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The Arabic quotations throughout this piece were added by me and can be found on the links at the end of the text. It defenitely isn't the most academic rigorous way, but accessing the physical copies of these books, or the scanned versions is fairly complicated...

Yesterday I read a few academic articles on ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Lakhnawī and came across several points which I'll summarize here, along with some personal reflections.

The article I found most interesting was Mohsin Ali's "The Growth of Arabic Biographical Writing in South Asia from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century" (International Journal of Middle East Studies 55, 2023: 134–138). In the subcontinent, biographies of scholars were written in Persian [and had a poetic quality, romanticized in style], with a focus on the spirituality of the person's life, his karāmāt, and so on.

Biographies of ʿulamāʾ in the Arab world, by contrast, were much drier. They emphasized the person's religious knowledge, his teachers, his scholarly achievements, and where he fit within a religious genealogy. That doesn't mean spiritual achievements went unmentioned, only that they were one aspect among several, rather than the organizing theme.

In the nineteenth century, with the rise of hadith sciences in the subcontinent, the ʿulamāʾ naturally gravitated toward the Arab historiographical approach. Two of the best examples are Nawāb Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān's al-Tāj al-Mukallal and al-Lakhnawī's biographical dictionary of Ḥanafī scholars, al-Fawāʾid al-Bahiyya fī Tarājim al-Ḥanafiyya. What I find most fascinating is that these two scholars, in adopting the Arabic style of biography, did so in two very different ways, because they had different goals.

Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān wanted to anchor the Indian anti-taqlīd movement within a wider network stretching back centuries across the Muslim world. In al-Tāj al-Mukallal, he starts with Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and moves through various scholars across Muslim lands. I think this point deserves further digging, the way movements try to link themselves to a deeper past, and how this can sometimes shade into anachronism, as I'd argue happens with both the Deobandis and the Ahl-i Ḥadīth. This is something I hope to expand on in a future piece: are the Ahl-i Ḥadīth as we know them today truly continuous with the ahl al-ḥadīth of the first centuries? Can the heavy emphasis contemporary Ahl-i Ḥadīth place on taʿaṣṣub and tamadhhub (in contrast to the early ahl al-ḥadīth, for whom the madhāhib weren't yet properly established) really be traced back to that earlier usage of the term? And what about the attempt by some Ahl-i Ḥadīth, like the Deobandis, to claim descent from Shāh Walī Allāh? Isn't this also a kind of anachronism, given that Walī Allāh never claimed to abandon the Ḥanafī madhhab or become lā-madhhabī? He says as much explicitly in ʿIqd al-Jīd fī Aḥkām al-Ijtihād wa-l-Taqlīd, in the chapter titled:

بَابُ تَأْكِيدِ الْأَخْذِ بِهَذِهِ الْمَذَاهِبِ الْأَرْبَعَةِ وَالتَّشْدِيدِ فِي تَرْكِهَا وَالْخُرُوجِ عَنْهَا (1)

("On the Necessity of Adhering to These Four Madhhabs, and the Severity of the Warning Against Abandoning or Departing from Them")

where he writes:

اعْلَمْ أَنَّ فِي الْأَخْذِ بِهَذِهِ الْمَذَاهِبِ الْأَرْبَعَةِ مَصْلَحَةً عَظِيمَةً، وَفِي الْإِعْرَاضِ عَنْهَا كُلِّهَا مَفْسَدَةً كَبِيرَةً، وَنَحْنُ نُبَيِّنُ ذَلِكَ بِوُجُوهٍ (2)

("Know that there is great benefit in adhering to these four madhhabs, and great harm in turning away from all of them, and we shall explain that from several angles.")

