Shams al-Dīn Iltutmish (r. 607–33/1211–36) was a slave-soldier, variously referred to in the sources as mamlūk, ghulām, and banda, who played an influential role in the politics and military conquests of the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries in North India. He rose in the service of Quṭb al-Dīn Aybak (r. 602–7/1206–10), the celebrated ghulām of the Ghūrid sultan Muʿizz al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Sām (r. 569–602/1173–1206) ruling from Ghazna, who is credited with laying the foundations of Delhi as a centre of Islamic power in South Asia. Iltu…

Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Bukhārī Badaʾūnī Dihlavī Chishtī (642–725/1244–1325), better known as Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ and nicknamed Sulṭān al-Mashāʾikh (“The King of Shaykhs”) and Maḥbūb-i Ilāhī (“The Divine Beloved”), was the founder of the Niẓāmī subbranch of the Chishtī brotherhood (the Chishtiyya probably originated in Chisht, near Herat, towards the end of the sixth/twelfth century and was introduced into India by Muʿīn al-Dīn Sijzī, d. 627/1230. From the ninth/fifteenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries on…

Muhammad b. ʿAṭā Allāh Maḥmūd (d. 643/1246), popularly known as Shaykh Ḥamīd al-Dīn Qāḍī Nāgawrī, was a renowned Ṣūfī scholar of mediaeval India, who was affiliated with both the Suhrawardī and Chishtī silsilas (spiritual lineage or initiatic genealogy) (the Suhrawadiyya is traditionally said to have been founded by Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234) and spread quickly to the Middle East and as far as India and Indonesia; the Chishtiyya was founded in Chisht, a small town near Herat, about 318/930 by Abū Isḥāq Shāmī (t…

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…

Sāʿadat Ḥasan Mant’o (1912–55) was a leading Urdu short-story writer who came into prominence during the 1940s in British India with his provocative writings on socially taboo subjects. 1. Early life He was born into a Kashmiri trading family in Samrala, in the Ludhiana district of Panjāb. His father, Khvāja Ghulām Ḥasan (d. 1932), a district session’s judge, had three sons and six daughters before his marriage to Mant’o’s mother, Sardār Begum (d. 1940). Resentful of the disrespect shown to his mother by his father’s family, Mant’o became rebe…

The architecture of the Delhi Sultanate (607–932/1210–1526) is associated primarily with Delhi, from the reign of Iltutmish, its first sultan (r. 607–33/1211–36), through the defeat in 932/1526 of the Lodī dynasty by the Mughal emperor Bābur. While centred on Delhi, the sultanate also included North Indian successor states that developed even before Delhi’s decline caused by Tīmūr’s sack in Rabīʿ II 801/December 1398. Sultanate architecture was revived briefly during the Sūrī interregnum, from 937/1540 to 962/1555, when the Mughals were temporarily ousted from India. 1. Aybak The…

Dāgh (lit., scar, stain, mark, sorrow) is the nom de plume (takhallus) of Navāb Mīrzā Khān Dihlavī, originally called Ibrāhīm, a pre-eminent modern Urdu poet. He was the son of Navāb Shams al-Dīn Khān of Jhirkā Firūzpūr—who belonged to the aristocratic Lohārū family, to which the great poet Ghālib (d. 1869) was also related by marriage—and Vazīr Begam (usually called Chhotʾī Begam). Navāb Mīrzā Khān was born in Chāndnī Chawk, Delhi, on 12 Dhū l-Ḥijja 1246/25 May 1831 (see his horoscope in Jalva-yi Dāgh, 9). In 1837, his father was hanged by the British and his property confisc…

While Lucknow declined from its Nawābī heyday after 1856, the city has remained one of the Indian subcontinent’s most significant centres of Muslim cultural expression and Islamic learning. Both under British colonial rule, and since India’s independence, the city has been known for its important Sunnī and Shīʿī madrasas, its public religious rites such as Muḥarram processions, and its distinctive civic culture of refinement (tahdhīb). The city has also been intermittently an important centre of Muslim literature and politics. 1. Annexation and uprising Lucknow lost its status…

The madrasa in South Asia was the main institution for transmitting Islamic knowledge and sustaining Islamic identity. 1. The Delhi Sultanate The first madrasas appear to have been founded after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 602/1206. One was the Muʿizziya, probably founded by Iltutmish (r. 607–33/1211–36) and named after Muḥammad Ghūrī’s title Muʿizz al-Dīn (Muḥammad Ghūrī ruled in Ghazna 569–99/1173–1203). The second, the Nāṣiriyya, was built by Balban (r. 664–86/1266–87), while he was chief minister t…

The Ghūrids (or Shansabānīs) were a dynasty of independent Muslim rulers who conquered much of eastern Iran and northern India from the mid-sixth/twelfth century to the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century. Arising from the mountains of present-day central Afghanistan, they established an immense empire that reshaped the political and cultural boundaries of the eastern Islamic lands and laid the foundations of the Delhi Sultanate. The Ghūrid territories west of the Indus were conquered by the Khvārazmshāhs shortly before the Mongol irruption. 1. Early Shansabānī history T…