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The “Lamp of Hind” in Cairo: 
How an Indian Jurist Became the Chief Hanafi Judge 
of the Mamluk Sultanate in the Fourteenth Century

Sohaib baig

University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract
This article explores scholarly exchange across the Arabian Sea in the fourteenth century with respect to 
Islamic law. It connects legal contexts from the Delhi Sultanate to the Cairo Sultanate and shows how the Sunni 
legal schools (madhhabs) and the recently emergent system of legal pluralism shaped transoceanic exchanges 
of scholarship. In particular, this article focuses on the career of Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī (d. 773/1372), an Indian 
scholar who traveled from Delhi via Mecca to Cairo, and then built an accomplished career that culminated 
with him as chief Hanafi judge in Cairo. It examines his relationships with Turkish mamluks and sultans as 
well as his prolific writings to uncover their shared investment in the Hanafi madhhab and the significance 
of ongoing transregional debates between the Hanafi and Shafiʿi legal schools. In so doing, this article sheds 
light on a missing history of how Mamluk initiatives towards expanding legal pluralism between the madhhabs 
created new opportunities across the Indian Ocean for Hanafi jurists like Sirāj al-Dīn. Hence, it widens our 
understanding of premodern Islamic intellectual exchange between South Asia and the Middle East, showing 
how South Asia also served as an exporter of Islamic scholarship and legal expertise rather than as its peripheral 
recipient.

Of the four Sunni legal schools (madhhabs), the Shafiʿi school is considered to have been the 
most predominant in the Indian Ocean since medieval times. Given that the Shafiʿi school 
spread across much of the Indian Ocean littoral, from East Africa and South India to the 
Indonesian archipelago, this idea is not particularly controversial or contested.1 Yet, many 
littoral societies did in fact have a strong presence of the Hanafi school, such as in Sindh, 
Gujarat, and even in medieval Yemen (particularly the Tihamah). Furthermore, the Indian 
Ocean was integrated within trade and scholarly networks extending further inland, such 
as in South Asia and Afghanistan where the Hanafi school was predominant. The role of the 
non-Shafiʿi Sunni legal schools within the Indian Ocean, and their interactions therein with 
the Shafiʿi school, has not yet been seriously explored.2

1.  Andre Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 1, Early Medieval India and the Expansion 
of Islam, 7th–11th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 69; Mahmood Kooria, Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts 
across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

2.  See Sohaib Baig, “Indian Hanafis in an Ocean of Hadith: Islamic Legal Authority between South Asia and 

© 2025 Sohaib Baig. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, 
which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long 
as attribution is given to the original authors and source.



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Consider, very briefly, the portrait that emerges from the voluminous biographical 
dictionary of the famous Mamluk hadith scholar and historian Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad 
al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497).3 Al-Sakhāwī lists about sixty-five scholars and traders who 
traveled from Mamluk domains, mainly the Hijaz and Egypt, to “Hind.” He describes most of 
the scholars as Shafiʿi (at least twenty-four), but he also lists several from the Maliki, Hanafi, 
and even Hanbali schools. In the reverse direction, he names several dozen scholars from 
South Asia (with the “al-Hindī” affiliation) who traveled to or were active in the Hijaz, Cairo, 
and other parts of the Mamluk Sultanate. They, in contrast, were overwhelmingly Hanafi. 
Only two such individuals are explicitly identified as Shafiʿi (in addition to one Maliki).4 
Hence, the majority of the Indians in his biographical dictionary who traveled to or settled 
in the Mamluk Sultanate were Hanafis; whereas most of the scholars who traveled from the 
Mamluk lands to South Asia were Shafiʿis.

Whereas contemporary scholarship has recognized the Shafiʿi jurists in al-Sakhāwī’s 
dictionary who would find employment as judges and imams along the Indian Ocean 
littoral, it has not yet reckoned with the Indian Hanafis who found employment in the 
Mamluk Sultanate as scholars and legal officials. This article analyzes the career of one such 
prominent Indian Hanafi scholar, Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī (also, Sirāj-i Hindī) (d. 773/1372), who 
studied in Delhi before making his way to Mecca, then Cairo, and eventually achieved the 
powerful position as chief Hanafi judge in Cairo. Besides serving as a judge, Sirāj al-Dīn also 
composed many texts and commentaries on Hanafi legal doctrine. In examining his career 
and scholarship, the article reveals the transregional history of the Sunni madhhab-system 
and its role in enabling such legal connection and exchange from medieval Delhi to Cairo 
(and beyond).

The significance of such legal and juristic connections between South Asia and the 
Middle East from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries has not yet been studied within 
the historiographies of the Hanafi madhhab, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mamluk Sultanate 
of Cairo, or the Indian Ocean. Historians of the Delhi Sultanate have discussed the role of 
the Delhi political elite in patronizing scholars, the nature of sultan-jurist relationships, 
as well as the commissioning of major legal compilations such as the fourteenth-century 
Fatāwā-yi Tātārkhāniyya.5 Yet, there is not much exploration of how Hanafi jurists in the 
Delhi Sultanate negotiated and built upon Islamic legal traditions within a transregional 
context beyond Central Asia.6

the Arabian Peninsula, 16th–20th Centuries” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2020).
3.  Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tāsiʿ (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1992).
4.  For the Maliki, see ibid., 3:257, “Saʿīd al-Hindī al-Mālikī.” For the Shafiʿis, see ibid., 6:36, 10:140.
5.  Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1999); Sunil Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192–1286 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), 
192–238; Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Salāṭīn-i Dihlī ke maz̲habī rujḥānāt (Delhi: Idārah-yi Adabiyāt-i Dillī, 1981).

6.  For some relevant works, see Zafarul Islam, Fatawa Literature of the Sultanate Period (New Delhi: Kanishka 
Publishers, 2005); Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, “The Impact of Ibn Taimiyya on South Asia,” Journal of Islamic Studies 
1 (1990): 120–49; Muhammad Qamaruddin, Crime and Punishment in the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) (Delhi: 
Adam Publishers and Distributors, 1992).



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Similarly, the activities of Indian scholars in the Mamluk Sultanate has not drawn 
much attention in the historiography on the Mamluk Sultanate, although scholarship on 
Indian-Mamluk diplomatic and commercial connections has been growing.7 Historians have 
recognized other transregional scholarly connections, such as the influx of Maliki jurists 
from West Africa and Andalusia to Mamluk Cairo, fueled by the decline of Muslim rule in 
Andalusia and the Sunnification of Egypt under the Mamluk Sultanate.8 Likewise, the influx 
of overland Anatolian and Central Asian Hanafis to Mamluk (and Ayyubid) lands, on the 
heels of the Mongol invasions, is also relatively well-known.9 The lack of attention towards 
Indian scholars may reflect the relatively lower number of Indian scholarly migrants to 
Cairo.10 It also likely reflects a perception of South Asia as being primarily the recipient 
of Islamic scholarship, at the periphery of the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East.11 For 
instance, while the Maghribi traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s (d. 770/1368 or 779/1377) stints as a 
judge in Delhi and the Maldives are well-known, there is virtually no attention given to Sirāj 
al-Dīn’s appointment as chief Hanafi judge in Cairo in the same century.12

By exploring the juristic and scholarly connections between the Delhi and Cairo 
Sultanates, this article makes a broader intervention regarding the histories of Islamic 
transregional intellectual exchange. It foregrounds the madhhab-system (and the idea of 
four-madhhab pluralism, whereby four madhhabs were recognized as the canonical schools 
of Sunni law) as a pillar of legal connectivity, an overlapping legal framework recognized 
by diverse historical Muslim societies. The madhhab-system’s significance for transregional 
connections is often lost in the attention to other forms of connection in Islamic 
scholarship such as hadith and Sufi networks as well as the politics of courtly patronage. 

7.  See, for instance, Mustafa Banister’s article in this issue. See also Stephan Conermann and Anna Kollatz, 
“Some Remarks on the Diplomatic Relations between Cairo, Delhi/Dawlatābād, and Aḥmadābād during the 
Eighth/Fourteenth and Ninth/Fifteenth Centuries,” in Mamluk Cairo: A Crossroads for Embassies: Studies on 
Diplomacy and Diplomatics, ed. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche, 621–37 (Leiden: Brill, 2019); John L. 
Meloy, “‘Aggression in the Best of Lands’: Mecca in Egyptian-Indian Diplomacy in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century,” 
in ibid., 604–20; Meia Walravens, “Arabic as a Language of the South Asian Chancery: Bahmani Communications 
to the Mamluk Sultanate,” Arabica 67 (2020): 409–35. Though not on Mamluk/Cairene-Indian connections, the 
following chapter on Rasulid Yemen and India in the thirteenth century is also relevant: Elizabeth Lambourn, 
“India from Aden: Khuṭba and Muslim Urban Networks in Late Thirteenth-Century India,” in Secondary Cities 
and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400–1800, ed. Kenneth R. Hall, 55–97 (Plymouth: Lexington 
Books, 2008). See also Carl F. Petry, “The Mamluk Sultanate from a Global Perspective,” in The Mamluk Sultanate: 
A History, 80–128 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

8.  For instance: Maribel Fierro, “Mālikī Jurists from the Maghrib and al-Andalus in Post-Fāṭimid Egypt,” 
in The Maghrib in the Mashriq: Knowledge, Travel and Identity, ed. Maribel Fierro and Mayte Penelas, 411–35 
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).

9.  See several works by Tuncay Başoğlu, including al-Fiqh fī al-ʿahdayn al-Ayyūbī wa-l-Mamlūkī: khaṣāʾiṣ 
al-taʾlīf wa-sard al-muʾallafāt (Amman: Dār al-Rāyāḥīn, 2022).

10.  Carl F. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 
Press, 1981), 77.

11.  See Mahmood Kooria, “Un agent abyssinien et deux rois indiens à la Mecque: Interactions autour du droit 
islamique au XVe siècle,” trans. Thibault Le Texier, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 74, no. 1 (2019): 75–103.

12.  Barbara D. Metcalf, “Ibn Battuta as a Qadi in the Maldives,” Islam in South Asia in Practice, ed. Barbara D. 
Metcalf, 271–78 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).



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Yet, itinerant Muslims jurists would very much draw upon the legal infrastructure of the 
societies they visited, including their foundational commitment to and support for the 
madhhabs and madhhab pluralism. An affiliation with a given madhhab, which could be 
further demonstrated through engagement with its scholarship and canonical authorities—
such as by writing legal commentaries—could hold special political and social importance 
in building a network and gaining employment or patronage. Hence, newcomers from a 
different political regime could make inroads and connections through their participation 
in the shared legal tradition of the madhhab.

This article begins with an exploration of the histories of the madhhabs, and in particular, 
the idea of four-madhhab pluralism, in the Delhi Sultanate, which was strongly Hanafi in the 
fourteenth century. It then examines Sirāj al-Dīn’s early years in Delhi and his subsequent 
journey to Mecca and Cairo, piecing together clues from each of these cities about his 
intellectual development and his opportunities as a Hanafi in their judicial systems. It 
proceeds to unpack his standout career in Cairo, exploring his steady rise in the judicial 
bureaucracy, despite occasional setbacks, to the position of chief Hanafi judge. Finally, the 
last section analyzes Sirāj al-Dīn’s writings and scholarship, showing how he addressed 
questions related to Mamluk rule and the Hanafi madhhab (in conversation with Shafiʿi 
critiques), and why this was significant in the diverse legal arena of the fourteenth-century 
sultanate.

The Four Madhhabs in Medieval Delhi

Sometime between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, a profound Sunni consensus 
emerged especially around Baghdad, Cairo, and Greater Syria that recognized the validity 
of four legal traditions: the Hanafi, Shafiʿi, Hanbali, and Maliki schools. Yet, relationships 
between madhhabs did not remain static or neutral. The creation of new chief judge 
positions for each madhhab at Cairo in 663/1265 by the Mamluk sultan Baybars (r. 1260–77), 
recognized as a watershed moment in Islamic legal history, did not end inter-madhhab 
influence, critique, or debate.13 Relations between madhhabs varied across regions, 
depending on state patronage and the legal affiliations of the local populations. As such, 
inter-madhhab relations and differences continued to matter, as intellectual debates and 
pedagogical tools regarding legal doctrine and reasoning, and as important elements of a 
scholar’s identity with potential political and social ramifications.

