168 Claudia Preckel
al-Wahhāb did: both scholars drew inspiration from the famous 14th-
century Ḥanbalī reformers Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim
al-Jawziyya. This claim by critics of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth is underlined by
more recent Saudi Arabian scholars who mention either Ṣiddīq Ḥasan
Khān or other Ahl-i Ḥadīth members among prominent supporters of
the Arabian Wahhabiyya.^19
This article analyses whether Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān and his scholarly
movement, the Ahl-i Ḥadīth, were deeply and directly influenced by
the Arabian Wahhabiyya or whether it was their reliance on the afore-
mentioned Damascene reformers Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim
that gave this movement a strong Wahhabi flavour:
i. This very first part deals with reception of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth move-
ment among the Muslim community in India. The use of Ibn
Taymiyya and other Ḥanbalī authors was widely regarded as proof
of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth’s linkage with the Saudi Arabian Wahhabiyya.
ii. Part two highlights influences of a decisive predecessor movement,
the Ṭarīqa-yi Muḥammadiyya, that had a strong impact on the
shaping of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth.
iii. Part three focuses on the latter’s Yemen connection.
iv. Part four depicts the rise of Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān to power in the
North Indian Muslim principality Bhopal.
v. In the fifth part, attention is given to the question of the kinds of
books Ḥanbalī authors read, how they worked with and com-
mented on them in 19th-century Bhopal. The genres of traditional
Islamic science from which these works were mainly taken will
also be analysed.
Overall, the following study is based on the list of books that Ṣiddīq
Ḥasan Khān claimed to have bought for his personal library. He list-
ed these 603 books in his work Silsilat al-ʿasjad fī dhikr mashāʾikh al-
sanad (The Golden Chain Commemorating the Shaykhs of the Line of
Transmission).^20 The books he mentioned belong to various disciplines
of Islamic science and were written in Arabic, Persian or Urdu. Ṣiddīq
19 See Āl al-Shaykh, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf: Mashāhīr ʿulamāʾ Najd wa-
ghayrihim, Riyadh 1394/1974, p. 451; and al-Salafī, Abū al-Mukarram ʿAbd
al-Jalīl: Daʿwat al-imām Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb fī shibh al-qārra al-
hindiyya, Riyadh 1413/1993.
20 Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān, Muḥammad: Silsilat al-ʿasjad fī dhikr mashāʾikh al-sanad,
Bhopal 1293/1876.
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