Sayyids and ashrāf are widely considered to be a ‘distinct social force’ as ‘the one indisputable nobility of Islam’.Footnote 1 They trace themselves back to the Prophet Muḥammad and his family, and this prophetic lineage accords them an exclusive social position in Muslim societies.Footnote 2 They often used this social position to get involved in politics. For example, Sayyids started playing a legitimising role as scholars and spiritual advisers when they attached themselves to courts and royal patrons across Ilkhanid Iran, from the (roughly) eighth century Hijrī/fourteenth century CE onwards.Footnote 3 Administrative acumen complemented their pedigree. Later, Sādāt (another term for Sayyid) continued to play an important political role as the religious elite around the Safavid shahs, first in Tabrīz, then in Qazvīn, and later in Isfahan.Footnote 4 Across (roughly) ninth-/fifteenth-century South Asia, Sayyids legitimised political groups lacking in social pedigree. Engseng Ho’s work on the al-ʿAydarūs kinship group stressed the symbiotic relationship between formerly enslaved Abyssinian (ḥabshī) courtiers who patronised Ḥaḍramī sayyids for their scholarly services in the sultanate of Gujarat.Footnote 5 Sayyids also shaped the fortunes of royal dynasties. According to later hagiographical writings, Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh (d. 1040/1631–1632), another Ḥaḍramī Sayyid, healed the illness of Sultan Ibrāhīm ʿAdil Shāh (r. 987–1035/1579–1626) of the Deccan sultanate of Bijapur.Footnote 6 Thus, different Sayyid lineages became recipients of patronage, served as advisers and scholars, and provided ‘charismatic legitimacy’ for political elites.Footnote 7 What is less clear so far, however, is what effects those mutually beneficial relationships between Sayyids and royal authority had on the socio-economic role of Sayyids within their kinship groups and in what capacity they actually served in political administrations.
This is a first exploratory article on a little-known Sayyid family and their dealings with their kin at home and royal patrons abroad. It looks at the legitimising role of the Banū (or Āl) Shadqam—Sayyids from Medina—for state formation processes of the Niẓāmshāhī Sultanate (r. 895–1045/1490–1636) in Ahmadnagar (located in the modern-day state of Maharashtra, India)Footnote 8 in the Deccan over the tenth/sixteenth century, and how this could translate into socio-economic clout back home in Medina. I will focus on one Sayyid in particular: Sayyid Abū l-Makārim al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Shadqam al-Madanī al-Ḥusaynī, in the following referred to as al-Ḥasan. He was born in Medina in 942/1535 and died in the Deccan in 999/1590.Footnote 9 His father, ʿAlī, was the first in the lineage to serve as naqīb (head or leader) of the Sayyids in Medina (al-ashrāf), a position which al-Ḥasan inherited. They both also served as mutawallī of the Prophet’s Mosque and tomb complex in Medina. In 962/1555, al-Ḥasan left his posts in Medina to make his living as a migrant scholar abroad. He spent the rest of his life in different places and often on the move, between Ahmadnagar and back home in Medina, but also in other places in Iran. His trips included visits to the shrine cities and scholarly centres such as Mashhad, Mecca, and Shiraz, where he built his scholarly networks. But he also entered the courts of Safavid kings and Deccani sultans, and received royal patronage. He married Fatḥ Shāh Begum, the daughter of the Sultan of Ahmadnagar, Burhān Niẓām Shāh, and thereby strengthened his relationship with a powerful royal patron. As he travelled between scholarly centres and shrine cities such as Mashhad, Mecca, Medina, and Shiraz, and royal courts such as Ahmadnagar and Qazvīn, he interacted with a range of different people, and he wrote several texts in ḥadīth (prophetic traditions), taʾrīkh (history), and nasab (genealogy). His son continued with genealogical writings and made sure that the memory of his father’s transregional pursuits was preserved for the benefit of his own and future generations.
Scholarship has already shown an interest in al-Ḥasan from different conceptual angles. Marco Salati studied al-Ḥasan’s family as proponents of ‘Shiism’ in the holy cities and in this context discussed their close relationship with the Deccani court of the Niẓāmshāhīs in Ahmadnagar.Footnote 10 Werner Ende mentioned al-Ḥasan’s scholarly works and their potential importance for writing a history of the nakhāwila, a shīʿī community of Medina.Footnote 11 Jacqueline Sublet and Muriel Rouabah located al-Ḥasan’s biographical and historical work Zahr al-riyāḍ wa-zulal al-ḥiyāḍ (The flower of the garden and the pure water of the cisterns) among a group of ‘continuations’ of Ibn Khallikān’s famous seventh-/thirteenth-century biographical compendium Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān (The deceased of the nobles and news about the sons of time).Footnote 12 Building on their work, I recently considered the al-Zahr al-riyāḍ as an example of transoceanic Arabic history writing across the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean in which al-Ḥasan updated a carefully selected past Islamic community for his patrons in Ahmadnagar.Footnote 13
Departing from the existing scholarship, I want to shift the attention to al-Ḥasan’s political and socio-economic role in Medina and Ahmadnagar, and how he managed to link the two places over the sixteenth century. More specifically, I want to look at the political and social strategies that al-Ḥasan employed to navigate different sociabilities from Medina to western Asia and to the Deccan. I suggest that al-Ḥasan’s charismatic descent as a Sayyid constituted a social mobility, particularly in the transregional political context of the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean region, which allowed him to reshape his social world and that of his descendants.
A range of Sayyid lineages populated Medina in al-Ḥasan’s time. I argue that the surviving sources on the Banū Shadqam highlight al-Ḥasan’s efforts to elevate his lineage among those of other Sayyids of Medina. And in the following, I will demonstrate that he combined a range of strategies to make his lineage stand out as naqīb al-ashrāf (political leaders of the ashrāf) and mutawallī of the Prophet’s Mosque. And those included efforts that Teresa Bernheimer has highlighted for earlier cases of such ambitious Sayyids: (1) genealogical investigation and writing to prove their lineage, which in turn necessitated (2) expertise in Islamic learning as well as other scholarly fields, and (3) securing patronage and administering charitable donations for the kinship group within a local Muslim society.Footnote 14
What makes al-Ḥasan a distinct case is the exceptional transregional mobility that he displayed, made possible in the context of employment opportunities across South Asia for a range of social and professional groups from West Asia that took off in the fifteenth and continued over the sixteenth century.Footnote 15 It allowed for the creation of a transoceanic, symbiotic relationship between the Banū Shadqam and the royal dynasty of Ahmadnagar. Al-Ḥasan acted as a carrier of charismatic authority serving a political dispensation where an Imāmī paradigm began to emerge as a prominent form of legitimisation and state-building in Ahmadnagar.Footnote 16 In turn, the royal patronage that the Āl Shadqam received from this engagement constituted a game-changer ‘back home’ in Medina, where the marriage to a royal lineage and the concomitant economic affluence could help them institutionalise their political and social standing further.
