Ibn Taymiyya’s Worldview and the Challenge of Modernity 511
3. The Development of the Controversy and
Its Settlement at the Islamic World Conference in 1926
His strong position among the laymen and the Islamic public in gen-
eral notwithstanding, Thanāʾ Allāh had to suffer setbacks whenever
he confronted an audience consisting of Ahl-i Ḥadīth scholars. The
controversy should have been settled in 1904 at a major convention
in the Ahl-i Ḥadīth stronghold Arrah (province of Bihar). How-
ever Thanāʾ Allāh simply ignored the mediation and continued in the
same vein. Therefore a second attempt at mediation was prepared at
the meeting of the All India Ahl-i Ḥadīth Conference at Madras 14
years later. Whereas Thanāʾ Allāh pledged to follow the method of the
muḥaddithūn, his opponents promised to abstain from denouncing
him as beyond the pale of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth. This mediation was again
to no avail because Thanāʾ Allāh regarded it as licence to continue as
he pleased. This behaviour motivated ʿAbd al-Aḥād Khānpūrī as one
of those who had signed the agreement as a representative of Thanāʾ
Allāh’s opponents, to write his 450 page attack against the alleged
heretic. Finally the controversy calmed down due to the mediation of
an outsider and probably because certain arguments of Thanāʾ Allāh’s
opponents had become less and less convincing.^69
To understand this we must take a short glimpse at Thanāʾ Allāh’s
political attitudes. Before World War I he was a pro-British loyal-
ist. Therefore he shunned any association with the Saudi Wahhabis,
because sympathy for them was considered seditious by the colonial
authorities.^70 However, at the end of World War I he changed into
an ardent nationalist because of his abhorrence at the anti-Ottoman
policies of the British. He became a leading figure of the Khilafat com-
mittee in Punjab. This political organisation was made up primarily
of Deobandī and Ahl-i Ḥadīth scholars strove for the preservation
burgh 1972, pp. 117–134; Crottet, Bernard: Calvin. Biographie, Paris 1995,
p. 290–291. Rienk Vermij (The Calvinist Copernicans. The Reception of the
New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic; 1575–1750, Amsterdam 2002, pp. 239–
333), stresses, however, that the resistance to post Copernican astronomy in
the Dutch Reformed Church was much stronger than Hooykaas’ presentation
suggests. Nevertheless, he too confirms that the advocates of the new astrono-
my took recourse to Calvin’s arguments to justify their approach; MacCulloch,
Reformation, pp. 685–688.
69 Riexinger, Sanāʾullāh Amritsarī, pp. 356–364.
70 Ibid., p. 523.
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