Pashtun scholar of Peshawar whose gloss on Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary on Sullam al-ʿulūm was printed in Delhi and Quetta.
Life
Muḥammad Aḥsan b. Muḥammad Ṣādiq, known as Ḥāfiẓ Darāz, belongs to a group of Pashtun and Afghan scholars who, in Asad Q. Ahmed’s account, began to comment on Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary on Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm outside the two main centres of that work, the Farangī Maḥall scholars of Lucknow and the Khayrābādīs of Rampur. Ahmed writes that little is known of him beyond the fact that he was from Peshawar and taught there a scholar named Ghulām Nabī (d. 1306/1889); he gives his death as 1263/1847, citing ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī’s Nuzhat al-khawāṭir.
His gloss on Mubārak shows how the later commentators looked back on the tradition. He explains that Mubārak’s expressions are difficult ‘because most of them are taken from the Ufuq mubīn’, Mīr Dāmād’s philosophical work, and he praises the lemmata of the Sullam itself as being ‘like the sun among the stars’. Ahmed lists the gloss among the commentaries on Mubārak and records two prints: a Delhi edition of 1905 from the Maṭbaʿ-yi Mujtabāʾī, Majmūʿat al-Sullam, and a lithograph published in Quetta in 1424/2003 with further notes by ʿUbayd Allāh al-Qandahārī.
Uncertain or disputed
- His father’s name appears as Ṣādiq in Nuzhat al-khawāṭir but as Ṣiddīq in the Quetta lithograph (Ahmed).
- The nisba al-Pishāwarī is used in some lists; Ahmed says only that he was from Peshawar. His date of birth and his teachers are not recorded in the sources consulted.
Works
- Ḥāshiya on Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary on Sullam al-ʿulūm — بر Qāḍī MubārakPrinted in Majmūʿat al-Sullam (Delhi: Maṭbaʿ-yi Mujtabāʾī, 1905) and in a Quetta lithograph of 1424/2003 with additional commentary by ʿUbayd Allāh al-Qandahārī (Ahmed).حاشیه
Reception
With Mullā Ṣarīkh and Saʿd Allāh al-Qandahārī he represents the Pashtun and Afghan readers of Qāḍī Mubārak, a line that continued into the twentieth century (Ahmed).
Sources (1)