In fourteenth-century Delhi, the idea of the four madhhabs constituting Sunni legal 
orthodoxy was referenced even though not all of them had a strong presence there. The 
famed historian Ẓiyāʾ al-Dīn Baranī (d. 758/1357), a contemporary of Sirāj al-Dīn, would 
write about considering the opinions of “the ʿulamāʾ of the four madhhabs” in his famous 

13.  For some seminal articles on this development, see Sherman A. Jackson, “The Primacy of Domestic Politics: 
Ibn Bint al-Aʿazz and the Establishment of Four Chief Judgeships in Mamlûk Egypt,” Journal of the American 
Oriental Society 115, no. 1 (1995): 52–65; Yossef Rapoport, “Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlīd: The Four Chief 
Qāḍīs under the Mamluks,” Islamic Law and Society 10 (2003): 210–28; Joseph Escovitz, “The Establishment of 
Four Chief Judgeships in the Mamlūk Empire,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 102, no. 3 (1982): 529–31.



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work on political theory and statecraft, the Fatāwā-yi jahāndārī.14 This sentiment was also 
seen in the famous discussion he recorded between Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khiljī (r. 1296–1316) 
and his Hanafi judge regarding accepting jizya (capitation fee) from Hindu subjects. In his 
account, the judge informed the sultan of his concerns that all the madhhabs, apart from 
the Hanafis, did not view Hindus as legitimate members of the protected category of ahl-i 
kitāb (people of the Book) and as eligible to pay the jizya (and hence that they, as Hanafis, 
had adopted a minority opinion as compared to the other madhhabs).15 Later, Sultan Fīrūz 
Shāh Tughluq (r. 1351–88) was praised by a biographer in 1371 as being learned in law 
according to the “four madhhabs.”16

Despite these references to “four madhhabs,” Delhi in the fourteenth century appears 
to have been an overwhelmingly Hanafi city (in comparison to the other Sunni schools). 
Sources do occasionally mention visitors from other madhhabs, such a Maliki scholar from 
Baghdad.17 Ibn Baṭṭūṭa also mentioned several in his travelogue whom he encountered 
during his visit.18 We also know that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa was himself appointed briefly as a judge 
in 1333, due to the positive impression he had made upon Sultan Muḥammad b. Tughluq 
(r. 1324–51), even as he protested that he was a Maliki and that the local population was 
Hanafi.19 Although several Shafiʿi jurists were mentioned as being born or having lived in 
Delhi in the thirteenth century, they appear to have receded from Delhi by the fourteenth 
century.20

Relations between Hanafis and Shafiʿis did have a more colorful and contentious past. 
One particular trope, which surfaced across multiple centuries in different contexts, 
concerned the alleged disregard by Hanafi jurists for hadith literature. One of the earliest 
instances close to the South Asian context concerned the eleventh-century sultan Maḥmūd 
al-Ghaznawī (r. 998–1030), who reportedly switched from the Hanafi to Shafiʿi madhhab.21 In 

14.  Ziyāʾ al-Dīn Baranī, Fatāwā-yi jahāndārī (Rulings on Temporal Government), ed. Afsar Salīm Khān 
(Lahore: Idārah-ʾi Taḥqīqāt-i Pākistān, Dānishgāh-i Punjāb, 1972), 200.

15.  Ẓiyāʾ al-Dīn Baranī, The Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī of Ziaa al-Din Barni, ed. Saiyid Ahmad Khan (Calcutta: Asiatic 
Society of Bengal, 1862), 291; idem, Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, trans. Ishtiyaq Ahmad Zilli (New Delhi: Primus Books, 
2015), 177.

16.  S. H. Askari, Sīrat-i Fīrūz Shāhī: Translation of a Unique Manuscript (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public 
Library, 2019), 393.

17.  Muḥammad Amīr Khurd Kirmānī, Siyar al-awliyāʾ (Delhi: Maṭbaʿyi Muḥibb-i Hind, 1885), 266–67.
18.  Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-ʿIryān (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-ʿUlūm, 

1987), 2:463–69.
19.  Ibid., 523–24.
20.  See Kumar, Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 222–23. There are no Shafiʿi scholars from/in Delhi listed 

in the famous biographical dictionary Nuzhat al-khawāṭir for the fourteenth century. See also the biography of 
Muḥammad b. ʿ Abd al-Raḥīm al-Armawī (d. 715/1315), a Shafiʿi scholar born in Delhi in 644/1246 who eventually 
moved to Yemen and the Hijaz, and beyond: ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī, al-Iʿlām bi-man fī tārīkh al-Hind min 
al-aʿlām al-musammā bi-Nuzhat al-khawāṭir wa-bahjat al-masāmiʿ wa-l-nawāẓir (hereafter Nuzhat al-khawāṭir) 
(Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1999), 2:200. See also the entry for Farīd al-Dīn al-Shāfiʿī of Awadh, likely from the late 
thirteenth century, and his students in Awadh in the fourteenth century: ibid., 187.

21.  Sultan Maḥmūd’s conversion to the Shafiʿi madhhab may be better understood, as mentioned by others, 
within the context of the politics of the Karrāmiyya, a legal-theological group active in the tenth to thirteenth 



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an anecdote related by the renowned Shafiʿi scholar al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085), who himself 
cited the Shafiʿi scholar Qaffāl al-Marwazī (d. 417/1026), the learned Sultan Maḥmūd 
would invite scholars to relate and discuss hadith in his presence.22 Gradually, according 
to the anecdote, he began to notice most hadiths would support the Shafiʿi school, which 
unsettled his own convictions in the Hanafi school. He then asked the scholars of his court 
to hold a prayer demonstration according to both schools for his observation (though it 
is not mentioned how this would answer his concerns regarding hadith). Al-Marwazī first 
performed the prayer according to the Shafiʿi school with utmost purity and perfection, and 
with full attention to all the requisite etiquettes and obligations. He then performed prayer 
according to the Hanafi school in the most outrageous manner: he prayed while wearing 
tanned dog skin, with about a quarter of his clothes soiled in impurity (najāsa); he also 
made ablution with a drink made from dates (nabīdh), attracting flies and mosquitoes in the 
heat of summer; and he recited the Qurʾanic verses in Persian as opposed to Arabic, among 
other issues. In this story, Sultan Maḥmūd was enraged and declared he would have killed 
him had not Imām Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767) authorized this prayer. The Hanafis protested 
that this was not an accurate depiction of their school, so al-Marwazī gathered the books 
of the school, and the sultan had a Christian scribe read them out (presumably to remain 
impartial); the sultan, according to this account, found that the prayer did indeed accord to 
the Hanafi school, and he thus switched to the Shafiʿi school.

This story does not appear to have been recounted by historians in Delhi or Central 
Asia, such as the eleventh-century Gardīzī23 (who was present at the sultan’s court), 
al-ʿUtbī24 (also in his employment), or al-Bayhaqī25 (who discusses the sultan’s patronage 
of Hanafi and Shafiʿi notables), the thirteenth-century al-Jūzjānī26 (who does not mention 

centuries in Khurasan, which developed strong conflicts with the Shafiʿi-Ashʿari theological school (and the 
Hanafi school as well). Sultan Maḥmūd was initially supportive of the Karrāmiyya before turning away from 
them. The Karrāmiyya would be severely weakened in 595/1199, when the Ghurid sultans abruptly converted 
from the Karrāmiyya to the Hanafi and Shafiʿi madhhabs. See Muhammad Khalid Masud, “Religion and State 
in Late Mughal India: The Official Status of the Fatawa Alamgiri,” LUMS Law Journal 3, no. 1 (2016): 32–50, at 
34–36; Margaret Malamud, “The Politics of Heresy in Medieval Khurasan: The Karramiyya in Nishapur,” Iranian 
Studies 27, no. 1–4 (1994): 37–51; Finbarr Barry Flood, “Ghurid Monuments and Muslim Identities: Epigraphy 
and Exegesis in Twelfth-Century Afghanistan,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 42, no. 3 (2005): 
263–94.

22.  ʿAbd al-Malik al-Juwaynī, Mughīth al-khalq fī tarjīḥ qawl al-ḥaqq (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Miṣriyya, 1934), 
57–59.

23.  Abū Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Ḥayy b. Daḥḥāk Gardīzī, Tārīkh-i Gardīzī, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī (Tehran: Dunyā-yi 
Kitāb, 1984), 386–419.

24.  Al-ʿUtbī did mention, however, that Sultan Maḥmūd’s brother Abū al-Muẓaffar Naṣr was a strong 
supporter of the Hanafis. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-ʿUtbī, al-Yamīnī fī sharḥ akhbār al-sulṭān yamīn 
al-dawla wa-amīn al-milla Maḥmūd al-Ghaznawī, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Thāmirī (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿa li-l-
Ṭibāʿa wa-l-Nashr, 2004), 435.

25.  See Bosworth’s discussion on this topic, drawing from al-Bayhaqī and other sources: C. E. Bosworth, 
The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern India, 994–1040 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal 
Publishers, 1992), 174–79.

26.  Minhāj al-Dīn ʿUthmān al-Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, ed. Captain William Nassau Lees, Mawlawī Khādim 
Ḥusayn, and Mawlawī ʿAbd al-Ḥayy (Calcutta: College Press, 1864), 8–11.



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Sultan Maḥmūd’s legal affiliation), or the fourteenth-century Baranī (who describes the 
sultan as a Shafiʿi).27 However, it did have a long afterlife in the Mamluk and even the 
Ottoman context. It was approvingly quoted and referenced by many Shafiʿi historians after 
al-Juwaynī, including Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282), al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348), and al-Subkī (d. 
771/1370) (though it is not mentioned by the twelfth-century Ibn al-Jawzī, d. 597/1201).28 
The fifteenth-century Cairo-based Hanafi historian al-Taghrībirdī (d. 874/1470) rejected 
this story, arguing that the sultan was well-learned in jurisprudence and had no need for 
an explanation about such basic differences between the madhhabs that were well-known 
to even the most junior of jurists and students.29 In the late sixteenth century, the Mecca-
based Afghan Hanafi Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī (d. 1014/1606) would write a detailed legal response 
to the issues raised in this story.30 Even as late as the twentieth century, the Ottoman Hanafi 
scholar Zāhid al-Kawtharī (d. 1952) would write another response to the legal claims in the 
story.31

Given Hanafi dominance in Delhi, it is not surprising that this anecdote does not appear 
to have resurfaced in the Delhi sources. Yet, the trope of the low regard by Hanafi jurists 
for hadith—which, in the anecdote, had triggered Sultan Maḥmūd’s anxieties and eventual 
conversion to the Shafiʿi madhhab—would reappear in other instances. One example is 
the famous debate about samāʿ (Sufi auditions) in Delhi, which occurred when Sirāj al-Dīn 
was likely still around in the city.32 A group of judges petitioned the sultan Ghiyāth al-Dīn 
Tughluq (r. 1320–25) to prohibit the Sufi master Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ (d. 725/1325) from 
engaging in this practice, arguing, among other things, that it was not permitted by Abū 
Ḥanīfa. In response to their pressure, the sultan held lengthy debates at his court between 
the two camps. At the debates, Niẓām al-Dīn was reported to have been deeply disappointed 
and perplexed by the opposing camp’s refusal to even listen to hadith traditions in favor 
of samāʿ. Instead, driven by their jealousy towards Niẓām al-Dīn, they prioritized their 
jurisprudence over the “sound” (ṣaḥīḥ) hadith and dismissed those that were cited in 
support of samāʿ as being associated with Imām al-Shāfiʿī, whom they called an “enemy of 
our scholars” (dushman-i ʿulamāʾyi-mā-ast).33

27.  Baranī, Fatāwā-yi jahāndārī, 18.
28.  Shams al-Dīn Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār 

Ṣādir, 1977), 5:180; Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿiyya al-kubrā, ed. Maḥmūd Aḥmad et al. (Cairo: Dār 
Iḥyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, n.d.), 5:316; Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ 
and Muḥammad Naʿīm (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1996), 17:486–87; Jamāl al-Dīn Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam fī 
tawārīkh al-mulūk wa-l-umam, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭāʾ and Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭāʾ (Beirut: Dār 
al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1992), 15:211–12. See also al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 1:72.

29.  Jamāl al-Dīn al-Taghrībirdī, al-Nujūm al-zāhira fī mulūk Miṣr wa-l-Qāhira (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 
1969), 4:273.

30.  Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī, Tashyīʿ al-fuqahāʾ al-Ḥanafiyya bi-l-tashnīʿ ʿalā sufahāʾ al-Shāfiʿiyya, Maktabat Makka 
al-Mukarrama, MS 109/Fiqh Ḥanafī.

31.  Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī, Iḥqāq al-ḥaqq bi-ibṭāl fī Mughīth al-khalq (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Azhariyya 
li-l-Turāth, n.d.), 58–64.

32.  Kashshaf Ghani, Sufi Rituals and Practices: Experiences from South Asia, 1200–1450 (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2023), 87–115.

