Anglo-Gujrati Mufti

Gateway to the sepulcher of Shah Wali Allah

فرستا صالح را به در، که متجرّیِ نامِ سردارِ مدینه است

چو مسیح‌نفس، کم‌کرده آید به دربارِ مدینه

Dispatch Saaleh to the gallows! For he has dared to say the Lord of Madina’s name

For even the Messiah Jesus will halt his breath when he arrives in Madina

Fresh out of completing the six canons of Hadith—the qawānin of life– in South Africa, I migrate to Chicago to begin my master’s, pursuing some branded fusion of Persian literature, cultural anthropology, and Mughal history. Not even two weeks of moving to Hyde Park, I take a drab grey train—slightly more streamlined, steam-lined than BART—towards the pine tree-lined suburbs of Glendale Heights, where I would eventually live for three years, amid the bolts of COVID. Entering the purple-inflected, campus, I lilt towards the office where it was epigraphed: Shaykh Amin Kholwadia, President.

I sit down before the Shaykh, in tahiyyat position, life-gifting posture, as he holds a red-rotted powdery book, likely block-pressed in an old Indian publishing house in the 1940’s that he had purchased in the village of Deoband. He eyes me, grins and says to read. I journey to the end of the Muqaddima, pausing once in the introduction as our author describes seeing the soul of His lordship, the Holy Prophet, in the Shah Jahan-built Masjid of Delhi, lording over and commanding him to write the text, in the 1750’s, in the same moment as Lord Robert Clive, and after him, Lord Cornwallis, began to plunder into the territorial integrity of the sons of Tamerlane, dar araziy-I saltanat-I Taimuriyya. The Introduction comes to a completion, the Arabic of Wali Allah suspended like applause before us. The Shaykh begins:

And Shah Wali Allah of Mughal India..

My head swirls to the moment that we sat on stage in Azaadville, the day of our ‘Alimiyya graduation, when Shah Waliullah’s name recited out in the metallic chain, with our Bukhari purple-paged texts lapped open before us, the Qadimi Qutub Khana ink finally shining before our eyes, in the aftermath of the logos of the Lord of Prophets.

My head swirls to the moment that we sat on stage in Azaadville, the day of our ‘Alimiyya graduation, when Shah Waliullah’s name recited out in the metallic chain, with our Bukhari purple-paged texts lapped open before us, the Qadimi Qutub Khana ink finally shining before our eyes, in the aftermath of the logos of the Lord of Prophets.

The first mention of Shah Wali Allah ever in English, in the 1800’s, by the British Resident Archibald in Delhi in a petition to Lord Cornwallis.

In the late 1770’s, for he was blind after, the grandfather of the founder of Tablighi Jam’at, Mufti Elahi Bakhsh, records that once he was praying Tarawih behind Shah ‘Abd al-Aziz, son of Wali Allah, some years after Wali Allah’s passing. A near-blacked-out prostitute sauntered before the Shah and begin to sing amid the recitation of the Quran, amid Taraweh, in the ancient Masjid of the Shah Waliullah family, right across the castle and fort of Sultan Firoze Shah. Shah ‘Abd al-Aziz halts his voice and the courtesan can now be heard coughing out couplets of Lisan al-Ghayb, or Hafez of Shiraz– the boy who memorized the Quran, who then became a drunk, collapsing into the streets with liquor, and then a political diplomat amid the massacres of Tamerlane, and finally the spokesman of the Ghayb

در کویِ نیک‌نامی مَرا گُذَر نَدَادَند
اگر تو نام نمی‌پسندی، تغیِیر کُن قَضا را

the high-reputationed didn’t permit us to enter into their courtyard

We’re here—if you don’t like it, change the fate of God!

Shah ‘Abd al-Aziz, sitting before Shah Ismail and Shah Muhammad Ishaq (of Delhi and Mecca!) and a Scottish Anglican Resident, the first two his grandson and nephew, repeats the couplet of the prostitute, of Hafez. He closes out the Majlis, beckoning to the younger Shahs that the Mahfil has ended– and to help the elderly blind Shah stand upright and walk to his quarters in the Mehndiyan madrasa-complex. And before he closes the door, as noted in Kamalat-I Azizi, he whispers a Quranic duah from his father Abraham (through Sayyiduna ‘Umar):

All praise is due to Allah who has gifted me Ismail and Ishaq in my old age—wahab li ‘ala al-kibar ismail wa Ishaq

The Wali Allah khandan: son of Shah Wali Allah, a grandson of Shah Wali Allah, and a great-grandson of Shah Wali Allah, a lalahzaar, amid the corporate regimes and the spectacle of the British Isles.

