The author: Faḍl-i Imām Khayrābādī

1Khayrābād and the family

Khayrābād lies about 75 km north of Lucknow, in the old province of Awadh. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi reports that Shāh Jahān called it ‘the Shiraz of India’, and from the seventeenth century it had families of scholars and Sufis of its own. Faḍl-i Imām was born and raised there; neither Nuzhat al-khawāṭir nor any other source consulted gives the year.

His family claimed descent from the caliph ʿUmar, hence the name al-ʿUmarī. An Urdu study of the family (Al-Qamar, 2023) traces it to two brothers who came from Iran to India, one of whom held the office of muftī at Rohtak while the other settled in Badāyūn; Faḍl-i Imām descended from the latter. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir calls him al-Harkāmī (from Hargām) ‘and then al-Khayrābādī’, and the TDV says his mother was a sister of Mullā Abū al-Wāʿiẓ Hargāmī, one of the scholars who compiled the Mughal law collection al-Fatāwā al-ʿĀlamgīriyya.

2Training

Faḍl-i Imām studied in Khayrābād with Muftī ʿAbd al-Wājid (d. 1216/1802). Through him, as Asad Q. Ahmed shows, he inherited the logic teaching of Sandīla and of Farangī Maḥall in Lucknow, the family of Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn whose name the madrasa course Dars-i Niẓāmī bears, together with that of the scholars of Gūpāmaw and Khayrābād who had trained Qāḍī Mubārak, the most read commentator on Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm.

Nuzhat al-khawāṭir sums up his learning in two sentences. In logic and philosophy he ‘stood alone as the imām of his time, and none of his peers disputed it’; but he ‘had little expertise in fiqh and ḥadīth’. The judgement comes from a later biographer, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī, but it fits the shape of his writings, which are almost all on logic and philosophy.

3In the Company’s service in Delhi

Most of his adult life was spent in Delhi; Ahmed writes that he arrived there after 1218/1803. According to the TDV he was appointed muftī and ṣadr al-ṣudūr (Al-Qamar: first muftī, then ṣadr al-ṣudūr), the most senior Indian legal officer of the Company’s administration in Delhi. The office advised on the selection of qāḍīs and examined the many petitions from scholars and religious families for grants of land and stipends. Malik calls him the Company’s first ṣadr al-ṣudūr in Delhi, and the TDV says that he was the first Indian Muslim scholar to accept the post. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir puts it more briefly: he ‘served the English government in the city of Delhi until he received a retirement pension’.

Jamal Malik notes that the Khayrābādīs belonged to the old Mughal service elite: they took employment with the Company, yet remained close to the Mughal court and critical of British rule. Faḍl-i Imām’s son Faḍl-i Ḥaqq also entered British service in Delhi, and letters he wrote to his father in 1234–1237 (1818–1822) survive.

Alongside his office he taught logic and philosophy. His best-known students were his son Faḍl-i Ḥaqq; Ṣadr al-Dīn Āzurda, who succeeded him as ṣadr al-ṣudūr when he retired, probably in 1827; and the Sufi Ghawth ʿAlī Shāh Pānīpatī. The biographical database tarājim.com, which links the entries of Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, lists further students, among them Karāmat ʿAlī Isrāʾīlī of Delhi and Sanāʾ al-Dīn of Badāyūn.

4Last years and death

After leaving the Company’s service, according to the TDV and Al-Qamar, he served for a short time as a minister of the ruler of Patiala in the Punjab, then retired to Khayrābād, where he died and was buried.

The year of his death is given in two ways. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir gives 5 Dhū al-Qaʿda 1243 (May 1828), and the Library of Congress heading ‘d. 1827 or 1828’ follows the same tradition. The TDV gives 1244/1829, and Al-Qamar gives 5 Dhū al-Qaʿda 1244 (May 1829): the same day and month, a year later. Ahmed writes ‘1244/1828 or 29’, and the 2015 Karachi edition of al-Mirqāt prints both years on its title page. The sources consulted do not allow a decision.

5Writings

Apart from al-Mirqāt, almost all of Faḍl-i Imām’s writings are on the advanced texts of the Indian logic and philosophy course and seem to have remained in manuscript. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir and the TDV name an abridgement of Ibn Sīnā’s al-Shifāʾ and glosses on two of Mīr Zāhid’s glosses, the one on Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s treatise on conception and assent and the one on al-Dawānī’s commentary on the Tahdhīb. The TDV and Al-Qamar add a commentary on (Badīʿ) al-mīzān, and Ahmed reports commentaries on Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary on the Sullam and on Mīr Dāmād’s al-Ufuq al-mubīn, though he could not find a copy of the latter.

He also wrote in Persian: Āmadnāma, a primer on verbal nouns for beginners, whose last part contains short lives of scholars of Awadh (published by A. S. Bazmee Ansari as Tarājim al-fuḍalāʾ, Karachi 1956), and a Persian version of al-ʿUtbī’s history of the Ghaznawids, al-Tārīkh al-Yamīnī. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir cites Āmadnāma as its source for the death date of his teacher.

Al-Mirqāt is the only one of his works that became widely known. The TDV says that it was mainly based on al-Kātibī’s al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya and al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq, that his grandson ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq wrote a commentary on it, and that it was translated into Urdu.