Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda

Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda (9 May 1917 – 16 February 1997) was a Syrian Hanafi scholar, teacher and textual editor. His reputation rests principally on his critical editions: over some four decades he prepared for publication a large number of works of law and hadith, many of which had existed only in manuscript or in unreliable printings. He also did more than any other figure of his generation to bring the hadith scholarship of modern South Asia before an Arabic-reading public.

Muhammad Qasim Zaman's study of the modern ulama devotes a passage to him as an illustration of something the history of print might otherwise obscure: that the older, person-to-person transmission of learning did not disappear when books became cheap. Abu Ghudda is, in Zaman's words, an instructive case of how "even earlier forms of person-to-person transmission of learning have also persisted in the world of new media." He was simultaneously a modern editor working with printing houses across the Arab world and a link in chains of oral transmission running from Morocco to Pakistan.

Family and Early Life

Abu Ghudda was born on 9 May 1917 at Aleppo, then in the Ottoman Empire and shortly to become part of Syria. His full name is given as Abd al-Fattah ibn Muhammad ibn Bashir ibn Hasan Abu Ghudda al-Khaldi.

The family was in trade rather than scholarship. His father, Muhammad, was a businessman in the textile industry, and his grandfather Bashir was among the larger textile merchants of Aleppo. The family traced its descent to Khalid ibn al-Walid, the Companion of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), and the nisba al-Khaldi records that claim.

He had eleven children. His paternal nephew, Abd al-Sattar Abu Ghudda, also became a scholar of Islamic law.

Education

He studied first at the Academy of Islamic Studies in Aleppo, and then went to Cairo, where he lived between 1944 and 1950. There he studied at al-Azhar, graduating from its College of Shari'a in 1948. He also pursued training in education and psychology during his years in Egypt.

The combination is worth noting. A traditional Syrian training in the religious sciences, followed by a degree from al-Azhar and study in modern educational method, produced a scholar equally at ease in the manuscript tradition and in the institutions of twentieth-century learning — which is what his later career required.

Teaching

Abu Ghudda taught at al-Azhar in Cairo. On returning to Syria he became an instructor at the Academy of Islamic Studies in Aleppo, the school where he had himself been a pupil, and rose to prominence among the scholars of the city; he was appointed mufti of Aleppo.

In 1960 he began teaching at the University of Damascus, where he lectured on theology, on the principles of jurisprudence, on Hanafi law and on comparative law, in the Shari'a College.

He was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. He was imprisoned in 1966 and afterwards left the country, settling in Saudi Arabia.

In exile he taught and conducted research in the Islamic sciences at Riyadh, at the institution Zaman names as the Imam Muhammad ibn Sa'ud Islamic University, and lectured as a visitor at the Omdurman Institute in Sudan. He remained in Saudi Arabia for the rest of his life.

Critical Editions

Zaman states the basis of his standing plainly: "Abu Ghudda's reputation as a scholar rests on his critical editions of numerous works of law and hadith."

The work of a textual editor in this tradition involves collating the surviving manuscripts of a text, establishing the most defensible reading, identifying the hadith and authorities the author cites, and supplying the apparatus a reader needs. It is exacting and largely invisible: the editor's name appears on the title page beneath the author's, and the measure of success is that the text can thereafter be used with confidence.

Abu Ghudda edited works by scholars of several different schools of law, though Zaman notes that he was himself a committed adherent of the Hanafi school. The willingness to edit outside one's own school is characteristic of the discipline, where the criterion is the importance of the text rather than agreement with it.

His own writing includes Tarajim Sitta min Fuqaha al-Alam al-Islami fi al-Qarn al-Rabi Ashar wa Atharuhum al-Fiqhiyya, a study of six jurists of the Muslim world in the fourteenth Islamic century and their contributions to law, published at Beirut in 1997.

Bringing South Asian Scholarship to the Arab World

The most consequential part of Abu Ghudda's work, in Zaman's account, was the transmission in one direction of a scholarly literature that had been largely invisible on the other side. "It was his interest in South Asian writings on hadith and law that drew him to the scholars of this region," Zaman writes, and he "published and introduced to the Arab world a number of works by modern South Asian 'ulama".

Three of these are named:

• Several writings on hadith by Abd al-Hayy Laknawi, who died in 1886 and whom Zaman describes as "one of the most prolific of the Indian 'ulama of the nineteenth century"
• A treatise by Anwar Shah Kashmiri, the Kashmiri scholar who held the chair of hadith at Darul Uloom Deoband from 1915 to 1927
• An exposition of the principles of hadith study by Zafar Ahmad Usmani, which also serves as one of the two prolegomena to Usmani's own hadith commentary, the I'la al-Sunan

He also wrote a commendation of the I'la al-Sunan itself.

The significance of this activity is easy to underrate. Arabic was the language of the classical religious sciences, and Arab scholarship had not generally treated the Urdu- and Arabic-writing scholars of India as contributors to it. By editing, prefacing and publishing their work in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo, Abu Ghudda placed South Asian hadith scholarship into the Arabic bibliography, where it could be cited, taught and answered.

Networks of Transmission

Zaman uses the biography of Abu Ghudda written shortly after his death by one of his students to make a point about the persistence of oral transmission. The book is, in his description, "really an extended list not just of his writings but also, and especially, of his teachers and numerous students."

The biographer names scholars from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Egypt, Morocco, India and Pakistan who had authorised Abu Ghudda to transmit hadith from them. The lists of those whom he in turn authorised are, Zaman notes, "even more expansive, and again straddle the Muslim world."

An authorisation of this kind, an ijaza, certifies that its holder has read a text or a body of hadith with the grantor and may transmit it onward under his authority. It is a personal transaction that cannot be conducted through print, and the scale of Abu Ghudda's involvement in it — spanning ten countries on the receiving side alone — shows that a scholar of the later twentieth century could still assemble a network of this kind, and that it retained value alongside publication.

Zaman offers an explanation for its unusual breadth. "Given that Abu Ghudda was not only a traditionally educated 'alim but also maintained close ties with the Islamist organization the Muslim Brotherhood, his circles of hadith transmission were wider than those of many other 'ulama." Membership of a movement with branches across the Arab world gave him contacts that a scholar confined to seminary networks would not have had.

One name on the list is unexpected. Among those who authorised him to narrate hadith was Abul A'la Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, who had no formal certification in the religious sciences at all. Zaman draws two inferences. The first is that "circles of hadith transmission" had expanded "beyond the 'ulama". The second concerns patronage: what brought the two men together was "not only a broadly shared Islamist ideology... but also the Saudi state, which was a patron of both Mawdudi and Abu Ghudda, and indeed of many of the Pakistani and Indian 'ulama."

Correspondence with the Scholars of India

Abu Ghudda corresponded with Muhammad Zakariya Kandhlawi, the Shaykh al-Hadith of Mazahir Uloom at Saharanpur, addressing him in terms of marked deference. The exchange between a Syrian editor in Riyadh and a hadith professor in a north Indian seminary is a small illustration of the connection Abu Ghudda's publishing work created, and both men are buried in the same cemetery at Medina.

Among his students was Muhammad Taqi Usmani of Darul Uloom Karachi, who wrote his obituary. Others included Muhammad Awwamah, himself a noted editor of hadith texts, Muhammad Abu al-Fath al-Bayanuni, Salman Husaini Nadwi and Muhammad Abdul Malek.

Death

Abu Ghudda died at Riyadh on 16 February 1997, at the age of seventy-nine. He was buried in the Jannat al-Baqi cemetery at Medina.

Historiographical Note

His studies at al-Azhar. Zaman records that he graduated from al-Azhar's College of Shari'a in 1948. Another account describes his advanced training at al-Azhar as being in psychology and education. These are not necessarily inconsistent, since students at al-Azhar in this period commonly took work in more than one faculty, and his years in Cairo from 1944 to 1950 would have allowed for both. This article follows Zaman on the Shari'a degree and notes the training in education alongside it.

The university at Riyadh. Zaman names his Saudi post as being at the Imam Muhammad ibn Sa'ud Islamic University of Riyadh; another account places him at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences at Riyadh University. Institutional names and boundaries in Riyadh changed over the period, and the two descriptions may refer to the same body at different dates.

His descent from Khalid ibn al-Walid. The family's descent from Khalid ibn al-Walid is a claim recorded in the sources as a family tradition rather than an independently established genealogy, and it is reported here as such.

The scope of this article. Abu Ghudda held office in a political organisation and spent the second half of his life in exile from his own country, and accounts of that side of his life are bound up with the internal politics of Syria in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This article records his membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, his imprisonment in 1966 and his subsequent exile, because these are established facts of his biography and because the first of them bears directly on the scholarly networks that are the subject of this account. It does not narrate the political history, which cannot be set out without the kind of judgement on persons and governments that this encyclopaedia does not undertake. Readers seeking that history should consult specialist works on modern Syria.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• The Qur'an — the foundation of the sciences he studied at Aleppo and al-Azhar and taught at Damascus and Riyadh
• The canonical hadith collections, the texts of his editorial work and of the authorisations he received and granted
• I'la al-Sunan by Zafar Ahmad Usmani — the Hanafi hadith commentary whose prolegomenon he published and to which he wrote a commendation
• Tarajim Sitta min Fuqaha al-Alam al-Islami by Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda — his own study of six modern jurists

Classical Islamic Sources

• The Hanafi school of law, to which he adhered and on which he lectured at Damascus
• The classical mustalah al-hadith literature on the terminology and grading of hadith, the field of the works he edited and introduced
• The works of law and hadith of several schools that he prepared as critical editions
• The writings on hadith of Abd al-Hayy Laknawi, which he published for Arab readers

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change by Muhammad Qasim Zaman — for his education and teaching posts, his critical editions, his publication of South Asian scholarship in the Arab world, his networks of hadith transmission, and the patronage under which he worked
• Wikipedia, "Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-Fattah_Abu_Ghudda — consulted with the owner's authorisation for his dates, birthplace, family, early education, teaching appointments and students
• Wikipedia, "Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Zakariyya_Kandhlawi — consulted with the owner's authorisation for his correspondence with Zakariya Kandhlawi and the obituary written by Taqi Usmani

Further Reading

• Muhammad Taqi Usmani, obituary of Shaykh Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda — an account by one of his students
• Anwar Shah Kashmiri — the Deoband hadith scholar whose treatise he published in the Arab world
• Muhammad Zakariya Kandhlawi — his correspondent at Saharanpur, buried in the same cemetery
• Muhammad Taqi Usmani — his student, and the author of his obituary
• Abul A'la Maududi — among those who granted him authorisation in hadith
• The Deobandi Movement — the South Asian tradition whose hadith scholarship he introduced to Arab readers