Conceptualising the past of the Muslim community in the sixteenth century

A prosopographical study of the Akhbār al-Akhyār

Bibliographic Data

ID8961907
AuthorsSushmita Banerjee (0000-0001-9471-2604, University of Delhi, Delhi, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume54
Issue4
Pages423-456
Publication date2017-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0019464617728221
OpenAlexW2769517968
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited20

This article studies a sixteenth-century sufi taz̠kirāt (biographical dictionary), Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār written by ‘Abd al-Haqq Muhaddis Dehlawi (1551–1642), an ‘ālim (scholar), who was also a sufi. The text is frequently cited as the earliest, most comprehensive and reliable biographical compilation of South Asian sufis and ‘ulamā’ (learned men in religious sciences) from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Indeed ‘Abd al-Haqq is best remembered for his scholasticism as a mūḥaddis̤ (a person well-versed in Prophetic traditions) which is also supposed to have made him into a rather staid scholar of Sufism. But what of him in his own society of elite Muslim intellectuals in the early seventeenth century? ‘Abd al-Haqq was networked into the elite circles of the Mughal court, but he stayed away from Mughal patronage, communicating his ambivalence regarding its political experiments by espousing alternative paradigms. My article studies the structure of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār to comprehend how a Muslim intellectual constructed a history of his peer group at a critical juncture in the making of Mughal authority. My article follows a prosopographical methodology to explore the innovative structure of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār and its complex projection of the past of the piety-minded in Hindustan. As I argue, the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār is a carefully structured, remarkable history of sufis and their networks, providing them with contexts and significance that questioned both, inherited paradigms of moral authority present in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sufi texts as well as those emerging in the statist renditions of the past from the courts of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir

Ambivalence · Ancient history · Elite · Islam · Piety · Political science · Politics · Prosopography · Sociology · Sufism · Theology · Asian Studies and History · Education and Islamic Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub