Manan Ahmed Asif , also known as Manan Ahmed , is a Pakistani historian of South Asia and West Asia. He is an associate professor of history at Columbia University in New York City .
46-648: Chach Nama ( Sindhi : چچ نامو ; Urdu : چچ نامہ ; "Story of the Chach"), also known as the Fateh nama Sindh ( Sindhi : فتح نامه سنڌ ; "Story of the Conquest of Sindh"), and as Tareekh al-Hind wa a's-Sind ( Arabic : تاريخ الهند والسند ; "History of Hind and Sind"), is one of the historical sources for the history of Sindh . The text, which purports to be a Persian translation by `Ali Kufi (13th-century) of an undated, original Arabic text, has long been considered to be
92-581: A BA in math and physics in 1991. In 1997, he graduated from Miami University in Ohio with a second BA with honors in history. At Miami, he completed two theses, one in art history on Paul Klee and Frida Kahlo , and a second on early Islamic history with Matthew S. Gordon. Ahmed's undergraduate thesis on early Islamic history earned him admission to the University of Chicago , where he completed his PhD in 2008. His graduate thesis centered on
138-643: A case marker (usually the genitive جو jo ). The case markers are listed below. The postpositions with the suffix -o decline in gender and number to agree with their governor, e.g. ڇوڪِرو جو پِيءُ chokiro j-o pīu "the boy's father" but ڇوڪِر جِي مَاءُ chokiro j-ī māu "the boy's mother". Manan Ahmed Asif He is the founder of the South Asia blog Chapati Mystery and co-founder of Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research . Since 2021, he
184-677: A colonial construction of a long history of religious antagonism between Hindus and Muslims, and one of narratives of Muslim origins in South Asia by various twentieth-century historians and writers. It has been a part of state-sanctioned history textbooks of Pakistan . The story of the seventeen-year-old Muhammad bin Qasim's attack on "Pak-o-Hind" was mentioned by the Pakistani-American terrorist Faisal Shahzad prior to his 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt . As we have it today,
230-677: A historical text of the 8th-century, states Asif. The Táríkh Maasúmí, and the Tuhfatulkirám are two other Muslim histories of the same period and, on occasion, give differing accounts of some details. Later Muslim chronicles like those by Nizamuddin Ahmad , Nurul Hakk, Firishta , and Masum Shah draw their account of the Arab conquest from the Chach Nama . Some western scholars such as Peter Hardy, André Wink and Yohanan Friedmann, question
276-537: A language can be found in a translation of the Qur’an into Sindhi dating back to 883 A.D. Historically, Isma'ili religious literature and poetry in India, as old as the 11th century CE, used a language that was closely related to Sindhi and Gujarati . Much of this work is in the form of ginans (a kind of devotional hymn). Sindhi was the first Indo-Aryan language to be in close contact with Arabic and Persian following
322-459: A mystical bent that profoundly influenced Sindhi poetry for much of this period. Another famous part of Medieval Sindhi literature is a wealth of folktales, adapted and readapted into verse by many bards at various times and possibly much older than their earliest literary attestations. These include romantic epics such as Sassui Punnhun , Sohni Mahiwal , Momal Rano , Noori Jam Tamachi , Lilan Chanesar , and others. The greatest poet of Sindhi
368-521: A relatively large inventory of both consonants and vowels compared to other Indo-Aryan languages. Sindhi has 46 consonant phonemes and 10 vowels . The consonant to vowel ratio is around average for the world's languages at 2.8. All plosives , affricates , nasals , the retroflex flap , and the lateral approximant /l/ have aspirated or breathy voiced counterparts. The language also features four implosives . The retroflex consonants are apical postalveolar and do not involve curling back of