The sources studied in this article need a crucial disclaimer: their authors are all Sayyids themselves. Their outlook is self-referential and, as I will show throughout, aimed at furthering their own exclusive social standing and that of their kin.Footnote 17 First of all, I focused on Arabic works of genealogy (nasab) by al-Ḥasan, entitled al-Mustaṭāba fī nasab sādāt ṭāba (The preferred among the pure of Sayyid descent), and his son Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s Zahra al-maqūl fī nasab thānī farʿī al-rasūl (The flower of utterance regarding the descendants of the second branch of the Prophet), as well as the latter’s summary Nukhba al-zahra al-thamīna fī nasab ashrāf al-madīna (The selection of precious splendour regarding the genealogy of the Prophet’s descendants of Medina). Those three genealogical treatises are compiled in a recent printed edition.Footnote 18 Secondly, I consulted Sayyid Muḥsin al-Amīn’s (1867–1952) massive compilation of biographies of Shīʿī (and also non-shīʿī) personalities written in Arabic, which includes an extensive biography of al-Ḥasan.Footnote 19 Al-Amīn’s account in the Aʿyān al-shīʿa is to some extent built on a twelfth-/eighteenth-century prosopographical work of his offspring entitled Tuḥfat al-azhār wa-zulāl al-anhār fī nasab abnāʾ al-aʾimma al-aṭhār (The gem of flowers and the cold water of the streams regarding the descent of the sons of the virtuous imams) as well as a version of al-Ḥasan’s Zahr al-riyāḍ which contains his own biographical entry including ijāzāt (sg. ijāza ‘certificate of transmission’) that he received from different teachers.Footnote 20 Thirdly, two Persian chronicles, Muḥammad Qāsim Hindū SHāh Astarābādī Firishta’s Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī (The flower garden of Ibrāhīm), often called Taʾrīkh-i Firishta (Firishta’s history), and Sayyid ʿAlī Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s Burhān-i maʾāthir (Burhān’s illustrious acts)—both served at different Deccani courts for some time—make it possible to locate al-Ḥasan at the court of Ahmadnagar briefly.Footnote 21 In a first step, I worked on Wolseley Haig’s English translation of the Burhān-i maʾāthir to identify the relevant sections and then zoomed in on those that refer to al-Ḥasan’s arrival in Ahmadnagar.Footnote 22 I also looked at the Persian edition of the Tarikh-i Firishta.Footnote 23
In the following, I will piece together al-Ḥasan’s professional life as it connected courtly and scholarly groups of the Hijaz, Iran, and the Deccan. My aim is threefold: firstly, this article will put a member of a little-known Ḥusaynid lineage from Medina on the map of the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean world more widely. Secondly, I will show that the sixteenth-century Niẓāmshāhī court’s shift to the Imāmī madhhab as its main legal and religious affiliation created the socio-cultural space that Sayyids like al-Ḥasan could fill with their prestigious prophetic descent and learning.Footnote 24 Thirdly, I will engage with Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s (al-Ḥasan’s son) memory-making through his genealogical works and how he framed his father’s pursuits to ensure his family’s enduring legitimacy and legacy. Taken together, it is possible to study al-Ḥasan as a crucial socio-economic agent within the sixteenth-century transregional connections between the Hijaz and the Deccan.
Medina: learning, genealogy, and acquiring administrative offices
The Banū Shadqam started to make a real effort over the sixteenth century to distinguish themselves among the Ḥusaynid ashrāf of Medina. Al-Ḥasan, the main protagonist of this study, his father, ʿAlī, and his uncle, Aḥmad b. Saʿd, tried to create the foundations for a more durable and secure social position of their kinship group in Medina. I argue here that we can still see at least four major directions of such a concerted effort in the available sources by focusing on al-Ḥasan. Firstly, al-Ḥasan immersed himself in various prestigious fields of learning, such as prophetic traditions (ḥadīth) and law (fiqh). Secondly, first his father and then al-Ḥasan took on administrative tasks to govern their community of Ḥusaynid ashrāf, presumably at the interface with the Ottoman provincial administration after their takeover of the Hijaz and the holy cities in 1517.Footnote 25 Thirdly, al-Ḥasan began writing genealogical texts that would situate his father and himself as the generations that stood out due to their socio-political efforts and service to the Sayyid community of Medina. Finally, Aḥmad reached out to the Ottoman authorities to secure a stable flow of endowments to the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.
Al-Ḥasan grew up acquiring scholarly credentials in various prestigious fields of learning, meaning the transmitted disciplines (manqūlāt) and the rationalist disciplines (maʿqūlāt).Footnote 26 As al-Amīn states in his Aʿyān al-shīʿa, al-Ḥasan detailed a group of his teachers (mashyakha) in his work on ḥadīth, entitled al-Jawāhir al-Niẓāmīya (or Niẓāmshāhīya), a text which unfortunately remains lost for now.Footnote 27 However, he provides an extensive list of al-Ḥasan’s teachers based on several sources but mainly the Tuḥfat al-Azhār by a member of a later generation, Ḍāmin b. Shadqam al-Ḥusaynī (d. 1090/1679).Footnote 28 Accordingly, al-Ḥasan began studies through the practice of qirāʾa (reading a text out under a teacher’s supervision) with his father, al-Sayyid b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan, Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Tūlāʾī al-Baṣrī, and al-Sayyid Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-Ḥusaynī al-Musawī in the rational subjects (al-maʿqūl) and al-Sayyid Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Sadīdī al-Ḥusaynī al-Jamāzī in the seven readings of the Qur’an, grammar, and morphology. His son Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī composed his Zahra al-maqūl in or before the year 1014/1605, the date of completion of an autograph, and stressed his father’s learning by labelling him as a jurist (faqīh) and a scholar (ʿālim).Footnote 29
Al-Ḥasan’s scholarly education amplified his social capital and that of his family. He started studying with his father and continued with teachers who could mostly boast of a Sayyid background as well. Those teachers would have probably mainly taught him in the family environment, setting him up with a prestigious and probably more local mashyakha and ijāzāt that reflected the social exclusivity of his family’s networks.
Later, al-Ḥasan travelled widely to acquire knowledge and to connect with learned groups in scholarly centres and at holy shrine cities. For his pursuits in the field of ḥadīth he travelled to Qazvīn to study with al-Shaykh Ḥusayn al-Ḥamadhānī, to Mecca to learn from al-Shaykh Muḥammad al-Bakrī al-Ṣadīqī, and to Yazd and Shiraz for Mullā ʿInayat Allāh as well as Shāh Niʿmat Allāh, respectively.Footnote 30 He performed the ḥajj in 983/1576, after he had already travelled to the Deccan—and visited the Prophet’s Mosque and continued his studies. On this occasion he also went to the graves of the imams, which could refer to the imams buried in Medina, and could even include those buried in Najaf and Kerbala. His ziyāra (visitation) of the eighth imam in Mashhad (eastern Iran) provided him with the opportunity to distinguish himself among his peers in Medina.