And in al-Inṣāf fī bayān asbāb al-Ikhtilāf he mentions:

ومنها أنهم اطمأنوا بالتقليد، ودب التقليد في صدورهم دبيب النمل وهم لا يشعرون... وأيضًا جهل رؤوس الناس، واستفتاء الناس من لا علم له بالحديث ولا بطريق التخريج، كما ترى ذلك ظاهرًا في أكثر المتأخرين... وفي ذلك الوقت ثبتوا على التعصب (3)

("Among [the causes] is that they became complacent through taqlīd, and taqlīd crept into their hearts the way ants creep, without their noticing... and also the ignorance of the leading figures among the people, and people seeking rulings from those with no knowledge of hadith or of the methods of derivation, as you plainly see in most of the later generations... and at that point they became entrenched in taʿaṣṣub.")

This shall be explored further, I hope, in a later article.

Al-Lakhnawī's project, by contrast, was to show the internal diversity within Ḥanafism in the subcontinent. This echoes Shāh Walī Allāh's own point in al-Inṣāf fī Bayān Asbāb al-Ikhtilāf, where he identifies ignorance of history and of the development of ideas as one of the main causes of taʿaṣṣub. Al-Lakhnawī was an interesting Ḥanafī: attached to the madhhab, but not hesitant to step outside it, in creed or in fiqh, when he felt the dalīl was stronger. A good example comes from al-Fawāʾid al-Bahiyya, in his entry on ʿIṣām ibn Yūsuf, where he writes:

عصام بن يوسف بن ميمون بن قدامة أبو عصمة البلخي أخو إبراهيم بن يوسف كانا شيخي بلخ في زمانهما بغير مدافع لهما... ويعلم أيضًا أن الحنفي لو ترك في مسألة مذهب إمامه لقوة دليل خلافه لا يخرج به عن ربقة التقليد بل هو عين التقليد في صورة ترك التقليد، ألا ترى إلى أن عصام بن يوسف ترك مذهب أبي حنيفة في عدم الرفع ومع ذلك هو معدود في الحنفية... (4)

("ʿIṣām ibn Yūsuf ibn Maymūn ibn Qudāma, Abū ʿIṣma al-Balkhī, brother of Ibrāhīm ibn Yūsuf: the two of them were, in their time, the uncontested shaykhs of Balkh... And it is also known that if a Ḥanafī abandons his imam's position on an issue because the opposing evidence is stronger, this does not remove him from the bond of taqlīd, rather it is itself taqlīd in the guise of abandoning taqlīd. Do you not see that ʿIṣām ibn Yūsuf abandoned Abū Ḥanīfa's position on not raising the hands [in prayer], and yet he is still counted among the Ḥanafīs...")

In other words: a Ḥanafī who departs from Abū Ḥanīfa's position on a single issue, because the counter-evidence is stronger, doesn't thereby leave the fold of taqlīd, he remains, in al-Lakhnawī's eyes, a Ḥanafī.

Personally, I think both Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān's and al-Lakhnawī's projects remain valuable today. Speaking from a Salafi point of view, one can benefit from Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān's transnational approach, it's a reminder that the Salafi tradition is far from limited to Saudi Arabia, and has appeared as a vibrant intellectual current in other contexts on its own terms. As for al-Lakhnawī's project, it's a useful reminder that even within the Saudi context, Salafi scholars don't come in one packet, and hold different views on issues that Salafis in the West often assume are clear-cut, such as al-inkār al-ʿalanī (public denunciation), which some consider tantamount to khurūj and others do not.

Finally, a Turkish-language article, Sümeyye Onuk Demirci, "[19th] Century: Two Mutually Opposed Scholars in the Indian Subcontinent: The Polemical Exchanges Between Lakhnawī and Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān", traces how the two scholars debated each other directly. It began with al-Lakhnawī pointing out factual errors in Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān's work, and grew into a fuller exchange over taqlīd, the role of ijmāʿ, and related questions. In a sense, the differing goals behind their two biographical projects didn't just coexist, they actively fed into this sectarian back-and-forth.

(1) https://usul.ai/ar/t/ciqd-jayyid

(2) Ibid

(3)https://www.islamicbook.ws/asol/alinsaf-lldhlwi.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(4) https://shamela.ws/book/132617/116

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"Two Biographies, Two Projects: Lakhnawī, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān, and the Politics of Genealogy"