Anwar Shah Kashmiri

Anwar Shah Kashmiri (26 November 1875 – 28 May 1933) was a scholar of hadith from Kashmir who served as principal and chief teacher of hadith at Darul Uloom Deoband from 1915 to 1927, succeeding Mahmud Hasan Deobandi and being followed in turn by Husain Ahmad Madani. He is known by the title Imam al-Asr. Over some eighteen years of teaching at the seminary he trained a very large number of hadith specialists, and the list of his students includes many of the men who led Deobandi institutions in India and Pakistan for the following half-century.

Barbara Metcalf's history of the seminary places him among the students of Mahmud Hasan who became, with Shabbir Ahmad Usmani and Hafiz Muhammad Ahmad, the leaders of Deoband's third generation of scholars. His position in the tradition is a distinctive one, because he wrote comparatively little himself. His principal works exist because his students took down his lectures.

Birth and Family

Anwar Shah was born on 27 Shawwal 1292 AH, corresponding to 26 November 1875, in Kashmir, into a Sayyid family whose scholarly descent was traced back to Baghdad. He began reading the Qur'an at the age of four under his father, Muazzam Ali Shah.

He had two sons who became scholars in their own right, Azhar Shah Qaiser and Anzar Shah Kashmiri. His son-in-law Ahmad Raza Bijnori compiled one of the two major commentaries drawn from his teaching.

Education

In 1889 he left Kashmir for Deoband. He studied at the Darul Uloom, where his teachers included Mahmud Hasan Deobandi, then the seminary's dominant figure and its foremost teacher of hadith. Metcalf's account describes Mahmud Hasan teaching ten lessons a day and drawing students from as far as Bukhara, Mecca and Yemen; Anwar Shah was among those who came a long distance to read with him.

In 1896, corresponding to 1314 AH, he went to Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, one of the two principal founders of the Deobandi school, from whom he received certification in hadith after two years of study, together with initiation in the Sufi path. His other teachers included Ghulam Rasul Hazarvi.

Teaching Career

Madrasa Aminia and Kashmir

After completing his studies he taught at Madrasa Aminia in Delhi, where he served as principal. In 1903 he returned to Kashmir and founded a seminary there, the Faiz-e Aam Madrasa, and taught in it for some three years.

He then performed the pilgrimage and spent a period in Medina, devoting the time to the study of hadith literature. On his return he visited Mahmud Hasan, who urged him to take up a teaching post at Deoband, and he joined the seminary about 1909.

Darul Uloom Deoband

When Mahmud Hasan's own commitments took him away from the seminary — he left for the Hejaz in 1915 on the journey that ended in his arrest and internment at Malta — Anwar Shah took over the teaching of hadith. He became principal and Shaykh al-Hadith in 1915 and held the position until 1927, some twelve years, within a total teaching career at Deoband of about eighteen.

Two details of his service are recorded. The first is that he taught hadith without accepting a salary. The second is the scale of his teaching: over his years at the seminary he is credited with training approximately two thousand students in the hadith sciences.

His students include Manazir Ahsan Gilani, Qari Muhammad Tayyib — later Deoband's long-serving rector — Hifzur Rahman Seoharwi, Saeed Ahmad Akbarabadi, Zayn al-Abidin Sajjad Meerthi, Muhammad Miyan Deobandi, Manzur Nu'mani, Yusuf Banuri, Atiqur Rahman Usmani, Abdul Qadir Raipuri, Badre Alam Merathi, Mufti Muhammad Shafi, and Muhammad Idris Kandhlawi, who came to Deoband specifically to complete the hadith course a second time under him.

Dabhel

He resigned from Darul Uloom Deoband in 1927 following a disagreement with its administration, and moved to the Jamia Islamia Talimuddin at Dabhel, in western India, together with Azizur Rahman Usmani. He taught hadith there until 1932. Shabbir Ahmad Usmani also moved to Dabhel, and for several years the seminary drew students who had followed their teachers from Deoband.

Method and Reputation as a Teacher

Anwar Shah's standing rested on his classroom rather than his desk. He had, by all accounts, an exceptional command of the hadith corpus and of the differences among the schools of law, and his teaching was noted for the way he handled the relation between a hadith and the juristic position it was cited to support. His central scholarly concern was the defence and exposition of the Hanafi school, and he was also noted for a comparatively accommodating approach on a number of contested questions.

He wrote little by inclination. A handful of treatises came from his own pen, and the substantial body of work under his name was assembled by students who transcribed his lectures, discourses and sermons. Muhammad Qasim Zaman's study of the modern ulama treats the hadith commentary as one of the principal media through which scholarly authority was constructed and displayed in this period; Anwar Shah's case is a variant of that pattern, in which the commentary was produced from an oral performance and put into circulation by the audience rather than the author.

His works were published under the patronage of the Majlis-i Ilmi, a scholarly body founded at Delhi in 1929.

Writings

Work	Description
Fayd al-Bari ala Sahih al-Bukhari	A four-volume Arabic commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, compiled from his lectures by his student Badre Alam Merathi and published at Cairo
Anwar al-Bari	An Urdu commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, compiled by his son-in-law Ahmad Raza Bijnori
al-Arf al-Shadhi	A commentary on the Sunan of al-Tirmidhi
Mushkilat al-Qur'an	On difficult passages of the Qur'an

Fayd al-Bari is the work on which his scholarly reputation principally rests. Its publication at Cairo, financed by the Jamiatul Ulama of the Transvaal in South Africa, is worth noting on two counts: it brought an Indian commentary on al-Bukhari before an Arabic-reading public, and the funding came from a Muslim community in southern Africa, which indicates how widely the networks sustaining South Asian scholarship already extended in the 1930s.

