Screening Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s Library 183
In Bhopal, the second marriage of the Bēgum in 1871 did not remain
undisputed. Shāh Jahān Bēgum’s own daughter Sulṭān Jahān Bēgum
was one of her stepfather’s fiercest opponents and often declared him
to be a Wahhabi who forced her mother to be in purda, the Indian
(Muslim) version of veiling.^70 The official documents of that time and
the daughter’s memoirs make it clear that she was against her mother’s
marriage for dynastic reasons. Nevertheless, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan remained
Nawwāb until 1885, when he was accused of instigating Indian Mus-
lims against the British. The British deprived him of all his titles and
sentenced him to house arrest in his palace Nūr Maḥall, where he lived
until his death in 1890. He was not allowed to see his wife Shāh Jahān
Bēgum during the day, but could spend the night with her in her pal-
ace, the Tāj Maḥall.^71 After Ṣiddīq Ḥasan was forced to give up his
titles, his personal networks were also destroyed. He was not able to
keep up his contacts with publishers in Cairo or Istanbul, and the pub-
lication of his works ended. It was only with the emergence of the
Salafiyya that some of his Arabic works were reprinted in Beirut. The
majority of his books in Persian and Urdu, however, have not been
reprinted. One of the main reasons might be that other persons in the
Ahl-i Ḥadīth^72 became more influential within the movement. The fact
that other scholars of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth from Bhopal, like Ḥusayn b.
practiced the remarriage of widows to the deceased husband’s younger brother.
Here, tensions between the Ḥanafī law, the Pashtuns’ “code of honour”, the
Pashtūnwalī, and the reformers’ interpretation of Islam become obvious. See
Colvin, Notice of the Peculiar Tracts, p. 493.
70 At the end of the 19th century, India (especially Bhopal) was the scene of fierce
controversies about the system of purda (literally Urdu for “curtain”). The
purda system not only meant wearing a veil, but also implied the segregation of
women in separate parts of the household, the zenāna. Although Sulṭān Jahān
Bēgum severely criticised her mother for wearing purda, she herself was a fierce
supporter of the purda system. Pictures of her public appearance show her com-
pletely veiled in a burqa (in light colours) including a face veil. In 1922, she even
published a book titled Hijab, or Why Purda is Necessary, Calcutta 1922. How-
ever, she abandoned the purda system after her abdication in 1926, four years
before her death. Her argument was that the veil was no longer necessary for
her because of her age. For more discussions on the issue of the veil in the 19th
century, see Minault, Gail: Secluded Scholars. Women’s Education and Muslim
Social Reform in Colonial India, Delhi 1999.
71 Saeedullah, Life and Works, p. 73 (quoting ʿAlī Ḥasan Khān, Maʾāthir-i Ṣiddīqī,
vol. 3, pp. 169–173) and personal communication with Ṣiddīq Ḥasan’s descen-
dent Ali Hasan Mujeeb, Bhopal 2001.
72 I. e. Thanāʾallāh Amritsārī, see the article by Martin Riexinger in this volume.
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