414-663: A scheduled language in India , making it an option for education. Despite lacking any state-level status, Sindhi is still a prominent minority language in the Indian state of Rajasthan . There are many Sindhi language television channels broadcasting in Pakistan such as Time News, KTN, Sindh TV , Awaz Television Network , Mehran TV, and Dharti TV . Sindhi has many dialects, and forms a dialect continuum at some places with neighboring languages such as Saraiki and Gujarati . Some of
460-456: A strong sub-national linguistic identity for Sindhi. This manifested in resistance to the imposition of Urdu and eventually Sindhi nationalism in the 1980s. The language and literary style of contemporary Sindhi writings in Pakistan and India were noticeably diverging by the late 20th century; authors from the former country were borrowing extensively from Urdu, while those from the latter were highly influenced by Hindi. In Pakistan, Sindhi
506-480: A template for the political history, but created a different and imaginative version of events. According to Asif, "there is little reason for us to consider the facticity" of verses in the Baladhuri's version either, an account written to glorify the martial conquest of courtly Abbasid times and composed over 200 years after Qasim's death. The Chach Nama is a romantic work influenced by the 13th-century history, not
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#1732801656024552-552: Is a similar paradigm to Punjabi . Almost all Sindhi noun stems end in a vowel, except for some recent loanwords. The declension of a noun in Sindhi is largely determined from its grammatical gender and the final vowel (or if there is no final vowel). Generally, -o stems are masculine and -a stems are feminine, but the other final vowels can belong to either gender. The different paradigms are listed below with examples. The ablative and locative cases are used with only some lexemes in
598-557: Is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 30 million people in the Pakistani province of Sindh , where it has official status. It is also spoken by a further 1.7 million people in India, where it is a scheduled language , without any state-level official status. The main writing system is the Perso-Arabic script, which accounts for the majority of the Sindhi literature and is the only one currently used in Pakistan. In India, both
644-646: Is co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas . Ahmed was born in 1971 in Lahore , Pakistan . At a young age, his family moved to Doha , Qatar , where his father worked as a migrant laborer . In the 8th grade, Ahmed and his family moved back to Lahore. Having grown up abroad, Ahmed initially struggled to reintegrate back into Pakistani culture, as his Arabic was more proficient than his Urdu . Ahmed graduated from Punjab University in Lahore with
690-576: Is derived from the Sanskrit síndhu , the original name of the Indus River , along whose delta Sindhi is spoken. Like other languages of the Indo-Aryan family, Sindhi is descended from Old Indo-Aryan ( Sanskrit ) via Middle Indo-Aryan ( Pali , secondary Prakrits, and Apabhramsha ). 20th century Western scholars such as George Abraham Grierson believed that Sindhi descended specifically from
736-631: Is taught in all provincial private schools that follow the Matric system and not the ones that follow the Cambridge system. At the occasion of 'Mother Language Day ' in 2023, the Sindh Assembly under Culture minister Sardar Ali Shah , passed a unanimous resolution to extend the use of language to primary level and increase the status of Sindhi as a national language of Pakistan . The Indian Government has legislated Sindhi as
782-634: Is the first language of 30.26 million people, or 14.6% of the country's population as of the 2017 census. 29.5 million of these are found in Sindh , where they account for 62% of the total population of the province. There are 0.56 million speakers in the province of Balochistan , especially in the Kacchi Plain that encompasses the districts of Lasbela , Hub , Kachhi , Sibi , Sohbatpur , Jafarabad , Jhal Magsi , Usta Muhammad and Nasirabad . In India, Sindhi mother tongue speakers were distributed in