A later prosopographical work, entitled Riyāḍ al-ʿulamāʾ wa-ḥiyāḍ al-fuḍalāʾ (The gardens of the learned and the water cisterns of the distinguished), emphasised an Imāmī-context of knowledge transmission in his educational upbringing. It is a collective biographical work by Mirzā ʿAbd Allāh Afandī (1066–1130/1655–1717), a widely travelled scholar who recorded both Sunnī and Shīʿī scholars.Footnote 31 Accordingly, al-Ḥasan became affiliated with a group of ʿĀmilī scholars, most probably in Iran. Andrew Newman delineated groups of Iranian sayyids and Arab scholarly migrants from Jabal ʿĀmil (in modern-day Lebanon), and their later fusion, as well as their contribution to the doctrinal corpus of Shīʿī law and thought.Footnote 32 Among al-Ḥasan’s teachers were al-Shaykh Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-ʿĀmilī and al-Shaykh al-ʿĀllāma Niʿmat Allāh b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Khātūn al-ʿĀmilī, as well as several students of one of the great legal authorities of the sixteenth century, Zayn al-Dīn b. ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-ʿĀmilī (referred to as Ibn al-Ḥujja) and known as al-Shahīd al-thānī (the second martyr) for he was murdered on his journey from Mecca to Istanbul, which he was forced to undertake due to accusations of spreading Shīʿī teachings.Footnote 33 Al-Ḥasan’s engagements with Shīʿī scholarly authorities continued into the next generation as well. Devin Stewart located a text with an ijāza signed by Shaykh ʿIzz al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-Ḥārithī (d. 984/1576) for al-Ḥasan, his daughter, and three sons in Mecca and dated 983/1576, which must have been during the above-mentioned ḥajj.Footnote 34
Al-Ḥasan’s Ḥusaynid lineage of ashrāf was one among several families who claimed social prestige in Medina over the sixteenth century. Many different branches and lineages of ashrāf lived in Mecca and Medina in particular. Ḥasanid descendants (going back to Ḥasan (d. 50/670)), son of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalib, son-in-law of the Prophet Muḥammad, acted as the emirs of Mecca in the medieval period.Footnote 35 Ḥusaynid descendants, tracing themselves back to Ḥasan’s brother Ḥusayn (d. 60/680), served as the emirs of Medina.Footnote 36 Al-Ḥasan’s lineage of Ḥusaynid ashrāf did not rank among those politico-militarily dominant groups of emirs in Medina, even though they were of course distantly related to an earlier branch of the al-Muhannā, whose offspring counted al-Amīr al-Ḥusayn Shihāb al-Dīn as a ruler of Medina.Footnote 37 However, this does not mean that his family was not influential. Al-Ḥasan and his father would find ways to differentiate the Banū Shadqam in the competitive landscape of Sayyid families.
Sayyids claimed a prestigious descent from the Prophet Muḥammad’s family by using genealogical texts to establish their credentials in written form and in a verifiable manner.Footnote 38 Al-Ḥasan himself served as the genealogist (al-nassāb) of his Ḥusaynid Sayyid lineage in Medina. He seems to have started this genealogical labour in a written form that traced his family back to the ahl al-bayt (the Prophet Muḥammad’s family). He thus occupied a powerful social and political role by keeping a record that could serve his claims to prophetic descent. His genealogical treatise al-Mustaṭāba fī nasab sādāt ṭāba (The preferred among the pure of Sayyid descent)—another reading of ṭāba being ‘the town of Madīnah [Medina]’Footnote 39—traces the descent of Al-Ḥasan’s family (Āl Shadqam) back via a complicated and detailed combination of branches of the Ḥusaynid family tree to the fourth imam =ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿAbidīn, son of Imām Ḥusayn, son of Imām ʿAlī, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muḥammad.Footnote 40 The lineage starts with the offspring (aʿqāb) of the fourth imam, ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿAbidīn, who had himself lived in Medina for an extended period (probably died in 94/714 or 95/713).Footnote 41 His progeny included the fifth imam, Muḥammad al-Bāqir, and al-Ḥusayn al-Aṣghar. From the offspring of al-Ḥusayn al-Aṣghar, the lineage is traced via the generations from the latter’s offspring ʿAqib ʿUbaydallāh al-Aʿraj to ʿAqib Jaʿfar al-Ḥujja to ʿAqib Yaḥyā al-Nassāba to ʿAqib Āl Shadqam.Footnote 42 Among the progeny of the Āl Shadqam, al-Ḥasan mentioned himself as the compiler of this treatise (risāla).Footnote 43
Ancestry mattered, but also the knowledge of it and what to do with that knowledge. The ways in which al-Ḥasan recorded, archived, and circulated genealogical knowledge served the socially exclusive claims of his kinship group. He intended for his text al-Mustaṭāba to cover all the Sayyid lineages in the Hijaz and to circulate among those who could not boast such a prestigious lineage. As he set out in the brief preamble to the text, he composed
a short treatise regarding all those in the Hijaz who are related to the offspring of the martyr Imām Husayn, both among the settled and the Bedouins and conceived it as an instructive text for those who did not belong to this lineage and an enriching device for those who did not keep a record of their people and ancestors.Footnote 44
Thus, the treatise was meant to advertise an exclusive prophetic descent among those with less exclusive lineages or none. By way of such an ‘instructive text’, prestigious descent could elevate one’s social position in the Hijaz among those who bought into this form of social differentiation. But how could they set themselves apart from the other Sayyid families in more tangible terms?
According to al-Ḥasan’s genealogical text, the important position of the Āl Shadqam begins with the offspring of another al-Ḥasan (two generations earlier—in the second half of the fifteenth century) who had two sons, Aḥmad and ʿAlī, with ʿAlī being mentioned as the first al-naqīb, the head of the ashrāf, in the Muṣṭaṭāba.Footnote 45 This ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan al-naqīb was also the father of al-Ḥasan, the al-Ḥasan who compiled the Mustaṭāba and is the central protagonist in this study. And it is a title that stuck with them. In the eleventh/early seventeenth century, al-Ḥasan’s son Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī recorded his father’s full name and descent from the ahl al-bayt in the genealogical treatise Zahra al-maqūl fī nasab thānī farʿī al-rasūl accordingly: Sayyid Abū l-Makārim Badr al-Dīn al-Ḥasan al-Naqīb b. al-Ḥasan al-Shahīd b. ʿAlī b. Shadqam b. Ḍāmin b. Muḥammad b. ʿArama b. Nakītha b. Tawba b. Ḥamza b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Wāhid b. Mālik b. Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ḥusayn b. al-Amīr Abī ʿImāra al-Muhannā al-Akbār b. al-Amīr Abī Hāshim Dāʾūd b. al-Qāsim b. ʿUbayd Allāh b. Ṭāhir al-Muḥaddith b. Yaḥyā al-Nassāba b. al-Ḥasan b. Jaʿfar b. ʿUbayd Allāh al-Aʿraj b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿAbidīn al-Ḥusaynī al-Madanī.Footnote 46 As becomes clear from the names of some of his ancestors, they also distinguished themselves through the practice of transmitting ḥadīth, such as Ṭāhir al-Muḥaddith, and the recording of genealogical descent (nasab), such as Yahyā al-Nassāba.
Importantly, al-Ḥasan carried two titles at this point. The title badr al-dīn (full moon of religion/faith), which distinguished his service for the Muslim faith, and the title naqīb, which marked the administrative and political post (niqāba) among the Sayyids of Medina. This is the title that set them apart from the politico-military elites that governed the emirate of Medina.