A printed Quran translation of Shah Wali Allah, Shah Rafi al-Din and Shah ‘Abd al-Qadir and **allegedly** Shaykh Muslih al-Din Saadi Shirazi

Lounging in any Deobandi bayan, Tablighi, ‘Ilmi, or ‘Irfani, one hears mention of the word Buzurgān, or the Elders. The invocation of Elders ebbs and flows—in that in every generation the referent set seems to shift. In South Africa, where I studied, it almost invariably meant Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi, Mawlana Rashid Gangohi, Mawlana Ilyas Kandehlawi, Mawlana Zakariyya and Mufti Mahmud al-Hassan (literally buried in South Africa)—for this was the flavor of Deoband that had commandeered the stripe of Islam in the southernmost tip of the continent. In Pakistan the Elders may symbolize more Mufti Muhammad Shafi, Mufti Rashid Ahmed and Shabbir Ahmed ‘Usmani, or in India it fixates on Allama Anwar Shah Kashmir and Mawlana Husayn Ahmed Madani (and of these are all sliding scales). But pressing any Madrasa-graduate on where their tradition begins, they will say, sometimes with a smirk, but more often with a strike of humility and hopefully some arrogance, and a lilted breath: Shah Wali Allah.

More than Mawlana Thanwi, more than Mawlana Qasim, more than Mawlana Rashid, more than Mufti Shafi, more than Mufti Rashid Ahmed, more than Shaykh al Hind, more than even Shah Ismail Shahid and Anwar Shah Kashmiri, more than Mawlana Ahmed Reza Khan and Pir Mehr Ali Shah and Sayyid Nazir Hussein Dihlavi, more than Shibli No’mani and Abd ‘al-Hayy al-Nadwi, nobody holds the title more pointedly and poignantly than Shah Wali Allah, when the word Buzurgan is deployed—despite how unspoken this notion may be. Shah Wali Allah is buzurgvar-buzargan, the elder of elders.

What they are laboring to say is not that Sunni Islam began or reached its apogee with Wali Allah (although many would agree) but that if anyone is to credit for their assimilation—their entombment—within Muslim scholarly sepulchers, within the semantic field of an ‘ālim, it is singularly Wali Allah. If pushed further, they will say that Wali Allah cargoed Hadith to subcontinent and was the causa singularla for the casting of six prophetic canons (and the monarch of Hadith, Imam Malik) in South Asia, extending its tentacles to Bradford, Chicago, and Azaadville.

Wali Allah, without hyperbole, perches over the hierarchy of all sacred traditions in South Asia, whether of Deoband, of Barelwis, of Ahl-i Hadith, of the literary school Nadwa, of the Hegelian-cum-Aristotelian-cum-Hafezian Iqbal, of the enlightened liberalism (rohsan khayali) of Sayyid Ahmed Khan, and of the Florence-like humanitas of Shibli No’mani—of the exegetical grove of Hameeduddin Farahi (for there is no doubt his idea of the Nazm originates in Shah ‘Abd al-Aziz’s Persian Fath). Which is to say to invoke God and his Prophet in the subcontinent, one was forbidden except by the name, by the musamma, of Wali Allah, and his sons, as one may not invoke Tasawwuf without Junaid al-Baghdadi and Bayazid Bistami, the Arbab-i Tasawwuf, and especially the lord of saints, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jeelani.

Dr. Israr Ahmed, the ex-Jamat-i Islami loyalist, famed for a breath of fresh air on the airwaves of Pakistan preceding the century-turn, and his ability to have sincere discussions with Deobandis and Barelvis—when both were Tafsiq-ing each other—is an excellent point of arrival. You can see him, navy blue in the wall gushing out behind him, as he says Shah Wali Allah’s name: “In Barr-i Saghir, we have had no thinker who animated the Muslim tradition like him, outpacing even Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Yes, I said it! Even outpacing Ibn Taimiyya!

