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Khandan-i-Ijtihad: Genealogy, history, and authority in a household of ‘ulama in modern South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2019

JUSTIN JONES
JUSTIN JONES*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Revisiting the debate on how Islam's ‘learned men’ (‘ulama) have sustained their religious authority through changing historical circumstances, this article offers a longue durée account of the so-called ‘Khandan-i-Ijtihad’: a family of renowned scholars and jurists who have held scholarly and popular precedence within South Asia's Shi‘i clerical networks for some 250 years. Instead of analysing the ‘ulama as a corporate group or a class of religious professionals, this article examines the ‘ulama as members of households (khandan, khanwadah) and emphasizes the important role of family lineage and inherited social influence as conduits of clerical leadership. Tracing both the genealogical succession and the vocational enterprises of this family over several generations, the article proposes a framework for understanding an individual scholar's relationship with the collective household, arguing that a cleric's own reputation (hasab-va-nasab) rests on a mingling of ancestral pedigree and personal achievement, with the stature of individual and household perpetually affirming and reinforcing each other in the making of Islamic clerical authority. Furthermore, the article establishes the importance of the ‘ulama-biography (tazkirah) as itself a mechanism for actively sustaining the relevance of contemporary ‘ulama, by perpetually memorializing their ancestors.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , July 2020 , pp. 1149 - 1191
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

This article has been a long time in coming. Early versions were presented at the University of Exeter, University of Royal Holloway, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, and I am grateful to all participants. Parts of the research were conducted on funding from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and I am grateful for their support. My additional thanks to Simon Fuchs, Denis Hermann, Pooya Razavian, Sajjad Rizvi, Francis Robinson, and Richard Williams for advice and assistance on different aspects of the article. In particular, I thank the Noor-i-Hidayat Foundation and those several members of this ‘ulama-household themselves in Lucknow, including some who feature in this article, who often spoke to me very candidly.

References

1 The organization has formerly released a serialized publication entitled Khāndān-i-Ijtihād, which carried biographical essays about the family's ‘ulama, and runs the ongoing magazine Shu‘ah-i-‘Amal. The latter publishes an assortment of essays on Shi‘i history, the lives of the Imams, and literary contributions chiefly written by the family's ‘ulama or their associates, including ruminations on Karbala, marsiyah (lamentation poetry), and advice on good comportment.

2 Acclamatory tracts that emphasize the need to protect the ‘legacy’ of this family include Mustafa Husain Asif Ja'isi, Hindūstān mein Shī‘at kī tārīkh aūr vaṣī‘at-nāmah-i-Haẓrat Ghufran-i-Mā’ab (Lucknow: Noor-i-Hidayat, 2008). The organization's website, which advertises community events as well as publishing biographies of family figureheads, is quite comparable in its perspective: http://www.al-ijtihad.com/ [accessed 19 September 2019].

3 By far the most substantive academic studies of this family in English remain Cole, Juan, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Rizvi, S. A. A., A Socio-intellectual History of the Isna’ Ashari Shi'is in India, vol. II (Canberra: Ma‘arifat Publishing House, 1986), pp. 128–52Google Scholar. Various Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu family histories exist, many of which are cited below; one of the most significant in Hindi, Sayyid Ahmad, Wārthat al-Anbīyā’ (Qom: Mu'assasat-i-Kitabshinasi, 2007 [first published 1918])Google Scholar.

4 For background on the sayyids and ‘patrician’ ‘ulama of this town in eastern Iran, see Bulliet, Richard, The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

5 Nasirabad is a small qasbah adjacent to Ja'is in Rai Bareili district, founded by sayyid immigrants from Iran around the thirteenth century. Like many UP qasbahs, it has its own illustrious history of Islamic scholars, Sufis, and poets, and has been the subject of nostalgic memorializations by contemporary Urdu writers and poets, who ruminate on the town's vanished glories. See, for example, Ja'isi, Mustafa Husain Asif, Gulkadah-i-Manāqib (Lucknow: Nizami Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

6 Literature on Dildar ‘Ali includes Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism; Rizvi, A Socio-intellectual History, pp. 128–39; Rizvi, Sajjad, ‘Faith deployed for a new Shi‘i polity in India: the theology of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (24, 3, 2014), pp. 363–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are also a range of Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu accounts, for example, ‘Naqvi, Ali Naqi, Janāb-i-Ghufran-i-Mā’ab (Lucknow: Imamiya Mission, 1958)Google Scholar; Lakhnawi, Agha Mehdi, Sawānih-i-hayāt-i-Hazrat-i-Ghufran-i-Mā’ab (Karachi: Jami‘yyat-i-Khuddam-i-A‘za, 1982)Google Scholar.

