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AMIR KHWURD, THE AUTHOR SIYAR AL-AULIYA
1
Author(s):
SUSHIL MALIK
Vol - 6, Issue- 1 ,
Page(s) : 576 - 579
(2015 )
DOI : https://doi.org/10.32804/IRJMSH
Abstract
The social stature and portfolio of skills of these naukars provided them with greater options which they used to negotiate conditions of service commensurate with their social status. This was evident in the way members of the Kirmani family plotted their careers. One of the members of the Kirmani family, Amir Khwurd, was the author of the biographical encyclopaedia of the Chishti saints, Siyar al-auliya’ (completed ca. 1360s). The Kirmanis were one of Delhi’s important and wealthy fourteenth century Sayyid families – beyond the family’s close association with the sufi saints Baba Farid and Nizam al-Din Auliya, they participated in a network of relationships with other Sayyids, ‘ulama, Sufis, merchants, the Delhi Sultans and their secretaries.
- Amir Khwurd, Siyar al-auliyā’, edited by Sayyid Mahdi Ghuri, Lahore: Markaz-i Tahqiqat-i Farsi Iran wa Pakistan, no. 23, Mu’assi-yi Intisharat-i Islami, 1978.
- For a useful analysis of the Kirmani family’s network see Jyoti Gulati, ‘Stature, Social Relations and the Piety-Minded: Reading Amir Khwurd’s Siyar al-Auliya’, Delhi University, Department of History, M.Phil. dissertation, 2005, charts 1 and 2. The details on the Kirmanis below come from her unpublished dissertation, pp. 64-105.
- Amir Khwurd, Siyar al-auliyā’, pp. 224-5.
- Ibid., p. 228.
- Ibid., p. 221
- Ibid., pp. 223-4.
- For the technical position of the freed slave and convert in Islamic law, note the earlier discussion and see also Joseph Schacht, Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 161; and in H.A.R.Gibb, et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, Leiden: E.J. Brill, second edition, 1956-, s.v.: A.J. Wensinck, I. Goldziher and P. Crone, ‘Mawla’, R. Brunschvig, ‘‘Abd’, and D. Sourdel, C.E. Bosworth and Peter Hardy, ‘Ghulam’.
- For Barani’s harsh criticism of administrators of low status in Muhammad Tughluq’s reign see Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, pp. 504-5.
- Ibid., pp. 454, 512, 578-9.
- For the biography of the two Khan-i Jahans, see ‘Afif, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, pp. 394-430, and on his origins see p. 394.
- Ibid., p. 395.
- Ibid., p. 397.
- See Barani, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, edited by Khan, pp. 504-5 and Jackson (1999), pp. 185-6.
- For an extremely valuable summation of the personal, social and educational abilities that secretaries in the Sultanate might have been expected to possess, see Nizami Aruzi Samarqandi, Chahār Maqālah, edited by Mohammad Qazvini, revised by Mohammad Moin, Teheran: Zawwar Bookshop, 1955-7, translated by Edward G. Browne, London, E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Series, 1978 reprint.
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