To love the Prophet in South Asia, one could only touch it, hold it, grapple and graze and grasp it by Wali Allah’s Prophet-love. Israr Ahmed is perfectly to describe Wali Allah as a Fatih, not even the Sultan Mehmet or Aurangzeb sense, but in the meaning of one who opens an era, Fatih al-Dawr.

As Sadr al-Sharia said in his book on Astronomy many centuries before Wali Allah: al-falak al-dawwar.

طبل درویشی ما بر در جاوید زدند بر لب بام بجز نوبت سلطانی نیست

We beat the Sufi’s drums on the gates of Eternity

On the roof’s lip, shouting:

“give us kingship- this is our demand!”

— Naziri Nishapuri (buried in Surat, Gujarat)

Hierarchy—a Greek dyad Wali Allah would have loved, from hierarkhēs, ἱεράρχης, to mean a high priest— the first declension hieros, sacred, and arkhes (think of archaic), to mean ruler.  A ruler of the sacred rites, a lord of sacrality, a fount of sacredness.  Wali Allah was the arkhes of the heiros in South Asia, in Afghanistan. As his three-hundred-year anniversary of journeying to the Hejaz approaches, what figure could possibly rival him in the past three hundred years—Muhammad Iqbal once asked this very question as he lectured to Muslims and Mawlana Manazir Ahsan Gilani in Osmania University.

Yet: why do we hold him in such lofty measure if his sole virtue was the transmission of Hadith—why not the same for Abd al-Rahman ibn Muzaffar al-Dawudi or Ahmed bin Sai’d al-Harawi or anyone else in the chain? Most Deobandi graduates know so little about the figures our Wali Allah chain back to the Prophet—we all know of Ibn Hajar and Zakariyya al-Ansari (yet try pressing a Deobandi graduate on naming one work of Ibrahim al-Kurani from his 60 book-oeuvre). Yet, in No’mani’s Ilm al-Kalam (the only Urdu book quoted in Muhammad Iqbal’s dissertation in Munich & Heidelberg) we see Wali Allah at the end of a list that includes Al-Farabi, al-Jurjani, Al-Kindi, Ibn Rushd, Shihab al-Din al-Suharwardi al-Maqtul, Mulla Sadra, Bu Ali Sina, Al-Farabi, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (and the only Hanafi, Mawlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi) and Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taimiyya—all figures within the Islamic frieze, within the Islamic philosophical canon, but all personas that have shaped, directed, animated, hammered away and onto the Islamic tradition in extraordinary ways that no Mufti can claim (for the only four Muftis who sit as proper Hukama in the frieze of history are Ibn Taimiyya, Mawlana Rumi, Shah Wali Allah and Mawlana Qasim Nanotwi.) Was Wali Allah a philosopher? If so what kind? The kind of Ibn Rushd or of Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taimiyya or of Al-Maqtul? If Shah Wali Allah was such an extraordinary Hakim, where and what is his Hikmah, his Hakimiyyah? Why don’t we know about it? Where does one?

Aurangzeb, during the lifetime of Shah Wali Allah, on the march towards Haiderabad

In the early hours of a morning in the year 1702, as Aurangzeb, almost ninety, crouched on a palanquin, ferried by Shi’iite Persian generals (for Aurangzeb despite his utter love for Sayyiduna Abu Bakr and Sayyiduna ‘Uthman, always preferred Shi’ite generals and bureaucrats over the feckless Sunni Afghans), hundreds of miles away outside the Maratha Raigarh Fort in the strip of Pune, 500,000 Mughal soldiers before him, a scholastic of Delhi, known in late seventeenth century hagiography as Shah ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Waiz al-Qadiri, and a popular sermonizer among the Khanqahs of Delhi, brought his baby boy to the Chishti Sufi grave of Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Khaki. (A Qadiri at a Chishti grave! In an era where Naqshbandi princes killed their Qadiri brothers!) The Shaykh of Farid Ganj Bakhsh, grand Shaykh of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, and student of that lord of Ajmer, Moi’unuddin Chishti, Bakhtiyar Khaki was buried in what would eventually be the summer palace and the basilica of the later Mughal monarchs, housing Shah Alam II, who read Sahih Al Bukhari from the same manuscript as Shah Waliullah, the manuscripts in Patna testify.

