178 Claudia Preckel
3. Central Impact of the Yemen Connection
Around the mid-19th century, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān got to know two
brothers in Bhopal^49 who originally came from Ḥudayda in Yemen:
Ḥusayn Ibn Muḥsin^50 (d. 1910) and Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn Ibn Muḥsin
(d. 1880).^51 Their family had met the ruler of Bhopal, Sikander Bēgum,
and her entourage, when the Bēgum performed her pilgrimage to Mec-
ca (ḥajj) in 1863–1864.^52 Some family members had accompanied the
Indians on their Hajj, and the Bēgum later also asked Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn
to come to Bhopal. He followed her invitation and became the state
kadi. His younger brother Ḥusayn joined him later in India^53 and
gained fame as a teacher of Hadith. The Yemenite brothers brought a
new impetus of Islamic reformism to Bhopal, namely the works of the
49 There are contradictions in the chronology of events in the history of this Arab
family and Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s autobiographical accounts that could not be
clarified. It is still questionable whether Ḥusayn Ibn Muḥsin had already come
to Bhopal at the time Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān arrived there in 1854.
50 For a short biography, see Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān, Abjad al-ʿulūm, part 3, pp. 211–
213; Sayf, Taḥrīk-i Ahl-i ḥadīth, pp. 642–645. I am deeply indebted to Ḥusayn
b. Muḥsin’s descendant Rāfiʿ ʿArab (Bhopal), who is also a prominent member
of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth in India, for writing down his family history in Urdu for
me.
51 On him, see the family history mentioned above. In contrast to his brother
Ḥusayn, Zayn never became a prominent supporter of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth and
never wrote any books in its favour. Also important is that the Yemenite broth-
ers were a link between Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān and prominent Yemenite Hadith
scholars, like the families of the al-Ahdāl and al-Mizjājī from Zabīd, and also
to the Idrīsī tradition of Aḥmad b. Idrīs (d. 1837). On them, see Voll, John O.:
Linking Groups in the Networks of Eighteenth-century Revivalist Scholars.
The Mizjaji Family in Yemen, in: Nehemia Levtzion and John O. Voll (eds.):
Eighteenth-century Renewal and Reform in Islam, Syracuse 1992, pp. 69–92,
here pp. 79–80; Radtke, Bernd: The Exoteric Aḥmad Ibn Idrīs. A Sufi’s Critique
of the Madhāhib and the Wahhābīs, Leiden 2000. For these connections, which
are beyond the scope of this paper, see also Reichmuth, Stefan: The World of
Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1732–91). Studies on the Life, Networks and Writings of an
Islamic Humanist Scholar of the 18th Century, Cambridge 2009, pp. 22–25, 107–
109, 152–158 (al-Ahdal family) and pp. 21–25, 220, 230, 282 (al-Mizjājī family);
Preckel, Islamische Bildungsnetzwerke, pp. 127–130.
52 For an account of her pilgrimage, see Bēgum, Sikander: A Pilgrimage to Mecca,
Calcutta 1906, new edition by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Bloomington 2008.
53 The reason for Ḥusayn’s final migration to India was a dispute with the Otto-
man authorities of Ḥudayda on the taxation of pearls. After Ḥusayn had even
been imprisoned and tortured, he finally followed his brother to Bhopal.
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