Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn

Teacher of Farangī Maḥall in Lucknow after whom the Dars-i Niẓāmī is named, and the teacher of the first great generation of commentators on Sullam al-ʿulūm.

Life

Niẓām al-Dīn was born at Sihālī near Lucknow, a son of the scholar Quṭb al-Dīn al-Sihālawī. When he was fourteen or fifteen his father was killed in a feud and their house burnt; according to ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī’s Nuzhat al-khawāṭir he himself was taken captive. The family moved to Lucknow with his elder brother Muḥammad Saʿīd, and the emperor Awrangzīb granted the sons of the murdered scholar a mansion that had belonged to a European merchant, the Farangī Maḥall, in 1103/1692. The TDV, in its article on his son Baḥr al-ʿUlūm, adds that the family had come to India from Herat.

Nuzhat traces his studies: most of the madrasa books with Mullā ʿAlī Qulī al-Jāʾisī at Jāʾis, the commentary on the Mawāqif with Amān Allāh al-Banārasī in Benares, and al-Qūshjī’s treatise on astronomy with Ghulām Naqshband al-Laknawī in Lucknow; the popular story that he studied with Muḥammad Bāqir al-Jāʾisī is, it says, mistaken. He completed his studies at twenty-five and then taught in Lucknow, where students crowded to him and ‘his order of teaching (niẓām darsihi) was received with acceptance in the madrasas of the scholars’, so that the leadership of teaching in most of India came to him. At forty he joined the Qādiriyya under ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Bānsawī, to whom he devoted a Persian book of merits.

The course named after him is described by Francis Robinson as ‘as much a style of teaching as a curriculum’: Niẓām al-Dīn taught the two most difficult books in each subject, on the view that a student who had mastered them would find the rest easy (see ‘The Dars-i Niẓāmī’). Asad Q. Ahmed quotes an Urdu history of Indian education to the same effect: Niẓām al-Dīn was not concerned with the particulars of the books but took them ‘as a means (dharīʿa) to training in the discipline’. He wrote commentaries and glosses but, as Zubair Zafar Khan notes (quoted in the same article), no textbook of his own.

His students, listed at length in Nuzhat, include Kamāl al-Dīn al-Sihālawī al-Fatḥpūrī, Ḥamd Allāh al-Sandīlawī, Mullā Ḥasan b. Ghulām Muṣṭafā and his brother Muḥammad Walī, and his own son ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm. Through them the Sullam al-ʿulūm of al-Bihārī, his father’s pupil, became the summit of the Indian logic course. Nuzhat lists two commentaries by him on al-Bihārī’s Musallam al-thubūt but none on the Sullam, and no source consulted credits him with one. He died, according to Nuzhat, on Wednesday 8 Jumādā I 1161, of a bladder stone, aged over seventy.

Works

• Two commentaries on Musallam al-thubūt (al-aṭwal and al-ṭawīl)On al-Bihārī’s textbook of Ḥanafī legal theory; the longer one was already lost in ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī’s time (Nuzhat). Ahmed dates a commentary of his on the Musallam to 1121/1709.commentaar
• Sharḥ al-TaḥrīrCommentary on Ibn al-Humām’s al-Taḥrīr on legal theory, left unfinished and completed by his son Baḥr al-ʿUlūm (Nuzhat; TDV).commentaar
• Sharḥ Manār al-uṣūlOn al-Nasafī’s handbook of legal theory (Nuzhat).commentaar
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā Sharḥ Hidāyat al-ḥikma — op al-AbharīGloss on al-Shīrāzī’s (Mullā Ṣadrā’s) commentary on al-Abharī’s Hidāyat al-ḥikma (Nuzhat).glosse
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā al-Shams al-bāzighaOn Maḥmūd al-Jawnpūrī’s philosophical work (Nuzhat).glosse
• Glosses on al-DawānīOn al-Dawānī’s commentary on the ʿAqāʾid ʿAḍudiyya and on his ‘old gloss’ (al-ḥāshiya al-qadīma) (Nuzhat).glosse
• Manāqib-i RazzāqiyyaPersian account of his Sufi master ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Bānsawī.werk

Reception

The Dars-i Niẓāmī, named after him, became the framework of madrasa education in South Asia and remains so today, in the words of Asad Q. Ahmed.

The three ‘gateway’ commentaries on the Sullam came from his circle or the generation around it: Ḥamd Allāh and Mullā Ḥasan were his students, and Qāḍī Mubārak belonged to the same line of teachers.