While Shah ‘Abd al-Rahim, perhaps still stung by Aurangzeb’s forceful de-barring of him from the committee of Fatawa ‘Alamgiri, kneeled before the grave and engaged in some form of Muraqaba (and likely Sarf-I Pir), he head as a voice, as narrated by both Wali Allah and his brother-in-law Ashiq Phulati in Al-Qawl al-Jali, informing him to name the boy Qutb al-Din, the axis of the religion: the earth rotating around its axis, mirroring the sun rotating her axis.

If we understand this analogy even further in post-Copernican astronomy, the idea is not that whole world mirrors the Qutb, but that the Qutb also mirrors the universe. Of course in Shah Waliullah’s era, most would have understood the cosmoi in geocentric terms, but if we grasp the name in today’s frame, we will assert the sun and the earth as the Qutb, as Copernicus taught us, drawing on Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and the Ptolemy, and not just the earth. What is striking is that in Shah Wali Allah’s own live visions of phainomenoi he seems to understand the sun in the exact same frame. As I was reading an astronomy commentary by the Hanafite Sadr al-Sharia, Ta’dīl al-‘Ulum, I was thinking of exactly how Shah ‘Abd al-Rahim must have understood this term when he named him after the great Chishti Sufi.

 Never matter geocentrism or helio-marginalia, it stands that as Shah ‘Abd al-Rahim kneeled before Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Khaki’s grave, cradling Shah Wali Allah, the alsina-yi ghayb commanded him to name him the axis of the faith. And there is no scab of a doubt that, in this heavily Sufi praxis of naming and unseen blue voices, Wali Allah revolved for the next few centuries, like a lancelet through a sphere, like a revolution of planets, as the theopania of Islam in South Asia, as those same theophania circled around him. Qutb al-Din, a mirroring of sub-lunar spheres, a mirroring of meridians, a mirroring of epicycles.

Yet in a strike of irony—Wali Allah defends shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taimiyya’s erasure of the Qutbs from the Islamic tradition (“no such figures exist”). “Ibn Taimiyya had sufficient right,” writes Wali Allah,” and evidence from the Sunnah to deny existence of the aqtab.

Some months ago, I visited that same grave with my uncle Abed, as we huddled across the musty earth upon which Shah ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Dihlawi al-Qadiri al-Waiz stood. The gravekeeper, tomb-guardian, forbade us to enter unless we entered with the Chishti crooked cap, the Kaj Kulah—for in the tombs of the mystics, riya is naught but inkisari.

That Muslim mystic with a crooked hat

How he weeps, weeps, weeps and has no idea why

A glance, Prophet of God, a glance if you could spare

– Muhammad Iqbal

My uncle Abed offered nazar on the name of my nani, ashiq-i chiragh-i Chishtiyan, to the Dargah of the patron-saint of Shah Wali Allah’s father.

The mythoi of Deoband, the story of the palm-tree—the sarv-i anar— that panoplied the student-and-teacher as they twinned around leather-bound texts, nastaliq letters scrawled diagonally across pages, of the Dars-i Nizami, looms as large as the very trees lining the jazira of Athens and her Acropolis. But in many ways what is neglected in this story is just how central Shah Waliullah and his oeuvre were in this moment. Mawlana Qasim Nanotwi, after laboring with his unfolded hands and reed-pens editing and rigging the iron presses in Saharanpur and Delhi under his manuscript drillmaster, Ahmed Ali Sahranpuri, ultimately relented to the summons to accept the appointment as sarparast in a minor Qasbah, not only taught Shaykh al-Hind, after he finished the major texts of the Dars-I Nizami, but also gifted him instruction in all texts of Wali Allah—and it was none other than Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi who recorded this. I find it incredibly distressing and dystopian that this element of this story is neglected in the much passe retelling that is shared across Bukhari khatams and Tablighi ecclesia. For what if the purpose, the raison d’etere of Deoband was Wali Allah?

That is, the ‘illa? And Deoband, the hukm of the ‘illa, purposing dawaran (around the Qutb) al ‘illa, with her tard and ‘aks—then must find no reason to exist without its raison d’etre, that is, Shah Wali Allah, and his epistemia.