33.  Kirmānī, Siyar al-awliyāʾ, 531.



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Although enveloped in many idiosyncrasies, including a perceived personal jealousy 
towards Niẓām al-Dīn, this account contained the familiar trope of how outrageously far 
Hanafi jurists could go in their dismissal of sound hadith. Yet, there was a slight variation 
here. The pro-samāʿ camp was not actually Shafiʿi but, for official purposes, Hanafi—which 
is why the jurists had specifically invoked Abū Ḥanīfa’s opinion against samāʿ, arguing 
that “in our city, acting in accordance with legal tradition is prioritized (muqaddam) over 
hadith.”34 In response, the pro-samāʿ camp refused to be bound to exclusive conformity 
(taqlīd) to the Hanafi madhhab and argued for drawing upon sound hadith outside their 
madhhab. This was propounded at length by Niẓām al-Dīn’s senior disciple Fakhr al-Dīn 
Zarrādī (d. 748/1347–48), who also participated in the courtly debates. In a treatise on 
samāʿ, Fakhr al-Dīn argued that following one fixed madhhab (muʿayyan) led to things like 
narrowness and rigidity (Ar. taḍyīq, Pers. tangī).35 Instead, Sufis had no fixed loyalties to 
madhhabs and practiced law on the direct basis of revelation. Fakhr al-Dīn hence devoted 
separate chapters discussing proofs from Qurʾanic verses, hadith reports, and the practices 
of early Sufis and Islamic figures—all of which, he argued, supported the permissibility of 
samāʿ (or its status as mubāḥ within certain parameters).

Fakhr al-Dīn’s critique against exclusive conformity to the madhhabs is an important 
measure of how deeply the madhhabs—and jurists associated with them—had come to 
direct legal practice in this period. Some have noticed a similarity with the famous critiques 
against taqlīd produced by the contemporaneous Damascene scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 
728/1327), who also wrote against exclusively following one madhhab (though he was 
firmly opposed to samāʿ).36 Another opinion instead places Fakhr al-Dīn in the tradition of 
the Sufi master Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) and in contrast views his Hanafi opponents as being 
influenced by Ibn Taymiyya due to their common criticism of samāʿ.37 In all, it reflected a 
self-declared Sufi independence from the madhhabs that would be articulated by several 
contemporaneous Sufis in neighboring regions and would continue to find expression in 
the following centuries.38

By the time of Sirāj al-Dīn, then, the Hanafi madhhab was unmistakably dominant in the 
capital of Delhi, enough to elicit a Sufi reaction against exclusive conformity to the madhhab. 
Alongside Hanafi dominance, there was a general recognition of Sunni legal pluralism, 
or the idea that four madhhabs constituted the authoritative Sunni legal tradition, and 
sources discussed, to a limited extent, the scholars from other legal schools such as the 
Maliki school who visited Delhi from abroad. Yet, there was likely a veritable decline in the 
local Shafiʿi juristic presence in Delhi from the previous century. Hints of the earlier, more 

34.  Ibid.
35.  Fakhr al-Dīn Zarrādī, Risālat uṣūl al-samāʿ ʿArabī (Delhi: Maṭbaʿyi Muḥibb-i Hind, 1889), 11.
36.  See Nizami’s discussion of this, as well as his reference to Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s views in “Impact of Ibn 

Taimiyya on South Asia,” 125.
37.  Ghani, Sufi Rituals and Practices, 85–86.
38.  See Muzaffar Alam’s discussion of how a seventeenth-century Chishti scholar drew upon fourteenth-

century Sufis ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla Simnānī (d. 736/1336) and Sharaf al-Dīn Manerī (d. 782/1381), among others, to 
reject being affiliated with a madhhab: Muzaffar Alam, “The Debate Within: A Sufi Critique of Religious Law, 
Tasawwuf and Politics in Mughal India,” South Asian History and Culture 2, no. 2 (2011): 138–59.



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intense periods of Hanafi-Shafiʿi factionalism in Central Asia and Khurasan also erupted 
in moments of courtly debate, as in the comments about Imām al-Shāfiʿī constituting an 
enemy to the Hanafis. The trope concerning Hanafi juristic prioritization—or perceived lack 
thereof—of hadith was also found here, though to a lesser degree than in Mamluk Cairo, 
where the Shafiʿis had a much stronger and longer presence and transmitted stories about 
Sultan Maḥmūd’s conversion to the Shafiʿi madhhab. Sirāj al-Dīn would confront all of these 
differences over the course of his career from Delhi to Cairo.

Sirāj al-Dīn in Delhi: Teachers and Affiliations

Born in 704/1304–5, Sirāj al-Dīn ʿUmar b. Isḥāq was a man who would be known by 
several affiliations (nisbas).39 In his own writings, he appears to have mostly used the 
nisba “al-Ḥanafī” (identifying with the Hanafi school) and “al-Shiblī,” and less frequently, 
“al-Ghaznawī” or “al-Hindī” (identifying himself from Ghazni or Hind, respectively).40 Yet, 
the famous Mamluk historian Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī (d. 749/1349), who met and quoted 
his conversations with Sirāj al-Dīn extensively (most likely before the latter wrote his 
books), used the affiliation “al-ʿAwaḍī,” stating explicitly that Sirāj al-Dīn was from Awadh.41 
Furthermore, a manuscript copy of one of Sirāj al-Dīn’s works, which was produced from his 
own personal copy, described him in the title page as “al-Dawlatābādī” (from Dawlatabad).42 
A contemporary in Damascus, Ibn Rāfiʿ al-Sallāmī (d. 774/1372), described him only as 
“al-Hindī.”43 Nonetheless, Mamluk scholars in the next century, such as Walī al-Dīn b. 
al-ʿIrāqī (d. 826/1422), Nasīm al-Dīn al-Murshidī (d. 833/1430), Taqī al-Dīn al-Maqrīzī (d. 
845/1442), Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449), Qāsim b. Quṭlūbughā (d. 879/1474), and 
al-Sakhāwī, all began to use the nisbas “al-Hindī” and “al-Ghaznawī” to refer to him.44 
This latter affiliation completely replaced the earlier reference to Awadh mentioned by 
al-ʿUmarī.

39.  For a comprehensive biography, see Ṣalāḥ Abū al-Ḥājj, “Tarjamat al-Sirāj al-Hindī,” in Sirāj al-Dīn 
al-Hindī, al-Ghurra al-munīfa fī taḥqīq madhhab Abī Ḥanīfa, ed. Ṣalāḥ Abū al-Ḥājj, 257–89 (Amman: Dār al-Fārūq, 
2019); Sayyid Riyāsat ʿAlī Nadwī, “Sirāj-i Hindī: Hindustān kā aik gumnām mashhūr ʿālim jis nay ʿālam-i Islām 
mein nām paida kyā,” Māhnāma-yi Nadīm (June–October 1939): 370–87. I am most grateful to Saif ul Hadi for 
providing me access to this latter article.

40.  This is in terms of manuscript evidence: most manuscripts of his works, including those copied during 
his lifetime, include “al-Shiblī” in the preface where he introduces his name; only a few contain “al-Hindī” or 
“al-Ghaznawī.”

41.  Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī, Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār, ed. Kāmil Salmān (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub 
al-ʿIlmiyya, 2010), 3:38.

42.  It is not clear who may have added this affiliation to the manuscript and when. Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, 
Sharḥ al-Mughnī, Berlin State Library, MS Landberg 55, fol. 1.

43.  Muḥammad b. Rāfiʿ al-Sallāmī, Wafayāt (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1982), 2:389.
44.  Walī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿIrāqī, al-Dhayl ʿalā al-ʿIbar fī khabar man ʿabar, ed. Ṣāliḥ Mahdī ʿAbbās (Beirut: 

Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1989), 2:336–38; Nasīm al-Dīn al-Murshidī, Tadhyīl al-dhayl, ed. Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Sattār 
(Cairo: Dār al-Dhakhāʾir Iḥyāʾ li-Turāth al-Aʾimma, 2019), 295; Taqī al-Dīn al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk li-maʿrifat 
duwal al-mulūk, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭāʾ (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 4:348; Ibn Ḥajar 
al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Durar al-kāmina fī aʿyān al-miʾāt al-thāmina, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Muʿīd Khān (Hyderabad: 
Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniya, 1972), 4:182; Qāsim Ibn Quṭlūbughā, Tāj al-tarājim, ed. Muḥammad Khayr 
Ramaḍān Yūsuf (Damascus: Dār al-Qalam, 1992), 223.



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Whether from Ghazni, Dawlatabad, or Awadh (or perhaps having connections to all three, 
which is quite possible), it is clear that Sirāj al-Dīn was given in Cairo an Indian identity 
during his lifetime.45 This not only reflected an ethnic identity but also his substantial 
training at the hands of scholars in Delhi. Sirāj al-Dīn was recognized as a scholar in his 
own right upon his arrival to Cairo, with his teachers in Delhi named as part of his scholarly 
pedigree. The Cairene scholar ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Qurashī (d. 775/1373), who referred to Sirāj 
al-Dīn as “our friend and our teacher,” listed several of Sirāj al-Dīn’s teachers, including 
Wajīh al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Wajīh al-Dīn al-Pāʾilī (who may been the same person), Sirāj al-Dīn 
al-Thaqafī, Shams al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb, Rukn al-Dīn al-Badāyūnī, and Fakhr al-Dīn Mubārak b. 
al-Ḥasan.46

Details about these teachers are sparse and conflicting, and the Mamluk sources all 
essentially restate information provided by al-Qurashī. Al-Qurashī described most 
as the students of a mysterious Abū al-Qāsim al-Tanūkhī, who also appears as Sharaf 
al-Dīn al-Tanūkhī and al-Naṣūḥī. This figure is described as being the student of Ḥamīd 
al-Dīn al-Ḍarīr (d. 666–67/1267–68), a Bukharan scholar who wrote several glosses and 
commentaries on Hanafi texts. Al-Ḍarīr was in turn the student of Shams al-Aʾimma 
al-Kardārī (d. 642/1244), another famous Bukharan scholar who was the direct student of 
the renowned Imām Burhān al-Din al-Marghīnānī (d. 593/1197), author of the Hanafi law 
compendium al-Hidāya.47

This genealogy established Sirāj al-Dīn’s strong link to Transoxanian Hanafi scholarship. 
As a Hanafi scholar in Cairo, this would mark an important element of his scholarly 
pedigree. Genealogies from al-Marghīnānī were quite renowned and extended through 
to other contemporaneous scholars to Mamluk Cairo, such as Akmal al-Dīn al-Bābartī (d. 
786/1384), another migrant Hanafi scholar (likely from Anatolia) who listed out his own 
chain to al-Marghīnānī in his commentary on the Hidāya.48 The Hidāya was perhaps the 

45.  This also suggests that Cairene scholars in the fourteenth century had greater awareness of Indian cities 
than previously suggested. Christopher Bahl has observed a trend in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century 
Mamluk biographical dictionaries that demonstrates greater specificity regarding Indian nisbas due to growing 
connections with Indian cities. The change in nisba from Awadh or Dawlatabad (in the fourteenth century) to 
Ghazni (in the fifteenth century) does not match that pattern. In particular, al-ʿUmarī’s usage of “al-ʿAwaḍī” 
points to a specificity beyond “al-Hindī” in the fourteenth century well before Sirāj al-Dīn established himself as 
an author and a judge—and it reflects al-ʿUmarī’s careful attention to listing individual provinces of South Asia 
elsewhere in his chronicle. Christopher D. Bahl, “Eunuch and Scholar—Two Ways To Be ‘Indian’: Socio-Cultural 
Significances of the Category ‘al-Hindī ’ in the Late Mamlūk Period,” in Islamische Selbstbilder: Festschrift für 
Susanne Enderwitz, ed. Sarah Kiyanrad, Rebecca Sauer, and Jan Scholz, 25–37 (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University 
Publishing, 2020). 

46.  On Wajīh al-Dīn al-Pāʾilī, see ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Qurashī, al-Jawāhir al-muḍiyya fī ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanafiyya 
(Karachi: Mīr Kutubkhāna, 2010), 2:286; on Wajīh al-Dīn al-Rāzī, ibid., 309; Mubārak b. al-Ḥasan, ibid., 151; Rukn 
al-Dīn, ibid., 288; and the rest, ibid., 308. On both “Wajīh al-Dīn”s being the same person, see the arguments 
presented by Nadwī, “Sirāj-i Hindī,” 374. The twentieth-century biographical dictionary Nuzhat al-khawāṭir 
assigns them separate entries, treating them as separate individuals: al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 2:217.

