Reading Faw'id-al-Fu'ad:Text, testimony and history

For nearly seven hundred years, Fawa'id-Ul-Fu'ad by Ameer Hassan Ala Sijli Dehlavi has been acknowledged as among the earliest examples of the genre of Malfuzat, which enjoys such a long afterlife in Sufi-literary culture. It is also held that unlike many later Malfuzat, which establishes the value of the text as a reliable historical document from the Tughlaq Shahi period of the medieval Indian history.
   In this paper, I shall examine how the question of the historical reliability of Fawa'id-Ul-Fu'ad exists in a complementary relationship with that of personal testimony. Whereas, it is generally believed that historiography, in order to be reliable, must elide the historian, in Fawa'id-Ul-Fu'ad, it is the presence of Hassan Sijli that gives the assurance of reliability. But Hassan Sijli is not a historian like contemporary court chroniclers such as Ameer Khusrao or Ziauddin Barani, whose relationship with the regimes they describe, is official and formal, indeed secular. In Sijli's case, his relationship with what he records is certainly imbued with a sense of the historical, but mediated by a Pir-Murid (mentor-disciple) relationship, itself founded on an act of faith. I shall try in this paper to establish the usefulness of reading Fawa'id-Ul-Fu'ad as the work of murid-historian,comparable with,yet wholly distinct from the official historiography of the Sultanate period.