164 Claudia Preckel
century, which were accompanied by an “amalgamation of Islamic
and Turkic cultures”,^6 the majority of Indian Muslims belonged to
the Ḥanafī school of law, whereas the Ahl-i Ḥadīth refused to restrict
their legal interpretations to one school of law alone.^7 One of the con-
sequences was that they came into conflict with the Deobandīs, who
belonged to the Ḥanafī school of law and were named after the town
where they had set up their teaching institution Dār al-ʿulūm in 1866.^8
From the late 1880s onwards, the Ahl-i Ḥadīth were also in grim con-
troversies with the so-called Barēlwī movement, founded by Aḥmad
Riḍā Khān Barēlwī (d. 1921). Several scholarly disputes (sg. munāẓara)
took place among the various movements, and sometimes their dis-
putes even led to riots, which the British authorities were hardly able
to curb.^9 The members of the Barēlwī movement like the Deobandīs
strictly followed the Ḥanafī school of law. They were also initiated into
the Sufi order of the Qādiriyya and believed in the miraculous power
of the saints and the Prophet Muḥammad. In contrast to that, the Ahl-
i Ḥadīth argued that Muḥammad was a human being (bashar) who
had lived together with other human beings and led an ordinary life
with his wives and children. The Ahl-i Ḥadīth often quote the Koranic
verse (18:110) in which Muḥammad says, “Say that I am a human being
like you are” (qul innamā anā bashar mithlakum), in order to under-
line their view of Muḥammad as a mortal man. And they deny the
teachings of the Barēlwīs, who ascribed a “Muḥammadan light” (nūr
muḥammadī) to Muḥammad and all the prophets before him.^10
One of the earliest reproaches against the Ahl-i Ḥadīth movement
was that it was a mere offshoot of the Arabian Wahhabiyya. Their
opponents, mainly the Barēlwīs, were of the opinion that the Ahl-i
Ḥadīth were the Indian followers of the Ḥanbalī scholar Muḥammad
6 Malik, Jamal: Islam in South Asia. A Short History, Leiden 2008, p. 14.
7 On Islam in India see Basham, Arthur Llewellyn: The Wonder that was India,
New Delhi 1981, vol. 1; and Robinson, Francis: Islam and Muslim History in
South Asia, Delhi 2000.
8 For a detailed account of the movement, see Metcalf, Barbara: Islamic Revival
in British India. Deoband, 1860–1900, Princeton 1982. For recent developments
see Haroon, Sana: Frontier of Faith. Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland, New
York 2007, esp. pp. 91–103.
9 Metcalf mentions some examples of disputes between Ahl-i Ḥadīth and
Deobandīs in the 1870s and 1880s. See Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 275, 286.
10 For a scholarly debate between Ahl-i Ḥadīth and Barēlwīs on this question,
see Sahsawānī, Muḥammad Nadhīr: Munāẓara Aḥmadiyya, Kanpur 1289/1872,
pp. 37–39.
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