The Dars-i Niẓāmī

1Farangī Maḥall and Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn

The Dars-i Niẓāmī takes its name from Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn Sihālawī (d. 1748) of Farangī Maḥall, the home of a family of scholars in Lucknow. According to Francis Robinson, Niẓām al-Dīn formalised in the early eighteenth century the teaching practice of his father, Mullā Quṭb al-Dīn Sihālawī (d. 1691), who had worked to bring the seventeenth-century advances in the rational sciences into the course. Abdul Momen, in a study of the family, dates the founding of their teaching institution to 1693 and gives Niẓām al-Dīn’s dates as 1678–1748.

Robinson stresses that the Dars was ‘as much a style of teaching as a curriculum’. Its aim was understanding rather than rote learning: 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. Momen adds that the books were arranged from short to long and from easy to hard, that works by Indian authors were included for the first time, and that a capable student was meant to finish by the age of about eighteen or nineteen. Zubair Zafar Khan likewise calls the Dars ‘a standardized method of learning rather than a list of books’; Niẓām al-Dīn wrote commentaries and glosses on existing books but no textbook of his own.

Logic had a long history in Indian teaching before him. Asad Q. Ahmed traces the stages: in the fifteenth century al-Taḥtānī’s (Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s) commentary on the Shamsiyya was the most widely read text; in the sixteenth, scholars in the line of al-Dawānī and al-Dashtakī brought in al-Dawānī’s commentary on the Tahdhīb and Mullā ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī’s commentary on the same text, while al-Taḥtānī’s commentary on the Maṭāliʿ began to be read; in the seventeenth, glosses by Mīr Zāhid al-Harawī (d. 1101/1689) and ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm al-Siyālkūtī (d. 1067/1656–57) became important. Khan and Robinson both point to the influence of Fatḥ Allāh Shīrāzī (d. 1589), who came to Akbar’s court in 1583 and encouraged the rational sciences.

2The logic books

In Robinson’s reconstruction of the early Dars, logic has eleven titles, against only two at Shāh Walī Allāh’s Madrasa-yi Raḥīmiyya in Delhi. Robinson does not put them in order; arranged here from primer to summit, they are: 1. Ṣughrā and 2. Kubrā, al-Jurjānī’s short Persian primers; 3. al-Abharī’s Īsāghūjī; 4. al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq; 5. Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb, the commentary of Mullā ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī; 6. Sharḥ al-Shamsiyya, al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya read with the commentaries of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī and al-Taftāzānī; 7. Quṭbī and 8. Mīr Quṭbī, Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary and a gloss on it (usually identified with al-Jurjānī’s), which Robinson lists separately; 9. Mullā Jalāl, Mīr Zāhid al-Harawī’s gloss on al-Dawānī’s commentary on the Tahdhīb; 10. Risāla Mīr Zāhid; 11. al-Bihārī’s Sullam al-ʿulūm.

Robinson describes Risāla Mīr Zāhid as a gloss on Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary on the Shamsiyya. Ahmed identifies it more precisely as Mīr Zāhid’s commentary on al-Taḥtānī’s Risāla fī l-taṣawwur wa-l-taṣdīq, a treatise on the nature of knowledge; its name in the Deobandi lists, al-Ḥāshiya al-Zāhidiyya al-Quṭbiyya, points the same way. Ahmed explains why such a work belonged to logic: its subject overlaps with the opening chapters of the logic handbooks, and after the Sullam it was the logic text on which Indian scholars wrote the most commentaries.

Ahmed also names texts read beside these: Mīzān al-manṭiq, studied through ʿAbd Allāh al-Tulanbī’s commentary Badīʿ al-mīzān (922/1516–17), and a commentary on the Īsāghūjī attributed in India to al-Jurjānī (‘Mīr Īsāghūjī’). In India the Shamsiyya and the Maṭāliʿ were read in the whole of al-Taḥtānī’s commentary, not only through al-Jurjānī’s glosses, and al-Taḥtānī on the Shamsiyya ‘continues to be part of the curriculum in various madāris in contemporary South Asia’.

3Sullam al-ʿulūm and its commentators

The summit of the course was an Indian book. Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī (d. 1119/1707) wrote Sullam al-ʿulūm before 1109/1698. Ahmed counts more than a hundred Indian commentaries and super-commentaries on it in about two centuries and calls it the most advanced logic textbook of the Niẓāmī curriculum; its structure follows the Shamsiyya, Maṭāliʿ and Tahdhīb, the three handbooks Indian students already knew. It was printed in Lucknow (1290 H), Delhi (1322 H) and, a sign of its reach, Kazan (1906).

Three first-order commentaries became the gateways through which the Sullam was taught, each with its own network of teachers. Qāḍī Mubārak b. Muḥammad Dāʾim al-Gūpāmawī (d. 1162/1749) began his commentary as a student before 1118/1707 and finished it in Delhi in 1143/1730–31 (Khan gives al-Munhiya as its other name); it was quickly adopted as a teaching text, and Baḥr al-ʿUlūm was already teaching it to one of Mubārak’s descendants. Ḥamd Allāh b. Shukr Allāh al-Sandīlawī (d. 1160/1747), a student of Niẓām al-Dīn and of Kamāl al-Dīn al-Sihālawī, founded a large madrasa in Sandīla, which became the first home of the tradition of his commentary; it attracted more super-commentaries than any other. The third is that of Mullā Ḥasan (Ḥasan b. Ghulām Muṣṭafā, d. 1199/1784), a nephew of Niẓām al-Dīn according to Momen, whose commentary remained the most closely tied to the Farangī Maḥall family of Lucknow.