828-561: The Chach Nama has been historically significant. It was a source of colonial understanding of the origins of Islam in the Indian subcontinent through the Sindh region. The text has been one of the sources of historiography and religious antagonism during the British ruled Indian people's struggles to gain independence from the colonial British Empire. The text, states Asif, has been a source of
874-550: The Chach Nama is centred on the historical figure of Muhammad bin Qasim found in extant Arabic manuscripts, but the 13th-century text is different, creatively extrapolating the alternative versions. For example, the version of Qasim story found in the Kitab Futuh al-Buldan of Al-Baladhuri (9th-century) and the version found in memoirs of Al-Biruni (11th-century), are much simpler and "markedly different" in structure, circumstances and martial campaign than that elaborated in
920-509: The Chach Nama is the work of ʿAlī b. Ḥāmid b. Abī Bakr Kūfī. He was writing in Persian, but claimed to be translating a book in Arabic, which he had discovered among the possessions of the ḳāḍī of Alōr , Ismāʿīl b. ʿAlī ... b. ʿU th mān al- Th aḳafī (who was appointed the first kādī of Alōr by Muhammad Kāsim after the conquest of the Sindh .) According to Y. Friedmann, a comparison between
966-631: The Chach Nama . In the Baladhuri version, for example, Qasim does not enter or destroy budd (temples) or compare them to "the churches of the Christians and the Jews and the fire houses of the Magians". Further the Baladhuri version of the Qasim story repeatedly credits the monks and priestly mediators of Hind with negotiating peace with him, while Chach Nama presents a different, martial version. The Chach Nama drew upon Baladhuri's work, and others, as
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#17328016560241012-544: The Umayyad conquest in 712 CE. A substantial body of Sindhi literature developed during the Medieval period, the most famous of which is the religious and mystic poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai from the 18th century. Modern Sindhi was promoted under British rule beginning in 1843, which led to the current status of the language in independent Pakistan after 1947. Europe North America Oceania The name "Sindhi"
1058-466: The Umayyad conquest of Sindh in 712 CE. Medieval Sindhi literature is of a primarily religious genre, comprising a syncretic Sufi and Advaita Vedanta poetry, the latter in the devotional bhakti tradition. The earliest known Sindhi poet of the Sufi tradition is Qazi Qadan (1493–1551). Other early poets were Shah Inat Rizvi ( c. 1613–1701) and Shah Abdul Karim Bulri (1538–1623). These poets had
1104-438: The semantic role of a nominal as an argument to a verb) are indicated using postpositions, which follow a noun in the oblique case. The subject of the verb takes the bare oblique case, while the object may be in nominative case or in oblique case and followed by the accusative case marker کي khe . The postpositions are divided into case markers , which directly follow the noun, and complex postpositions , which combine with
1150-637: The Arabs. The body of the work narrates the Arab inclusions into Sindh of the 7th-8th centuries AD. Thus it chronicles the Chacha dynasty's period, following the demise of the Rai dynasty and the ascent of Chach of Alor to the throne , down to the Arab conquest by Muhammad bin Qasim in early 8th century AD. The text concludes with 'an epilogue describing the tragic end of the Arab commander Muḥammad b. al-Ḳāsim and of
1196-550: The Perso-Arabic script and Devanagari are used. Sindhi is first attested in historical records within the Nātyaśāstra, a text thought to have been composed between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. The earliest written evidence of Sindhi as a language can be found in a translation of the Qur’an into Sindhi dating back to 883 A.D. Sindhi was one of the first Indo-Aryan languages to encounter influence from Persian and Arabic following