We are left in the dark when it comes to any specific responsibilities, obligations, or privileges that the role of naqīb might have entailed in sixteenth-century Medina. According to Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Māwardī’s fifth-/eleventh-century treatise Kitāb al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya (Book on governmental regulations), the niqāba was ‘intended to protect persons of noble descent from being governed by someone of lower origins and less honour than themselves’.Footnote 47 Thus, in this earlier period it was intended to ensure a form of social etiquette in the governance of Sayyids. The post itself spread across the Muslim world to many places where Sayyids settled and organised themselves, and according to Kazuo Morimoto served as an administrative tool for the Abbasid Caliphate to reintegrate Sayyid communities.Footnote 48 The fourth-/tenth-century genealogist al-Bukhārī mentioned that the post of naqīb in Medina was held by ‘the descendants of Mūsā b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn’.Footnote 49
Al-Ḥasan’s son Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī stated in the Zahra al-maqūl that, before travelling to the Deccan for the first time, al-Ḥasan had acted as naqīb al-ashrāf of Medina, but he does not mention any further details regarding this role.Footnote 50 Axel Havemann translated the title naqīb al-ashrāf as ‘the marshall of the nobility’ and someone ‘who verifies something with regard to its correctness’,Footnote 51 the latter a befitting attribute to al-Ḥasan’s role as genealogist. Havemann identified some of its general functions as discussed in normative texts of the fifth/eleventh centuries. The naqīb al-ashrāf was tasked ‘to keep a register of nobility’, ensure proper intermarriage and moral behaviour among the ashrāf, and administer those awqāf (religious endowments) that were founded for them. Studies on the ashrāf of Mamlūk and Ottoman Egypt do not help us in the case of the Hijaz, apart from confirming a religious and political function they performed on behalf of the ashrāf (usually descendents of Ḥasan) or sādāt (usually descendents of Ḥusayn) towards the political elites.Footnote 52
I argue here that the Banū Shadqam take on the office of naqīb al-ashrāf in the first half of the sixteenth century to enhance their social position in Medina. While this post existed in the early period, it might have become vacant at some point. This office is not mentioned in important sources for fifteenth-century Medina. Neither al-Samhūdī’s (d. 891/1506) historiographical work on Medina entitled Wafāʾ al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā (The completion of the pledge regarding the news of the city of the chosen one) nor al-Sakhāwī’s (d. 902/1497) biographical compilation on Medina, entitled al-Tuḥfa al-laṭīfa fī taʾrīkh al-madīna al-sharīfa (The kind gift regarding the history of the noble city), make any reference to the position of the naqīb al-ashrāf.Footnote 53 Al-Ḥasan also does not give any further details. Thus, for now, we are left in the dark as to the procedure that elevated the Āl Shadqam to the holders of this political and administrative position.
It might be possible that this office re-emerged during the first decades of Ottoman control over the Hijaz, which initially started with the defeat of the Mamlūk sultans in 923/1517. The naqīb al-ashrāf emerged as an office across different provinces of the Ottoman empire in this period to allow for a different degree of administrative centralisation.Footnote 54 At the same time, the creation of the office could have been reinvigorated by the Sayyids themselves to constitute a political leadership that would lobby for the Sayyid community vis-à-vis the new Ottoman overlords. In the end, instituting such an office would have probably needed the negotiated consent from both the Ottoman suzerain, power-holders in Medina, and the Banū Shadqam.
In any case, acquiring the post of naqīb al-ashrāf allowed the Banū Shadqam to socially differentiate themselves further among the many social groups in Medina. Already in pre-Ottoman times, different important office-holders were involved in political decision-making in Medina. In the early fifteenth century, the Mamlūks of Egypt and Syria continuously tried to subject the Hijaz to more political control, for example by appointing a vice-sultan of the Hijaz.Footnote 55 At the same time, local power-holders, often in support of the mujāwirūn (temporary residential learned individuals), petitioned the Mamlūk sultans to install the military emirs of the city.Footnote 56 During the early sixteenth century, the Mamlūk sultan Qānsūh al-Ghawrī asked the emir of Mecca to choose a new emir of Medina ‘in consultation with the Shaykhs of the Prophet’s Mosque and the Qāḍīs of Madīna [Medina]’.Footnote 57
Given the recurring conflicts between ashrāf lineages in Medina,Footnote 58 it is possible to assume that the post of naqīb al-ashrāf was not only administrative but also political in character. Both Werner Ende and Marco Salati have pointed out the importance of the Banū Ḥusayn for the history of Medina (a history which remains unwritten for this period).Footnote 59 Salati outlines that they tended to have a monopoly on the offices of the judge (al-qāḍī), the preacher (khaṭīb), and the imam.Footnote 60 At the same time, three branches, namely the Jammāz, ʿAṭiyya, and Hawāshim were responsible for managing the awqāf (sg. waqf ‘religious endowment’) intended to support the needy and destitute during ʿāshūrāʾ, the day of mourning that commemorated the martyrdom of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib’s son Ḥusayn at Kerbala.
In this highly competitive political and social context, the Banū Shadqam served in two further offices apart from that of the naqīb al-ashrāf. Firstly, based on al-Amīn’s prosopographical work, Salati stated that the Banū Shadqam also ran the bayt al-māl (office of finances). According to the biography of Aḥmad b. Saʿd b. Shadqam (d. 988/1580), they secured strong financial support from the Ottoman sultan Murad III (r. 982–1003/1574–1595), in the form of farmland in the province of Egypt that was declared as waqf, as well as 1,500 aḥmar sharīfī (Ottoman royal coins) on an annual basis.Footnote 61 The Safavid shah ʿAbbās (r. 985–1038/1577–1629) also sent donations to the ashrāf of Medina. According to al-Ḥasan’s genealogical work al-Muṣtaṭāba, this Aḥmad b. Saʿd b. Shadqam is the brother of al-Ḥasan’s father, ʿAlī, who was the first naqīb of the lineage, and thus, al-Ḥasan’s uncle, and in a side-branch to his lineage.Footnote 62 The Banū Shadqam thus seemed to also have played a significant socio-economic role in Medina by overseeing the accounting processes for endowment flows (awqāf) designated for the support of the ashrāf. The naqīb’s authority presumably rested to a considerable extent on the responsibility of distributing those funds as did the charismatic authority derived from the prophetic descent and the genealogical services and monitoring of the community of Sayyids.
Secondly, al-Ḥasan also served as al-mutawallī of the Prophet’s Mosque (masjid al-nabawī) in Medina. Here again, scholarship on the function of the mutawallī of the Masjid al-Nabawī in Medina is almost non-existent. Shaun Marmon’s study of the eunuchs serving at the Prophet’s Mosque over the medieval period refers to different branches of Ḥusaynid ashrāf in Medina, coming from ‘an old and strongly rooted Shiʿi tradition’, and serving as emirs, scholars such as the Friday preachers, prayer leaders, chief judges, and jurists.Footnote 63 Nothing else is revealed about the function of the custodians and administrators of this exceptional holy site. However, we can assume that the role of mutawallī carried with it a considerable socio-religious prestige given the importance of the Prophet’s Mosque as a place of pilgrimage in Medina.
