"Born in northern Sialkot in the year of Newton’s death, Tafazzul belonged to an eminent family who were converts to Shi’ism and close to the fading Mughal court. He studied logic, mathematics and natural philosophy in the imperial capital at Delhi, then moved to Awadh in 1745, where he rose rapidly in favour with the Nawāb Shujā’u‘d-Dawla. Tafazzul enrolled in Lucknow at the celebrated college at Firangī Maḥal, a former Dutch trader’s house taken over in the name of the emperor Aurangzeb in 1693 for the cultivation of a neoteric curriculum developed by the learned Nizām-ud dīn Sahalvī, where material from the rationalist tradition of Greco-Arabic texts was taught to candidates for courtly and administrative responsibilities.