7 Kashmiri, Muhammad ‘Ali, Nujūm al-Samā’, vol. I (Tehran: Mir Kabir, 2003–04 [first printed 1884–85]), pp. 179–80Google Scholar.

8 Works on one or both of these brothers include Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism; Rizvi, A Socio-intellectual History, pp. 139–46; Lakhnawi, Agha Mehdi, Tārīkh-i-Sultān al-‘Ulamā: Sayīd Muhammad Rizvān-i-Mā’ab kē hālāt-i-zindagī (Karachi: Jami‘yyat-i-Khuddam-i-A‘za, 1977)Google Scholar; and ‘Ali Shushtari, Sayyid Muhammad Abbas bin, Aurāq al-dhahab (republ. Beirut: Mu‘assasat al-Balagh, 2007 [1854])Google Scholar, which detailed their roles in the Islamic life of the city during this period. For the additional role of Sayyid Muhammad and his cousin, Muhammad Hadi, in engaging in major written and spoken polemics with Christian missionaries, see Powell, Avril, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1993), pp. 121–31Google Scholar, 171–77; Pfander, Karl Gottlieb, Hall-ul-Ishkal: A Reply to Kashf-ul-Astar [by Hadi, Muhammad] (Agra: Publisher Unnamed, 1847)Google Scholar.

9 Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism, passim.

10 The sole exception is Rizvi, A Socio-intellectual History, pp. 146–52, which discusses the third generation onwards, including many of the same characters as this article, although it prioritizes detail over analysis.

11 Certainly the shutting-down of Lucknow's madrasa and judiciary in 1856 immediately deprived the mujtahids of their salaried employment, while the king's dethronement simultaneously threatened the household with the loss of their royal stipend and the repossession of their landholdings by the British administration. Despite early foreboding, the household may have fared better than they had feared. At least some of Dildar ‘Ali's descendants did hold onto their estates: H. R. Nevill, Rai Bareli: A Gazetteer (Allahabad: Government of North Western Provinces and Oudh, 1905), pp. 200–01. Moreover, biographies claim that some family scholars in later generations did continue to draw an allowance (tankhwah) from the coffers of the former king, although some—for example, the fourth-generation family scholar Abul Hasan (‘Milaz al-‘Ulama’, 1851–91)—refused to claim it. Kashmiri, Nujūm al-Samā’, vol. I, p. 124.

12 For example, ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi, Tabsarah-i-hayāt-i-Jinnat-i-Mā’ab (Lucknow: Imamiya Mission Society, n.d. [circa 1955–1960]), pp. 10–11; Lakhnawi, Agha Mahdi, Sawānih-i-hayāt-i-Firdōs-i-Makān (Karachi: Jami‘yyat-i-Khuddam-i-A‘za, 1966), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.

13 Space does not permit a proper discussion of these contemporary clerics, though they regularly receive attention in the press and online, including through organizations such as Noor-i-Hidayat. Kalb-i-Sadiq, like his brother, Kalb-i-‘Abid, has been an important public spokesman on a range of social and religious affairs, and is often lauded as an Islamic modernist—even a ‘second Sir Sayyid’. For elaboration on Kalb-i-Sadiq's progressive readings of Islamic social affairs, see Sikand, Yoginder, ‘An Islamic critique of patriarchy: Mawlana Sayyed Kalbe Sadiq's approach to gender relations’, in Abu-Rabi, Ibrahim ed., The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 644–56Google Scholar. Kalb-i-Jawad has been known for engaging in a series of controversial campaigns including Danish cartoon and anti-United States of America protests, and rallies in support of Shi‘i public mourning processions and freedom of waqf administration, for example, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/maulana-syed-kalbe-jawad-naqvi-shia-muslim-cleric-lucknow-imam-e-juma-189143-2014-04-15 [last accessed 14 October 2019].

14 The landmark text on this esteemed Sunni clerical family is Robinson, Francis, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001)Google Scholar. The Khandan-i-Ijtihad could be seen in many ways as a Shi‘i equivalent to the Farangi Mahallis. Both families shared origins in landowner-scholar families in the Awadhi qasbahs (the Farangi Mahal came originally from Sihali, the Khandan-i-Itjihad from Nasirabad); both, moreover, enjoyed strong relationships with the government of Awadh and influenced its educational and judicial systems, although the Khandan-i-Itjihad usurped the eighteenth-century dominance of Farangi Mahal through the early nineteenth century.

15 The notion of religious ‘capital’ has been applied widely by modern sociologists of religion and draws from the framework of Pierre Bourdieu in investigating how religious authorities construct cultural ‘fields’ within which they are experts. ‘Genèse et structure du champ religieux’, Revue Française De Sociologie (12, 3, 1971), pp. 295–334.

