The introduction to the special issue provides a framework to think about the changing conceptions of Sayyid-ness in various historical contexts in South Asia. First, we review some of the sociological and anthropological literature on caste among South Asian Muslims, to argue for a contextualised and historicised study of Muslim social stratification in Muslims’ own terms. Second, we throw light on the fact that Sayyid-ness, far from being a transhistorical fact, may be conceptualised differently in different socio-political and historical contexts. For instance, Sayyid pedigree was at times downplayed in favour of a more encompassing Ashraf identity in order to project the idea of a single Muslim community. Far from projecting an essentialising image of Sayyid-ness, by focusing on historical change, the articles in this collection de-naturalise Sayyids’ and Ashraf's social superiority as a ‘well-understood and accepted fact’. They further shift attention from the debate on ‘Muslim caste’, often marred by Hindu-centric assumptions, to focus instead on social dynamics among South Asian Muslims ‘in their own terms’. In so doing, these studies highlight the importance of the local, while pointing to possible comparisons with Muslim groups outside South Asia.

There is a long tradition of describing Sindh as peculiarly prone to Sayyid veneration. On the face of it, the biographical section of Tuhfat al-Kiram or Gift for the Noble, an eighteenth-century history and geography written in Persian in Sindh, appears to confirm this idea. In listing the notables of Thatta, Sindh's premier city, the author, Mir ʻAli Shir Qaniʻ, orders them by groups, giving priority in his hierarchical arrangement to Sayyids. However, this article examines Tuhfat al-Kiram not as a transparent description of Sindh, but rather as a normative exposition of a Sayyid-led social order. It draws attention to Qaniʻs project of reconciling individual excellence with lineage in a post-Mughal context without a discerning sovereign to uphold a meritorious order. By exploring Qaniʻs silences, particularly on Hindus and women, this article investigates the anxieties that run through this text about the threat to the old Persianate elite of Thatta. This threat spurred Qaniʻ to reimagine a social order in Sindh where claims of descent served to close off mobility in an otherwise meritocratic Persianate society. Sayyid priority in eighteenth-century Sindh was not an established fact, but a newly-fashioned claim, which remained contested and contradictory, even within Tuhfat al-Kiram.

It has generally been acknowledged that Sayyids, through their real or imagined connection to the Prophet, have represented a key trans-regional dimension of Islam. In the Punjab, the status of the Ashraf has been reinforced by their role as custodians of the Sufi shrines. In the Multan region, Sayyids and Qureshis acted frequently as pir and sajjada nashin for many Sufi dargahs. Their position, however, did not go unchallenged. The Chishti Nizami revival in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century saw the growth of an alternative religious network that competed with older families both religiously and socially. This process directly challenged the idea of inherited charisma and the established social hierarchy. Although reform movements are often considered to represent a shift towards a universal dimension of Islam, connected symbolically to Arabia and to the figure of the Prophet, the Chishti Nizami revival in Multan can be seen rather as a vernacularisation of Islamic authority. The movement favoured the social ascent of local tribes and non-Arab Ashraf families. The alliance between these groups would become a stable feature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contributed to the social status of Sayyid families being questioned.

British social surveys and census statistics defined ‘Sayyid’ as a caste identity, while often casting a sceptical eye on the authenticity of genealogical claims associated with the concept. The article examines how Muslims, especially Sayyid Ahmad Khan, participated in the formulation of the concept of Sayyid identity and status. Islamic ideology and practice have long wrestled with conflicting claims of religious equality and hierarchical status, often based on concepts of sacred lineage. From his earliest writings Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) emphasised his descent from the Prophet Muhammad on his father's side alongside his somewhat less exalted relationship with his Kashmiri grandfather. In later years he tried to balance universalistic ideals with claims to status based on supposedly ‘foreign’ ancestry, which he cited as parallel to the supposed Aryan ancestry of high-status Hindus. His British allies used his Sayyid ancestry as reinforcement of his leadership of an India-wide Muslim ‘community’ and evidence that India was not prepared to develop into a national polity based on representative government. But the Aligarh movement's claim to represent the wider Muslim population and in particular its educational project at Aligarh struggled with a more egalitarian ethos, defining students and the members of voluntary associations as ‘brothers’, and quite prepared to cross ascriptive boundaries both in public life and personal relationships.

This article reflects on the significance of genealogy for Sayyids and other Muslim elites in British North India by exploring some literary productions and political endeavours of the Aligarh movement. At the end of the nineteenth century, poems recalling the extra-Indian origins of Muslim elites became increasingly popular, as Altaf Husain Hali's Musaddas best exemplified. Translating an anxiety of seeing their power and influence reduced in the colonial world, such nostalgic discourse, intertwining representations of lineage and authority, promptly entered the political realm. The genealogy rhetoric deployed in Urdu poetry played a significant role in sustaining the claims of the leaders of the Aligarh movement as they strove to bolster a cohesive sharīf community identity and secure political leadership during the anti-Congress propaganda of 1888 as well as to obtain advantages from British officials according to their so-called political importance. In this context, this article emphasises that in Aligarh's nostalgic poetry, the greatest political weight was put on belonging to the ashrāf category rather than to the Sayyids, who only occasionally feature in the sources.

