Prophetic Conceptions and Literary Competition in Late Mughal India
Muḥammad Ṣiddīq Lāhōrī’s Silk al-Durar as a Literary Response to Abū ’l-Fayḍ Fayḍī’s Mawārid al-Kalim
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52541/isiri.v65i2.7546Keywords:
Islamic History, Sīrah writing, Late Mughal India, Muḥammad Ṣiddīq Lāhōrī; Abū l-Fayḍ Fayḍī, Ḥurūf al-muhmalaAbstract
This article examines Silk al-Durar, an eighteenth-century Arabic sīrah authored by Muḥammad Ṣiddīq Lāhōrī (d. 1779), and situates it within shifting prophetic conceptions in late Mughal India. Focusing on the post-Akbarid period, the study explores how political and intellectual transformations reshaped sīrah writing among South Asian Muslim scholars. Composed in ḥurūf al-muhmalah, Silk al-Durar represents a rare formal experiment and a deliberate engagement with earlier Mughal models. The article frames the work as a literary response (naẓīrah) to Abū 'l-Fayḍ Fayḍī’s Mawārid al-Kalim, interpreting this relationship not as a polemic rebuttal, but as a literary emulation aimed at asserting textual and intellectual superiority. Through a comparative codicological and textual analysis of two manuscripts, including a previously unidentified copy preserved in the Süleymaniye Manuscript Library in Istanbul, this study challenges the assumption that eighteenth-century sīrah writing was merely derivative. It argues instead that prophetic conception operated as a locus of literary authority and intellectual contestation within the scholarly milieu of the South Asian 'ulamā'.
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