1242-534: The Sindh Private Educational Institutions Form B (Regulations and Control) 2005 Rules, "All educational institutions are required to teach children the Sindhi language. Sindh Education and Literacy Minister, Syed Sardar Ali Shah , and Secretary of School Education, Qazi Shahid Pervaiz, have ordered the employment of Sindhi teachers in all private schools in Sindh so that this language can be easily and widely taught. Sindhi
1288-522: The Vrācaḍa dialect of Apabhramsha (described by Markandeya as being spoken in Sindhu-deśa , corresponding to modern Sindh) but later work has shown this to be unlikely. Literary attestation of early Sindhi is sparse. Sindhi is first mentioned in historical records within the Nātyaśāstra, a text on dramaturgy thought to have been composed between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. The earliest written evidence of Sindhi as
1334-423: The arrival of Muslims to the Indian subcontinent , and the memory and history of Muhammad Bin Qasim as a "conqueror". At Chicago, Ahmed studied under Muzaffar Alam , Fred Donner , Ronald Inden , Dipesh Chakrabarty and Shahid Amin . Ahmed's work often combines archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic, and literary evidence and focuses on the history of South Asia . According to Ahmed, Muslim presence in
1380-530: The development of modern Sindhi literature. The first printed works in Sindhi were produced at the Muhammadi Press in Bombay beginning in 1867. These included Islamic stories set in verse by Muhammad Hashim Thattvi , one of the renowned religious scholars of Sindh. The Partition of India in 1947 resulted in most Sindhi speakers ending up in the new state of Pakistan , commencing a push to establish
1426-421: The documented dialects of Sindhi are: The variety of Sindhi spoken by Sindhi Hindus who emigrated to India is known as Dukslinu Sindhi. Furthermore, Kutchi and Jadgali are sometimes classified as dialects of Sindhi rather than independent languages. Tawha(n)/Tawhee(n) Tahee(n)/Taee(n) /Murs/Musālu /Kāko/Hamra Bacho/Kako Phar (animal) /Bārish Lapātu/Thapu Dhowan(u) Dhoon(u) Sindhi has
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1472-489: The following key manuscripts: British Library Or. 1787; India Office, Ethé 435. According to Manan Ahmed Asif , Chach Nama is not a work of translation nor is a book of conquest. ʿAlī states that he wrote it to gain favor in the court of Nasiruddin Qabacha ( Nasir ad-Din Qabacha ). Asif adds that Qasim's campaign in Chach Nama is a deliberate shadowing of campaigns Chach undertook in "four corners of Sindh". He states that
1518-428: The following states: and Daman and Diu Sindhi is the official language of the Pakistani province of Sindh and one of the scheduled languages of India, where it does not have any state-level status. Prior to the inception of Pakistan, Sindhi was the national language of Sindh. The Pakistan Sindh Assembly has ordered compulsory teaching of the Sindhi language in all private schools in Sindh. According to
1564-525: The historical authenticity and political theory embedded in the Chach Nama because of its supposed geographical errors, glaring inconsistencies with alternate Persian and Arabic accounts of the Qasim story, and the missing Arabic tradition in it even though the text alleges to be a Persian translation of an Arabic original. Sindhi language Sindhi ( / ˈ s ɪ n d i / SIN -dee ; Sindhi: سِنڌِي ( Perso-Arabic ) or सिन्धी ( Devanagari ) , pronounced [sɪndʱiː] )
1610-726: The nominative and oblique cases. The genitive is a special form for the first and second-person singular, but formed as usual with the oblique and case marker جو jo for the rest. The personal pronouns are listed below. The third-person pronouns are listed below. Besides the unmarked demonstratives, there are also "specific" and "present" demonstratives. In the nominative singular, the demonstratives are marked for gender. Some other pronouns which decline identically to ڪو ko "someone" are ھَرڪو har-ko "everyone", سَڀڪو sabh-ko "all of them", جيڪو je-ko "whoever" (relative), and تيڪو te-ko "that one" (correlative). Most nominal relations (e.g.
