Farangī Maḥall was a family of prominent Indian Ḥanafī scholars and mystics who flourished from the twelfth/eighteenth century to the twentieth. The family traces its ancestry through the great scholar and mystic Khwāja ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī of Herat (d. 481/1089) to Ayyūb al-Anṣārī, the Prophet's host in Medina. It is not known when the family migrated to India but, according to family biographers, one ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn settled in Sihālī, in the Awadh province of north India, during the eighth/fourteenth century. His descendant Mullā Ḥāfiẓ was