obscure.¹¹ Bilgrami thus viewed the lack of information about intellectual genealogies connecting teachers, texts, and authors as a serious shortcoming of the Indo-Persianate biographical genre.

The second chapter of Subhat is devoted to biographies of forty-five Indian Muslim ʿulama’, showing the importance of Indians in Islamic intellectual history. The chapter is titled “What Has Been Mentioned about ʿUlama’.”¹² Those Bilgrami categorized as sufis in the Persian work, such as his teacher from Medina, Muhammad Hayat al-Sindhi (d. 1750), were categorized in the Arabic work as ʿulama’.¹³ Bilgrami chose to memorialize exemplary South Asian Muslims as ‘ulama’ because Arabic biographical histories often centered them as transmitters of knowledge.

Bilgrami's concern about the lack of historical information on Indian ʿulama’ and Shah Wali Allah's diagnosis of taʿassub as rooted in ignorance of early Islamic history were repeated in the nineteenth century by Nawwab Siddiq Hasan Khan al-Qanuji (d. 1890) in Abjad al-ʿUlum (The Most Established of the Sciences), a three-volume Arabic encyclopedia of Islamicate scholarly disciplines.¹⁴ Here, al-Qanuji portrayed the history of Islam as a history of religious learning, stating that to remember the virtues of the illustrious ʿulama’ will expose readers to God's blessings.¹⁵

Moreover, al-Qanuji's position as consort to Shah Jahan (r. 1868–1901), the ruler of Bhopal, helped him incorporate South Asia into wider Arabic discussions on hadith-centered reforms through his publications and correspondences.¹⁶ His al-Taj al-Mukallal min Jawahir Ma'athir al-Ṭiraz al-Akhir wal-Awwal (The Crown Bejeweled with Gems of the Virtues from the Latest and Earliest Exemplars), an Arabic biographical history, linked contemporary anti-taqlīd (tradition/al) hadith scholars from Yemen, the Hijaz, Baghdad, Cairo, Istanbul, and India. He cast them as representing the latest chapter in a longer history of iconoclasm, which began with Ahmad b. Hanbal's (d. 855) stand against the Abbasids. Al-Qanuji explicitly eschewed a focus on political history, stating that he preferred to focus on religious knowledge. Through his selection of biographical material, he hoped Arabic readers would see that “despite the world being filled with injustice and darkness, and catastrophes and massacres, there still remain secrets in sufi lodges, knowledge of religion, love of piety, preference for truth over the world, abandonment of taqlīd, and the strength of certainty.”¹⁷

ʿAbd al-Hayy al-Laknawi (d. 1886), a younger contemporary of al-Qanuji from the prestigious Farangi Mahall family, felt that al-Qanuji and the generality of Indian ʿulama’ were ignorant of the Ḥanafī legal tradition's history. Al-Laknawi wrote al-Fawa'id al-Bahiya fi Tarajim al-Hanafiyya (Beautiful Lessons from Lives of Ḥanafīs), a biographical dictionary of Ḥanafī scholars in Arabic, to show the changes the legal school had undergone and how it encompassed diversity. Explaining his motivation, he wrote, “I have found past and present scholars in our land treating history as if it were strange and turning their backs to it. Consequently, it has become a forgotten and lost treasure.”¹⁸ According to al-Laknawi, the Indians’ ignorance of the multitude of Hanafī scholars rendered them unable to grasp the breadth of the legal tradition. He further clarified that he did not write about sufis because books on their lives were abundant and easily found in South Asia.¹⁹

The Muslim community built in al-Laknawi‘s Ḥanafī biographical history was different from al-Qanuji ’s community of anti-taqlīd scholars, and this competition to define transregional Muslim communities spilled over into historiographical polemics.²⁰ Indeed, in Ibraz al-Ghayy fi Shifa' al-ʿAyy (Highlighting Errors to Cure the Weak), al-Laknawi cataloged nearly two hundred of al-Qanuji's historical errors and critiqued him for not verifying (taḥqīq) information in the oldest historical sources available.²¹ In 1885, al-Laknawi sent a copy of Ibraz al-Ghayy to the salafi scholar Nuʿman al-Alusi (d. 1899), an admirer of al-Qanuji in Baghdad, evidencing that Arabic biographical writing produced in South Asia was addressed to—and did reach—a transregional audience.²²