16 I make particular use of those that pay some attention to third- and fourth-generation scholars, especially Kashmiri, Nujūm al-Samā’ (Tehran: Mir Kabir, 2003–04 [first printed 1884–85]), vols. I and II; Naqvi, Tabsarah-i-hayāt; Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt; Husain, Sayyid Murtaza, Matla‘-i-Anwār: tazkirah-i-Shī‘ah afāzil-va-‘ulamā, kabār-i-bar-i-saghīr Pāk-va-Hind (Karachi: Rashid Art Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

17 I mostly end in the 1920s, since the following decade witnesses the ascendancy of the family's mujtahid Sayyid ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi (1903–88), who has been discussed in other work, for example, Syed Rizwan Zamir, ‘Rethinking, reconfiguring and popularising Islamic tradition: religious thought of a contemporary Indian scholar’ (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2011); Jones, Justin, ‘Shi‘ism, humanity and revolution in twentieth century India: selfhood and politics in the Husainology of ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (24, 3, 2014), pp. 415–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rizvi, Salamat, Sayīd-ul-‘Ulamā: hayyāt aūr kārnāmē (Lucknow: Imamiya Mission, 1988)Google Scholar.

18 For this framing, see Robinson, Francis, ‘Strategies of authority in Muslim South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Modern Asian Studies (47, 1, 2013), pp. 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 In practice, I look especially at the five mujtahids: Muhammad Taqi (‘Mumtaz al-‘Ulama’/‘Jinnat-i-Ma'ab’, 1819–72), Muhammad Ibrahim (‘Firdos-i-Makan’, 1843–90), Muhammad Mustafa (‘‘Imad al-‘Ulama’/‘Mir Agha’, 1837–1906), Aqa Hasan (‘Qutvat-al-‘Ulama’, 1865–1929), and Sayyid Ahmad (‘Allamah Hindi’, 1878–1947). All were each other's close relatives, tutors, collaborators, and, in many cases, chosen successors.

20 While this term of ‘authority’ is used widely in historiography to describe religious leadership in Islam, it has little direct translation in the vernacular sources upon which this article is based. These sources tend to speak in terms including their ‘leadership’ (marji‘yyat, riyasat), ‘honour/reputation’ (‘izzat), offering of ‘guidance’ (rahnama'i/ islah), ‘certification’ (istihqaq), or ‘custody/jurisdiction’ (wilayat) over tradition.

21 Representative examples include Krämer, Gudrun and Schmidtke, Sabine, Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ed., Dale Eickelman, New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Robinson, Francis, ‘Crisis of Authority, Crisis of Islam?’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (19, 3, 2009), pp. 339–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar4.

22 Turner, Bryan, ‘The crisis of religious authority’, in Reid, Anthony and Gilsenan, Michael eds, Islamic Legitimacy in a Plural Asia: Education, Information and Technology (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 58Google Scholar.

23 For example, Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Skovgaard-Petersen, Jacob, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: Muftis and Fatwas of the Dār-al-Iftā (Leiden: Brill, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 On printing and preaching, see especially Metcalf, Barbara, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 1860–1900 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Antoun, Richard, Muslim Preacher in the Modern World: A Jordanian Case Study in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for engagements with more contemporary media, Skovgaard-Petersen, Jacob, Global Mufti: The Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi (London: Hurst, 2011)Google Scholar. New institutional and organizationally focused structures of authority were prominent themes within the classic volume Keddie, Nikki ed., Scholars, Saints and Sufis: Religious Institutions since 1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar, and the many studies influenced by it. On the recalibration of a clerical public sphere, see Hatina, Meir, ‘Ulama’, Politics and the Public Sphere: An Egyptian Perspective (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010)Google Scholar. For an emphasis on the ‘ulama’s ability to engage social networks, build ties with elites, and work via a range of public institutions and religious organizations, see Pierret, Thomas, Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

25 For example, Skovgaard-Petersen, Jacob, ‘Towards a typology of state muftis’, in Haddad, Yvonne and Stowasser, Barbara eds, Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity (Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2004), pp. 81–98Google Scholar; Vogel, Frank, Islamic Law and the Legal System: Studies of Saudi Arabia (Leiden: Brill, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 This is the focus of much of Hatina, Meir ed., Guardians of Faith in Modern Times: ‘Ulama’ in the Middle East (Leiden: Brill, 2008)Google Scholar; see also Kara, Ismail, ‘Turban and fez: ulema as opposition’, in Ozdalga, Elisabeth ed., Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 162–200Google Scholar. This has also been the perspective of influential studies of the South Asian ‘ulama, the earliest of which include Qureshi, Ishtiaq Husain, Ulema in Politics: A Study Relating to the Political Activities of the Ulama in the South-Asian Subcontinent (Delhi: Renaissance Publishing House, 1985)Google Scholar and Faruqi, Ziaul Hasan, Deoband and the Demand for Pakistan (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963)Google Scholar.

