Mufti Kifayatullah Dehlawi

Kifayatullah Dehlawi (1875 – 31 December 1952) was an Indian Islamic scholar and Hanafi jurist who became one of the most widely consulted legal authorities in the subcontinent during the first half of the twentieth century. He spent the greater part of his working life at Madrasa Aminia in Delhi, where he taught, issued legal rulings, and reorganised the curriculum, and he came to be known by the honorific Mufti-e-Azam, Grand Mufti of India. He was appointed interim president of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind at its foundation in 1919 and later held its presidency for nearly two decades. He was also a member of the committee that founded Jamia Millia Islamia.

His career illustrates a pattern common among the scholars trained at Darul Uloom Deoband in the late nineteenth century. A student of modest means moved through a succession of small provincial madrasas, completed the higher curriculum at Deoband, and then spent a working life divided between teaching, the issuing of fatwas, institutional administration, and public affairs. As Muhammad Qasim Zaman observes of the Indian ulama more generally, the fatwa was one of the principal media through which such scholars exercised authority, and a reputation built on legal rulings could reach well beyond the seminary walls.

Family and Early Years

Kifayatullah was born in Shahjahanpur, in what were then the North-Western Provinces of British India and is now Uttar Pradesh, in 1875. His family had moved to Shahjahanpur from Bhopal. His father, Inayatullah, had four sons and two daughters, and the household was poor — a circumstance that shaped the early stages of his education, since he had to meet part of his own costs.

The biographical literature gives his descent as Kifayatullah ibn Inayatullah ibn Faidhullah ibn Khairullah ibn Ibadullah, with the nisba Dehlawi attached later in life from his long residence in Delhi rather than from birth. He is therefore sometimes referred to as Shahjahanpuri and Dehlawi together, the first marking his origin and the second his adopted city.

Education

The Maktab and Madrasa Azeeziya

He began his schooling at the age of five at the maktab of Hafiz Barakatullah, where he completed the Qur'an. He received instruction in Urdu and elementary Persian from a teacher named Nasimullah. He then enrolled at Madrasa Azeeziya, where he finished his Persian studies — working through the Sikandar Nama, one of the most advanced Persian texts in the ordinary syllabus — and began Arabic under Budhun Khan.

The sequence is worth pausing on, because it reflects the layered structure of Indian Muslim education in the period. Persian remained the language of administration and polite letters well into the nineteenth century, and a student normally acquired a working command of it before turning to Arabic, the language of the religious sciences. Kifayatullah's schooling moved him through both.

Muradabad

His teacher Ubaidul Haq then sent him with a letter of recommendation to the administrator of the Madrasa Arabiya attached to the Shahi Masjid in Muradabad. He was admitted and lodged at the house of a man named Muhammad Ismail. Because his father could not support him, he paid his own expenses by weaving and selling topis, the caps worn across northern India. He studied at Muradabad for two years.

Darul Uloom Deoband's own institutional history, Sayyid Mahboob Rizvi's History of the Dar al-Ulum Deoband, records the same arrangement — that he made caps by hand and met his costs from their sale, both at Muradabad and afterwards at Deoband — and it names his principal teacher at the Muradabad madrasa as Maulana Abd al-Ali, a disciple of the seminary's founder Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi. The detail matters for the shape of his training: before he reached Deoband at all, his instruction already ran back to Nanautawi through a pupil of his.

Darul Uloom Deoband

In 1895 he enrolled at Darul Uloom Deoband, then approaching the end of its third decade and established as the most influential of the reformist seminaries of northern India. Barbara Metcalf's study of the institution describes a curriculum in which hadith occupied the culminating position, taught by scholars who combined juristic training with Sufi affiliation, and funded not by state endowment but by public subscription. Kifayatullah completed the course in 1898, at the age of about twenty-two.

Rizvi's history counts him among the graduates of the Darul Uloom and names Mahmud Hasan Deobandi, known as Shaykh al-Hind, as his teacher there. That attachment is the thread running from his training into his later public life, since it was Mahmud Hasan who preceded him in the presidency of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind and who headed the committee that founded Jamia Millia Islamia, both bodies in which Kifayatullah went on to serve. The same history gives the year of his graduation as 1313 AH, which does not correspond to 1898; the discrepancy is set out in the Historiographical Note below.