Other commentaries were admired but less taught. Mullā Mubīn’s Mirʾāt al-shurūḥ (completed 1200/1786) is, in Ahmed’s judgement, the clearest exposition of the whole tradition, and ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm (d. 1225/1810) wrote one of his own; both entered the course only late and drew few glosses. A Lahore lithograph of 1892 prints Ḥamd Allāh’s commentary with the Taʿlīqāt al-Muftī of Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Ṭūnkī, a typical classroom combination of text, commentary and teacher’s notes.

The Sullam was taught in regional centres as much as in Lucknow: Ahmed maps distinct traditions at Farangī Maḥall, Sandīla, Gūpāmaw, and Khayrābād and Rampur, where the Khayrābādī scholars (see ‘The Khayrābādī school’) wrote commentaries on Qāḍī Mubārak and also taught Mīr Dāmād’s philosophical al-Ufuq al-mubīn. The whole commentary tradition, Ahmed notes, remained ‘almost exclusively a North Indian affair’.

4Deoband and the Urdu commentaries

The Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband, founded in 1866, kept the frame of the Dars-i Niẓāmī but, as Barbara Metcalf writes, with ‘less emphasis on “rational” studies’ and Urdu as the language of instruction. Its eight-year course became the model for the madrasas affiliated with it, more than a thousand in 2004 according to Dietrich Reetz. In the Deobandi version listed by Zubair Zafar Khan the logic books run: 1. Ṣughrā; 2. Kubrā; 3. Īsāghūjī; 4. Mirqāt; 5. Mīzān al-manṭiq; 6. Tahdhīb; 7. Quṭbī; 8. Mīr Quṭbī; 9. Mullā Ḥasan; 10. Ḥamd Allāh; 11. Qāḍī Mubārak; 12. Mīr Zāhid. Al-Mirqāt, a nineteenth-century addition, is discussed in ‘Al-Mirqāt in the madrasa’.

Ahmed shows how the setting changed the commentaries. From the late nineteenth century first-order commentaries on the Sullam were written mostly by scholars connected with Deoband, among them ʿUbayd Allāh al-Pishāwarī (d. 1344/1924), Muḥammad Ibrāhīm al-Balyāwī (d. 1387/1967), Muḥammad Isḥāq al-Hazārawī (d. 1391/1971) and Sayyid Anwār al-Ḥaqq al-Pishāwarī (d. 1388/1968), and more recently Muftī ʿAṭāʾ al-Raḥmān Multānī (2002), Muftī Saʿīd Aḥmad Pālanpūrī (2012) and Muftī Shakīl Aḥmad Sītāpūrī. Most were in Urdu, written for printed classroom use rather than for debate between scholars: in Ahmed’s words, the tradition ‘had come to serve the teaching of a set curriculum within a formalized institution’.

The course has since been cut down. The current eight-year course of the Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband has four logic books, one a year: Taysīr al-manṭiq (first year), al-Mirqāt (second), Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb (third) and Quṭbī (fourth), with an introduction to philosophy and al-Maybudī’s commentary on al-Abharī’s Hidāyat al-ḥikma in the sixth year. The Sullam and its commentaries are no longer in it.

5Nadwa, Barelwī and Khayrābādī madrasas

The Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ in Lucknow went further. Shiblī Nuʿmānī, its leading educational thinker, held that logic was a useful aid to philosophy but no end in itself, objected that logic books in the Dars outnumbered those of philosophy, and wanted the Greek philosophical texts replaced by modern philosophy. N. Parveen notes that the Nadwa curriculum gave logic and philosophy less weight than the Dars and taught philosophy from newer books, although Shiblī’s plans were only partly realised.

Madrasas of the Barelwī (Ahl-i Sunnat) movement also teach the Dars-i Niẓāmī, examined in Pakistan by their own board, the Tanẓīm al-Madāris; al-Mirqāt, for instance, is read in Barelwī as in Deobandi madrasas, and a student gloss on it was written at the Jāmiʿa Niẓāmiyya Riḍawiyya in Lahore (see ‘Al-Mirqāt in the madrasa’). The Khayrābādī line, from Faḍl-i Imām and Faḍl-i Ḥaqq to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d. 1316 or 1318/1899 or 1901) and his students at Rampur, continued to write commentaries on the Sullam and its commentators into the twentieth century. The sources consulted for this article do not give a dated Barelwī or Khayrābādī syllabus, so their logic sequences cannot be stated as precisely as Deoband’s.

6Pakistan today: the Wifāq al-Madāris

In Pakistan the Dars-i Niẓāmī is examined by boards (wifāq) for each school of thought. The boys’ syllabus published in 2025 by the Deobandi Wifāq al-Madāris al-ʿArabiyya, prescribes logic as follows: 1. Taysīr al-manṭiq and al-Mirqāt in the second year of the thānawiyya ʿāmma (matriculation level); 2. Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb, together with al-ʿAqīda al-Ṭaḥāwiyya, in the first year of the thānawiyya khāṣṣa; 3. Quṭbī, ‘from the introduction to the end of the taṣawwurāt’, in the second year of the thānawiyya khāṣṣa, beside rhetoric; 4. in the first year of the ʿāliya, under ‘creed and philosophy’, Muʿīn al-falsafa by Saʿīd Aḥmad Pālanpūrī. The last years have no logic book.

The course that once ran from al-Jurjānī’s primers to the glosses on Sullam al-ʿulūm has thus become, in the Deobandi mainstream, a four-step sequence ending in half of Quṭbī. Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb in these syllabi is Mullā ʿAbd Allāh al-Yazdī’s commentary, the same book read in the Shīʿī ḥawza (see ‘Kurdish madrasas and the Shīʿī ḥawza’). A comparative study of the Pakistani boards by Hameedullah Bhutto and Ibrahem Narongraksakhet found logic in the higher-secondary curricula of all of them, with Sharḥ al-Tahdhīb the most common text at that stage.