Grandson of the author and author of Sharḥ al-Mirqāt, the first full Arabic commentary on al-Mirqāt; the leading Khayrābādī logician of the later nineteenth century.
Life
ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq was the son of Faḍl-i Ḥaqq and the grandson of Faḍl-i Imām, the author of al-Mirqāt. An Urdu study of the family in Al-Qamar gives his birth as 1244/1828 in Delhi and says that he completed his studies with his father by the age of sixteen. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir says that he stayed with his father for a long time and was trained by him.
His career followed princely patronage. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir and Asad Q. Ahmed describe how Nawwāb Kalb ʿAlī Khān of Rampur kept him at his court; under the next ruler, whose minister he disliked, he left for Khayrābād and then Hyderabad, where he received a monthly stipend without duties; and he was recalled to Rampur by Nawwāb Ḥāmid ʿAlī Khān, where he stayed until his death. Ahmed adds a period of patronage at Tonk, and Jamal Malik mentions that he taught at the Delhi College. It was ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq who sought his father’s release from the Andamans; according to family records he arrived at Port Blair just after his father’s death in 1861. The British later gave him the title Shams al-ʿUlamāʾ and returned part of the family’s confiscated land.
He was known above all as a teacher and commentator in and philosophy. Nuzhat al-khawāṭir praises his intelligence, eloquence and skill in but also describes him as proud and sharp-tongued: he is reported to have said that India had produced no real scholars, only ‘teachers of children’, apart from a few such as Niẓām al-Dīn Sihālawī, Kamāl al-Dīn Fatḥpūrī and Baḥr al-ʿUlūm. His students, among them Barakāt Aḥmad (d. 1347/1928) of Tonk and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Kābulī, carried the Khayrābādī teaching into the twentieth century.
His on his grandfather’s al-Mirqāt opens by calling the book ‘a fine little treatise worthy of being written in liquid gold on the tablets of the hearts of men of understanding’. It explains the text phrase by phrase and argues with other authorities; it was still used as the main source for the notes of a 2015 Karachi edition.
Uncertain or disputed
- Year of death: 1318/1900–01 (Nuzhat al-khawāṭir); ‘1316 or 1318/1899 or 1901’ (Ahmed); 1899 (Malik); ‘d. 1898 or 1899’ (Library of Congress heading). Al-Qamar gives his birth as 1244/1828; the other sources consulted give no birth date.
- Nuzhat al-khawāṭir does not list Sharḥ al-Mirqāt among his works, but the 1866 and 1915 lithographs and the modern edition carry his name.
Works
- Sharḥ al-Mirqāt شَرْحُ المِرْقَاةِ — on al-MirqātArabic commentary on al-Mirqāt. Lithographed [Rampur] 1866 (384 pp.; British Library copy) and at the Maṭbaʿ Niẓāmī, Kanpur, in Rabīʿ al-ākhir 1333/1915 (222 pp., at the request of Mawlawī ʿAbd al-Subḥān Bihārī); facsimile Lahore: Maktaba Dār al-Islām 2022 (Al-Qamar); critical edition by ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Turkumānī (Amman: Dār al-Nūr al-Mubīn, 2019, 816 pp.).commentary
- Glosses on the Sullam commentariesOn the commentaries of Ḥamd Allāh and of Qāḍī Mubārak on Sullam al-ʿulūm (Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, Ahmed).gloss
- Gloss on Ghulām Yaḥyā’s gloss on Mīr Zāhid’s Risāla (on conception and assent)Nuzhat al-khawāṭir lists it; Al-Qamar records a Kanpur print (Maṭbaʿ Niẓāmī, Muḥarram 1278, 194 pp.). Ahmed describes the work at issue in the Rampur debate of 17 July 1916, between his student Barakāt Aḥmad and ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bihārī, as his commentary on al-Harawī’s (Mīr Zāhid’s) commentary on al-Taḥtānī’s treatise on conception and assent.gloss
- Sharḥ Hidāyat al-ḥikmaCommentary on al-Abharī’s handbook of philosophy Hidāyat al-ḥikma (Nuzhat al-khawāṭir).commentary
- Other worksGlosses on Mīr Zāhid’s gloss on Sharḥ al-Mawāqif (printed Delhi 1290, Al-Qamar); a commentary on Musallam al-thubūt; Tashīl al-Kāfiya, an Arabic version of al-Jurjānī’s commentary on the Kāfiya; a commentary on al-Ufuq al-mubīn; and the completion of his father’s al-Hadiyya al-saʿīdiyya.work
Reception
His on al-Mirqāt remained the reference work on the book. It is cited throughout the notes of the 2015 Maktabat al-Madīna edition, and a report from the Rampur debate of 1916, quoted by Ahmed, challenges his opponents to answer ‘the objection related to [al-Khayrābādī’s] commentary on the Mirqāt’, which shows that it was still being argued over a generation after his death.
Malik, writing about his father, calls him ‘a much inferior scholar’; Nuzhat al-khawāṭir and Ahmed, by contrast, present him as the leading of his time and the centre of the Khayrābādī network in Rampur.
Sources (8)
- ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir: entry ‘al-ʿAllāma ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Khayrābādī’ (tarājim.com)
- Asad Q. Ahmed, Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2022), 30–31, 37, 72, 91–93
- Farooq Amir et al., ‘Khayrābādī khāndān kī ʿilmī o taṣnīfī khidmāt’ (Urdu), Al-Qamar 6/1 (2023), 296–297
- Jamal Malik, ‘Letters, prison sketches and autobiographical literature’, IESHR 43/1 (2006)
- Penn Libraries catalogue: Sharḥ Mirqāt, [Rampur] 1866 (British Library, Early Arabic Printed Books)
- Penn Libraries catalogue: Sharḥ al-Mirqāh, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Turkumānī (Amman: Dār al-Nūr al-Mubīn, 2019)
- Sharḥ Mirqāt, Kanpur: Maṭbaʿ Niẓāmī, with Barakāt Aḥmad’s Risāla fī al-wujūd al-rābiṭī (scan on archive.org)
- al-Mirqāt, with al-Ḥāshiya al-mufīda (Karachi: Maktabat al-Madīna, 2015), introduction