174 Claudia Preckel
central figures of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth network. Almost all major late
19 th- and early 20th-century Ahl-i Ḥadīth scholars studied under him,
which earned him the appellation shaykh al-kull (“teacher of all”).
Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān met another person who was extremely influential
in shaping the teachings of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth: ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Banārsī
(d. 1870),^33 who became Ṣiddīq Ḥasan’s Hadith teacher in Delhi. ʿAbd
al-Ḥaqq also wrote the first Indian treatise against blindly following
juridical opinions (taqlīd), calling instead to search for juridical proofs
only in the Koran and the Sunna of the Prophet. These ideas, which
went beyond Shāh Walī Allāh’s understanding of ijtihād^34 within
one school of law, were the foundation for the later Ahl-i Ḥadīth.
ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq had been a member of the Ṭarīqa-yi Muḥammadiyya
before he became a follower of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth. In 1821, he went to
Mecca and Medina with Sayyid Aḥmad Barēlwī’s pilgrimage group.
Unlike the other members of this group, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq decided to
stay behind in the Hijaz. Later he travelled to the Yemenite capital,
Sanaa, where he met and studied with Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī
(d. 1834). ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Banārsī later became the first man in India to
teach al-Shawkānī’s works (and, as will be demonstrated in the course
of this article, thus indirectly also Ibn Taymiyya’s). When Ṣiddīq
Ḥasan met ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, the latter was already a renowned teacher
of Hadith and of works against taqlīd.
2.3. The Intellectual Precursor Shāh Muḥammad IsmāʿīlOne of Shāh Walī Allāh’s grandsons, Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (1779–
1832), gained special importance for the later movement of the Ahl-i
Ḥadīth. Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, who might be considered its intellectu-
al precursor, compiled among others, three Persian and Urdu works
in which he explained the theories and teachings of the Ṭarīqa-yi
Muḥammadiyya. The first book is called Taqwiyat al-īmān (Strength-
For short biographies in Urdu, see Nawshahrawī, Tarājim, pp. 135–154; Sayf,
Taḥrīk-i Ahl-i ḥadīth, pp. 323–330. For an extensive, quite hagiographic Urdu
biography, see Bihārī, Faḍl-i Ḥusayn: al-Ḥayāt baʿd al-mamāt, Delhi 1908, vari-
ous reprints.
33 For a biography, see Nawshahrawī, Tarājim, pp. 280–282; Sayf, Taḥrīk-i Ahl-i
ḥadīth, pp. 391–392.
34 He wrote the treatise al-Durr al-farīd fi-manʿ al-taqlīd (The Precious Pearls
About the Prohibition of taqlīd), or simply Radd al-taqlīd (Against taqlīd).
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