47.  Al-Qurashī, al-Jawāhir al-muḍiyya, 2:82.
48.  Akmal al-Dīn al-Bābartī, al-ʿInāya sharḥ al-Hidāya, ed. ʿAmr b. Maḥrūs (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 

2007), 1:9.



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most prolifically glossed and commented upon Hanafi text in this period, including by other 
chief Hanafi judges in the Mamluk Sultanate.49 Sirāj al-Dīn himself would go on to write a 
commentary on this text.

Of these named teachers, we can only find a few with some certainty in the Delhi sources. 
Wajīh al-Dīn al-Pāʾilī was a senior disciple of Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ and appears within the 
Sufi texts Fawāʾid al-fuʾād of Amīr Ḥasan Sizjī (d. 738/1337) and the Siyar al-awliyāʾ of Amīr 
Khurd Kirmānī (d. 770/1368–69).50 In addition, he was also known for his mastery of law and 
theory.51 Wajīh al-Dīn al-Rāzī appears within Baranī’s list of forty-six scholars from the reign 
of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khiljī.52 Rukn al-Dīn al-Badāyūnī may have been the same Rukn al-Dīn listed 
by Baranī as belonging to a prestigious family of judges who served at times at Budaun, 
Awadh, and other places.53 Similarly, there are other individuals with the names Sirāj al-Dīn 
and Shams al-Dīn listed for this time period in Delhi that could possibly represent the same 
individuals noted as his teachers in the Mamluk sources. However, the Delhi sources do not 
describe any with the pedigree linking him back to al-Marghīnānī.

From the Delhi sources, we thus obtain the additional information that Sirāj al-Dīn’s 
teachers included a senior Chishti shaykh as well as a Hanafi judge. This was not an unusual 
pairing, but it helps contextualize Sirāj al-Dīn’s lifelong interest in Sufism as a judge who 
does not appear to have been affiliated with an established Sufi order. Sirāj al-Dīn would 
write at least two texts on Sufi topics, and the famous Mamluk historian and scholar Ibn 
Ḥajar later described him as having a strong partisanship (taʿaṣṣub) for monistic Sufism 
(ittiḥādiyya), referring to the tradition of Sufism that promoted the idea of waḥdat al-wujūd 
(unity of being).54 At the same time, his Sufi perspective did not lead to a rejection of 
exclusive conformity to the madhhab (taqlīd), as it did for the aforementioned Zarrādī: 
as we shall see below, as a mufti himself, Sirāj al-Dīn expressed his firm convictions in the 
authority of the madhhab and the importance of complying with the rulings of a Hanafi 
mufti.

Other details of Sirāj al-Dīn’s life and times in India are very sparse. From the Mamluk 
chronicler al-ʿUmarī, we learn that Sirāj al-Dīn witnessed the emergence of Tughluq power 
over Delhi, as Ghiyāth al-Dīn Tughluq and later Muḥammad b. Tughluq established their 
political dynasty. He may have also been present when Muḥammad b. Tughluq moved the 
capital from Delhi to Dawlatabad in 727/1327, if we accept the aforementioned manuscript 

49.  Tuncay Başoğlu, “Eyyûbîler ve Memlükler Dönemi Fıkıh Yazımı,” İslam Tetkikleri Dergisi 10, no. 1 (2020): 
229–332.

50.  Amīr Ḥasan ʿAlā Sijzī, Fawāʾid al-fuʾād, ed. Muḥammad Laṭīf Malik (Lahore: Nashrīyāt-i Malik Sirāj al-Dīn 
Īnd Sanz, 1966), 18; Kirmānī, Siyar al-awliyāʾ, 296–97.

51.  Al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 2:217.
52.  Baranī, Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, 353.
53.  Ibid., 347–49. See also al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 2:160; Nadwī, “Sirāj-i Hindī,” 375.
54.  Aḥmad b. Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr bi-abnāʾ al-ʿumr, ed. Ḥasan Ḥabshī (Cairo: al-Majlis al-Aʿlā 

li-l-Shuʾūn al-Islāmiyya, 1969), 1:29. For further analysis of this reference with respect to Ibn Ḥajar’s own 
politics, see Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont, “Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s Texts and Contexts: Producing a Sufi 
Environment in the Cairo Sultanate,” in New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and 
Syria, ed. Jo Van Steenbergen and Maya Termonia, 291–318 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).



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description of him as being from Dawlatabad at face value. Al-ʿUmarī mentioned that 
Sirāj al-Dīn was from the distinguished class of jurists (aʿyān al-fuqahāʾ), would attend 
the sultan’s court in Delhi, and accompany him in his travels with scholars.55 He quoted 
Sirāj al-Dīn’s descriptions of Muḥammad b. Tughluq, discussing the latter’s learning, piety, 
and generous support for scholars.56 Al-ʿUmarī also directly transmitted information from 
Sirāj al-Dīn about the Delhi Sultanate, including descriptions of a very efficient postal and 
intelligence system where couriers throughout the empire would rapidly relay news to the 
sultan (his contemporaries such as Baranī would also describe this “ulagh/ulaq” courier 
system instituted in the reigns of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khiljī and Ghiyāth al-Dīn).57 Al-ʿUmarī quoted 
Sirāj al-Dīn in enumerating and describing twenty-three provinces within the sultanate, 
the prices and qualities of slaves in Delhi’s markets, the practices of betel consumption, the 
intelligence and poetry of the people of Delhi, the general prosperity of the sultanate, and 
the veneration in the hearts of the people towards the sultan, among other topics.58 All of 
this suggests that Sirāj al-Dīn enjoyed a high status—or at least access to elite spaces—in 
Delhi. It also suggests that he left Delhi on positive terms with the sultan.

From the Mamluk sources, thus, we read that Sirāj al-Dīn studied with a group of top 
scholars in Delhi who belonged to a tradition that extended to the Transoxanian author of 
the most popular compilation of Hanafi law, namely, al-Marghīnānī’s Hidāya, which was 
studied deeply in Cairo. They also indicate that Sirāj al-Dīn himself had an elite standing 
since he frequented the sultan’s assemblies, joined his entourage of scholars in his travels, 
and had direct information about the sultan, the provinces of the sultanate, and its imperial 
system of communication. The Delhi sources reveal that one of his teachers was actually a 
senior Chishti shaykh with mastery in law and theory, and another was likely a judge, but do 
not offer much corroborating information. The overall picture, thus, is one that emphasizes 
Hanafi law as the primary focus of his education in Delhi and the foundational basis of his 
career, alongside a firm grounding in Sufism.

Sirāj al-Dīn in Mecca

From Delhi (or Dawlatabad), Sirāj al-Dīn made his way in unclear circumstances to Mecca. 
Almost certainly Sirāj al-Dīn traveled by sea, as did many of his contemporaries who took 
a maritime route from South Asia for hajj, and thereafter to different cities. For instance, 
Fakhr al-Dīn Zarrādī also left Delhi, performed hajj, went to Baghdad, but drowned in a 
shipwreck on his way back from Baghdad to India.59 Here, the role of the pilgrimage—and 
by extension the Hijaz—in serving as a conveyor for scholars between Delhi and the Indian 
Ocean and cities such as Cairo, Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Damascus should be highlighted. 

55.  Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik al-abṣār, 3:38.
56.  Ibid., 63, 68. See also idem, al-Taʿrīf bi-l-muṣṭalaḥ al-sharīf, ed. Aḥmad Ḥusayn Shams al-Dīn (Beirut: Dār 

al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1988), 72–73.
57.  Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik al-abṣār, 3:77–78; Sunil Kumar, “The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian 

Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 45–77, at 64–66.
58.  Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik al-abṣār, 3:77–84.
59.  Al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 2:185–86.



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For many travelers such as Sirāj al-Dīn and Fakhr al-Dīn, the Hijaz formed a stopping point—
even if for multiple years—within a longer journey that would take them further up north.

Details of Sirāj al-Dīn’s stay in Mecca are limited. His time here roughly overlapped with 
Muḥammad b. Tughluq’s overtures towards the Abbasid caliph in Cairo through several 
delegations, but there is no indication that Sirāj al-Dīn was involved in any diplomatic 
efforts.60 Sirāj al-Dīn would later write in one of his books about how it was the pursuit of 
knowledge from “senior scholars” that led him to travel and leave behind his family, friends, 
and homeland (ḥattā ḥubbiba ilayya muhājarat al-aṣdiqāʾ wa-l-ikhwān…wa-l-tagharrub 
ʿan al-awṭān wa-muwāẓabat al-asfār li-iqtibās al-ʿulūm min al-mashāyikh al-kibār).61 The 
reference here to “senior scholars” may indicate a greater estimation of scholarship in 
the Mamluk Sultanate, though it could also refer more generally to his adopted lifestyle of 
traveling in the pursuit of knowledge, including any travels he may have taken between 
cities in South Asia.

In Mecca, the only exchange of knowledge mentioned is that he heard the famous ʿAwārif 
al-maʿārif, the central text of the nascent Suhrawardi tariqa, from Shaykh Khiḍr, the head 
of the Ribat Sidra (one of the first endowed ribats to be established in Mecca in 311/924 
during the Abbasid period).62 Although merely a passing reference in biographical sources, 
this is a significant piece of information which reveals several things. First, the Shaykh 
Khiḍr mentioned was most likely Khiḍr b. Muḥammad al-Irbilī al-Ṣūfī (d. 730/1329–30), 
who is reported by the Meccan historian Taqī al-Dīn al-Fāsī (d. 832/1429) to have served as 
the shaykh of this same ribat.63 This would mean Sirāj al-Dīn was in Mecca before Shaykh 
Khiḍr’s death in 730/1329–30, when Sirāj al-Dīn was about twenty-five or twenty-six years 
old. This would also mean that Sirāj al-Dīn had an unaccounted seven to eight years that 
he spent in the Hijaz or elsewhere until 738/1338, when we can affirm that he would be in 
Cairo.

Second, that Sirāj al-Dīn is described as hearing this famous text here, at Mecca, rather 
than in Delhi where it was also heavily circulated and taught, merits further attention. It 
is possible, perhaps, that Sirāj al-Dīn may have “heard” portions in Delhi—maybe excerpts 
quoted here and there during the course of Sufi assemblies—but did not focus on the full 
text back in Delhi. It is also possible that his biographers mentioned this particular chain 
simply because they were more familiar with Shaykh Khiḍr in Cairo: they mentioned that 
Shaykh Khiḍr transmitted this text from Ibn al-Qasṭallānī (d. 686/1287), one of the more 
famous disciples of Shihāb al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), the famous author of 
this text. Ibn al-Qasṭallānī played a key role in teaching and transmitting this text in Cairo, 
where he was known as a successor of al-Suhrawardī.64

60.  Conermann and Kollatz, “Diplomatic Relations,” 526–27.
61.  Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, Sharḥ al-Mughnī fī al-uṣūl, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Fatih no. 13181, MS 22905, 

fol. 1.
62.  Ḥusayn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Shāfiʿī, al-Arbiṭa fī Makka al-mukarrama mundh al-bidāyāt ḥattā nihāyat al-ʿaṣr 

al-Mamlūkī, ed. ʿAbbās Ṭāshkandī (Riyadh: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2005), 29–38.
63.  Taqī al-Dīn al-Fāsī, al-ʿIqd al-thamīn fī tārīkh al-balad al-amīn, ed. Muḥammad ʿ Abd al-Qādir ʿ Aṭāʾ (Beirut: 

Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), 4:43.
64.  Erik S. Ohandler, Sufism in an Age of Transition: ʿ Umar al-Suhrawardī and the Rise of the Islamic Mystical 

Brotherhoods (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 318–20.



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Third, the reference to the Ribat Sidra is demonstrative of the role of such Hijazi ribats 
in facilitating the movement of scholars and the proliferation of Sufi teaching in the Indian 
Ocean region. As the Mamluk historian al-Maqrīzī described Cairene ribats in the fifteenth 
century, they were not only hospices for traveling or destitute pilgrims but also places 
of Sufi teaching and practice.65 The Mamluk state and society’s upkeep of these ribats 
thus unmistakably shaped urban and scholarly life not only within Mecca but within a 
transregional arena.

Although there are no further details of his sojourn in Mecca, it is likely that Sirāj al-Dīn 
used his time there to become acquainted with other scholars in the Hijaz. In fact, Sirāj 
al-Dīn would later write a treatise, most likely in Cairo, in response to a question about the 
theological validity of a couplet composed by the contemporaneous Yemeni Shafiʿi jurist 
and mystic ʿAbdullāh b. Asʿad al-Yāfiʿī (d. 768/1367), who spent extensive periods in Mecca 
and Medina and performed the pilgrimage repeatedly during his life.66 Sirāj al-Dīn praised 
him profusely as someone who combined mastery of substantive law and legal theory, 
and as an authority in the rational and transmitted sciences. Although he did not mention 
meeting him, it is evident that he was closely familiar with and deeply appreciative of his 
work. This familiarity likely would have emerged during or since his time in Mecca.