For episteme—in ancient Greek, meaning to know, hails from a dual root of epi (meaning around or above or beyond, think of epiphany or epigraph or Episcopalian or epilepsy) and stamai (of the middle declension)—to mean to stand and peer over or look above. And who else peers over Deoband, that is, looms larger, than Shah Wali Allah? That is, who epistatai’s (of the active middle mood) more than Shah Wali Allah in the Deoband myth?

Σαχ Οὐαλιουλλάχ ἐπίσταται τοὺς μύθους τοῦ Ἰσλάμ καὶ τοὺς μύθους τοῦ Δεοβάνδου.
Shah Waliallah epistatai tous mythous tou Islam kai tous mythous tou Deobandou.

بهاران است و خاک از جلوه گل امتلا دارد

به رگ نشتر زن از موج خرام ناز صحرا را

So many springs! The dust of the desert is theophanied with roses
yet cut the veins with a spear of the desert’s proud waves!—

Mirza Ghalib (he wrote this couplet only a few streets away from Mawlana Qasim- where was finishing up his Dawrah, in Delhi under Mawlana Mamluk Ali and Shah Abd al-Ghani)

In a retelling of that ever-treating Hakim-i Jahan, Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanwi, he recounts that Mawlana Qasim ordered Shaykh al-Hind—likely in between Hedaya and the Sihah Sittah—to parse each line of Wali Allah’s thirty book library. I am at pains to stress how crucial this element is to the founding—foundering– myth of Deoband—the crescendo, apogee, culmination; the crystallizing project of Deoband was centered on the transmission of Wali Allah knowledge. This is not simply about al-Fawz al-Kabir or Hujjat Allah al-Balighah but about texts like the notoriously abstruse Lamahat, where Shah Waliullah takes the Aristotelian notions of the sub-lunar, the Platonic of the ideal, the Ibn ‘Arabi and his heirs’ outlining of the Tajalliyat, the Avicennian notion of Wujud and Mahiyya (especially in Lamha #2 and 3), and the Mulla Sadran notion of Tashkik and synthesizes all the doctrines of Islam, offering a totally new canvas of the cosmoi and Wujud and the Tajallaiyat, all while drawing on the canon of Bukhari in his project!

 In his Persian Sat’at—edited and published by the rather unknown student of Ubaidullah Sindhi, ‘Allama Ghulam Mustafa Qasimi, we see that same genius deployed in the relationship of the human and the universal, the shakhs al-akbar and the shakhs al-asghar, macrocosm and microcosm, the nasamah and the ruh, the mawalid al-thalathah (Thanwi’s book is clearly a play on this)—the physics and the ghaybiyyat of the universe. Or in Hama’at, where he offers a telling of sacred history of the mystic-philosophers vias (and via) Ibn ‘Arabi’s notions of theophania—or in his Budur al-Bazighah, where he addresses perhaps the most fraught concept between Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Arianism, Hellenism, and Plotinus and his followers—that what is it about sayyiduna Musa and his uncle Ibrahim that excels over Aristotle and Socrates and Pythagoras? (Such an inquiry had only fruitfully attempted by his predecessor, writing in a prison in Alexandria, namely, Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taimiyya, and by Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi in his Masnavi). Or in his multi-volume, a la Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Blue Book, al-Tafhimat al-Ilahiyya, where he addresses a medley of logical and philosophical issues that plague the four systems within Sunni and Shi’i Islam—namely discursive theology, Sufism, both theoria and praxai; philosophical wisdom (Hikmah), and the Quran-Sunnah along with their Hanbali interpreters. I do not exaggerate in saying if just he had written one of these texts it would have been to mark him as the greatest thinker of South Asia—fadhlan ‘an Hujjat Allah al-Balighah!

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taimiyya wrote, sneering in Dar Ta’arud Al-Naql wa al-Aql: Al-Ghazali became irredeemably sick when he studied Greek Philosophy—and how foolish that he thought he could find a cure in Avicenna’s Shifa! (talab al-shifa min Shifa li Ibn Sina). Shams al-Islam al-Dhahabi would sneer back at Shaykh al-Islam, in a letter where he accused Shaykh al-Islam of “swallowing the poison of the Greeks.”

