Screening Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s Library 179
Yemenite scholar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī.^54 Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn
and his brother had been students of al-Shawkānī’s son Aḥmad
(d. 1864?). Al-Shawkānī was a Zaydī Shii,^55 but he used many Sunni
sources – especially in the fields of fiqh and Hadith.^56 He refused to
take radical Shii positions, like slandering the companions or favour-
ing the ahl al-bayt. This was in accordance with those Zaydī ideas
that the Shāfiʿī population of the Yemen regarded as having tendencies
toward “Sunnitisation”. Recent Zaydī scholars even held al-Shawkānī
responsible for dismantling the Zaydiyya by introducing Salafi or even
Wahhabi thoughts into the Yemen.^57 Al-Shawkānī was the Chief Judge
(qāḍī al-quḍāt) of the Imamate of Yemen. Besides his career as a judge,
he gained great popularity even among Sunni scholars because of his
criticism of taqlīd in legal matters. In contrast to those modernists who
consider ijtihād to be “free reasoning”, al-Shawkānī wanted a fatwa
(legal judgement) to be in accordance with the Koran and the Sunna of
the Prophet. He even claimed the necessity of ijtihād for the layman
(ʿāmmī). Shawkānī’s position was deeply rooted in the school of the
Ẓāhirīs, especially in the works of the Andalusian scholar Ibn Ḥazm
(d. 1046). Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān – like al-Shawkānī before him – also
fully approved and even admired the Ẓāhirīs,^58 who denied the legiti-
macy of legal decisions based on analogy (qiyās), consensus (ijmāʿ) and
54 For a biography, see Haykel, Bernard: Revival and Reform in Islam. The
Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkānī, Cambridge 2003; al-Amri, Husayn Ibn-
Abdullah: The Yemen in the 18th and 19th Centuries. A Political and Intellectual
History, London 1985; Ibn ʿAbbās al-Wājih, ʿAbd al-Salām: Aʿlām al-muʾallifīn
al-Zaydiyya (Leading Authors of the Zaydiyya), Sanaa 1420/1999, pp. 958–978.
Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān stressed the important role of al-Shawkānī for his own
works in Abjad al-ʿulūm, part 3, pp. 194–211 and al-Tāj al-mukallal, pp. 443–
456.
55 Recent scholars of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth strictly deny that al-Shawkānī was a Zaydī
Shii, but maintain that he belonged to the Sunni Shāfiʿī school of law. Personal
communication by the author with Ahl-i Ḥadīth members and students at the
Nadwat ul-ʿulamāʾ in Delhi and Lucknow in 2001.
56 Haykel, Revival and Reform, pp. 109–110.
57 On tensions between the Zaydiyya and the Salafis/Wahhabis in the 20th/21st cen-
tury, see the paper by vom Bruck, Gabriele: Regimes of Piety Revisited. Zaydī
Political Moralities in Republican Yemen, in: Die Welt des Islams 50 (2010),
pp. 185–223.
58 Ignaz Goldziher’s famous book Die Zahiriten was first published in Leipzig
in 1884 and was much later translated into English as Goldziher, Ignaz: The
Ẓāhirīs. Their Doctrine and Their History. A Contribution to the History of
Islamic Theology, Leiden 2007. For a biography of Ibn Ḥazm from the Ahl-i
Ḥadīth perspective, see Sayf, Taḥrīk-i Ahl-i ḥadīth, p. 79.
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