27 As established in Weber, Max, The Sociology of Religion (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993 [1920])Google Scholar. We might even speculate that interpreting the ‘ulama as a corporate, professional clerical hierarchy reflects a ‘Christianized’ understanding of religious leadership as a recognized hierarchy, more befitting for religions with an official ‘church’ than for Islam's amorphous medley of ‘learned men’.

28 Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, pp. 66, 99.

29 Of course, to see the ‘ulama as sharing mutual vocational duties does not imply their unity. On the ‘ulama’s ‘internal criticism’ of their own tradition and of each other, see Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 For example, Nizri, Michael, Ottoman High Politics and the Ulema Household (London: Palgrave, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nizri's work, like this article, sees the ‘household unit’ as sustained by a combination of cultural practices, including marriage alliances, social relationships with family patrons and clients, and the protection of sources of collective reputation and revenue. All of these features are on view within the Khandan-i-Ijtihad.

31 Ibid.

32 This phrase comes from Berkey, Jonathan, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Writing on late antiquity, he continues: ‘the social authority of the ulama tended to produce family dynasties of scholars, with all of a dynastic system's usual mechanisms for guarding the integrity and value of the family's authority, including nepotism (in which sons succeeded to the offices and privileges of their scholarly fathers) and intermarriage with other socially elite groups.’ For a similar focus on the dynastic character of the ‘ulama, see Bulliet, The Patricians of Nishapur, pp. 24–25, 55–57.

33 For example, in different ways, Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam; Metcalf, Islamic Revival. My own earlier work on the Shi‘i ‘ulama could also be accused of taking this more vocational interpretation of the ‘ulama: Jones, Justin, Shi‘a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (New York: Cambridge, 2012), especially pp. 32–72Google Scholar. Others still have gone further, arguing that modern movements of Islamic renewal have even actively eroded the importance of distinctions of ancestry; for instance, some argue that non-sharif Muslims have used participation in ‘ulama-led movements to seek their own religious empowerment and social dignification. The important role of the non-ashraf in contemporary ‘ulama networks is highlighted especially in Alam, Arshad, Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India (Delhi: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar.

34 Adab refers to a mark of good reputation, character, or conduct, based on a combination of ancestry, social status, and individual piety and good etiquette. See Metcalf, Barbara ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 He continues: ‘it is possible to discern as distinctive a form of adab [for the ‘ulama-family] as the forms set out … for the sultan, the qadi or the Sufi.’ Robinson, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahall, pp. 69–70.

36 This interpretation of the gradual shift of adab from high birth to include good conduct is evident in many of the contributions in Metcalf ed., Moral Conduct and Authority; cf. Pernau, Margrit, Ashraf into Middle-classes: Muslims in Nineteenth Century Delhi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 For a recent enquiry into the dominance of ‘ulama-led organizations by sharif leaders, who draw from ‘various modalities of sayyid authority’ and position themselves as ‘privileged interlocutors’ between religious organizations, see Laurence Gautier and Julien Levensque, ‘The sayyids in South Asia: the social and political role of a Muslim elite’, unpublished presentation, European Conference of South Asian Studies, Paris, July 2018.

38 For example, Mirathi, Muhammad ‘Ashiq Ilahi, Tazkira't al-Rashīd (Lahore: Idarah-i-Islamiyah, 1986 [first published 1908]), pp. 13–18Google Scholar.

39 Metcalf argues that the disciplined, literate style of Islam propagated by these colonial-era renewal movements was ‘congruent to the interests of the ashraf’. Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 238–58.

40 For instance, some of the major collective biographies of Deobandis allude to the various inter-relationships between scholar-families, such as those between the Qasmi and Usmani clerical dynasties. ‘Aziz ul-Rahman, Tazkirah-i-mashā’ikh-i-Dēōband (Bijnor: Medina Press, 1958); Usmani, Muhammad Taqi, Akābir-Dēōband kiyā thē? (Karachi: Maktabah Ma‘arif-ul-Qu'ran, 2003)Google Scholar.

41 Corboz, Elvire, Guardians of Shi‘ism: Sacred Authority and Transnational Family Networks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 6–8, 196–97Google Scholar. An influential earlier account of nasab and hasab respectively as combining ‘the influence of a man's pedigree’ and ‘honour acquired through deeds’ is made in Mottahedeh, Roy, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 The language of hasab-va-nasab is used throughout some family biographies used in this study, for example, Hindi, Wārthat al-Anbīyā’, passim.

