Rejuvenating Muhammad in Memory: Exploring the Impact of a Nineteenth-Century Urdu Sacred Biography

The Muslim literary tradition of composing sīra (the biography of the Prophet Muhammad) experienced a rapid increase in production and consumption in colonial South Asia. Production was fueled by the newly embraced print technologies, while compositions of the biography in vernacular languages for the first time piqued interests of new readerships. The disruptive experiences of colonial activity forced several Muslim communities to restructure themselves in small towns distanced from the surveillance of colonial authorities, such as in the political capital of Delhi. Important research has been published on the production of Muslim religious literature by ʿUlama’, scholars formally trained in Islamic law and doctrine, from these types of Sunnī associations, such as the grouping at Deoband (Metcalf 1982, Ingram 2018, Tareen 2020).

The social circumstances also made it possible for lay individuals to compose and publish religious texts even though they did not have membership in, or training from, the traditional theological organizations where this work had been carried out in the past. These types of writers have often been thought of as marginal and, in their time, became the targets of criticism and rejection particularly by scholars associated with more customary theological colleges. Furthermore, the significance and impact of the writings of individuals of this type has received limited scholarly attention (an exception is Lelyveld, 1978). Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḳhān, (d. 1898) fits the description of this type of authorship. Sir Sayyid penned two important Urdu sīra texts, Jilāʾ al-Qulūb bi-Ẕikr al-Maḥbūb (1842) and al-Khutb̤ āt al-Aḥmadīyah (1870). Sir Sayyid wrote in ways that strayed from the conventional and that made traditional materials accessible to readers in new and interesting ways. Responses to his 1870 publication varied. The text garnered attention from European and Indian readers but was also condemned by his co-religionists for allegedly violating core Islamic tenets. This paper studies the ways in which Sir Sayyid’s 1870 publication influenced three sīra works. These are Sīratul Nabī (1914) by Shiblī Nuʿmānī (d. 1914), Raḥmatullil ‘Ālamīn (1911) by Muḥammad Sulaimān Salmān Manṣūrpūrī (d. 1930), and Bashariyati Anbiyā’ (1959) by ‘Abdulmājid Daryābādī (d. 1977). 

Scholars acknowledge that the sīra is comprised of several modes of writing that include devotional poetry, history, genealogy, personal narrative, theological argument, and more. This characteristic makes it difficult to understand the sīra in terms of a single genre of writing. Indirectly aware of this situation, Sir Sayyid refers to sīra as both “biography” (savānih ʿumrī) and “history” (tārīḳh), but advises that the sīra ought to be thought of as the latter. This is by no means a natural approach to this category of text. In fact, this work may be the first of its kind where the author names historicity as the desired focus of writing. While providing a narrator’s source, along with rigorously constructed chains of transmission are commonplace in sīra composition, Muslim biographers have given great emphasis to other qualities of this genre. Examples of central objectives of the sīra as a work of sacred biography include the ability to express devotion, to present Muhammad as a figure worthy of emulation, and being inclusive about materials on Muhammad inherited from past scholars even where they would need to accommodate inconsistencies and contradictions. Thinking of the sīra strictly as a work of history, which in Sir Sayyid’s sense is a type of facticity that achieves objectivity by severing it from the perspective of individuals or communities, presents difficulties. The narratives of Muhammad and his companions found in sīra texts are often first-person accounts, sometimes anchored by the names of witness and chains of transmission. Jan Assman’s work in Memory Studies captures the sense of what a sīra represents. He argues that in communal memory, the original significance of a past event is less important than questions about how an event emerges, is translated over time, and persists (Assman 2009). Rao et al 2001 offer a context to think about Sir Sayyid’s conception of a biographical work in terms of positivist histories. In their account, Orientalists had found it difficult to reconcile texts like sīra that presented a plurality of literary genres. One of their solutions was to categorize writings into two distinct types, the “mythical” and the “historical,” that would solve the issue of the purportedly jumbled texts. Writing particularly about the religious biography in South Asia, Tony Stewart explains that European scholars had classified these “problematic” texts as folk writing, legend, mythology, etc thus stripping them of their literary authority (Stewart, 2019).  In this paper, I examine Sir Sayyid’s sense of the writing that is appropriate for a sīra and ask a) how did South Asian scholars read his text and respond to his conception and b) what impact did this conception of sacred biography have on three subsequent compositions in the early twentieth-century.