Thus, by around the middle of the sixteenth century, al-Ḥasan and his father, ʿAlī, carried a considerable social responsibility for their kinship group, the Banū Shadqam, but also for the Banū Ḥusayn at large, as well as the pilgrims coming to Medina to visit the Prophet’s Mosque. Their political and administrative involvement must have made them a prominent kinship group with not only political influence but also social obligations. To retain both, ʿAlī and al-Ḥasan must have recognised patronage opportunities across the Arabian Sea in al-Hind, the South Asian subcontinent, especially in the newly consolidated Deccan sultanate of Ahmadnagar. Initially, al-Ḥasan’s father, ʿAlī (d. 960/1553), established the contact with the court of the Niẓāmshāhīs when he travelled to al-Hind (the Indian subcontinent) to meet Burhān Niẓāmshāh, but then he came back to Medina.Footnote 64 Al-Ḥasan would develop a much stronger relationship with the Niẓāmshāhī court in Ahmadnagar. The socio-economic role of al-Ḥasan and his kinship group would take on a transoceanic dimension over the second half of the sixteenth century.
Ahmadnagar: marriage, patronage, and scholarly service in residence
The sultanate of Ahmadnagar became an important point of contact for the Banū Shadqam from around the mid 1550s onwards. I argue here that al-Ḥasan and for a shorter time also his father, ʿAlī, affiliated themselves with the Niẓāmshāhī Dynasty and served their royal court in return for a patronage arrangement that could further the kinship group’s causes ‘back home’ in Medina. To achieve this, the Ḥusaynid descent provided them with exclusive access. The political and administrative positions that they held in Medina must have strengthened their case and shaped their professional service to the court.
The sultanate of Ahmadnagar became a professional career option because of a recent ‘regime change’ that made it necessary to recruit new scholarly groups. Sultan Burhān Niẓāmshāh and his minister Shāh Ṭāhir had just disowned, exiled, or killed their Ḥanafī Sunnī scholarly elites serving the court of the Niẓāmshāhs in favour of an Imāmī (or Twelver Shīʿī) dispensation and legal interpretation.Footnote 65 According to the two Persian chroniclers Sayyid ʿAlī Ṭabāṭabāʾī and Muḥammad Qāsim Firishta, those political changes led to the invitation of, among others, Sayyids to the court of the Niẓāmshāhīs. According to Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s narrative, Shāh Ṭāhir then takes over as vakīl (minister) and head of Ahmadnagar’s administration.Footnote 66 Burhān Niẓāmshāh entrusts him with running the treasury. Shāh Ṭāhir convinces the sultan to explore alternative options in attracting scholarly professionals from across western Asia.Footnote 67 The court sends ‘shiploads of treasure’ to Mecca, Medina, Najaf, Kerbala, and Mashhad, among other places. They also dispatch standards (sg. ʿalam) to the graves of the imams in those places. This is a practice that some of the other Deccani sultanates pursued as well.Footnote 68 The dispatch of ʿalams probably also spread the word about the new patronage opportunities in Ahmadnagar.
Here, the significance of Sayyid families for the new Imāmī patronage paradigm becomes clearer. I think that the Banū Shadqam were able to gain an important foothold in those new patronage systems, not necessarily only because some of them had an affinity with Imāmī teachings and doctrines but because they could demonstrate a genealogy going back to the ahl al-bayt. The genealogical link with the Prophet endowed them with prestige and charismatic authority, and those in turn paved the way for patronage by political elites who sought out this legitimacy. Sayyids could often substantiate those prophetic links with their scholarly erudition, especially in the field of ḥadīth and nasab. Ho developed a similar line of argumentation with regard to the Ḥaḍramī Sayyids that served Ḥabshī administrators in the fifteenth-century sultanate of Gujarat.Footnote 69
The Sayyids from Medina and the sultans of Ahmadnagar forged a mutually beneficial relationship. While prophetic descent offered a useful tool to legitimise the dynasty, Sayyids also gained from their association with a courtly patron.Footnote 70 As the translator of Ṭabāṭabāʾī phrases it, ‘the giving of effect to Shāh Ṭāhir’s advice had its rewards from God, for many Sayyids of high degree and religious leaders of great fame came to the Dakan (sic!) and met with the fulfilments of their hopes from the king’s bounty’.Footnote 71 Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s chronicle then makes explicit reference to Al-Ḥasan’s father, Amīr Sayyid ʿAlī Shadqam, as one of the Sayyids who heeded the call and travelled to the Deccan.Footnote 72 However, upon arrival Sayyid ʿAlī expressed his wish to perform the pilgrimage and ‘to recite the evening prayer at the head of Muṣṭafā’s grave’ (the grave of the Prophet Muḥammad) in Medina.Footnote 73 Burhān Niẓām Shāh gave him a charitable donation of 12,000 hūns (gold coins), which, based on Salati’s research, might have been an annual endowment dedicated to Amīr Sayyid ʿAlī’s family.Footnote 74 It is not entirely clear whether Sayyid ʿAlī’s son, and the main protagonist of this study, travelled with him or followed directly afterwards. Ṭabāṭabāʾī mentions al-Ḥasan as well in this context.Footnote 75
Al-Ḥasan did not affiliate himself with the Niẓāmshāhī Dynasty straight away, but he kept looking for alternative patrons. Al-Ḥasan’s son, Sayyid Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī, offers more information on his father’s peregrinations in his genealogical work Zahra al-maqūl. According to Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s chronology of events, al-Ḥasan arrives in Ahmadnagar in 962/1554–1555 during the reign of Ḥusayn Niẓāmshāh. He soon leaves again for a ziyāra to the shrine of the eighth imam, ʿAlī b. Mūsā al-Riḍā, buried in Mashhad in the eastern Iranian region of Khurasan, to pay his respects to him who ‘inherited the knowledge of the master of humankind’ (wārith ʿulūm sayyid al-anām).Footnote 76 He also paid a visit to the Safavid shah Ṭahmāsp in Qazvīn in the year 964/1557. It is difficult, however, to get a sense of what this meeting with Shāh Ṭahmāsp was about. The fact that he left again suggests that he could not negotiate a stable patronage relationship. Shāh Ṭahmāsp does not mention al-Ḥasan in his memoirs, for example.Footnote 77
What some of the available sources seem to suggest though is that the visit to Mashhad and Qazvīn and his return to Ahmadnagar only increased his standing with the Niẓāmshāhīs. With regard to al-Ḥasan’s meetings with Sultan Ḥusayn Niẓāmshāh in 962/1554–1555 and Shāh Ṭahmāsp in 964/1557, al-Amīn states that both ‘bestowed on him the greatest abundance of benefits’, which can be read as a reference to generous royal patronage.Footnote 78 According to al-Amīn’s chronology, al-Ḥasan only left for his ziyāra to Mashhad after the meeting with Shāh Ṭahmāsp, which is crucial because he states that al-Ḥasan studied with a range of teachers there, acquired much learning, distinguished himself, and climbed to the highest rank and intellectual perfection, before returning to Ahmadnagar, where he was well received by the courtiers and nobles.
