Niyaz Nama: An Open Letter to the People of Islam

The Niyaz Nama is an open letter addressed to “the brethren, the people of Islam,” written by Maulvi Safdar Ali and printed at the Mission Press in Allahabad in 1876, in an edition of two thousand copies. Safdar Ali wrote it because friends kept pressing him to say why he had changed his religion, and to give them his proofs.

It opens with eight differences he draws between the Bible and the Quran — on the Trinity, on the divinity and sonship of Christ, on the one way of salvation, on what makes a thing good or evil, on prayer and fasting and almsgiving, on jihad and the Canaanite wars, on the nature of the promised paradise, and on the discrepancies between the two books in their accounts of the creation, of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Solomon and Christ.

But the bulk of its 304 pages is given to two long inquiries, and they are what the book is really for. The first answers the charge of tahrif — that Christians corrupted their scriptures — and is closer to textual scholarship than to preaching: it sets out the variant readings of the Quran itself, cites the great collations of Biblical manuscripts by name and number, dates the codices against the Hijra, and traces the chain of witness back through Origen and Eusebius to the apostolic fathers. The second answers the charge that the Bible stands abrogated, and turns on the Muslim doctors’ own rules of abrogation.

There is no other English edition of this book, and until now there was no English text of it at all. The Niyaz Nama survives only in lithographed Urdu printings of 1876 and 1878 — handwritten Nastaliq calligraphy rather than movable type — and no OCR engine can read that hand: Tesseract’s Urdu model is trained on naskh, and returns noise on lithography. That is why a book of this standing went untranslated for a century and a half while far more obscure works reached English. Our edition is the complete text in English for the first time, all 304 printed pages, in fourteen chapters with the two inquiries set out in full. It is a machine translation: the English was produced by a language model reading the lithographed pages one band at a time, and no reader of Urdu has checked it. We would rather say so plainly than let a reader assume a human translator stood behind it. The 1876 Urdu original is in the public domain and we mirror the scan free alongside the edition, so anyone who reads Urdu can hold our English against the page it came from. Also available as a 7-hour 39-minute audiobook.

This is the Niyaz Nama — "an open letter addressed to the brethren, the people of Islam" — written by Maulvi Safdar Ali, Inspector of Schools at Jabalpur, and printed at the Mission Press in Allahabad in 1876, in an edition of two thousand copies, with the help of the North India Tract Society. Safdar Ali had been a Muslim scholar; he was baptized at Jabalpur in 1864, a convert of the same circle as Imad-ud-din, whose own autobiography we publish.

He wrote this letter because friends kept pressing him to say why he had changed his religion, and to give them his proofs.

The letter opens with his address to his Muslim brethren, his account of why he writes, and the eight differences he draws between the Bible and the Quran — on the Trinity, on the divinity and sonship of Christ, on the one way of salvation, on what makes a thing good or evil, on prayer and fasting and almsgiving, on jihad and the Canaanite wars, on the nature of the promised paradise, and on the discrepancies between the two books in their accounts of the creation, of Adam, of Noah and Abraham and Joseph and Moses and Solomon and Christ.

Then come the two long inquiries that are the real substance of the book. The first, and by far the longest, answers the charge of tahrif — that Christians corrupted their scriptures. It is a piece of textual scholarship as much as apologetics: he sets out the variant readings of the Quran itself, cites the collations by name (Kennicott's 603 Old Testament manuscripts, De Rossi's 976 more, Scholz's 1,276 New Testament copies), names the great codices and dates them against the Hijra, traces the chain of witness back through Origen and Eusebius and the Syriac and Old Latin versions to Clement and Ignatius and Polycarp, and argues that the standard applied to the Bible would unmake the Quran if applied to it.

The second inquiry answers the charge that the Bible stands abrogated, and turns on the doctors' own rules of abrogation — with Rahmatullah Kairanawi, the most famous Muslim controversialist of the age, quoted from his own books and from the printed record of the Agra debate.

The book had never been translated. It survives in a single lithographed Urdu printing of 1876 — handwritten Nastaliq calligraphy rather than type — and no English version has existed until now, in copyright or out of it.