ʿAbd al-Hayy al-Hasani (d. 1923), the rector of the Nadwat al-ʿUlama’ seminary in Lucknow, expanded on the above critiques of Indo-Persianate histories in his monumental eight-volume Arabic biographical dictionary Nuzhat al-Khawaṭir wa Bahjat al-Masami’ wa-l-Nawazir (Promenade of Thoughts and Delight of the Ears and Eyes). In 4,515 biographical entries, he divided notable Muslims associated with learning and scholarship in South Asia into fourteen generations, from the eighth century to the early twentieth century. Within each of the fourteen generations, the entries are organized alphabetically. Al-Hasani criticized Indo-Persianate histories for being so preoccupied with ornate writing about poetic verses and sufi miracles that they failed to provide crucial information about erudite Muslims, such as their birth and death dates, what subjects and books they studied, with whom they studied, and what they taught, wrote, or contributed intellectually.²³

Al-Hasani believed the Indo-Persianate historical tradition had led to two main problems: that the authorship of renowned books, such as al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya, remained unknown and that some contemporary Muslims doubted the historical existence of certain famous Muslims.²⁴ The latter problem, according to al-Hasani, arose because “the [Indo-Persianate] compiler's entire effort is spent in detailing the unveiling and miracles of the saint. And every attempt is made to present the saint as a superhuman being.”²⁵ In al-Hasani's view, the lack of historical data necessary to tracing the continuity of knowledge from present to past generations posed a challenge to writing the intellectual history of Indian Muslims.²⁶

Arabic biographical works continued to be relevant for Urdu histories of Islam in the twentieth century, especially works published by the Dar al-Musannifin academy in Azamgarh, which became part of the Republic of India in 1947.²⁷ Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi (d. 1953), its founder and one of the most important South Asian historians, mentioned that his interest in history was piqued by his engrossment in Arabic hadith studies and the associated biographical histories, such as Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAziz's Bustan al-Muhaddithin and al-Dhahabi's (d. 1348) Tadhkirat al-Huffaz (Biographies of the Memorizers).²⁸ The popular nine-volume Siyar-i Sahaba (Lives of the Companions) series on Muslims from the first three centuries of Islam published by the academy between the 1920s and 1950s represents an Urdu synthesis of information gleaned from hadith and Arabic biographical sources.²⁹ Thus, in line with Michael O'Sullivan's essay in this roundtable, the histories published by Dar al-Musannifin show that the adoption of Urdu did not necessarily diminish the relevance of Arabic in constructing Muslim communities in South Asia.

Fully comprehending the production of Arabic and Urdu histories discussed above requires widening the historiographical perspective beyond the Indo-Persianate historical tradition and the disruptions generated by colonialism.³⁰ In this essay, I argued that South Asian hadith scholars had been involved in reading and writing Arabic histories since the eighteenth century, constructing communities across the Indian Ocean and maintaining a connection to the past through intellectual genealogies. This often entailed critiquing Indo-Persianate histories for their tendency to memorialize Muslims as sufis rather than ʿulama’.

When combined with Indo-Persianate histories, Arabic historical works shed light on how Indian scholars negotiated their location in a Persian and Arabic cosmopolis. Moreover, increased interest in Arabic histories for constructing transregional Muslim communities in South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot be singularly explained as a modern search for cultural authenticity due to British colonialism's marginalization of Indo-Persianate histories, nor as a product of anti-imperial ideologies.³¹ Greater study of South Asia's Arabic historical traditions can therefore help contextualize the salience of ongoing intellectual exchanges between South Asia and the Middle East in the twenty-first century.