Sirāj al-Dīn may have considered remaining in Mecca and pursuing a position as a judge 
or an imam at the Grand Mosque. Yet, in the 730s/1330s, there was little room for a visiting 
Indian Hanafi scholar in the judicial bureaucracy. Up to this point, Mecca’s judges were 
primarily appointed by the (Shafiʿi) Rasulids of Yemen, consisted of Shafiʿis (and at times 
some Zaydis appointed by the Zaydi Imam in Yemen), and drew from well-established local 
families.67 The first Hanafi judge would not be appointed until 806/1403–4, after the Mamluk 
sultan al-Nāṣir Faraj b. Barqūq (r. 1399–1412) established positions for four chief judges in 
Mecca, as there already were in Cairo and other cities.68 (That judge too would be of Indian 
descent.69)

Sirāj al-Dīn’s path thus eventually led him to the Mamluk capital in Cairo, where migrant 
Hanafi scholars like him had greater opportunities to study, teach, and work. Although the 
significance of such a seemingly minor detail can easily be overlooked, it reveals the central 
role of the madhhab in shaping transregional connections. This is often overshadowed 
within Indian Ocean histories in favor of other kinds of scholarly connections, like Sufi and 
hadith networks. Yet, as this example demonstrates, the legal infrastructure of a given city, 
including its judicial bureaucracy, its law colleges, and support for legal pluralism, could 
be highly significant in shaping the demographics of its scholarly population. As we shall 

65.  Al-Maqrīzī, cited in Richard T. Mortel, “‘Ribāṭs’ in Mecca during the Medieval Period: A Descriptive Study 
Based on Literary Sources,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61, no. 1 (1998): 29–50, at 29–30.

66.  Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, Lawāʾiḥ al-anwār fī al-radd ʿ alā man ankara ʿ alā al-ʿārifīn laṭāʾif al-asrār, Süleymaniye 
Kütüphanesi, Carullah 02070-005.

67.  John L. Meloy, “The Judges of Mecca and Mamluk Hegemony,” in Trajectories of State Formation across 
Fifteenth-Century Islamic West Asia, ed. Jo Van Steenbergen, 286–92 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

68.  Ibid.
69.  See the discussion of this judge in the conclusion of this article.



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see below, as the Mamluks sought to expand legal pluralism and thereby challenge Shafiʿi 
dominance in the sultanate, they created new opportunities for Hanafi migrant scholars 
like Sirāj al-Dīn.

Sirāj al-Dīn in Cairo: An Overview of His Appointments

Sirāj al-Dīn likely arrived in Cairo sometime before 738/1338, while in his early thirties.70 
Little did he know that the next several decades of the Mamluk Sultanate, after the reign 
of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (r. 1310–41), would be viewed by modern-day historians “primarily 
as an episode of social, economic, and political chaos and upheaval,” with “failed harvests, 
famines, pestilence and plague on the one hand, and of seemingly endless conflicts in the 
cities and the countryside on the other.”71 He would witness the ascension of eleven sultans 
until his death in 773/1372. Yet, even without having roots within Mamluk networks in 
Cairo to support him, or the deep pockets of a regional merchant, he managed as a complete 
newcomer to this city to have a very successful career and reach the upper echelons of 
scholarly hierarchy as the chief Hanafi judge.

How did Sirāj al-Dīn manage to achieve such success? There has been brief reference 
to Sirāj al-Dīn’s own political ambitions and his cultivation of close relationships with the 
Mamluk elite.72 Sirāj al-Dīn certainly had ambitions, and unlike others, such as his Hanafi 
contemporary al-Bābartī, he actively sought out high positions in the judiciary.73 Yet, this 
alone does not explain his success and overlooks the significance of a Mamluk intellectual 
and social context that saw a substantial demand for his acumen and judicial expertise. As 
Escovitz noted, many Hanafi chief judges in this period had to be summoned from Damascus, 
indicating a probable lack of Egyptian Hanafis willing or qualified to serve as chief judges.74 
Furthermore, as mentioned previously, numerous Hanafi scholars migrated to Cairo at 
this time from Anatolia and Central Asia.75 Certainly, as Mamluk historians described, 
Sirāj al-Dīn’s reputation grew quickly after his arrival in Cairo. Below is an account of his 
activities and appointments in Cairo, followed by an exploration of the larger sociopolitical 
and intellectual context of his career.

70.  This was before the death of the hadith scholar Aḥmad b. Manṣūr al-Jawharī (d. 738/1338), from whom he 
is reported to have heard hadith. Nadwī, “Sirāj-i Hindī,” 376. On al-Jawharī, see al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Durar al-kāmina, 
1:377.

71.  See Jo Van Steenbergen’s critique of this description in Order out of Chaos: Patronage, Conflict and 
Mamluk Socio-Political Culture, 1341–1382 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1–2.

72.  See Joseph H. Escovitz, “Patterns of Appointment to the Chief Judgeships of Cairo during the Baḥrī 
Mamlūk Period,” Arabica 30, no. 2 (1983): 156. Escovitz incorrectly relates that Sirāj al-Dīn went on a pilgrimage 
with the sultan.

73.  Al-Bābartī was reportedly offered positions as judge several times but refused and remained content as 
the shaykh of the Shaykhūniyya lodge. Al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:298.

74.  Escovitz, “Patterns of Appointment,” 158.
75.  For an overview of some migrant scholars who wrote on legal theory, see Hasan Tuncay Başoğlu, 

“Memlükler Dönemi Hanefî Usul Literatürü,” in Memlükler Dönemi İlim Geleneği (13.-14. Yüzyıllar), ed. Halil 
İbrahim Hançabay, Muhammed Enes Buluş, and Mustafa Taş, 71–108 (Istanbul: Istanbul University Press, 2023).



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Although a scholar in his own right, Sirāj al-Dīn continued to study in Cairo specifically 
in the fields of hadith and law. One of his hadith teachers, Manṣūr al-Jawharī, was reported 
to have been supported by Sultan Manṣūr Qalawūn (r. 1279–90), since the former’s brother 
was closely associated with the sultan.76 The study of hadith had special resonance in the 
Mamluk legal context: the trope of a poor Hanafi commitment to hadith was much more 
pronounced here in Cairo, within its entrenched Shafiʿi scholarship, than it was in Delhi 
(which is why the story about Maḥmūd Ghaznawī’s conversion was related so actively here). 
The fourteenth century also marked when Mamluk Hanafis began to grapple more seriously 
with the canonization of the hadith compilations, and several Hanafi scholars in Cairo such 
as his own teacher ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Turkmānī (d. 750/1349), the Somali Jamāl al-Dīn al-Zaylaʿī 
(d. 762/1361), al-Bābartī, and others wrote large commentaries and tomes on the topic.77 
As we shall see below, Sirāj al-Dīn too would participate in this effort to defend the Hanafi 
madhhab through hadith.

Sirāj al-Dīn also attended the lessons of several chief Hanafi judges in Cairo, and these 
connections enabled his participation within the Mamluk judiciary. These included Zayn 
al-Dīn al-Bisṭāmī (d. 771/1370), who served as chief Hanafi judge from 742/1341 to 748/1347, 
and after his dismissal, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Turkmānī, who served from 748/1347 until his death. 
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn authorized Sirāj al-Dīn to officiate marriages and inheritances, which marked his 
first official legal work.78 Alongside such judicial responsibilities, Sirāj al-Dīn was evidently 
a teacher at the Madrasa al-Baydamuriyya in these early years, as described by al-ʿUmarī 
(who died in 749/1349).79 After ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn’s death in 750/1349, his successor and son, 
Jamāl al-Dīn al-Turkmānī (d. 769/1368), appointed Sirāj al-Dīn as his sole deputy judge. This 
marked a major breakthrough for Sirāj al-Dīn, since deputyship constituted one of the main 
pathways to the position of chief judge.

Later, after the death of the Hanafi military judge ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Aṭrūsh opened up this 
position, Sirāj al-Dīn requested the appointment from Mamluk amir Shaykhū (d. 758/1357). 
Shaykhū refused and instead granted him an iqṭāʿ, or a land grant typically awarded to 
Mamluk military officers.80 Yet, Sirāj al-Dīn persisted and asked another powerful Mamluk 
amir, Sayf al-Dīn Ṣarghitmish (d. 759/1358), with known pro-Hanafi and pro-Persian 
sympathies who also established a Hanafi madrasa and recruited other Hanafi migrant 
scholars.81 Ṣarghitmish granted him this position in 758/1357 (reportedly upsetting 

76.  Al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Durar al-kāmina, 1:377.
77.  Sohail Hanif, “Hadith and Fiqh in the Ottoman Period between Egyptian and Rumelian Ḥanafīs, 9th–11th 

Centuries A.H.,” in Osmanlı’da İlm-i Hadis, ed. Zekeriye Güler, Bekir Kuzudişli, and Mustafa Celil Altuntaş, 232–33 
(Istanbul: İsar Yayınları, 2020); Yusuf Acar, “Hanefî Hadis ve Sünnet Anlayışının 8./14. Asırda Hadis İlimleri 
Açısından İhyası Çabaları: İbnü’t-Türkmânî ve Öğrencileri,” in Memlükler Dönemi İlim Geleneği, 181–204.

78.  Al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:27.
79.  Al-ʿUmarī, al-Taʿrīf, 73. This madrasa was affiliated with the Mamluk Sayf al-Dīn Baydamur al-Badrī (d. 

748/1347); see al-Taghrībirdī, al-Nujūm al-zāhira, 10:180.
80.  Al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:28.
81.  Leonor Fernandes, “Mamluk Politics and Education: The Evidence from Two Fourteenth Century 

Waqfiyya,” Annales islamologiques, 23 (1987): 87–98; ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Ibrāhīm ʿAlī, “Min al-wathāʾiq al-ʿarabiyya 
fī al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā: naṣṣān jadīdān min wathīqat al-amīr Ṣarghitmish,” Majallat Kulliyyat al-Ādāb 27, no. 1–2 



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Shaykhū, who was nevertheless killed soon thereafter).82 Sirāj al-Dīn would actually be only 
the second Hanafi (after al-Aṭrūsh) to assume this role alongside the Shafiʿi army judge.83 He 
likely recognized this position from Delhi, since it existed there as well—and we can only 
speculate that this prior familiarity may have motivated him to pursue this appointment. 
As military judge, Sirāj al-Dīn would have opportunity to accompany Mamluk sultans and 
senior officials on military expeditions and build even closer relationships.

In all, it took about two decades in Cairo for Sirāj al-Dīn to become the second-most 
powerful Hanafi judge in the sultanate. His ascent did not go uncontested; as he rose through 
the ranks, he also gained an enemy. This was Quṭb al-Dīn Hirmās (d. 769/1367–68), a Shafiʿi 
imam who had a rapid ascent (and equally rapid decline) in the court of Sultan al-Nāṣir 
Ḥasan (r. 1347–51 and 1354–61), after he deceptively claimed to have seen spiritual visions 
predicting the sultan’s ascension.84 As Hirmās angled to get closer to the sultan, he sought 
to remove others in his way: after the death of Sirāj al-Dīn’s benefactor, the aforementioned 
Ṣarghitmish, Hirmās conspired in 759/1357–58 to have Sirāj al-Dīn dismissed from his 
position as deputy judge.85 Sirāj al-Dīn, it is reported, then began teaching from his home, 
where people began to crowd his lessons, but this period did not last long. When Hirmās left 
for pilgrimage the following year, in 760/1359, Sirāj al-Dīn and another ally, Ibn al-Naqqāsh 
(a Shafiʿi mufti whom Hirmās had also attacked and gotten his privileges to issue fatwas 
revoked), took the opportunity to disillusion the sultan about Hirmās.86 Soon thereafter, 
the sultan decided to exile Hirmās, demolish his house, and went so far in 761/1360 as to 
attempt to nullify an endowment established for the Ḥākim Mosque, in which Hirmās’s 
own children also stood to gain a portion.87 Sirāj al-Dīn was present at these high-level 
proceedings with muftis from other madhhabs and argued along with most of them for the 
voiding of this endowment.88

Sirāj al-Dīn then began to accompany and ride with Sultan Ḥasan, and enjoy his close 
company in public events and trips without even being chief judge, until the sultan was 
killed in 762/1361. As the victorious Mamluk amir Yalbughā al-Khaṣṣakī (d. 768/1366) flexed 

(May–December 1965): 121–58. An example of a migrant scholar Ṣarghitmish recruited to teach Hanafi law at his 
madrasa is the jurist Qiwām al-Dīn al-Fārābī al-Itqānī (d. 758/1357), who was born in Farab (Central Asia), and 
made his way to Baghdad and Damascus, serving variously as teacher and judge, and eventually moved to Cairo, 
where he died. Ahmet Akgündüz, “İTKĀNI,” TDV İslam Ansiklopedisi 23 (2001): 464–65.

