Rejuvenating Muhammad in Memory: Exploring the Impact of a Nineteenth-Century Urdu Sacred Biography

This presentation examines genre in sacred life stories through a close study of al-Khutb̤ āt al-Aḥmadīyah (1870), a sīra (biography of the Prophet Muhammad) by Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḳhān. Sir Sayyid directly engages questions about the types of writing that ought to be employed for a sīra, concluding that it should mirror styles resembling the facticity and objectivity of historical writing. This paper historically situates this argument by contrasting it with the writing types and the objectives that sīra have traditionally sought to employ and fulfill. The presentation focuses on two questions. First, how did South Asian scholars read and respond to the conception of sacred biography laid out by Sir Sayyid; second, what impact did this proposal for sacred biography have on three early twentieth-century compositions.