While Islamic scriptures like the Quran and Hadith are often quoted to negate the existence of social stratification among Muslims, authors of genealogical texts rely on the very same scriptures to foreground and legitimise discussions on descent and lineage. In the South Asian context, several conceptions of hierarchy as practised by Muslims in north India evolved over the course of colonial rule and were deployed interchangeably by Sayyids. These were based on notions of race, ethnicity, respectability and nobility, and occupational distinctions as well as narratives that referred to the history of early Islam. This article contributes to the study of social stratification among South Asian Muslims by exploring the evolution of Urdu tarikh (historical texts) produced by Sayyid men in the qasbah of Amroha in the Rohilkhand region of the United Provinces during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sayyid authors narrated the past through the medium of nasab (genealogy). While their texts place emphasis on lineage and descent to legitimise a superior social status for Sayyids, they also shed light on the changing social and material context of the local qasbah politics with the discourse on genealogy evolving into a form that engaged with social contestations.

This article draws on a wide range of Shiʽi periodicals and monographs from the 1950s until the present day to investigate debates on the status of Sayyids in Pakistan. I argue that the discussion by reformist and traditionalist Shiʽi scholars (ʽulama) and popular preachers has remained remarkably stable over this time period. Both ‘camps’ have avoided talking about any theological or miracle-working role of the Prophet's kin. This phenomenon is remarkable, given the fact that Sayyids share their pedigree with the Shiʽi Imams, who are credited with superhuman qualities. Instead, Shiʽi reformists and traditionalists have discussed Sayyids predominantly as a specific legal category. They are merely entitled to a distinct treatment as far as their claims to charity, patterns of marriage, and deference in daily life is concerned. I hold that this reductionist and largely legalising reading of Sayyids has to do with the intense competition over religious authority in post-Partition Pakistan. For both traditionalist and reformist Shiʽi authors, ʽulama, and preachers, there was no room to acknowledge Sayyids as potential further competitors in their efforts to convince the Shiʽi public about the proper ‘orthodoxy’ of their specific views.

This article examines the relations between trade, faith, and textual traditions in early modern Indian Ocean region and the birth of Arabi-Malayalam, a new system of writing which has facilitated the growth of a vernacular Islamic textual tradition in Malabar since the seventeenth century. As a transliterated scriptorial-literary tradition, Arabi-Malayalam emerged out of the polyglossic lingual sphere of the Malabar Coast, and remains as one of the important legacies of social and religious interactions in precolonial south Asia. The first part of this article examines the social, epistemic and normative reasons that led to the scriptorial birth of Arabi-Malayalam, moving beyond a handful of Malayalam writings that locate its origin in the social and economic necessities of Arab traders in the early centuries of Islam. The second part looks at the complex relationship between Muslim scribes and their vernacular audience in the aftermath of Portuguese violence and destruction of Calicut—one of the largest Indian Ocean ports before the sixteenth century. This part focuses on Qadi Muhammed bin Abdul Aziz and his Muhiyuddinmala, the first identifiable text in Arabi-Malayalam, examining how the Muhiyuddinmala represents a transition from classical Arabic theological episteme to the vernacular-popular poetic discourse which changed the pietistic behaviour of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar.

Rawḍat al-murīdīn of Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥusayn Ibn Yazdānyār al-Hamadhānī is a distinguished Sufi manual of the early fifth/eleventh century. Though an early Sufi textbook, this work is relatively unknown when compared with other Sufi textbooks written prior to and after it. This article draws on Williams’ edition from 1957 in addition to two manuscripts held in Princeton and Istanbul, in order to examine this early Sufi work and to appraise its contribution to the development of early Sufism. Rawḍat al-murīdīn presents us a unique formula of taṣawwuf that differs essentially from the famous manuals of the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries which concerned themselves with Sufi rules of conduct. There is strong evidence to suggest that its author, if not formally a member of Karrāmiyya, was a pro-Karrāmī writer who operated in a historical context where the renunciatory-Karrāmī mode of piety was widely condemned. Unlike the early character of Abū Bakr Ibn Yazdānyār, who lived in the fourth/tenth century and was generally known as an opponent of ecstatic Sufism, the author of Rawḍa seeks to present a comprehensive umbrella of Sufism under which the teachings of al-Junayd co-exist side by side with those of al-Ḥallāj.

One of the longest Hismaic inscriptions yet discovered comes from the region of Madaba, Jordan. It was published first in an Arabic article by Khraysheh in 2000 and was re-edited by Graf and Zwettler four years later. Both editions remark on the striking similarity in language and style between this text and Classical Arabic. Indeed, this inscription and a closely related text from Uraynibah West, also published by Graf and Zwettler in the same article, are among the best witnesses to the Arabic of this region during the Nabataean period. This article will offer a few remarks on the language of the Hismaic inscriptions and then provide a new reading of line 4 of the Madaba inscription, which had previously evaded satisfactory interpretation.