Screening Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s Library 177
Taqwiyat al-īmān, which was translated into Urdu in 1833–34 but
seems to have been written ten years earlier, states:
The services which he [Muḥammad Ismāʿīl] has rendered for the reforma-
tion of Ummah and his undertaking the task of Da’wah [the mission of
propagating Islam]; especially after the previous works of Shaikhul-Islam
Ibn Taimiyah and Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, are absolutely unfor-
gettable and shall always be cherished in our minds.^45Although in general Muḥammad Ismāʿīl himself makes no direct ref-
erences to specific writings of Ibn Taymiyya, far more obvious is the
appreciation of Ibn Taymiyya through another strand of transmission,
the works of the Yemenite scholar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī.^46
Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān in his work al-Idrāk li-takhrīj aḥādīth radd
al-ishrāk (Grasping the Interpretation of Hadith in the Negation of
Polytheism),^47 which comment on Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s works and
make some references to Ibn Taymiyya, also without mentioning
bibliographic details.^48 Here, it is obvious that Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān
had become familiar with some of Ibn Taymiyya’s thoughts through
the Ṭarīqa-yi Muḥammadiyya. Especially during their pilgrim-
age to the Hijaz in 1821, the leaders and members of the Ṭarīqa-yi
Muḥammadiyya might have studied some of Ibn Taymiyya’s writings.
It is possible that they also came across the works of Muḥammad b.
ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, although this is not explicitly stated. Hence, the influ-
ences to which Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān was exposed in India were already
decisively shaped by reform ideas from the Arab world, notably but in
no way exclusively from the Arabian Peninsula.
45 Mujahid, Abdul-Malik: Publishers Note, in: Shah Ismail Shaheed Taqwiyat
al-īmān Riyadh: Dar-us-Salam Publ., 1995, p. 9.
46 Following Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s work Radd al-ishrāk, which is a collection of
his own and Sayyid Aḥmad’s sermons, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan conceived the following
kinds of polytheism: polytheism in knowledge (shirk fī al-ʿilm), polytheism
in the field of authority (shirk fī al-taṣarruf), polytheism in worship (shirk fī
al-ʿibāda) and polytheism in blind following (shirk fī al-taqlīd).
47 Kanpur 1873.
48 See also Saeedullah, Life and Works, pp. 109–111, here p. 110.
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