43 A few key examples of biographies from these decades, both Sunni and Shi‘i, include Mirathi, Tazkira't ul-Rashīd; ‘Ali, Rahmat, Tazkirah-i-‘Ulamā-i-Hind (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore, 1914)Google Scholar; Ansari, Muhammad ‘Inayatullah, Tazkirah-i-‘Ulamā-i-Farangī Mahāl (Lucknow: Asha‘at-i-‘Ulum Barqi Press, 1928)Google Scholar; Nauganwi, Sayyid Muhammad Husain, Tazkirah-i-bī-bahā‘ fī tarīkh al-‘ulamā (Delhi: publisher unknown, 1934)Google Scholar; Mian, Muhammad, Tarīkh-i-‘Ulamā kā Shāndār Māzī (Lahore: Ishtiaq Press, 2005 [1957–60])Google Scholar; Rahman, Tazkirah-i-mashā’ikh; al-Hasani, ‘Abd al-Ha'i, Nuzhat al-khawātir (Hyderabad: Da'irat al-Ma‘arif, 1970)Google Scholar.

44 ‘The overwhelming majority of biographical dictionaries (in the medieval Islamic world) were written by ‘ulama for ‘ulama …. Ulemalogy is a noble science—at least we have to think so, because it is almost all the Islamic social history we will ever have’. Mottahedeh, Roy, ‘Review: The patricians of Nishapur: a study in medieval Islamic social history’, Journal of the American Oriental Society (95, 3, 1975), p. 495CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On works of ‘ulamalogy in South Asia, see Malik, Jamal, Islam in South Asia (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2012), pp. 61–62Google Scholar.

45 For example, Kashmiri, Nujūm al-Samā’, 2 vols.

46 Sayyid Ahmad is best remembered for his almost permanent presence in Iraq, where he picked up his title ‘Allamah Hindi. He established a circle of students in Karbala and was central to the overhaul of the Awadh Bequest, the Indian endowment that funded pilgrimage and education circles in Najaf and Karbala. For his biography, see Hindi, Wārthat al-Anbīyā’, pp. 15–35.

47 This title, ‘Heirs of the Prophets’, alludes to the status of guardians of the Islamic law and was once used primarily to refer to the earliest jurists. See Brockopp, Jonathan, Muhammad's Heirs: The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities, 622–950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Al-Hindi never completed the intended second volume.

48 ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi wrote biographies of Dildar ‘Ali, Sayyid Muhammad, Sayyid Husain, and Muhammad Taqi, all of which are cited above. For the author himself, see note 18 above.

49 ‘Agha Mahdi Lakhnawi, an essayist of Karachi who wrote tracts on Dildar ‘Ali, Sayyid Muhammad and Muhammad Ibrahim that were published in both Lucknow and Karachi (all cited above), claimed to be a distant family relation.

50 Sharkey, Heather, ‘Tabaqāt of the twentieth-century Sudan: Arabic biographical dictionaries as a source in colonial history’, Sudanic Africa (6, 1993), pp. 17–18Google Scholar. The classical tabaqat genre first emerged to document ruling or royal histories, but subsequently was expanded to catalogue the ‘ulama.

51 Burak, Guy, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early-modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 68–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 As in, for example, the account of Sayyid Husain. Hindi, Wārthat al-Anbīyā’, pp. 101–212.

53 On the classic form of the tazkirah, see especially Pritchett, Frances, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 63–76Google Scholar; Hermansen, Marcia and Lawrence, Bruce, ‘Indo-Persian tazkiras as memorative communications’, in Gilmartin, David and Lawrence, Bruce eds, Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2000), pp. 149–75Google Scholar; Lawrence, Bruce, ‘Biography and the seventeenth-century Qadiriyya of North India’, in Dallapiccola, Anna and Lallemant, Stephanie Zengel-Avé eds, Islam and Indian Religions (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993), pp. 399–425Google Scholar.

54 For example, Kashmiri, Nujūm al-Samā’, vol. II, pp. 160–64; Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, pp. 5–7, 47. These texts also provide anecdotes that illustrate these luminaries’ mannerly sophistication; for instance, in reference to their gracious reception of envoys, their accomplished travel on horseback, and, most frequently, the red-carpet treatment that they would receive as guests of noblemen and rulers. Ibid., pp. 22–23, 28–30.

55 Ibid., pp. 47–48; Naqvi, Tabsarah-i-hayāt, pp. 16, 25; Husain, Matla‘-i-Anwār, pp. 520–24, 600.

56 Litvak, Meir, ‘Madrasa and learning in nineteenth-century Najaf and Karbala’, in Brunner, Rainer and Ende, Werner eds, The Twelver Shia in Modern Times (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 63–64Google Scholar.