82.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:231; al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:28.
83.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:80.
84.  Al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Durar al-kāmina, 6:4–5.
85.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:238; al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:27.
86.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:242.
87.  Setting an endowment was a strategy used by individual Mamluk elites to transmit wealth to their 

children and protect against state confiscation. However, Hirmās was not a Turkish Mamluk. Lisa Blaydes, 
“Mamluks, Property Rights, and Economic Development: Lessons from Medieval Egypt,” Politics & Society 47, 
no. 3 (2019): 395–424. See al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:246.

88.  Taqī al-Dīn al-Maqrīzī, al-Mawāʿiẓ wa-l-iʿtibār bi-dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār, ed. Khalīl al-Manṣūr (Beirut: 
Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), 4:60–63. For a discussion of this episode, see Leonor Fernandes, “Between Qadis 
and Muftis: To Whom Does the Mamluk Sultan Listen?,” Mamlūk Studies Review 6 (2002): 95–108, at 102–5.

https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1031?v=pdf
https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1031?v=pdf


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his power, Sirāj al-Dīn’s stature declined for the next few years, likely due to his association 
with the deposed sultan Ḥasan.89 However, he was eventually reappointed as the army 
judge in 764/1363 (just three years before Yalbughā was also killed).90 Yalbughā was another 
Mamluk amir who was known to have a predilection for supporting Hanafis.91 In fact, 
Yalbughā appointed another Indian scholar to teach Hanafi law in Mecca in 763/1362.92

After Yalbughā’s death, it is reported that Sirāj al-Dīn began to accompany and find 
support from other powerful Mamluk amirs, such as Mankālī Baghā al-Shamsī, Amīr ʿAlī 
al-Mardīnī, Arghūn Shāh, and Uljay al-Yūsufī (d. 775/1373), among others.93 He was then 
appointed as the chief Hanafi judge after the death of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Turkmānī on Shaʿbān 
21, 769 (April 11, 1368), at the expense of Jamāl al-Dīn’s son, who took Sirāj al-Dīn’s former 
position as army judge.94 In this way, Sirāj al-Dīn interrupted the Turkmānī family’s hold on 
the Hanafi chief judge position.

After having assumed this top position, Sirāj al-Dīn continued to take upon new roles and 
expand his spheres of influence. He began to teach tafsīr at the Ibn Ṭūlūn Mosque, another 
prestigious position, after the death of his teacher Zayn al-Dīn al-Bisṭāmī (a former Hanafi 
chief judge). He also appointed loyal allies to positions, drawing criticism from others.95 
When the amir Uljay gained control of the endowments and restricted the stipends of 
teachers at Ibn Ṭūlūn and other institutions, Sirāj al-Dīn famously stood up to him defiantly 
and sternly exclaiming, as described by Ibn Ḥajar:

“Your land grant (iqṭāʿ) yields you two million dinars, and yet you consider this amount 
too much for the poor jurist (al-faqīh al-miskīn)!”

Uljay responded: “I take the grant to protect the lands of the Muslims (li-ḥifẓ bilād 
al-muslimīn).”

Al-Hindī retorted: “And who taught you jihad, except the scholars?”

Uljay was then silent and left everything as it was.96

This marked a rare instance of conflict with the Mamluk elites, one that earned him 
admiration from later scholars like Ibn Ḥajar. For the most part, as detailed in the section 
below, Sirāj al-Dīn’s work would align well with their interests.

89.  Al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Durar al-kāmina, 4:182.
90.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:274.
91.  Jo Van Steenbergen, “The Amir Yalbughā al-Khāṣṣakī, the Qalāwūnid Sultanate, and the Cultural Matrix 

of Mamlūk Society: A Reassessment of Mamlūk Politics in the 1360s,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 
131, no. 3 (2011): 437–63, at 440–41.

92.  This was Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn al-Ṣāghānī al-Hindī (d. 780/1378). See al-Fāsī, al-ʿIqd al-thamīn, 2:362.
93.  Al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Durar al-kāmina, 4:182.
94.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:317.
95.  For an account of criticism, see al-Maqrīzī, al-Mawāʿiẓ, 3:139.
96.  Al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:27–28.



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Most controversially, Sirāj al-Dīn strove to gain parity with the Shafiʿi chief judge, who 
held greater power over the other chief judges and controlled endowments for orphans, 
among other privileges. During his tenure, he petitioned for and received permission in 
Jumād al-Ūlā 773 (November/December 1371) to wear the headgear reserved for Shafiʿi 
judges in official ceremonies, appoint deputies, and take over administratorship of 
endowments for Hanafi orphans (and hence draw funds away from the Shafiʿi judiciary’s 
control).97 Yet, as some chroniclers observed as a sign of Imām al-Shāfiʿī’s spiritual power, 
he developed a sickness that left him bedridden and unable to actualize these controversial 
changes until he passed away about two months later in Rajab 773 (January 1372).98

There are scant details about Sirāj al-Dīn’s family and children, and hence, about his 
ability to establish a new family dynasty to succeed him in the judgeship. We do learn 
that he had a son-in-law by the name of Jalāl al-Dīn Jār Allāh (d. 782/1380), who excelled 
in medicine, likely traced his origins to Nishapur, and at one point was the head of the 
Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ Sufi lodge in Cairo.99 Sirāj al-Dīn appointed him as his deputy judge, and 
in fact Jār Allāh became the chief Hanafi judge several years after Sirāj al-Dīn (from 
778/1376 to 782/1380) and also took his teaching position at the Manṣūriyya college.100 Most 
interestingly, he revived Sirāj al-Dīn’s efforts to achieve parity with the Shafiʿi chief judge: 
he too received permission to wear official headgear and to manage endowments for Hanafi 
orphans. This created such a backlash that the sultan had to backtrack.101

Overall, Sirāj al-Dīn’s rise to the top contained familiar factors seen in other cases, 
including, most importantly, his close connections to the previous Hanafi chief judges. 
He also had a remarkable ability to befriend Mamluk elites, one after the other, even as 
they battled each other. At one point, as chief judge, he made a passing comment that he 
had “accompanied [the Turkish Mamluk] kings (mulūkahum) for forty years, in cities and 
in travel, in private and public.”102 He somehow managed to keep himself safe from their 
crossfire, though he faced brief setbacks after the deaths of his benefactors Ṣarghitmish 
and Sultan al-Nāṣir Ḥasan. We may speculate that his early experiences in the courts of 
the Delhi Sultanate helped him in successfully navigating Mamluk politics in Cairo. Most 
fundamentally, it appears that he—along with Hanafi migrants from other regions—found 
common cause with these Mamluks due to their shared interests in the Hanafi madhhab. 
This kind of success and resilience depended upon a deeper investment and commitment by 
the parties involved. To understand this, we now turn to Sirāj al-Dīn’s scholarship.

97.  On the significance of this development, see Evan Metzger, “Orphans’ Property and the Judicial Treasury 
in Medieval Islam” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2023), 47–62.

98.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:345.
99.  Al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:229; al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:347. See also regarding his nephew Shams 

al-Dīn b. Akhī Jār Allāh (d. 791/1389): al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:389.
100.  See also Escovitz, “Patterns of Appointment,” 156–57.
101.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 5:67; al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 1:193–94. For a detailed analysis of this episode, 

see Metzger, “Orphans’ Property,” 47–62.
102.  ʿAbd al-Majīd b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Bajawī, “Risālat al-kafāʾa li-qāḍī al-quḍāt ʿUmar b. Isḥāq b. Aḥmad 

Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī al-Ḥanafī (d. 773) taḥqīqan wa-dirāsatan,” Majallat Kulliyyat al-Sharīʿa wa-l-Qānūn 28, no. 
2 (2024): 618–74, at 656.



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Sirāj al-Dīn’s Writings and Rulings

Like many of his teachers and judges in Cairo (and seemingly unlike judges in Delhi who 
have not left us many books), Sirāj al-Dīn exerted himself in producing written works. 
As described below, some comprised commentaries on well-known legal texts on theory 
and substantive law; others included works and commentaries on theology and Sufism; 
and still others consisted of treatises addressing specific questions. Given their extensive 
and voluminous nature, it is not possible here to examine them in detail. This section will 
provide a brief survey, proceeding as possible in chronological order. It will first examine 
several commentaries he appears to have written in the earlier part of his career; then two 
works dedicated to Ṣarghitmish, who appointed him as military judge; and finally, a treatise 
he wrote in his capacity as chief judge wherein he defended Mamluk interests and status in 
society. Altogether, it will examine in broad strokes how these works fit into the intellectual 
context of Mamluk scholarly society, as well as how Hanafism bolstered his relationships 
with the Mamluk elite. Furthermore, it will uncover hints of lingering influences from Delhi.

The first set of works Sirāj al-Dīn wrote were commentaries on texts of law and legal 
theory. In short, these established his standing as a learned expert of the Hanafi madhhab 
(including theory and substantive law) and addressed a certain demand in Mamluk 
society for understanding intricate points of difference within Hanafi law as well as for 
responding to criticisms made by Shafiʿi scholars. One early commentary was on al-Mughnī 
by ʿUmar al-Khabbāzī (d. 691/1291), a text on Hanafi legal theory (uṣūl), which he appears 
to have completed in 746/1345, about seven to eight years after his arrival in Cairo.103 This 
commentary gained immediate circulation; several copies of this manuscript were made 
during his own lifetime, including one in 763/1362 in Jerusalem.104 It also continued to be 
studied by students in the next century.105 In the preface of this work, he wrote about his 
motivations for leaving behind his homeland, as if introducing himself for the first time to 
a larger audience.106 He also wrote that he was requested to compose this commentary since 
he had spent time focusing on the science of uṣūl—which suggests he had already gained a 
reputation for being a specialist in this subfield of law.

While this work did not outright contribute to the project of defending Hanafi legal 
tradition against critics from other schools, a further commentary Sirāj al-Dīn wrote, 
likely in this period, was motivated by a more explicitly pro-Hanafi agenda. This was a 
commentary on another text of legal theory by Muẓaffar al-Dīn Aḥmad b. al-Sāʿātī (d. 
694/1295), a Baghdad-based Hanafi scholar, concerning legal differences within and beyond 
the Hanafi school.107 Sirāj al-Dīn wrote in his introduction how many commentaries of this 

103.  A manuscript in the Berlin State Library (itself copied a few decades later) includes this date of 
authorship in the colophon. Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, Sharḥ al-Mughnī, Berlin State Library, MS Landberg 55, fol. 
233. My sincere thanks to Thoralf Hanstein for providing images of this manuscript.

104.  Al-Hindī, Sharḥ al-Mughnī fī al-uṣūl.
105.  See, for instance, al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, 10:30.
106.  Al-Hindī, Sharḥ al-Mughnī, fol. 1.
107.  Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, Kāshif maʿānī al-badīʿ bi-bayān mushkilihi al-manīʿ, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, 

Hasan Hüsnü Paşa no. 00531, MS 270325.



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text had been written by Shafiʿis, and some contained errors in transmitting the opinions of 
the Hanafi madhhab, so a group of distinguished nobles (aʿyān al-fuḍalāʾ) requested him to 
write a commentary. This commentary was also well-received and is listed in biographical 
dictionaries as one of his main works.

Another significant commentary Sirāj al-Dīn wrote was on the Hidāya of al-Marghīnānī, 
which, as mentioned before, was one of the most common texts in this period to be glossed 
or commented upon.108 In his preface, Sirāj al-Dīn wrote about his aim to substantiate the 
soundness of the hadith in the main text. This reflected a concern addressed by his teacher, 
the chief judge ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn b. al-Turkmānī, who pursued a more substantial project in 
this area.109 Sirāj al-Dīn also began with a lengthy discussion on the life and virtues of the 
eponym Imām Abū Ḥanīfa, his teachers and students, and his principles, defending him 
from critics.110 Furthermore, Sirāj al-Dīn made it his focus to expand on the points of inter- 
and intraschool disagreement (ikhtilāf) on each ruling mentioned in the Hidāya. In writing 
this commentary, Sirāj al-Dīn exhibited his command not only of the theory of law but also 
substantive law.