Al-Ḥasan entered into a closer relationship with the Niẓāmshāhī Dynasty than his father. According to Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s chronicle, he married Fatḥ Shāh Begum, the daughter of Sultan Burhān Niẓām Shāh.Footnote 79 Firishta’s chronicle mentioned him as ‘Sayyid Ḥasan Madanī, who was one of the niqābs of Medina’ among a longer list of Sayyids who came to Ahmadnagar.Footnote 80 Thus, al-Ḥasan already promoted his administrative title of niqāb at this point. Through the marital alliance with the house of the sultan, al-Ḥasan acquired a suitable assignment of land. I think that the marriage between al-Ḥasan and Fatḥ Shāh Begum bound al-Ḥasan stronger to his patron, but thereby he probably also steadied the support of the royal house for the Sayyids. The couple performs the pilgrimage together, but Fatḥ Shāh Begum decides to forthwith reside in Medina in the proximity of the Prophet’s tomb, forsaking any ‘wordly advantage’.Footnote 81 She dies there; however, Sayyid al-Ḥasan returns to the Deccan and later dies in Junnār, in the realm of Ahmadnagar, where he was also buried initially.Footnote 82
Still, al-Ḥasan’s new marital relations had worldly consequences. They brought further material benefits for his Sayyid lineage in the future. And they were tied not directly to his wife but to the connection with the family of the dynasty that ensued. Thus, al-Ḥasan had left for Medina with his (by now) children, their wives, and their grandmother, Bībī Āmina.Footnote 83 After the death of al-Ḥasan’s wife in Medina, he then returned to Ahmadnagar together with Bībī Āmina. She became a patron for al-Ḥasan’s family and endowed him and the offspring he had with her daughter with an annual sum of 12,000 gold coins, indefinitely. Whether or not this sum is accurate is difficult to assess, however, as in similar contexts, the large number should probably be read as a statement of grandeur and refer to a huge amount of gold coins (the number 12 could have a significance, too). In addition, al-Ḥasan and his offspring also seemed to have received grants and gifts from the sultan and the officers of state (or courtiers). This happened during the reign of Murtaḍā Niẓāmshāh (r. 972/1565–996/1588).
Al-Ḥasan used his courtly affiliation and royal patronage to strengthen his political position in Medina. Those aspects of patronage seem to be important to al-Amīn’s prosopographical depiction. The cash donations that he received enabled him to further entrench his family’s political position and social standing in Medina. Al-Ḥasan and his offspring established endowments in Medina.Footnote 84 According to al-Amīn, this involved the produce from a palm date plantation, which was directed into an endowment purpose. Additionally, he endowed a house where only reciters of the Qur’an and students were allowed to reside.
Al-Ḥasan remained affiliated with the court in Ahmadnagar and emerged as a powerful figure there. According to his son Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī, the sultan patronised (niʿamun jasīmatun) him and offered him a lofty reception (quran ʿaẓīmatun). He quotes his father saying, ‘when I entered on him, he descended from his elevated seat and sat down next to me. And he [al-Ḥasan] was never linked with any matters relating to the affairs of the state and the treasury.’Footnote 85 In this last sentence, Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī stresses that his father stayed away from worldly affairs of the court. In the current context, this presumably signals that in his son’s (and maybe his kinship group’s) understanding he was not supposed to meddle in worldly affairs but only involve himself as a scholar and adviser.
Al-Ḥasan continued his commitment to acquiring learning and expanded his scholarly networks, enabled by his exceptional transregional mobility. Al-Amīn quotes various references to ijāzāt by different teachers. Some of them refer to Mecca repeatedly for the years 977/1566 and 983/1575.Footnote 86 Those two dates then indicate additional instances when al-Ḥasan had left Ahmadnagar to further his scholarly pursuits. Salati’s work details that when he first arrived in Ahmadnagar, Ḥusayn Niẓām Shāh was already in power.Footnote 87 When this Ḥusayn Niẓām Shāh died in 972/1565, he decided to move back to the Hijaz, advanced his studies with Shīʿī as well as Sunnī scholars, and initiated the establishment of two endowments in Medina. However, after all, he did not seem content with his role in Medina, so he left for the Deccan, where he lived until his death.
His transregional scholarly connections and pursuits have to be seen in their interplay with his scholarly pursuits in Ahmadnagar. In the reign of Sultan Murtaḍā Niẓāmshāh, al-Ḥasan returned to Ahmadnagar for extended periods of time. He penned the Zahr al-riyāḍ wa-zulal al-ḥiyāḍ, a massive biographical work, over the years from 988/1580 to 992/1584, for his royal patron.Footnote 88 The Zahr al-riyāḍ represents one of the main outcomes of al-Ḥasan’s learned pursuits as scholar-in-residence at Ahmadnagar.Footnote 89
Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s memory-making: Al-Ḥasan as a socio-economic intermediary
In the early seventeenth century, Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s genealogical writings stressed the prestige of his lineage by focusing on three aspects. Firstly, compared with his father’s al-Muṣṭaṭāba, he structured his genealogical text Zahra al-maqūl by further refining the different branches of the Banū Shadqam’s lineage. Secondly, he detailed al-Ḥasan’s transregional exploits in an extensive biographical overview. Finally, he narrated the miracles (karāmāt) that his father performed in his different professional roles and during his transoceanic travels. I argue that Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s genealogical writings commemorated his father’s achievements in a culturally acceptable way. He presented al-Ḥasan as a socio-economic agent and a safe pair of hands, able to transfer funds between the Deccan and the Hijaz. However, his role of a socio-economic intermediary who managed material wealth needed to be packaged in the form of miracles to become acceptable in his community.
Sayyid Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī differentiated his genealogical tree in the Zahra al-maqūl into ever finer branches of family lines compared with his father’s (al-Ḥasan) genealogical treatise al-Mustaṭāba. The Mustaṭāba traces the lineage from one ʿaqib (offspring) to the next until it reaches the ʿaqib Āl Shadqam. In contrast, the Zahra al-maqūl frays into ever more specific units of family lines, which it prefixes to the respective ʿaqib.Footnote 90 It starts with al-dawḥa (family tree) al-ūlā of the ʿaqib al-Ḥusayn al-asghar to al-ghuṣn (branch) al-awwal to al-fanan (twig) al-thānī to al-thamara (fruit) al-thālitha to al-shaʿb (folk) al-awwal to al-qabīla (tribe) al-ūlā to al-fakhidh (subdivision of a tribe) al-awwal to al-ḥayy (tribal community) al-awwal to al-baṭin (the inner part, womb) al-awwal to al-ʿimāra (building) al-ūlā to al-bayt (house) al-thānī to al-ḥizb (group, party) al-awwal. This final al-ḥizb al-awwal begins with the ʿaqib al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī, the main protagonist of this study, followed by al-ḥizb al-thānī which introduces the ʿaqib Saʿd b. ʿAlī, al-Ḥasan’s uncle, who was introduced earlier as a crucial recipient of funding from both the Ottomans and the Safavids. Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī then also includes himself and his progeny and continues enumerating the other branches of the family tree.
There are different ways to interpret the inclusion of Zayn al-DīnʿAlī’s particularised terminology, which is only translated tentatively here, because those terms might have had very specific meanings that a rendering in English can only partly capture. Firstly, Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī could have developed or appropriated this conceptual vocabulary to make the genealogical treatise more navigable and enhance its readability as a reference tool for members of his lineage or a larger audience. For someone versed in this terminology, the different elements of the family tree might serve as an identifier and might make it easier for a reader to find what they are looking for. Secondly, and related to the first one, this conceptual vocabulary could indicate a change in the practice of writing nasab texts happening in this period, possibly responding or reflecting on specialisations in other areas of scholarly practice. Further comparative research would be necessary to assess this. However, such an assessment is beyond the scope of this article.