His work also reached the Arab world through Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda, the Syrian hadith scholar and editor. Zaman records that Abu Ghudda's interest in South Asian writing on hadith and law "drew him to the scholars of this region", and that he published and introduced to Arab readers a number of works by modern South Asian ulama, among them a treatise by Anwar Shah Kashmiri.

His writing ranged more widely than hadith alone, covering the Qur'an, doctrine, metaphysics, jurisprudence, natural history, poetry and political thought. Most of it was in Arabic, with two works in Persian. He was also a poet, and some fifteen thousand couplets are attributed to him.

Public Affairs

Anwar Shah opposed British rule in India and, as a member of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, urged Muslims to withhold cooperation from the colonial government. He is particularly remembered for the presidential address he delivered at the organisation's annual meeting at Peshawar in 1927.

Death and Legacy

He fell ill in 1933 and travelled to Deoband for treatment, continuing to address students there. He died on 28 May 1933, at the age of fifty-seven, and is buried in the Mazar-i Anwari cemetery.

Muhammad Iqbal, who was among those influenced by his work, arranged a condolence gathering after his death.

Jamia Imam Muhammad Anwar Shah at Deoband is named after him, and the Government of Jammu and Kashmir has designated his house in Kashmir a heritage site of wooden architecture. His life and writings have been the subject of a doctoral thesis at the University of Durban-Westville, and of a study in Urdu by Muhammad Taqi Usmani in a volume on the senior scholars of Deoband.

Historiographical Note

Several dates in his career are reported inconsistently, and the variations should be stated rather than smoothed over.

The pilgrimage. One account places his pilgrimage in 1905, corresponding to 1323 AH, and another in 1906. The difference is a year and does not affect the sequence of events, but no single date can be given with confidence.

The departure from Deoband. The account of his own life gives his resignation from Darul Uloom Deoband as 1927, and this is consistent with the tenure of 1915 to 1927 recorded for the office he held. The account of Idris Kandhlawi's life, however, dates the departure of Anwar Shah Kashmiri and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani from the seminary to 1929, with other teachers and students following them. The two dates may describe different stages of the same process — a resignation followed by a move, or successive departures by the two men — or the sources may simply disagree. This article gives 1927 for his resignation, which is the date recorded in the accounts of his own career, and notes that 1929 appears elsewhere.

The length of his tenure. His period in the chair of hadith is described variously as nearly twelve years and nearly thirteen, and his teaching career at Deoband as eighteen years. These are reconcilable if the longer figure counts from his arrival at the seminary about 1909 and the shorter ones from his appointment as principal and Shaykh al-Hadith in 1915.

The principalship of Madrasa Aminia. He is described as the first principal of Madrasa Aminia in Delhi. Accounts of Kifayatullah Dehlawi describe him as the institution's second rector, preceded by a different scholar. The two statements may refer to distinct offices, since a madrasa of this kind commonly separated the roles of academic head and administrative head, or the ordinals may be applied inconsistently across sources. This article records that Anwar Shah served as principal of Madrasa Aminia without assigning him an ordinal.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• The Qur'an — begun at the age of four with his father, and the subject of his Mushkilat al-Qur'an
• Sahih al-Bukhari — the collection he taught for years at Deoband and the subject of both major commentaries drawn from his lectures
• The Jami of al-Tirmidhi — the collection treated in his al-Arf al-Shadhi
• The six canonical hadith collections, studied by him under Mahmud Hasan and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi and taught by him for eighteen years
• Fayd al-Bari ala Sahih al-Bukhari, compiled by Badre Alam Merathi from his lectures — the primary record of his hadith teaching

Classical Islamic Sources

• The Hanafi school of law, whose positions his teaching was chiefly directed to expounding
• The Maturidi tradition in theology, the doctrinal position of the Deobandi seminaries
• The Dars-i Nizami curriculum, the course he studied at Deoband and later taught
• The classical literature on the relation between hadith and juristic reasoning, the field in which his teaching was most closely engaged

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 by Barbara Daly Metcalf — for Mahmud Hasan's teaching, and for Anwar Shah's place among the third generation of scholars at the seminary
• The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change by Muhammad Qasim Zaman — for the hadith commentary as a vehicle of scholarly authority, and for Abu Ghudda's publication of his work in the Arab world
• Wikipedia, "Anwar Shah Kashmiri", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_Shah_Kashmiri — consulted with the owner's authorisation for the biographical framework, the career chronology, the students, and the works
• Meraj Ahmad, "Contribution of Anwar Shah Kashmiri to the Hadith Literature in India", Insight Islamicus, vol. 19 (2019) — a peer-reviewed study of his hadith scholarship; cited in the source consulted rather than read directly for this article
• Yunoos Osman, "Life and Works of Allamah Muhammad Anwar Shah Kashmiri", doctoral thesis, University of Durban-Westville — a dedicated academic study; cited in the source consulted rather than read directly for this article

Further Reading

• Syed Mehboob Rizwi, History of the Dar al-Ulum Deoband, translated by Murtaz Husain F. Quraishi (Idara Ehtemam, Darul Uloom Deoband, 1981) — the institutional history, which carries a notice of his tenure
• Muhammad Taqi Usmani, The Great Scholars of the Deoband Islamic Seminary (Turath Publishing, London, 2013) — includes a chapter on Anwar Shah Kashmiri
• Asir Adrawi, Dabistan-i Deoband ki Ilmi Khidmaat (Darul Muallifeen, Deoband) — on the scholarly output of the Deoband school, in Urdu
• Mahmud Hasan Deobandi — his teacher, whom he succeeded in the chair of hadith
• Husain Ahmad Madani — his successor in that chair
• Darul Uloom Deoband — the seminary he studied at and later led
• Muhammad Idris Kandhlawi — among his students, who returned to Deoband to read hadith under him