Sirāj al-Dīn further demonstrated his knowledge of other madhhabs in another work he 
composed in the long-established ikhtilāf genre.111 In it, he compiled verdicts from the four 
schools without evaluating or disputing their evidences, possibly drawing upon an earlier 
work by a Hanbali scholar.112 And although there was no normative privileging of a certain 
school’s verdicts, Sirāj al-Dīn introduced the Hanafi verdicts first.

Collectively, the detailed commentaries on legal theory and substantive law, along with 
the primer on intraschool difference, cemented Sirāj al-Dīn’s impressive standing as a well-
rounded authority on law.113 These works were particularly well-suited for the Mamluk 
context, where there was an increasing growth of Hanafi writings on legal theory, and 
where other Hanafi scholars were also pursuing similar projects to defend the madhhab. 
The work on ikhtilāf would also be far more useful as an introductory text or a quick legal 
reference amid the pluralism of Mamluk Cairo than in Delhi. Altogether, these works reflect 
how quick Sirāj al-Dīn was to respond to the needs of a legal readership in Cairo. In fact, 
there is far less evidence of jurists in the Delhi Sultanate composing such commentaries on 
Hanafi texts (or works in the ikhtilāf genre).114 There, the most notable or popular form of 
legal writing seems to have been fatwa compilations, which Sirāj al-Dīn does not appear to 

108.  I have only come across one manuscript of this work thus far. It contains Sirāj al-Dīn’s name on the title 
page, and not within the text’s introductory or ending portion. Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, Baḥr al-riwāya wa-l-dirāya 
fī tawshīḥ al-Hidāya, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Kadızade Mehmed no. 00208, MS 290432.

109.  See ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-Turkmānī, al-Tanbīh ʿalā aḥādīth al-Hidāya wa-l-Khulāṣa (Damascus: Dār 
al-Minhāj al-Qawīm, 2020).

110.  Al-Hindī, Baḥr al-riwāya, fols. 1–41.
111.  Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, Zubdat al-aḥkām fī madhāhib al-aʾimma al-arbaʿa al-aʿlām, ed. ʿAbdullāh Nazīr 

Aḥmad Mizzī (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Rayyān, 2001).
112.  Mizzī, introduction to ibid., 8–13.
113.  Sirāj al-Dīn also wrote several other commentaries and texts in matters of law and Sufism; the texts 

discussed above are not exhaustive.
114.  Islam, Fatawa Literature, 7–13.



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have composed. In contrast, his commentaries had a strong didactic function of explaining 
and sifting—in encyclopedic fashion—across the expanse of Hanafi discourse, reflecting his 
early role in Cairo as a teacher of Hanafi law.

In these works, Sirāj al-Dīn did not mention any Mamluk patrons; this may possibly 
represent their completion before his rise in Mamluk circles. In contrast, Sirāj al-Dīn 
dedicated two additional works to the aforementioned Mamluk amir Ṣarghitmish. These are 
revelatory in terms of their relationship and intellectual interests. One was a commentary 
on al-ʿAqīda al-Ṭaḥāwiyya, a famous primer on Sunni theology.115 Sirāj al-Dīn wrote in his 
introduction that he spent a period of time contemplating to whom he should dedicate 
this work, and after some deep soul searching, he received divine inspiration to dedicate it 
to Ṣarghitmish.116 He showered Ṣarghitmish with lengthy and elaborate praise, such as for 
being “the pride of all the world leaders,” the “holder of sword and pen,” someone who had 
been entrusted with training and supporting scholars, and as someone who deeply valued 
knowledge and learning himself.117 At the end, Sirāj al-Dīn made a commitment to compile 

115.  Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, Sharḥ ʿAqīdat al-imām al-Ṭaḥawī, ed. Ḥāzim al-Kilānī al-Ḥanafī and Muḥammad 
ʿAbd al-Qādir Naṣṣār (Cairo: Dārat al-Karaz li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 2009). This same text by Sirāj al-Dīn has 
recently been published and misattributed to al-Bābartī by several presses. However, I have not seen any 
evidence from premodern biographical or bibliographical sources that al-Bābartī wrote such a commentary.

116.  Ibid., 23.
117.  Ibid. Here is the translation of the full excerpt by Amjad Mahmood: “When it reached the pinnacle of 

excellence and beauty, and the height of subtlety and allusion, I thought for a while as to whose name I should 
dedicate it, so that it remains forever in his legacy. As I vacated my heart of all misgivings and turned it to the 
Madyan of the Unseen, I thereby received inspiration in the recesses of my soul from the holy realm (ʿālam 
al-quds), hidden [even] from my shirt buttons, to present it as a gift to the assembly of the one who ascended 
from the constellation of felicity as a full moon shining with light and filling the hearts with joy and ebullience, 
and who became the beauty of the hearts (ghurrah al-jinān) in delight and radiance, and the continuous rainfall 
from the skies in elevation and splendour. The marks of blessings appeared on him; prosperity and divine 
providence accompanied him in his movements; the traces of felicity glistened on him; and the fragrances of 
pre-eminence effused from him. He is the venerable, the exalted and sublime amir, the pride of all the world 
leaders, the sanctuary for the poor and the destitute, the peerless one of his age and the adornment of Egypt, 
the benefactor, the holder of the sword and pen, who combines both the virtues of knowledge and practice, 
who has attained both religious and worldly felicity, the one from whose forehead shines the light of guidance 
and in whose right hand the flags of God-consciousness are raised, who puts the vast oceans to shame with 
his benevolence, and the early morning clouds with his goodness and generosity, the august amir, Sayf al-Dīn 
Shaykh al-Malikī al-Nāṣirī Ṣarghatmush al-Malikī al-Ṣāliḥī. May Allah maintain his honour, make his treasure 
abound with blessings, preserve his life from others, and perpetuate his joy and happiness! He has been 
entrusted in this age with training scholars, dedicated to assisting the virtuous. All praise be to Allah, who has 
let loose the tongues of the people to proclaim his praise, and girdled the necks of scholars with the burdens of 
his munificence. It is befitting for the introduction of a book to be honored by the appellations of such a person 
who encompasses the aforementioned qualities and virtues like how the skies encompass the stars and planets; 
and to be ascribed to his excellency, so that his honourable name remains in books and records among people 
throughout the alternation of nights and days and the passing of aeons and years. I found everyone orientated 
by his aspiration to ingratiate himself [to him] by serving him with a generous gift. However, [when I found 
that] my state was inhibiting me from offering a gift that corresponds to his generous treasure, or resembles 
the matchless gems therein, I recalled the words of al-Mutanabbī: [If] you have neither the steeds nor wealth 
to give / Then let [your] words cheer [him] if [your] state cannot. When I realized that knowledge is the most 
desired thing and the most precious gift to him, I chose to present him with the aforementioned commentary in 



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a book on law in dedication to him: “If my life is long and I am assisted in achieving [my] 
goals, I shall compile a book for him in jurisprudence that incorporates a lucid summary of 
what is in the extensive works.”118

The dedication is significant for demonstrating not only their deep relationship but also 
Sirāj al-Dīn’s appreciation for Ṣarghitmish’s intellectual investments in learning. The last 
sentence about his wish to compile a legal book in the honor of Ṣarghitmish could also be 
indicative of something else. It may reflect an aspect of juristic-court relations from Central 
and South Asia, where there was an active tradition of producing legal compilations in 
honor of specific sultans or notables, with lengthy eulogies and praises in their prefaces 
(and sometimes having the works named after them).119 Dedicating texts (with a preface 
replete with praises) to local sultans or elites was a practice with a longer history from 
at least Abbasid times.120 In the Mamluk context, many dedications are found in historical 
chronicles, panegyric poetry, or other disciplines such as astronomy, rather than legal 
or theological commentaries.121 There is no indication, for instance, that Sirāj al-Dīn’s 
contemporary al-Bābartī felt the need to dedicate his legal or theological commentaries to 
a Mamluk leader.

Sirāj al-Dīn composed another book at the direct request of Ṣarghitmish himself. This 
was the al-Ghurra al-munīfa fī tarjīḥ madhhab Abī Ḥanīfa, a response to an earlier critique 
of Hanafi doctrine reportedly made by the famous Shafiʿi polymath Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 
606/1210), which, as mentioned in Sirāj al-Dīn’s introduction, was dedicated to Bahāʾ al-Dīn 
Sām II (d. 603/1206), the Ghurid ruler of Bamiyan.122 Sirāj al-Dīn’s work served two functions: 
first, as a translation of the original text attributed to al-Rāzī from Persian to Arabic; and 
second, as a response to his critiques of Hanafi doctrine. Sirāj al-Dīn proceeded in systematic 
fashion, listing the issue of contention, the Hanafi and Shafiʿi evidence, respectively, and his 
counter-responses in turn to the Shafiʿi evidence. For each issue, his mode of reasoning and 
choice of evidence would change, but it encompassed everything from citing hadith reports 
to more rational (ʿaqlī) reasoning. For instance, in the very first issue pertaining to the 
removal of impurity with pure liquids besides water, he critiqued al-Rāzī’s claim that the 
Hanafis only had analogistic evidence (qiyās) for their position and showed how the Hanafis 
relied upon several source texts from the hadith and Qurʾan.123

writing. I hope from his utter compassion that he receives it with goodly acceptance, as that is my utmost wish.” 
Abū Ḥafs Sirāj al-Dīn al-Ghaznawī, Imām al-Ṭaḥāwī’s Creed of Islam: An Exposition, trans. Amjad Mahmood 
(Birmingham: Heritage Press, 2020), xxi–xxiii.

118.  Ibid.
119.  Islam, Fatawa Literature, 7–13.
120.  Houari Touati, “La dédicace des livres en Islam médiéval,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 55, no. 2 

(2000): 325–54.
121.  See, for instance, the dedications by the Syrian scholar and historian Ibn Wāṣil (d. 697/1298): Konrad 

Hirschler, “Ibn Wāsil,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (Leiden: Brill Online, 2016).
122.  Al-Hindī, al-Ghurra al-munīfa. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate a copy of al-Ṭarīqa 

al-Bahāʾiyya (also apparently known as al-Barāhīn al-Bahāʾiyya fī al-farq bayn al-Ḥanafiyya wa-l-Shāfiʿiyya), 
the original text by al-Rāzī. See ʿAlī al-Riḍā Qarabulūṭ and Aḥmad Ṭūrān Qarabulūṭ, Muʿjam al-tārīkh al-turāth 
al-Islāmī fī maktabāt al-ʿālam (al-makhṭūṭāt wa-l-maṭbūʿāt) (Kayseri: Dār al-ʿAqaba, 2001), 4:301–2.

123.  Al-Hindī, al-Ghurra al-munīfa, 303-8.



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Sirāj al-Dīn included an epilogue where he made a case, somewhat reminiscent of Najm 
al-Dīn al-Ṭarasūsī (d. 758/1357), the Hanafi chief judge of Damascus, to “sell Hanafism to 
the Mamluk Sultanate” just a few years earlier in 753/1352.124 Yet, instead of writing about 
how it would benefit the Mamluk class or be more “government friendly” per se, as had 
al-Ṭarasūsī, he wrote about how the Hanafi school was much more favorable and practical 
for judges, witnesses, the dead, and the general public, since it legitimated a wide variety 
of everyday transactions and issues that were (allegedly) invalid in the Shafiʿi school and 
would subject everyone to immense difficulty, impossibility, or sin if actually followed.125 (A 
later treatise written by al-Bābartī in 776/1374 would also share this theme.126) It is difficult 
not to imagine Sirāj al-Dīn thinking back to his roots in Hanafi Delhi as he made these 
arguments.

