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The Dars-i Niẓāmī, often referred to as the “Niẓāmī curriculum,” is in fact a method of education, rather than a curriculum, that has been prevalent in South Asian madrasas (Muslim colleges) since the mid-twelfth/eighteenth century. The method of instruction, often associated with a loosely defined curriculum and set of texts, is attributed to Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn al-Sihālawī (d. 1161/1748), a leading scholar of rationalist disciplines such as philosophy and logic and a member of the Indian Farangī Maḥallī family of scholars…

ʿAbd al-ʿAlī b. Niẓām al-Dīn b. Quṭb al-Dīn al-Sihālawī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm (b. c.1135/1723, d. 1125/1810) was a leading Indian scholar of fiqh (law), uṣūl al-fiqh (legal theory), manṭiq (logic), falsafa (philosophy), and kalām (theology). He was drawn to Ṣūfism, and he was considered a mujtahid (authoritative interpreter of the law) in positive law among the Ḥanafī scholars of his period. Born in Lucknow, he completed his initial training under his father by the age of seventeen and went on to adopt a dialectical method of study under Kamāl al…

Faḍl-i Imām b. Muḥammad Arshad b. Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ b. ʿAbd al-Wājid al-Ḥanafī Khayrābādī (d. 1827–8) was a leading scholar of the rationalist disciplines (maʿqūlāt), such as philosophy, logic, and philosophical theology, in late-twelfth/eighteenth and early-thirteenth/nineteenth-century India. In the immediately preceding generations, his family traced itself to Hargām, in North India, though Khayrābādī himself was born and raised in the town of Khayrābād, in Uttar Pradesh, India. There he was trained by the scholar ʿAb…

ʿAbdallāh b. ʿĀmir (or ʿAmr) Ibn al-Ḥaḍramī (d. c.38/658) is remembered in the sources as the agent sent by the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya (r. 41–60/661–80) to Basra in order to garner the support of its inhabitants after the Battle of Ṣiffīn (37/657). Some explanation for the choice of Ibn al-Ḥaḍramī is to be found in prosopographical and genealogical details. Ibn al-Ḥaḍramī was probably, at some point, the governor of Basra for the Rightly Guided caliph ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān (r. 23–35/644–56). This fact wa…

Maḥmūd b. Muḥammad al-ʿUmarī al-Fārūqī al-Jawnpūrī (993–1072/1585–1652) was an Indian scholar known primarily for his contributions, in Arabic and Persian, to philosophy (falsafa), theology (kalām), and rhetoric (ʿilm al-maʿānī wa-l-bayān). He was born in Jawnpur, in Uttar Pradesh, at the very beginning of Mughal suzerainty in the region. Al-Jawnpūrī received his early training from his grandfather, Shāh Muḥammad al-Jawnpūrī (d. 1032/1622), with whom he studied various books in the emerging curriculum (Lakhnawī, 5:181, 429). He then studied the rationalist disciplines (maʿq…