More significantly for the current purpose, this narrowing down of the conceptual language from the larger ‘family tree’ via the ‘fruit’ to the ‘house’ and its ‘group’ bears the tendency of focusing on the present and the nearer past, when members of the family were active agents in service of the lineage. The granular level is more tangible than the big ‘branches’ of the past. Thus, it seems that al-Ḥasan’s pursuits in Ahmadnagar, Medina, and beyond, just as those of his brother, had direct implications for the significance and standing of the Āl Shadqam when Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī was writing his Zahra al-maqūl.
Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s further reworking of the Zahra al-maqūl indicates that some branches of the family tree played a more important role than others. He wrote a mukhtaṣar—shortened summary often focused on a particular aspect—of his Zahra al-maqūl and entitled it Nukhba al-zahra al-thamīna fī nasab ashrāf al-madīna (The selection of precious splendour regarding the genealogy of the Prophet’s descendants of Medina).Footnote 91 He reworked the Zahra al-maqūl according to his own words by mentioning ‘the fathers without the mothers, the sons without the daughters, the successors without the ones who died out, the residents without the ones who withdrew, the descendants without the descriptions, and the fixed without the doubtful’. The result is a much shorter and streamlined genealogical treatise, with a focus on the dominant (male) ashrāf of Medina. It retained the specialised terminology. Here, the Āl Ḥasan (al-bayt al-awwal) includes al-Ḥasan with his son ʿAlī, the composer of the Nukhba.
Returning to Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s Zahra al-maqūl, I think that the composer highlighted the virtues of his most direct family members to make them reflect well on his own generation. The sections on the ʿaqib of al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī and Saʿd b. ʿAlī stand out in the family tree. They are both mentioned with long biographical overviews and sections entitled faṣl, which contain edifying stories about the subjects’ attributes, stories, and ‘powers’. They must have been formative for Zayn al-DīnʿAlī. His father and his uncle probably both shaped his upbringing considerably. But they also brought increasing socio-economic success to the Āl Shadqam, which translated into an elevated social standing among the Ḥusaynid ashrāf in Medina.
While his son stressed that al-Ḥasan kept his distance from ‘worldly affairs’, I think that we still must consider al-Ḥasan’s role at the court beyond that of a scholar-in-residence only committed to his learned pursuits. I argue that al-Ḥasan needed to be presented exclusively in his role as scholar and spiritual adviser to the court of Ahmadnagar to remain a legitimate socio-economic intermediary who transferred royal patronage for his endowments to Medina.
Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s biographical overview in the section (faṣl) under the ʿaqib al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī negotiates the tensions between al-Ḥasan’s political, learned, and socio-economic activities that linked Ahmadnagar with Medina. It characterised his father as an erudite scholar of law and a dedicated servant of the niqāba. It also explained his absence from his post as naqīb.Footnote 92 Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī makes a rhetorical effort to downplay his service at the court of Aḥmadnagar and his absence from Medina:
My father—may his earth be light—was a perfectly chaste naqīb in his piety, and strengthened it. He was a legal scholar, righteous and learned in the arts of knowledge. He laboured for his hereafter and his judgement. Then he separated himself from the post of niqāba in abstinence and loathed it.
He did not withdraw from the ḥaram of his ancestor—Allāh’s blessings on him and his family—since his birth apart from one time to the ḥaram of Allāh al-Amīn [the Kaʿba in Mecca] receiving the honourable knowledge, and another time to the land of the Deccan in the year Żand [AH 954/1548] seeking its great king, my ancestor, Burhān Niẓām Shāh, may Allāh shelter them both in his mercy and his favour.
He bestowed the highest honours on him and made him comfortable with the utmost of donations, and he let him have a parsang [also farsang or farsakh—measurement of length]Footnote 93 of the lands. And a completeness of convictions overtook him there, so that he asked him for an examination of his treasuries, and he lent his assistance and served him. He was never troubled apart from this short time and he possessed some lands, mā shāʾ Allāh.
Then he returned to his homeland in the year Ẓanū [956/1550]. And the entirety of his absence was two years. The day of his entry into his homeland was the day of his departure from it.Footnote 94
Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī makes clear that al-Ḥasan’s main responsibility was that of the naqīb al-ashrāf, but he has to account for two absences by 956/1550 which troubled al-Ḥasan. He left Medina only to acquire further knowledge in Mecca and to serve Sultan Burhān Niẓām Shāh, whose daughter he later married. The sultan offered what can only be understood as rewarding royal patronage including donations and land grants. Thus, he served him as an accountant running the courtly treasury, which contradicts his previous statement regarding the keeping away from ‘worldly affairs’. Serving the sultan in this capacity seems to have been a sensitive issue and had to be done discreetly and in a limited manner. Al-Ḥasan had planned to leave his political responsibilities in Medina for this courtly service, which renders it a socio-economic choice with political implications. He thereby paused his leadership role to offer his professional skills at a royal court.
Here and for now, four anecdotes (fully quoted in translation below) depicting events of a miraculous nature from al-Ḥasan’s life allow us to explore him as a socio-economic intermediary between Ahmadnagar and Medina. The obvious problem with the framing of his life story in his son’s genealogical treatise is that we need to assume that it served to boost the legitimacy and social standing of Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s generation. And it is important to recognise Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s depiction of al-Ḥasan’s life in its hagiographic dimension and what this implies for both the composer and the protagonist of the biography. Denise Aigle recently studied ‘the “remarkable deeds” (manāqeb) of the Qattāli Sufis as historical sources’ and highlighted two important conceptual considerations:Footnote 95 Firstly, the narrated life should be read as a reconstruction that made more sense in the composer’s context than in that of the depicted person. Secondly, hagiographers retold life stories to elevate its person to a saintly or ‘holy’ status.
Still, we must presume that al-Ḥasan’s biography and the stories which exemplify crucial moments in his life have a certain truth-value, even if their framing follows rhetorical preconceptions that might make them seem unbelievable or exaggerated. As Erik Ohlander has argued in his study of Sufi orders and their narrative strategies, rhetorical devices often framed events or life stories in a particular way in response to tastes and expectations of authors and audiences.Footnote 96 Yet, according to him, this rhetoric is not supposed to devalue the historicity of the embellished event. On the contrary, it was only culturally acceptable to be narrated in this way. Since the four anecdotes are important for understanding how Zayn al-Dīn framed his father’s pursuits, I offer a full translation in the following:
And among them that the Syrian Ḥajj Caravan entered Medina and they were in much debt. They refrained from the frequent coming and going due to the swelling of ritual impurity among its marchers on that day. And when the third day came and the departure of the Ḥajj Caravan [was imminent] the servant came to him and reported to him, that there was a man from Khurasan at the gate/door. He permitted him/called him and so he entered, he sank to his feet and kissed them both. So, he asked him about his debt. He told him the amount. He [al-Ḥasan] took out from his pocket a bag with the amount of this debt not more than that and not less.
