The Lived Prophetic Model: Reinterpreting Sirah as an Ethical Framework in the Malfuzat of South Asian Sufism

Abstract

Sirah has been treated primarily as a historical or legal text, and its role as a historical guide for moral conduct was overlooked. This article attempts to solve the problem of application by describing the Lived Prophetic Model and the Malfuzat literature (oral teachings) of the recorded conversations of the South Asian masters, which is the most important yet under-researched source of this lived tradition. The study takes a three-dimensional approach that frames the themes in a Sirah in terms of their ethical function, instead of historical chronology, and represents the themes through the dialogic nature of Malfuzat, the Sufi concept of spiritual transmission (Nisbat), and the contextual urgency of medieval and colonial South Asia, the themes are grouped into categories of the inward gaze for the process of self-transformation, the outward hand for the process of social equity, and the communal bond for the process of building moral community. The article illustrates the concept of Malfuz interpretation through a case study of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah as explained in various Malfuz collections, which shows that Malfuz interpretation is not static, but is a living hermeneutical tool, a science of remedies not a science of reports. Arguing for the profound relevance of the Malfuz tradition in the context of the pedagogic model, the article brings the recovered paradigm into the present field of leadership development training, interfaith ethics, and mental wellness discourse. The Malfuz-based hermeneutics promise a potentially strong recovery in various fields in which the problem of knowing and becoming good is the central issue of the current time.

Keywords: Malfuzat, Sirah, lived Prophetic model, Nisbat, Tazkiya, Sufi pedagogy