57 Hermansen and Lawrence, ‘Indo-Persian tazkirahs’, pp. 150–57.

58 For an account of the ‘urban mythology’ that has grown around Lucknow's memorialized history, see Jones, Justin, ‘Urban mythologies and urbane Islam: refining the past and present in colonial-era Lucknow’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (11, 2015), pp. 1–21Google Scholar; Naim, C. M., ‘Interrogating “the East”, “culture” and “loss” in Abdul Halim Sharar's Guzashta Lakha'u’, in Patel, Alka and Leonard, Karen eds, Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 189–204Google Scholar.

59 These events allegedly marked the death of Sayyid Muhammad. Kashmiri, Nujūm al-Samā’, vol. II, pp. 158–59, 163–64.

60 Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, pp. 26–27.

61 Ibid., 22–23; cf. Hermansen and Lawrence, ‘Indo-Persian tazkiras’, p. 155.

62 This is argued in Rizvi, ‘Faith deployed’.

63 Sabrina Mervin argues that contemporary Shi‘i‘ulama-autobiographies show the influence of the tabaqat genre in how their authors establish their presence in landmark religious locations and historical events, thus placing themselves at the centre of a community historical narrative. See Mervin, Sabrina and al-Amin, Haïtham eds, Autobiographie d ’un clerc Chiite du Ǧabal ‘Āmil, tiré de: Les notables chiites (A‘yān al-šī‘a) (Damascus, 1998), pp. 14–29Google Scholar.

64 The biographical essays in these modern periodicals clearly source much of their information from the earlier works cited above, such as Hindi, Wārthat al-Anbīyā’; Shuhstari, Aurāq al-dhahab; and Kashmiri, Nujūm al-Samā’, and present it in simpler, shorter form.

65 For the different manifestations of religious, cultural, and social distinction implied by sayyid status in various contexts, see Morimoto, Kazuo ed., Sayyids and Sharifs in Muslim Societies: The Living Links to the Prophet (London: Routledge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For South Asia specifically, see Gautier and Levensque, ‘The sayyids in South Asia’.

66 Sanyal, Usha, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 97–110Google Scholar. The seminal mufti Ahmad Raza Khan's ancestral origins in a family of sayyid pirs (saints) in Rohilkhand were carefully preserved and were central to his credentials within the sayyid networks centred on local shrines.

67 As in the case of the marriage of Muhammad Taqi's daughter to Muhammad Mustafa, his cousin's son.

68 For example, Muhammad Taqi's other daughter married the regarded mujtahid Abul Hasan (d. 1895), a highly regarded mujtahid (not to be confused with other individuals with the same name within this family).

69 de Groot, Joanna, Religion, Culture and Politics in Iran: From the Qajars to Khomeini (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leon Carl Brown, ‘The religious establishment in Husainid Tunisia’, in Keddie ed., Scholars, Saints and Sufis, p. 89.

70 Merriweather, Margaret, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), p. 145Google Scholar; cf. Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, pp. 61–67, cf. 14–15.

71 Aqa Hasan originally belonged to a separate line of Naqvi sayyids from the adjacent qasbah of Ja'is.

72 Muhammad Husain, for instance, married the daughter of Mirza ‘Ali Qadr, a former royal and Husainabad trustee.

73 Fisher, Michael, ‘Political marriage alliances at the Shi‘i court of Awadh’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (25, 4, 1983), pp. 593–616CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khan, Muhammad Amir Ahmad, ‘Local nodes of a transnational network: a case study of a Shi‘i family in Awadh, 1900–1950’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (24, 3, 2014), pp. 400–04CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 For example, there were occasional marriages between Ottoman ‘ulama-households and vizier (ministerial) and mercantile families. Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, pp. 61–67.

75 This notion of ‘neo-calligraphy’, or the redevelopment of visual and calligraphic models from older Islamic literary genres to impart contemporary Shi‘i clerical authority, is discussed in Clarke, Morgan, ‘Neo-calligraphy: religious authority and media technology in contemporary Shiite Islam’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (52, 2, 2010), pp. 351–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Muhammad Ibrahim, for instance, married three times, though whether these were simultaneous or consecutive marriages is unclear.

77 There is little evidence, even outside of male-focused tazkirahs, of these women having significant social roles; this contrasts with, say, the high ‘ulama in Qajar Iran, whose female relations sometimes worked as lay preachers and tutors for other elite women.

78 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, and other works.

