200 Claudia Preckel
into contact with other influences, mostly during their pilgrimage to
Mecca. Nevertheless, all of them remained supporters of the Ḥanafī
school of law. Hence, the Ahl-i Ḥadīth acknowledged only them as
their intellectual predecessors. This is mainly because of their inter-
est in the study of Hadith though they cannot be considered as Ahl-i
Ḥadīth in the narrow sense of this word, simply because they lived
before the institutionalisation of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth in 1912. They never
officially announced to have left the Ḥanafī school of law, and their
interpretation of the ijtihād.
Muḥammad Ḥayāt al-Sindī, for example, never claimed to have left
the Ḥanafī madhhab, but insisted on “finding a legal decision accord-
ing to Hadith”, called ʿamal bil-ḥadīth in Urdu. In contrast to him,
Shāh Walī Allāh, who also claimed to have never left the Ḥanafī school
of law, but gave different views on ijtihād/taqlīd in his numerous
works. In his Arabic work ʿIqd al-jīd fī aḥkām al-ijtihād wal-taqlīd
(The Necklace about the Rulings of the ijtihād and taqlīd),^122 Shāh
Walī Allāh stressed the necessesity of the four schools of law, especially
for the layman. Every Muslim needed guidance, and the fatwas of the
mufti should likewise be the layman’s guide. Every Muslim and espe-
cially the scholars should try to learn about the traditions. The exact
transmission of the Hadith is of utmost importance. Therefore, there
should be a close link between the disciplines of fiqh and Hadith, and
the ʿamal bil-ḥadīth should be performed in each legal decision. In this
point the Ahl-i Ḥadīth followed Shāh Walī Allāh. In his work Ḥujjat
Allāh al-bāligha,^123 Shāh Walī Allāh further stated that the ijtihād is
not a necessity in all times and for all Muslims, meaning that it is a
duty which is fulfilled when parts of the umma do accomplish it (farḍ
kifāya).^124 This meant that Shāh Walī Allāh held the qualified scholars
to be responsible for the ijtihād. Following the famous Shāfiʿī schol-
122 Dihlawī, Shāh Walī Allāh: ʿIqd al-jīd fī aḥkām al-ijtihād wal-taqlīd, Bombay
1306/1889 (see Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, suppl. 2,
p. 615). For this book see the partial translation by Rahbar, Mohammad Daud:
Shah Waliullah and Ijtihad, in: Muslim World 45 (1955), pp. 346–358.
123 This paragraph is a summary of Dihlawī, Shāh Walī Allāh: Ḥujjat Allāh
al-bāligha, part 1–2 (see Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur,
vol. 2, p. 418), suppl. 2, p. 615, especially part I, pp. 144–146 (chapter on the
reasons for the differences of the schools of law) and pp. 147–152 (chapter on the
difference between the ahl al-ḥadīth and the ahl al-raʾy). For several important
quotations see Sayf, Taḥrīk-i Ahl-i ḥadīth, pp. 108, 197–199, 200–202.
124 For Shāh Walī Allāh’s interpretation of this see Nadwi, Saviours of Islamic
Spirit, vol. 4, pp. 42–43.
Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological University
Authenticated