But what if someone could dive into the urns—the Kalistos— of the Greeks and come out unashed, unlashed—what if the only thinker that escaped the curse of the Greeks and her Hellenesia was Wali Allah of Firuzabad of Dar al-Khilafat-I Dili– of Phulat and Mehndiyan? And what if Shah Wali Allah not only possessed the knowledge of the Greeks, but also the ancient Indians, the ancient Persians, and the ancient Arabs? And what if he was the first to do so in human history, before any antiquarian of England or France?

Near the end of the 14^th Sat’ah, or Optical Flash, Wali Allah concludes a paragraph with:

In Nuktah Ra bayamoz! Wa diger bah-zuban mayavar!

Learn this secret! And don’t you dare bring it again on your tongue!

Shah Wali Allah writes in the al-Tafhmiat:

And among God’s blessings upon me — without boast — is that He made me the spokesman of this era, its sage, the leader of this whole generation, and the chief of it. He spoke upon my tongue and breathed into my soul; so if I speak of the remembrances and devotions of the people (of the path), I utter their essentials and encompass their doctrines entire. And if I discourse on the relationship between the people and their Lord, its sides are drawn near to me and its expanse unfolded before me; I reach the summit of its height and grasp the reins of its course.

And if I preach about the secrets of human subtleties, I sound the depths of its ocean and seek its hidden springs; I seize its garments and hold fast to its fringes. And if I ride upon the back of the sciences of the soul and their utmost limits, I am their first discoverer — bringing forth marvels beyond counting, and wonders no understanding can encompass or hope to encompass.

And if I inquire into the knowledge of the divine laws and prophethoods, I am the lion of their thicket, the guardian of their pasture, the heir to their treasures, and the seeker of their abodes.

And how many are the subtle kindnesses of God — hidden so delicately that even the keenest mind cannot perceive them!

a postcard portraying a street scene of Shaykh Amin’s childhood city, in the 1960’s

Shaykh Amin does not hail from a long line of scholars— his father was the first to enlist in the ranks of the Ulema. He was born in a small village in Gujarat, where, after I asked him why his father chose the gowns of the ‘Ulema, he offered: “Upon reaching adulthood in our village in Gujarat, you, as a Muslim, could either choose to become a merchant or an Imam.” So Shaykh Amin’s father packed his bags and journeyed to Deoband—literally “the sealing of the Demon” in Persian, or, in Sanskrit: “The Sealing of God.” The word Deo is an Indo-European cognate with the ancient Greek word Theos, where we get theology, theosophy, theocracy. Curiously, in Latin, Deo retained as the same form across the nominative to the vocative, think of Deus Ex Machina. Deo in Persian meant demon—they were horrified by what the ancient Indians were worshipping and, upon witnessing the Indians, mockingly called their god demon. The Urdu-Persian word Divana is an adverbial reflection of this—literally one possessed by a demon. The Ancient Greeks had a similar word, Daimonos, for the exact meaning.

Upon the founding of Deoband, no set of teachers taught more theology and theosophy and law in all of India in the late nineteenth century (Allama Kashmiri said as much when Rashid Rida visited Deoband). I wonder if Mawlana Qasim knew this when he emigrated there? Deoband, the city of Theos. Deoband, the city of the last dual theologian-theosophian, Mawlana Qasim Nanotwi (for ever since him we have only had historians of Islamic philosophy!)

