It is a commonplace trope to see the incorporation of material objects in Muslim devotional practices, particularly in South Asia, as symptomatic of a “popular” Islam shaped by local religious traditions and disconnected from the textual discourses of Muslim scholarly authority and knowledge systems. In this paper, I challenge these assumptions by examining the logic of Muslim discourses and practices surrounding the veneration of material remains, or relics, associated with the Prophet Muhammad in early modern South Asia. Within the tradition such remains are often referred to as the Prophet’s traces (asar in Persian or athar in Arabic); these include both corporeal relics such as cuttings of the Prophet’s hair or parings of his nails, as well as objects of use, such as his staff, sandals, and cloak. In this paper I examine a particular category of asar known as qadams, stones bearing the impression of a foot, purportedly that of the Prophet Muhammad’s. The study takes as its point of departure the arrival of a qadam from the Hijaz to the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556–1605) in the late sixteenth century. In my presentation I reconstruct the debates engendered by the arrival of the relic based on two hitherto unexamined works that I read in conversation with other contemporary sources. The first is the Risalah-i Qadamiyah, a prosimetric work written in Persian that was not only authorized by the Mughal court but is also the earliest known treatise on the topic of footprint relics produced in Muslim South Asia. The second is a local history of Gujarat written by the man responsible for bringing the relic to the Mughal court from Mecca. In tracing the contours of the debate precipitated by the arrival of the qadam, we begin to see how early modern Muslims navigated issues of authenticity and efficacy of sacred objects on the one hand, and questions of textual authority and the economy of knowledge on the other, particularly as it pertained to the performance of rituals of veneration for relics of the Prophet Muhammad. In doing so, this paper seeks to redress the commonplace trope of disassociating material practice from the textual tradition in the historiography of Muslim devotion in South Asia and beyond.