And among them that he, may his earth be light, when he returned from India, and he was in the port of Jidda making preparations to travel on to Medina, when a collector of taxes [of the tithe] arrived and he said: ‘Stay with us, as you have got 100 Ashrafi if not more. And so he said: You don’t have the right to anything, so the tax collector spoke and said: ‘It is necessary that you give me this.’ So, he [al-Ḥasan] said, ‘I call upon Allāh, praise be to him the great, that the wrath of the sultan will be inflicted on you.’ So, he troubled him for a short time. Then it became clear that the tax collector had stolen a large rug from the sharif of Mecca, and [since] he also had hindered him [al-Ḥasan] profoundly, the sharif ordered that his hands be cut off, as one would cut the rug. He [al-Ḥasan] received support, since he had lost much money.
And among them that he, may God make his earth light, was in the Ḥaḍramawt in a village, and it is called Zaffār, and there was a man who molested him and wanted to lead him to its Sultan, and he was a tyrant who took the merchants’ wealth when they came to his country, and when he heard of his coming and he did not see him, he send out his aide with the order not to encroach on him and he entrusted him with the order to sail the ship to Mecca. And with this he summoned the one who had troubled him and said to him: May God not grant peace to the one who is far away, and his son was travelling. When morning came the news reached him of the drowning of his son. And so it happened that he took complete trust in it.
And among them that he, may God make his earth light, was discredited by a man to the tyrannical Ottoman governor of Medina, for he said: Truly, this Sayyid came from the Niẓāmshāhīs with an enormous amount of charitable donations for the worshippers. With me is a piece of writing from Qāsim Bek of the Aʿyān of this country. So, the sultan asked my forefather, but he denied it. The governor greedily ordered the imprisonment of the slanderer, saying: Assemble the judges of the land and the notables and have [them] verify the view and examine the truth of the report. The prisoner detected the chance and [placed] the money into the bag, he fled and clang to the window of the Prophet of Allah, (Saʿs), who washed him of his crimes and freed him from his accusation, and he said: Allah and the Prophet testified to his lies and crimes.Footnote 97
The four anecdotes are set in different locations in al-Ḥasan’s life. Firstly, they place him in the various locations that he passed through when moving between Medina and Ahmadnagar, but they exclude Ahmadnagar itself. Nevertheless, there is a particular focus on Medina, where he served as mutawallī with interruptions and for some time as naqīb. The other places such as Jidda, the main port of Mecca, are significant waystations on his journeys from and to Medina. Secondly, all four anecdotes are about money; in particular, funds that al-Ḥasan delivers to Medina or that he hands out to other supplicants. Thirdly, al-Ḥasan encounters various political protagonists who try to rob him (in a licit or illicit manner) of the money—be it the tax collector, the tyrannical sultan, or the slanderer who calls on the Ottoman governor. Thirdly, al-Ḥasan remains rather passive in all four anecdotes, and the issues resolve themselves, some almost ‘miraculously’.
Building on Ohlander’s work, I argue here that al-Ḥasan’s actions needed to be framed as miracles to legitimise his handling of charitable funds and stipends for his kin. This was the culturally acceptable way for a Sayyid to handle material wealth. In the first one, he can provide the man from Khurasan with the exact amount of money that he needed. In the second one, a previous crime by the tax collector leads to the latter’s downfall. In the third and fourth, al-Ḥasan ensures the safe transit of the charitable donations destined for the ashrāf of Medina and the religious endowments through a transoceanic world of greedy sultans and slanderers. Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī presents al-Ḥasan as legally untouchable. He is protected, and so are the financial resources that he carried with him.
At the same time, Zayn al-Dīn’s anecdotes enhance al-Ḥasan’s prophetic descent through the attribution of miraculous powers. Al-Ḥasan is not only a Sayyid anymore but his prestige is increased by the charismatic faculty of a walī (holy person). The miracles depicted in the anecdotes establish his father, al-Ḥasan, as a safe pair of hands in the movement of charitable donations. Those qualities do not appear in the other parts of al-Ḥasan’s biographical entry (tarjama). In those parts of the tarjama, al-Ḥasan distinguished himself as an erudite scholar and repeatedly engaged with other learned communities in Ahmadnagar, Mecca, Medina, and Shiraz throughout his life. In contrast, the textually separated miracles are distinct from the life story. They represent al-Ḥasan as a safe vessel, whose prophetic descent combined with a saintly aura that allowed him to transfer royal patronage from Ahmadnagar for the benefit of the pious of Medina. Ultimately, including those stories as karāmāt benefited Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī’s generation of the Banū Shadqam. It backed up their claims to stand out among the Ḥusaynid ashrāf of Medina by providing the material means to enhance their social position.
Conclusion
Over the sixteenth century, the Āl Shadqam became very important, first in Medina, with ʿAlī as first political leader of their community (naqīb al-ashrāf) and custodian of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina followed by his son al-Ḥasan, and later in Ahmadnagar with al-Ḥasan as scholar-in-residence at the court of the Niẓāmshāhīs. The royal patronage that al-Ḥasan received in Ahmadnagar and his marriage into the family of the sultan also shaped his socio-economic role back home in Medina over the sixteenth century. His son Zayn al-Dīn ʿAlī employed his genealogical writings to make sure that his father’s transregional pursuits could consolidate their legitimacy as a prestigious lineage of Ḥusaynid ashrāf over the seventeenth century.
Al-Ḥasan’s life story invites us to consider the symbiotic relationship between the charismatic authority of Sayyids with the royal authority of sultans in the sixteenth century, and how this shaped both the Deccan and the Hijaz. Al-Ḥasan used his courtly affiliation at Ahmadnagar to establish a family that linked his Ḥusaynid lineage with a royal lineage of the Deccan. The marriage with Fatḥ Shāh Begum gave him access to wealth, which in turn allowed him to create enduring endowments ‘back home’ in the city of Medina, to which he returned repeatedly and where he settled his family as well. At the same time, al-Ḥasan engaged with learned communities across the Hijaz, Iran, and the Deccan. He remained an active practitioner of genealogy but also contributed to the writing of Islamic history at the Niẓāmshāhī court. Al-Ḥasan developed valuable scholarly skills which complemented the prestige of his lineage. He exemplified the networked character of scholarly pursuits and their often political implications.
Most importantly, this article emphasises that apart from scholarly pursuits and spiritual counsel Sayyids such as the Banū Shadqam also took on the role of socio-economic intermediaries. It was their Sayyid background that made them trustworthy custodians of charitable donations. They channelled those resources across the Arabian Sea for the upkeep of religious endowments and social obligations. Further research is necessary to broaden our understanding of Sayyids as socio-economic agents and political protagonists across early modern West and South Asia. This would open up a more differentiated view on socio-economic groups and their political roles at courts, in their communities, and at shrine cities.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the organisers of and audiences at conferences and workshops in Oxford (2021) and Kyoto (2026) for their useful comments and suggestions. In particular, I am grateful to Frédéric Bauden and Zacharie Mochtarie de Pierrepont for inviting me to the workshop on ‘The Ḥijāz and the making of Islamic history: cultural and social engagements in Western Medieval Arabia (6th–10th/12th–16th c.)’, 12–13 May 2023, at Liège University. This article was written during a period when I served as co-principal investigator on an AHRC-DFG funded grant entitled ‘Interreligious Communication In and Between The Latin-Christian and The Arabic-Islamic Sphere: Macro-theories and Micro-settings’ (the leading co-PIs were Theresa Jäckh and Daniel König). I also thank the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments and suggestions which helped me in revising this article. All mistakes remain mine alone.
Conflicts of interest
None.
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