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

Abstract

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 al-ḥurūf al-muhmalah (undotted letters), 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 (d. 1595) Mawārid al-Kalim. It interprets 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 unnoticed copy preserved in the Süleymaniye Manuscript Library in Istanbul, this study reconsiders the view 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’.