182 Claudia Preckel
Ḥasan’s future career as a Nawwāb and his efforts to transform Bhopal
into a state broadly governed by Islamic principles. It is further said to
have reinforced the reception of Ibn Taymiyya in India.^66
Shortly after his return to Bhopal in 1871, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan married a
second time: his second wife was the widowed ruler of Bhopal, Shāh
Jahān Bēgum (d. 1901, r. 1868–1901). From that time on, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan
had an almost free hand in propagating the ideas and teachings of the
Ahl-i Ḥadīth. Two things are interesting: first, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan did not
officially divorce his first wife. Second, one of the teachings of the
Ahl-i Ḥadīth was that widows should be allowed to remarry.^67 They
claimed that the practice of forbidding widows to remarry was rooted
in Hinduism and not in Islam. Therefore, Muslim women should be
encouraged to remarry after divorce or the death of their husbands.
Indeed, in the South Asian context, widows of all non-Hindu religions
are allowed to remarry, but it is socially not accepted. The Hindu Wid-
ow’s Marriage Act of 1856 regulated the allowance of remarriage – but
widows thereby lost their limited interest in their husband’s estate.
According to more recent studies, “in the opinion of 20.08 per cent
Hindu widows, 8.33 per cent Muslim widows and non-Christian wid-
ows remarriage is against religion”.^68 In the 19th century, belief in the
prohibition of widow remarriage might have been even more deeply
rooted in the Muslim community. Since the mid-19th century, Mus-
lim reformist movements propagated allowing widow remarriage. The
Ṭarīqa-i Muḥammadiyya, for example, had started their campaign to
allow widow remarriage in the North Western Frontier Provinces.^69
66 See von Kügelgen, Anke: Ibn Taimiyyas Kritik an der aristotelischen Logik, in:
Dominik Perler and Ulrich Rudolph (eds.): Logik und Theologie. Das Organon
im arabischen und lateinischen Mittelalter, Leiden and Boston 2005, pp. 167–
226, see p. 172. Wael B. Hallaq reports that the manuscript of this key treatise
was kept in the Āṣafiyya Library, Hyderabad. In contrast to this, it has been
stated that it was in the private collection of the Zaydī Imams, from whence
Ṣiddīq Ḥasan brought it to India. See Hallaq, Wael B.: Ibn Taymiyya Against
the Greek Logicians, Oxford 1993, p. lv.
67 Preckel, Claudia: Interpretations of Widow Remarriage and Divorce. Shah
Jahan Bēgum’s (d. 1901) Tahdhib an-Niswan and the Ahl-e Hadith Move-
ment in 19th-century Bhopal, in: Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies 11 (2004),
pp. 41–51, here pp. 44–45; see also several certificates of marriage and divorce
in the edited volume by Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.): Divorce and Remarriage Among
Muslims in India, New Delhi 2003.
68 See Kitchlu, T. N.: Widows in India, New Delhi 1993, pp. 67–68.
69 Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl seems to have pleaded for the forced remarriage of
women. This might have been to win the support of the local Pashtuns, who
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