1656-467: The other hand, the book also comprises a considerable amount of material which probably reflects a local Indian historical tradition. The part dealing with the rise of the Čač dynasty (14-72), the story of Darōhar, Djaysinha and Djanki (229-234), and some traditions attributed to a Brahman called Rāmsiya (179) and to “some Brahman elders” ( baʿḍī ma sh āyi kh -i barāhima ) (197; cf. also 206) deserve to be mentioned in this context. The Chach Nama survived in
1702-732: The singular number and hence not listed, but predictably take the suffixes -ā̃ / -aū̃ / -ū̃ ( ABL ) and -i ( LOC ). A few nouns representing familial relations take irregular declensions with an extension in -r- in the plural. These are the masculine nouns ڀاءُ bhāu "brother", پِيءُ pīu "father", and the feminine nouns ڌِيءَ dhīa "daughter", نُونھَن nū̃hã "daughter-in-law", ڀيڻَ bheṇa "sister", ماءُ māu "mother", and جوءِ joi "wife". Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Sindhi has first and second-person personal pronouns as well as several types of third-person proximal and distal demonstratives . These decline in
1748-502: The story of the early 8th-century conquests by the Umayyad general Muhammad bin Qasim . The text is significant because it has been a source of colonial understanding of the origins of Islam and the Islamic conquests in the Indian subcontinent . It influenced the debate on the partition of British India and its narrative has been included in the state-sanctioned history textbooks of Pakistan . However, according to Manan Ahmed Asif ,
1794-515: The subcontinent is not to be understood as a history of conquests or Manichean conflict (religious, military, etc.). Ahmed argues instead, that we recognize that presence as “lived spaces” (A Book 49), interconnected with each other across the region, and full of particularities that must be understood in their own terms. In 2014, he helped co-found Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research , which focuses on “mobilized humanities” and innovations in scholarly methodologies. One of
1840-459: The text is in reality original, "not a work of translation". The Chach Nama is a romantic work influenced by the 13th-century history, not a historical text of the 8th-century, states Asif. Some Islamic scholars and modern historians question the credibility of some of the Chach Nama's reports. The report contains an introductory chapter about the history of Sindh just before its conquest by
1886-745: The tip of the tongue, so they could be transcribed [t̠, t̠ʰ, d̠, d̠ʱ n̠ n̠ʱ ɾ̠ ɾ̠ʱ] in phonetic transcription. The affricates /tɕ, tɕʰ, dʑ, dʑʱ/ are laminal post-alveolars with a relatively short release. It is not clear if /ɲ/ is similar, or truly palatal. /ʋ/ is realized as labiovelar [w] or labiodental [ʋ] in free variation, but is not common, except before a stop. The vowels are modal length /i e æ ɑ ɔ o u/ and short /ɪ ʊ ə/ . Consonants following short vowels are lengthened: /pət̪o/ [pət̪ˑoː] 'leaf' vs. /pɑt̪o/ [pɑːt̪oː] 'worn'. Sindhi nouns distinguish two genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers (singular and plural), and five cases (nominative, vocative, oblique, ablative, and locative). This
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1932-472: The two daughters of Dāhir , the defeated king of Sindh. As one of the only written sources about the Arab conquest of Sindh, and therefore the origins of Islam in India , the Chach Nama is a key historical text that has been co-opted by different interest groups for several centuries, and it has significant implications for modern imaginings about the place of Islam in South Asia. Accordingly, its implications are much disputed. According to Manan Ahmed Asif,
1978-775: The use of Sindhi in official documents. In 1868, the Bombay Presidency assigned Narayan Jagannath Vaidya to replace the Abjad used in Sindhi with the Khudabadi script . The script was decreed a standard script by the Bombay Presidency thus inciting anarchy in the Muslim majority region. A powerful unrest followed, after which Twelve Martial Laws were imposed by the British authorities. The granting of official status of Sindhi along with script reforms ushered in
2024-420: The Čač-Nāma and Arab historians such as Balā dh urī [...] bears out the Arab provenance of those parts of the book that describe the battles leading to the conquest of Sind; Kūfī might well have used Madāʾinī’s Kitāb Th a gh r al-Hind and Kitāb ʿUmmāl (or Aʿmāl ) al-Hind [...] The Čač-Nāma seems to have preserved Madāʾinī’s tradition concerning India in a much fuller fashion than classical Arab histories. On
2070-582: Was Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689/1690–1752), whose verses were compiled into the Shah Jo Risalo by his followers. While primarily Sufi, his verses also recount traditional Sindhi folktales and aspects of the cultural history of Sindh. The first attested Sindhi translation of the Quran was done by Akhund Azaz Allah Muttalawi (1747–1824) and published in Gujarat in 1870. The first to appear in print
2116-504: Was by Muhammad Siddiq in 1867. In 1843, the British conquest of Sindh led the region to become part of the Bombay Presidency . Soon after, in 1848, Governor George Clerk established Sindhi as the official language in the province, removing the literary dominance of Persian . Sir Bartle Frere, the then commissioner of Sindh, issued orders on August 29, 1857, advising civil servants in Sindh to pass an examination in Sindhi. He also ordered
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