The Khayrābādī school

1Where the school came from

In eighteenth-century North India logic and philosophy were taught above all by the scholars of Farangī Maḥall in Lucknow, the family of Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn (d. 1748) after whom the madrasa course Dars-i Niẓāmī is named, and by smaller centres in Awadh such as Sandīla, Gūpāmaw and Khayrābād. Francis Robinson notes that the Dars-i Niẓāmī owed part of its success to its emphasis on the rational sciences.

Asad Q. Ahmed describes the Khayrābādī tradition as ‘an offshoot of Farangī Maḥall’. Its link is Muftī ʿAbd al-Wājid al-Khayrābādī (d. 1216/1802), the nephew and student of Muḥammad Aʿlam al-Sandīlawī, who had studied with the Farangī Maḥall masters; ʿAbd al-Wājid also studied with scholars of Gūpāmaw and Khayrābād who stood in the line of Qāḍī Mubārak, the most important commentator on al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm. His student Faḍl-i Imām, the author of al-Mirqāt, is ‘the fountainhead’ of the Khayrābādī line.

Unlike a madrasa, the ‘school’ had no single building. It was a chain of teachers and students, held together by the family and by princely patronage in Delhi, Rampur, Tonk, Alwar and Hyderabad. Urdu writers distinguish between the family (khānwāda-yi Khayrābād) and the wider circle of their students (madrasa-yi Khayrābād).

2Three generations

Faḍl-i Imām (d. 1243/1828 or 1244/1829) taught in Delhi while serving the East India Company as ṣadr al-ṣudūr. His son Faḍl-i Ḥaqq (1797–1861) became the most famous member of the family. After a career in Delhi he taught, according to Ahmed, in Alwar, Saharanpur and Tonk between 1246/1832 and 1256/1840, and then in Rampur as tutor to the Nawwāb’s household, training a large number of students along the way.

Faḍl-i Ḥaqq’s son ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq (1828–1899 or 1900/01) continued the line at the courts of Rampur, Hyderabad and Tonk. He wrote the first commentary on his grandfather’s al-Mirqāt and glosses on most of the advanced logic texts of the course. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir calls him an unrivalled master of logic and philosophy, but also reports his disdain for most other Indian scholars, of whom he spared only a few such as Niẓām al-Dīn, Kamāl al-Dīn Fatḥpūrī and Baḥr al-ʿUlūm.

Through ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq the teaching passed to students such as Barakāt Aḥmad (d. 1347/1928), who taught in Tonk, the Afghan ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Kābulī (d. 1321/1903), and Faḍl-i Ḥaqq of Rampur (d. 1358/1939), who read ‘works of the ancients’ with him and later headed the Madrasa ʿĀliya in Rampur. Ahmed notes that Tonk had by then become an important centre of the rational sciences and that Rampur remained loyal to the Khayrābādī legacy.

3What the Khayrābādīs studied

The Khayrābādīs worked on the same texts as the rest of the Indian logic course: the Shamsiyya and the Tahdhīb with their commentaries, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s treatise on conception and assent with Mīr Zāhid’s gloss, and above all Sullam al-ʿulūm. Ahmed shows that commentaries on Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary on the Sullam were written in this period mainly in two circles, the Farangī Maḥallīs in Lucknow and the Khayrābādīs in Rampur, and that the Khayrābādīs, whose teachers stood in Mubārak’s own intellectual lineage, were the more deeply invested in it.

Their special mark was Mīr Dāmād’s al-Ufuq al-mubīn, a difficult work of the Safavid philosopher that had shaped Mubārak’s commentary. ‘Starting with Faḍl-i Imām’, Ahmed writes, ‘the tradition included scholars who taught the Ufuq and also wrote the occasional commentary on it’: of the four premodern Indian commentaries on it, three are by Faḍl-i Imām, Faḍl-i Ḥaqq and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq. Faḍl-i Ḥaqq’s al-Hadiyya al-saʿīdiyya, on natural philosophy, is still listed among the philosophy books of the Dars-i Niẓāmī.

Jamal Malik adds that the Khayrābādīs, like the Farangī Maḥallīs, combined the rational sciences with the Sufi doctrine of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) and kept their distance from the reformist line of the descendants of Shāh Walī Allāh in Delhi.

4Controversy and 1857

The family’s best-known public role was in controversy. Faḍl-i Ḥaqq wrote several treatises against Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl of Delhi on whether God could create another being equal to the Prophet; the TDV says the dispute involved the Mughal emperor and the poet Ghālib, and Nuzhat al-khawāṭir quotes Nawwāb Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s criticism of Faḍl-i Ḥaqq for it.

After the uprising of 1857 Faḍl-i Ḥaqq was convicted by the British and transported to the Andaman Islands, where he died in 1861. How far he took part in the uprising is debated (see his biography). His prison writings made him, in the twentieth century, a hero of the struggle against British rule, and Malik notes that Barelwi scholars republished his works and claimed him as a forebear, while Deobandi historians also praised him.

5The school in the twentieth century

The last great public event of the school was the Rampur debate of 17 July 1916, studied in detail by Ahmed. Barakāt Aḥmad, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s student, defended his late teacher’s positions in his gloss on Mīr Zāhid’s treatise against ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bihārī, in the presence of scholars at the court of the Nawwāb of Rampur. One report challenges the Khayrābādīs to answer an objection to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s commentary on al-Mirqāt as well. Printed replies and counter-replies followed, one of them published in Kolkata.

Today several groups trace a link to the Khayrābādīs. Barelwi scholars and publishers in particular present the family as their own: the Khairabadi Institute counts later Punjabi teachers of the rational sciences, such as Yār Muḥammad Bandyālwī, among the Khayrābādīs, and the notes of the Barelwi Karachi edition of al-Mirqāt (2015) quote ʿAṭā Muḥammad Bandyālwī, a teacher of the glossator ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm Sharaf Qādirī. Al-Mirqāt itself, however, is read in Deobandi and Barelwi madrasas alike.