Shaykh Amin’s father journeyed in the 1930’s, with the independence movement picking up steam, with the headliners of both movements—Jinnah and Gandhi—hailing from Bombay and Gujarat (There is much to say why Gujarat produced the most politically prominent figures for Hindus and Muslims—and not Lahore, or Haiderabad, or Lucknow, or Dhaka). His father scorned the path of the merchant, and banked in Deoband for some years and graduated with the Dastar of Deoband, studying Sahih al-Bukhari under the politically-inclined Mawlana Hussain Ahmed al-Madani. It is curious how many of the asanid seem to run through him—across India, Pakistan, and English. The major sanads of Falah-I Darayn, Darul Uloom Karachi (through Mufti Rashid Ahmed Ludhiyanvi), and the Darul Ulooms in Attock and Khyber Pakhtunwa and Azaadville and of course Deoband’s head teachers found their genos through Mawlana Madani. Mawlana Madani is of a striking legacy and character— he was the only Mawlana of repute to challenge Allama Muhammad Iqbal, often mocking him with the Persian genitive clause: Sir-I Mausuf ( “The so-called Sir”)—and writing off Iqbal’s knowledge regarding Quranic terms Qawm & Millah, with both penning Persian couplets to assail each other on conflicting notions of Pan-Islamic nationhood and localized Indian belonging. (The myth that the ‘Ulema rose in revolt against Iqbal is precisely just that—some type of liberal fetish that people would like to believe about Iqbal). But what was so striking Mawlana Madani is that he retains that one last breath of the socio-political tradition of the Wali Allah tradition—founding political organizations of ‘Ulema, teaching Sahih al-Bukhari, and dialoging with Hindus and British staff officers on the position of Muslims in India.

Mawlana Hussain Ahmed Madani knew he was a sayyid, but didn’t know past a certain ancestor named Shan Anwar al-Haqq—Shah Waliullah, and Anwar Shah Kashmiri and Mawlana Hussayn Ahmad, and Mawlana Qasim all have “Shah” ancestors. Beyond that, he lamented: “we have no written documents to prove anything.” His ancestor was given a Jagir by a  Mughal emperor in a certain Qasbah, where his family settled. His Naqsh-I Hayat—reads  like a third person’s observation about his life,  and you can see him wrestling with the old notions of Muslim self-writing and the interpenetration of the Augustinian-cum- Victorian biographical tradition that had opened up the genres of Urdu to new forms of writing oneself—as Ayesha Jalal showed in a monograph some years ago.  This tension is most visibly observed in the opening pages of the book, where a standard Sufi autobiography would unleash unmatched praise on one’s ancestors—as we see in Wali Allah’s own Anfas—but Mawlana Madani seems to hesitate to offer the same unwavering adulation. After writing a few paragraphs on his ancestors, he launches into an apologos, rife with Waliullah symbolism and tools, quoting passages from Sayyid Ahmed Shahid Barelwi, the general who convinced Shah Ismail al-Dihlawi, the grandson of Shah Wali Allah of his youngest son, to join him in an ill-fated (or well-fated) expedition against the Sikhs. Sayyid Ahmed Shahid was of course descended  from the Prophet as well—and wrote about the notion of Isti’dad, or the latent potential available in humans in his Iqtida al-Sirat al-Mustaqim. It is worthwhile to quote the whole Persian passage:

“Man’s existence and nature indicate that he possesses certain innate abilities and aptitudes that are essential for social and economic life. If these abilities and aptitudes are awakened and nurtured through education, training, and guidance, they can manifest as great virtues and powerful expressions of religious and worldly success. But if these aptitudes remain dormant and undeveloped, they may become sources of harm and destruction.”

This human ability to unlock the potential of his ancestors in one’s own life was a core theme of Shah Wali Allah’s own life. Later on in the biography, the only time Mawlana Madani mentions Wali Allah, is where he lists out the Nisab of Deoband, which was just the Farangi Mahal curriculum, and then concludes that “Well, this was just the curricula of the Wali Allah family!”—and not mentioning the genealogy to the Frankish Palace masters. He in many ways was a final reader of the entire Wali Allah ouvre—who saw all the Wali Allah silhouettes, that is, the final worthy turath of the Ummah.

The first of Wali Allah’s ancestors to emigrate to India was a Shaykh Shams al-Din Al-Mufti, who fled the political violence ensuing in the aftermath of Shah Ismail Al-Safavi’s reign—from Persia to India. He established a Madrasa, and a served as Mufti of the town, hailing his lineage as connected to Sayyiduna ‘Umar. His son and grandson both preferred the life of war, and did not follow their line into knowledge. The grandfather of Shah Wali Allah, Shah Wajih Al-Din, son of Shaikh Muhammad Mu’azzam chose the life of a military solider and joined the civil war between Aurangzeb and his younger brother, Shah Shuja, where he joined the forces of the former, lauded as a flagstone solider on that day, for impeding the tide of a crazed elephant of Shah Shuja’s army. He was later killed in a firefight between him and a group of bandits.