Texts such as these likely opened doors for Sirāj al-Dīn in Cairo and strengthened 
his relationships with the Mamluk elites. As mentioned before, Ṣarghitmish granted 
Sirāj al-Dīn’s request to be appointed as the military judge after Shaykhū had refused. 
Simultaneously, they also reveal Ṣarghitmish’s deeper investments in both Hanafi 
scholarship and patronship. Sirāj al-Dīn’s dedication to Ṣarghitmish in this refutation 
now overlay (or paralleled) al-Rāzī’s dedication to Sultan Bahāʾ al-Dīn, and this may also 
represent Ṣarghitmish’s ambitions to be seen in this longer Central/South Asian model of 
patronship. That Ṣarghitmish was aware of and concerned by the text attributed to al-Rāzī 
(which itself appears to have been an obscure text) may represent his deep exposure to 
such legal discourse. In fact, Ṣarghitmish’s interest in individual texts can also be seen in 
the array of manuscripts he endowed (as waqf) for his madrasa’s library collection.127

Ṣarghitmish was jailed and died soon thereafter (due to suspicions that he would unseat 
the sultan), but, as mentioned in the previous section, Sirāj al-Dīn’s career would continue 
to grow. His relationship with the Mamluk elite was further strengthened as he used his 
legal skills to directly justify decisions favorable to them. We get an insight, within a treatise 
Sirāj al-Dīn wrote late in his career, in his official capacity as chief judge, into the question 
of kafāʾa (suitability) within marriage.128 At a grand wedding held at the royal palace, and 
attended by all the chief justices, Sirāj al-Dīn had the honor of officiating the marriage 
ceremony of the Mamluk Biktāsh (d. 771/1370), captain of the sultan’s guard (raʾs nawba), 

124.  Baki Tezcan, “Hanafism and the Turks in al-Ṭarasūsī’s Gift for the Turks (1352),” Mamlūk Studies Review 
15 (2011): 51–78, at 68.

125.  Al-Hindī, al-Ghurra al-munīfa, 541–44.
126.  Ahmet İnanır, “Ekmelüddin Bâbertî’nin ‘en-Nüketü’z-Zarîfe fî Tercîhi Mezhebi Ebî Hanîfe’ Adlı 

Risalesinin Metni ve Tercümesi,” Islam Hukuku Araştırmaları Dergisi 21 (2013): 71–93.
127.  Ṣarghitmish’s curated collection of titles for his madrasa library (bearing his personal endowment 

statements) deserves further study. One such manuscript in his library was the Kitāb al-aṣl by Imām al-Shaybānī 
(d. 189/805), one of the most important texts of the Hanafi school. See Muḥammad Būynūkālin, al-Aṣl li-l-imām 
Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī: al-muqaddima (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm and Wizārat al-Awqāf wa-l-Shuʾūn 
al-Islāmiyya Dawlat Qaṭar, 2012), 157–58.

128.  An edited version has been published as Bajawī, “Risālat al-kafāʾa.” Another manuscript, not consulted 
in the edited version, is Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī, Risāla fī al-kafāʾa, Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi, Veliyyuddin Efendi 
V3288/9, MS 548612, fols. 142b–153b.

https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1198?v=pdf


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with Khāwand Sāra, sister of the Mamluk sultan.129 Yet, this marriage to the sultan’s sister 
was seen by some jurists as invalid, due to the lack of compatibility (kafāʾa) between a freed 
man and freeborn woman.130

In response, Sirāj al-Dīn penned a detailed treatise exploring the conditions of kafāʾa in 
multiple schools. He argued for the importance of evaluating compatibility by considering 
changes in time and place, and that a freed person (former slave) could marry a freeborn 
woman if he had proportional prestige, wealth, intelligence, and other such qualities. For 
instance, some scholars in Central Asia ruled that Hanafis should not marry their daughters 
to non-Hanafis, but this, Sirāj al-Dīn argued, did not apply in regions where followers of 
different schools intermingled.131 Similarly, in Egypt, it had become customary for kings 
to marry their daughters to high-ranking officials, without inquiring about their lineage 
(nasab). This applied to marrying Turkish Mamluks, since the Turks had gained distinctive 
prestige after taking hold of power throughout Muslim lands in the aftermath of Genghis 
Khan’s invasions.132 Sirāj al-Dīn wrote at length in praise of the Mamluk Turks, downplaying 
and even questioning their background as slaves. As he wrote: “[The Turks] established the 
foundations of justice and fairness, eliminated the innovations of oppression and tyranny, 
supported the religion during its periods of decline… built mosques and schools… quelled 
the flames of discord, closed the doors of tribulation, took upon themselves the cultivation 
of knowledge and scholars.”133 Some scholars, he added, had even recommended caution 
in regards to holding Turkish women as slaves, as many of them were actually free women 
who had wrongfully been sold into slavery.

This treatise encapsulated the symbiotic relationship between mobile Hanafi jurists such 
as himself and the Mamluk elite who sought to establish their authority in society. It is 
also likely that his comments and high praise extended to the Turks of the Delhi Sultanate 
as well, given the positive comments al-ʿUmarī quoted from him about the sultanate. 
As someone with the unique perspective of having intimate access to Turkish elites in 
both Delhi and Cairo, Sirāj al-Dīn’s high praise for Mamluk contributions to society and 
patronage of religious scholarship contrasted with a cooler reception among many local 
Arab scholars.134

Sirāj al-Dīn’s expertise was thus in high demand at the precise moment when a series 
of Mamluk amirs also pushed for more pro-Hanafi (and pro-Mamluk) initiatives. With his 
pedigree that included detailed commentaries on well-recognized Hanafi texts on law and 
theory, and an ability to defend Hanafi rulings against Shafiʿi critiques through a variety 

129.  Al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 4:326.
130.  Ibid.
131.  Bajawī, “Risālat al-kafāʾa,” 655.
132.  Ibid.
133.  Ibid., 663.
134.  Ulrich Haarmann, “Arabic in Speech, Turkish in Lineage: Mamluks and Their Sons in the Intellectual 

Life of Fourteenth-Century Egypt and Syria,” Journal of Semitic Studies 23 (1988): 81–114; Jonathan Berkey, The 
Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 
University Press, 1992), 128–60.



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of legal sources, Sirāj al-Dīn exhibited deep knowledge of Hanafi law for a wider Mamluk 
readership and students. Sirāj al-Dīn’s relationship with the Mamluk elite was strengthened 
by their joint investment in Hanafi texts (including evidently Persian texts), as marked 
most vividly by his text in dedication to his Mamluk benefactor Ṣarghitmish. Later, after 
achieving the chief judge position, he was likely fueled by his initial decades in Hanafi Delhi 
to continue to strive and achieve greater parity with the Shafiʿi chief judge rather than 
accept a secondary role. Furthermore, given active Mamluk support for scholars in Cairo, he 
praised them abundantly and defended their social status. The Mamluks certainly found a 
grateful and capable ally in the Hanafi jurist from Delhi.

Conclusions

The Hanafi madhhab was the most critical institution that shaped and facilitated Sirāj 
al-Dīn’s career in Mamluk Cairo. Here, as a newcomer with no established links to the 
Mamluk elites, he found common cause and support from a series of Hanafi judges and 
Mamluk amirs. Yet, this was not an effortless or inevitable collaboration based on a shallow 
notion of a shared affiliation with the Hanafi school. Nor was it simply a result of having 
good relationships with a select number of influential elites. Unlike Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s mostly 
ceremonial role as a Maliki judge in Hanafi Delhi, Sirāj al-Dīn worked his way in Cairo to 
the top of the judicial hierarchy by studying with chief judges and writing voluminous 
works on relevant issues in Mamluk intellectual discourse that addressed larger concerns. 
His training and scholarship—expressed in his commentaries, treatises, and refutations—
converged with the pro-Hanafi interests and deeper familiarity with Persian legal literature 
of the Mamluk amirs to defend the Hanafi school’s standing in the competitive legal arena 
of Mamluk Cairo.

The juristic connections across this zone of scholarship in the Arabian Sea from South 
Asia to the Mamluk Sultanate in the fourteenth century must therefore be taken more 
seriously.135 The foundation of these links was the madhhab-system, a transregional legal 
tradition that connected jurists from different Muslim societies and polities, including across 
the Indian Ocean. Existing scholarship has considered how the Shafiʿi madhhab spread 
to different corners of the Indian Ocean; in contrast, this article has shown a remarkably 
different story where Hanafism was effectively imported from South Asia (among other 
places) to bolster Mamluk Hanafi positions in the sultanate. As such, it reverses the flow 
of intellectual circulation and exchange usually considered in the literature on Islamic 
scholarship in the Indian Ocean.

As the Mamluks sought to create more opportunities for other madhhabs and chip 
away at the predominance of the Shafiʿi leadership, they created new positions for Hanafi 
judges and teachers at local madrasas, both in Cairo and other cities in their sultanate. 

135.  Future scholarship that dives deeper into Sirāj al-Dīn’s work may reveal how his writings in legal theory 
and doctrine brought together rulings or theories from South Asia to Cairo. As an example from a different field, 
in a discussion on gnosticism (maʿrifa), Sirāj al-Dīn listed the viewpoints of diverse groups, including what he 
termed the “madhhab of the Sufis,” the sages of Hind (ḥukamāʾ al-Hind), people of education (ahl al-taʿlīm), and 
the Ashʿaris and Muʿtazilis. Al-Hindī, Lawāʾiḥ al-anwār, fols. 45–73.



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The expansion in legal pluralism thus opened new opportunities for scholars of different 
madhhabs across the Indian Ocean. In a broader perspective, Sirāj al-Dīn paved the way for 
other Hanafis from South Asia to find employment in such positions after him. In the next 
century, another Indian, Saʿd Allāh al-Hindī (d. 890/1485), served as an imam in Jerusalem 
and a Hanafi deputy judge in Damascus.136 Sirāj al-Dīn’s contemporary Ḍiyāʾ al-Hindī 
al-Ṣāghānī (d. 780/1379), who had Indian roots and claimed ties to the renowned thirteenth-
century hadith scholar and Lahore-born Raḍī al-Dīn al-Ṣāghānī (d. 650/1252), in fact left a 
much more enduring family legacy in Mecca.137 After initial turmoil, Ḍiyāʾ al-Hindī settled 
in Mecca with an appointment as a teacher of Hanafi law by the Mamluk amir Yalbughā. 
Thereafter, he became the progenitor of the famous Banū Ḍiyāʾ family in Mecca. Beginning 
with Ibn al-Ḍiyāʾ al-Ṣāghānī (d. 825/1422), appointed as the first independent Hanafi judge 
in Mecca in 806/1403–4, several generations of this family would serve as Hanafi judges and 
imams in Mecca.138

Later, even the Ottomans would initially continue the Mamluk precedent of appointing 
Indian and Indian-origin muftis from across the Arabian Sea to bolster the Hanafi madhhab 
in the Hijaz. A jurist of Gujarati origin, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Nahrawālī (d. 990/1582), was appointed 
the Hanafi mufti of Mecca and the professor for Hanafi law at the newly established 
Madrasa Süleymaniye adjoining the Grand Mosque.139 Furthermore, these intellectual links 
encompassed not only the movement of people but also of texts. Manuscript copies of the 
Fatāwā-yi Tātārkhāniyya, a major fatwa collection composed in fourteenth-century South 
Asia, abounded in collections in Istanbul.140 Similarly, there was significant exchange of 
Arabic grammar texts between South Asia and Ottoman Istanbul.141

The Mamluk Sultanate was thus not only host to a great diversity of African, Anatolian, 
Persian, and Central Asian scholars but also Hanafi scholars traveling across the Arabian 
Sea from South Asia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sirāj al-Dīn’s example reveals 
the underlying legal framework of madhhab pluralism that encompassed and organized 
the legal activities of such jurists, which made it possible for newcomers without a deep 
scholarly network to ascend the ranks and achieve upward social mobility. By focusing on 
these histories, we recover a missing chapter of Indian intellectual and juristic activity in 
the Mamluk Sultanate as well as the shared legal system that brought and organized them 
together in a meaningful way.

136.  ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ al-Malaṭī, Nayl al-amal fī dhayl al-duwal, ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salām (Beirut: al-Maktaba 
al-ʿAṣriyya, 2002), 7:414.

137.  Al-Fāsī, al-ʿIqd al-thamīn, 2:362; al-Malaṭī, Nayl al-amal, 2:150.
138.  Al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, 7:84; al-Fāsī, al-ʿIqd al-thamīn, 3:107.
139.  Baig, “Indian Hanafis,” 58–59.
140.  Sohaib Baig, “The Textual Landscapes of Ḥanafī Eurasia: South Asian Scholarship in Turkish Manuscript 

Collections (Part 1 of 2),” Islamic Law Blog, August 10, 2023.
141.  Christopher D. Bahl, Mobile Manuscripts: Arabic Learning across the Early Modern Western Indian 

Ocean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

https://islamiclaw.blog/2023/08/10/the-textual-landscapes-of-%e1%b8%a5anafi-eurasia-south-asian-scholarship-in-turkish-manuscript-collections-part-1-of-2/
https://islamiclaw.blog/2023/08/10/the-textual-landscapes-of-%e1%b8%a5anafi-eurasia-south-asian-scholarship-in-turkish-manuscript-collections-part-1-of-2/


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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Zayde Antrim, Jyoti Balachandran, and the reviewers for their valuable 
suggestions and corrections.

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