Editions of al-Mirqāt

1Manuscripts and the nineteenth-century lithographs

Al-Mirqāt was written in the early nineteenth century, at the end of the age of manuscripts in North India, and it seems to have reached most readers in print. The sources consulted for this article do not survey its manuscripts, and none is described here. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi refers for manuscripts of Faḍl-i Imām’s works to the British Museum catalogue of A. G. Ellis, Storey’s Persian Literature and the Encyclopaedia of Islam, which were not consulted.

The earliest dated printing seen is a small lithograph of 1286/1869 from the Maṭbaʿ Sayyid al-Maṭābiʿ in Delhi, now in the Maulana Azad Library of Aligarh Muslim University and scanned by the Digital Library of India. Its title page gives the year in both hijri and Christian reckoning, and the text fills pages 2 to 32.

The British Library holds two later Delhi lithographs, of 1886 and 1888, which the TDV takes as the first editions. The 1886 edition, 32 pages, was prepared with marginal notes by Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Majīd, a teacher at the Nuʿmāniyya madrasa; the 1888 edition, 48 pages, is called Mirqāt muḥashshā and carries notes compiled by Mawlawī Iʿjāz Aḥmad. Both catalogue the book as al-Mirqāt al-mīzāniyya.

The commentaries were printed in the same period: ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Khayrābādī’s Sharḥ al-Mirqāt in [Rampur] in 1866, and the Persian Hadiyya-yi Shāhjahāniyya of Sayyid ʿAlī Ḥasan Bhūpālī in Kanpur in 1879.

2Deoband, Kanpur and Hyderabad, 1915–1921

A Deoband lithograph by the Kutub Khāna Iʿzāziyya prints the text in a large, partly vocalised hand inside a frame, with Muḥammad ʿImād al-Dīn al-Shērkōṭī’s gloss al-Mirʾāt (finished in 1336/1917) in the margins; it must therefore date from 1917 or later. A copy from the Allama Iqbal Library of the University of Kashmir is on archive.org.

The Maṭbaʿ Niẓāmī in Kanpur printed ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s commentary in Rabīʿ al-ākhir 1333/1915 (Al-Qamar); the scan of a Maṭbaʿ Niẓāmī printing on archive.org is followed by a treatise on the copula (al-wujūd al-rābiṭī) by his student Barakāt Aḥmad. In 1339/1921 the Dār al-Ṭabʿ of Osmania University in Hyderabad published an Urdu translation for its matriculation course.

3Modern editions and scans

Today al-Mirqāt is printed by most of the publishers who serve the Dars-i Niẓāmī. Maktaba al-Bushrā in Karachi publishes it on its own and in a three-in-one volume with Taysīr al-manṭiq and the Īsāghūjī; scans of a Qadīmī edition and of an ‘Ashrafiyya’ edition with Urdu notes circulate as well; Maktabat al-Madīna (Dawat-e-Islami) publishes the text with interlinear explanations and the notes al-Mishkāt (archive.org copy 2015); and the Maktaba Qādiriyya in Lahore printed al-Mirḍāt, Sharaf Qādirī’s gloss. In India Idārat al-Ṣiddīq at Dābhel publishes the text with Taqwiyat al-Mirqāt.

In 2025 Maktaba al-Ghānim published a 632-page edition with al-Shērkōṭī’s gloss al-Mirʾāt and the versification Sullam al-ruqāt li-naẓm al-Mirqāt, and in 2026 the Islamosaic edition of Musa Furber printed the Arabic text facing an English translation.

No critical edition of the matn, based on manuscripts and early prints, was found. Of the commentaries, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s Sharḥ al-Mirqāt has been edited by ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Turkumānī (Amman: Dār al-Nūr al-Mubīn, 2019, 816 pp.), and a facsimile of a Kanpur print was published in Lahore in 2022.

Several printings can be read online. The Digital Library of India scans on archive.org include the Delhi lithograph of 1869, the Deoband lithograph with al-Mirʾāt, and two copies of the Osmania Urdu translation of 1921. Modern Pakistani editions, among them those of al-Bushrā, Qadīmī and Maktabat al-Madīna and an ‘Ashrafiyya’ edition, and a scan of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s commentary in the Kanpur printing, have been uploaded by readers. The British Library lithographs are available in the Gale database Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library.