Screening Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s Library 173
collections of Hadith should be taken as sources for decisions in law.
This relativised the positions of the four schools of law (madhāhib,
sg. madhhab), because the text of the Hadith itself was regarded to
be “more authentic”. Shāh Walī Allāh did not criticise adherence to
one school of law in general, but the “blind following of one particu-
lar school of law” (taqlīd), especially in cases in which the opinion of
one school of law contradicted the Hadith. He further warned against
a certain fanaticism in following one particular school (taʿaṣṣub fī al-
madhhab), since all schools of law could be regarded as equal. Shāh
Walī Allāh’s critical position against taqlīd was further developed by
the Ṭarīqa-yi Muḥammadiyya and later by the Ahl-i Ḥadīth. The focus
on Hadith was promulgated in the Madrasa-yi Raḥīmiyya, where Shāh
Walī Allāh, his sons, grandsons, nephews and other family members
taught. The members of the Ṭarīqa-yi Muḥammadiyya acquired teach-
ing licenses (ijāzāt) in Hadith from Shāh Walī Allāh’s family members,
were often initiated into Naqshbandī Sufism and had studied works on
the relevance of the independent legal reasoning (ijtihād) from Yemen.
Students of this profile linked with each other and formed new net-
works that later became the Ahl-i Ḥadīth.
2.2. Ḥasan Khān’s Hadith-Teacher ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq BanārsīṢiddīq Ḥasan’s father Sayyid Awlād Ḥasan Khān had been deeply
influenced by the Ṭarīqa-yi Muḥammadiyya. He died in 1837, when
Ṣiddīq Ḥasan was a child of only five years. Some of his father’s friends
decided to take care of young Ṣiddīq Ḥasan’s education, and thus he
travelled to the Northern Indian cities Kanpur, Rampur and Delhi.
In Delhi, he studied with some Hadith experts, for example with the
sons and grandsons of Shāh Walī Allāh in the Madrasa-yi Raḥīmiyya.
He is also said to have met the most renowned Hadith scholar of
his time, Nadhīr Ḥusayn Dihlawī (d. 1902),^32 who became one of the
the method of ʿamal bil-ḥadīth to back their legal decisions and the mere
muḥaddithūn who analyse the corpus of the Hadith concerning the chain of
transmission (sanad) and text (matn). See Nafi, Basheer: A Teacher of Ibn ʿAbd
al-Wahhāb. Muḥammad Ḥayāt al-Sindī and the Revival of aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth’s
Methodology, in: Islamic Law and Society 13 (2006), pp. 208–241, here pp. 208–
209.
32 Although Nadhīr Ḥusayn is one of the founding figures of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth,
so far no extensive biography has been written on him in a European language.
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