Over the last decades, a growing amount of case studies has increased our understanding of the different roles that Sayyids (descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad) played in many regions of the Muslim world. Still, many lineages remain unstudied and especially the socio-economic roles of Sayyids often remain unclear. This article studies a little-known Sayyid from sixteenth-century Medina, his genealogical writings and those of one of his sons, to trace the social rise and increasing economic affluence of this family. They combined their Ḥusaynid descent, the prestigious office of custodian of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, and political leadership of the Medinese Sayyids, with marital relations with the Niẓāmshāhī dynasty of Ahmadnagar in the western Deccan (South Asia), offering scholarly service to the court for royal patronage. The symbiotic relationship between charismatic and royal authority propelled this Sayyid-family to the forefront of lineage building in Ahmadnagar and in Medina. They also increasingly served as socio-economic agents in channelling charitable donations from the Deccan to Medina. Transgenerational practices of writing genealogical texts helped legitimise their Sayyid-claims, complementing transregional mobility and royal patronage to consolidate their social and political position “at home”.

In recent years, researchers have shown an increased interest in transregional cultural exchanges between South Asia and the Red Sea region, particularly from the fifteenth century onwards. Nevertheless, while researchers working on the history of South Asia have started paying attention to the role of the Arabic language in the context of transregional connections, there has been little research on the reception of late medieval Arabic histories of the Red Sea region in pre-modern South Asia.

Attempting to fill this research gap, this paper focuses on Jazb al-Qulūb ilā Diyār al-Maḥbūb, a work on Medina primarily written in Persian by the famous South Asian hadith scholar and Sufi ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Dihlavī (d. 1052/1642) based on the late medieval Arabic history of Medina by the Egyptian scholar al-Samhūdī (d. 911/1506). Despite the significance of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq in the intellectual history of South Asia, his work on the history of Medina has not been thoroughly explored.

Addressing this issue, this paper first introduces these two historians and their histories of Medina. It then examines how ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq reworked al-Samhūdī’s text through omission, addition, and reorganization of content. It thus aims to shed light on the complex nature of transregional transmission of knowledge.