79 Naqvi, Tabsarah-i-hayāt, p. 16.

80 Ibid., pp. 27–30.

81 Literature on the Husainabad Trust includes Pandit, Aishwarya, ‘The Husainabad Trust: the case of a Shi'a heartland?’, Modern Asian Studies (52, 5, 2018), pp. 1692–728CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 The fund and its reform, including Sayyid Ahmad Hindi's central personal role, are discussed in several works, for example, Cole, Juan, Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi‘ite Islam (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 78–98Google Scholar; Jones, Shi‘a Islam, pp. 132–37.

83 Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, p. 19. His students of the 1860s included a number of relatives and members of the former royal family, as well as some who progressed to work as ‘ulama, imams, sermonizers, debaters, and tutors in places as distant as Saharanpur, Lahore, and Jaipur. Ibid., pp. 19–23.

84 Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, pp. 43–46 lists students from across North India, Punjab, Hyderabad, and elsewhere.

85 For example, Litvak, Meir, Shi‘i Scholars of Nineteenth-century Iraq: The ‘Ulama’ of Najaf and Karbala’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

86 Ibid., pp. 15–17.

87 For example, Abul Hasan frequently travelled to Allahabad at the invitation of a local landowner (ibid.); Muhammad Husain did the same for the Nawab of Rampur; and ‘Ali Muhammad (‘Taj al-Ulama’, 1846–94) regularly offered khutbah by noble invitation in Patna and Jaunpur. Kashmiri, Nujūm al-Samā’, vol. II, pp. 160–62, 248–50.

88 Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, pp. 40–41; Husain, Matla‘-i-Anwār, pp. 600–01.

89 Sayyid Muhammad's legal decisions included upholding the distinctions of sayyid ancestry as enduring social leaders; allowing interest (riba’) to be taken on loans made to non-Shi‘is; praising the accumulation of wealth, since the wealthy were less likely to fall into sinful practices; blessing Wajid ‘Ali Shah's numerous mut‘ah (temporary marriages) as legitimate acts; and disallowing jihad and other agitations against state authority in the absence of the hidden imam. Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism, pp. 153–55, 255–63. Rulings of both Sayyid Muhammad and Sayyid Husain were compiled in Musharraf Lakhnawi, ‘Ali Khan, Bayāz-i-masā’īl (Lucknow: publisher unknown, 1835–36)Google Scholar.

90 Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, pp. 6–7.

91 Ibid., pp. 10–11.

92 Ibid., pp. 50–52.

93 Ibid., pp. 37–40.

94 For example, ibid., pp. 6–7, 26–27, 31.

95 Al-Mazandrani's biography is available in al-Mousawi, Muhammad Mahdi, Ahsān al-wadī‘ah (Najaf: publisher unknown, 1968), pp. 95–98Google Scholar.

96 ‘Voh mard-i-mēdān hēn apnī jagah; ham mard-i-mēdān hēn apnī jagah.’ Naqvi, Tabsarah-i-hayāt, pp. 17–18. The original Arabic phrase is a long-established legal maxim that has been used by Sunni reformists to legitimize the ongoing practice of independent judicial reasoning by modern ‘ulama rather than solely by the early jurists. El-Fadl, Khalid Abou, Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari‘ah in the Modern Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), p. 211Google Scholar.

97 Cf. Cole, Sacred Space, pp. 92–93.

98 Most scholarship has argued that the increasingly global reach of Najaf and Karbala's scholarly networks and the elaboration of a more hierarchical clerical order under a single Shi‘i mujtahid (marja‘ al-taqlid) was leading to a ‘monopolization’ or ‘centralization’ of global Shi‘i leadership during this period. For example, Litvak, Shi‘i Scholars. These family-authored tazkirahs of the Khandan-i-Ijtihad give the alternative impression of their largely autonomous juristic reasoning in India.

99 The figureheads of the Farangi Mahal in this period insisted that scholar-families should ‘avoid all dependence or even association with the government’. Robinson, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahall, pp. 91–92. This was not true of all Farangi Mahallis, however: some among the family's Bahr al-‘Ulumi section seemed more willing than others to accept government honours, medals, and offers of jobs. Ibid., pp. 92–94.

100 Husain, Matla‘-i-Anwār, pp. 50, 128–29.

101 Ibid., p. 348.

102 Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, pp. 18–21. In the interim, prayers had been held in the inadequate Tehsin ‘Ali Khan mosque that was deficient as a venue both for its size and location.

103 Some Sunni clerics of the city had argued that the Shi‘i azan, which contained a reference to Imam ‘Ali as first Caliph, was deliberately antagonistic towards Sunni Muslims and should be proscribed by the British administration.

104 Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, pp. 21–25.

105 India's Sunni and Shi‘i ‘ulama became more widely involved in petitioning the colonial state a few decades later, especially during the pan-Islamic campaigns and legislative debates about waqf reform in the 1910s.

106 As discussed further in Jones, Shi‘a Islam, pp. 50–52, 115–25.

107 These included Aqa Hasan's translation of one of Dildar ‘Ali's works: Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi, Tarjumah-i-‘Imād-al-Islām, hēsa-i-awal: Kitāb-al-Taūhīd (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore, circa 1905–10).

108 Hindi, Wārthat al-Anbīyā’, pp. 18–19.

109 Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, p. 12; Kashmiri, Nujūm al-Samā’, vol. II, pp. 153–64, especially 161.

110 ‘Ali Muhammad wrote a Farsi tract entitled Havāshi-i-Qur’ān dar-radd-i-Sayyīd Ahmad Khān nēcharī, refuting the Aligarh project. Ibid.

111 ‘Ali Naqi Safi, Sahīfa't ul-millat-i-ma‘rūf be-lakhat jagir (Lucknow: undated), pp. 7–8.

112 Jones, Shi‘a Islam, pp. 172–83.

113 Those to have written such tracts included Dildar ‘Ali, Sayyid Muhammad, Muhammad Ibrahim, and ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi. Lakhnawi, Sawānih-i-hayāt, p. 37; Naqvi, Ali Naqi, Mut‘ah aūr Islām (Lucknow: Sarfaraz Qaumi Press, 1933)Google Scholar.

114 Petition to the Governor, 2 September 1926, Political File 254/1926, Uttar Pradesh State Archives (UPSA). As one British administrator noted: ‘the aim of the progressive party is to injure the reputation of the … chief Mujtahids.’ Deputy Commissioner and Advisor to the Trustees of Husainabad to the Commissioner of Lucknow, 2 September 1926, ibid.

115 Porter, Commissioner of Lucknow division, to Chief Secretary, undated, Political File 95/1906, UPSA.

116 Petition of Syed Muhammad Husain to Lieutenant-Governor, 4 June 1906, ibid.

117 Syed Sibte Husain, ‘Mujtahid of Karbala’, to Lieutenant Governor, 9 May 1906, ibid.

118 Telegram, ‘Shia public of Lucknow’ to Lieutenant Gov, 19 February 1906, ibid.

119 Ibid.; Husain, Matla‘-i-Anwār, p. 506; To O'Donnell, 9 October 1918, GAD 806/1918, UPSA.

120 He may have distributed these roles amongst multiple relations in order to reassure the British that Awadh's Shi‘i judiciary had been fully disassembled.

121 Encapsulating this shift of power across family branches, Sayyid Ahmad's household biography allots approximately four times the space to Sayyid Husain as it devotes to his older brother, Sayyid Muhammad. Hindi, Al-Warthat al-anbīyā’.

122 It seems that, while Sayyid Muhammad's most influential sons, Bandeh Husain and ‘Ali Muhammad, had unparalleled reputations as faqihs (jurists) and debaters (munazirs), they carried less popular acclamation than some of their cousins.

123 Robinson suggests a similar trajectory within the Farangi Mahal household, which also split into varying lines during the twentieth century. ‘The life of Jamal Mian of Farangi Mahal, 1919–2012’, unpublished seminar paper, Royal Asiatic Society, London, 17 April 2018.

124 See the works cited in notes 23–26 above.

125 For discussion of the alleged fragmentation of the Shi‘i scholarly milieu in post-independence South Asia, see Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, ‘Relocating the centers of Shi‘i Islam: religious authority, sectarianism and the limits of the transnational in colonial India and Pakistan’ (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2015), pp. 165–73.

126 The family's contemporary figureheads are usually classified as hujjat-allah—a title that falls short of the performance of full ijtihad.

127 This is common to well-known works by Muslim ‘historians’ in this period, including Shibli Nu‘mani, Sirat al-Nabi (1898), Ameer Ali, A Short History of the Saracens (1899), and the historical fantasies of poets like Muhammad Iqbal. On romanticizations of Islam's South Asian past in colonial-era Urdu literature, see Tignol, Eve, ‘Nostalgia and the city: Urdu shahr āshob poetry in the aftermath of 1857’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (27, 4, 2017), pp. 559–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naim, ‘Interrogating “the East”’.

128 For example, Richard Williams, ‘Hindustani music between Awadh and Bengal, c.1758–1905’ (Unpublished PhD dissertation, King's College London, 2015), pp. 127–74, 242–53.

129 For example, Naim, C. M., ‘Syed Ahmad and his two books called ‘Asar-al-Sanadid’, Modern Asian Studies (45, 3, 2011), pp. 669–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bredi, Daniela, ‘Nostalgia in the reconstruction of Muslim identity in the aftermath of 1857 and the myth of Delhi’, Cracow Indological Studies (11, 2009), pp. 137–56Google Scholar.