Teaching at Shahjahanpur

After graduating he spent a period in Delhi with a close friend, Aminuddin, and then returned to Shahjahanpur, where his former teacher Ubaidul Haq had founded a madrasa called Ainul Ilm. Kifayatullah joined it as a teacher, taking on secretarial and administrative duties alongside instruction in Arabic and Persian. It was during these years that he began answering fatwas, the activity for which he would later be best known.

While at Ainul Ilm he also founded a monthly periodical, Al Burhan, whose first issue appeared in Sha'ban 1321 AH. The magazine engaged the contested questions of belief then being argued over in northern India, a period in which print had become the principal arena for religious debate. Zaman's account of the ulama and the printing press describes exactly this development: the fatwa, the tract, and the periodical allowed scholars to reach audiences far larger than a madrasa lecture room, and the resulting competition for religious authority was conducted largely in Urdu and largely in print.

Madrasa Ainul Ilm's finances deteriorated, and teaching salaries were reduced. Kifayatullah nevertheless remained for several more years, until the death of his teacher Ubaidul Haq.

Delhi and Madrasa Aminia

He then moved to Delhi and joined Madrasa Aminia as a teacher, an association that lasted the rest of his life. He taught hadith, answered legal questions, and managed the institution's organisational affairs, eventually becoming its second rector, succeeding Amin al-Din Dehlawi and holding the post until his death, when he was followed by Ahmad Saeed Dehlavi.

Rizvi's history describes the move somewhat differently. In its account he went to Delhi in the latter part of 1321 AH, at the insistence of Amin al-Din Dehlawi himself, and went directly to the principalship rather than working up to it from a teaching post; from that point he remained attached to Madrasa Aminia until his death. The same notice identifies the madrasa as the institution most closely bound up with his name, and records that it grew considerably under his direction and came to be counted among the better-known seminaries of India. The two accounts differ over the timing rather than the substance, and the difference is set out in the Historiographical Note.

At Aminia he introduced changes to the educational structure in stages rather than at once. In 1328 AH he established an assembly called Anjuman Islah al-Kalam, whose purpose was to train students in public speaking and formal debate. Every eighth day each student was required to deliver a speech or take part in a dialogue, with Kifayatullah assisting. The assembly achieved its aim for a time but was eventually discontinued for want of participation. The initiative reflects a concern visible across the reformist madrasas of the period, described by Metcalf in the Deoband context: scholars needed not only to master texts but to argue publicly and effectively, since so much religious life was now conducted through debate before an audience.

His standing rested above all on his work as a mufti. Over roughly five decades he answered a very large number of legal questions, and his rulings were noted for being brief while resting on stated evidence, and for addressing the actual question the enquirer had asked. His reputation extended beyond religious scholars to the courts, where his opinions were consulted in cases turning on points of Muslim law. His collected rulings were published as Kifayat al-Mufti.

Kifayatullah's prominence as a jurist should be read against the transformation of Islamic law under colonial rule. As Zaman describes it, the British administration had taken over the enforcement of law while leaving questions of personal status to be decided according to Muslim law as the courts understood it. That arrangement left the mufti without coercive authority but with considerable practical influence, since his rulings shaped what ordinary Muslims understood their obligations to be, and could be cited in a colonial courtroom.

The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind

Foundation and interim presidency

The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind was established in November 1919 as a body through which religious scholars could act collectively in public affairs. Kifayatullah was appointed its interim president on its foundation, serving until November 1920, when Mahmud Hasan Deobandi took the office.

The presidency, 1921 to 1940

Following Mahmud Hasan's death, Kifayatullah assumed the presidency on 6 September 1921 and held it until 7 June 1940, when he was succeeded by Husain Ahmad Madani. His nineteen-year tenure spans most of the period in which the Jamiat defined its position on the constitutional future of India, and it ended in the year of the Muslim League's Lahore resolution, at the point when the constitutional question moved to the centre of Indian politics.

During the non-cooperation period he drafted a fatwa recommending the boycott of British goods, a ruling that placed the weight of juristic authority behind a form of political action then being urged across India.

Rizvi's history records that this public activity brought him repeated terms of imprisonment, and that he went on teaching while he was held: Ahmad Saeed Dehlawi, later his successor at Madrasa Aminia, read the Diwan al-Hamasa and other books under his instruction in the jail at Multan. The same notice records that he twice served as a delegate of the Indian Muslims at gatherings abroad, once in the Hejaz and once in Egypt.

He was also drawn into the affairs of his old seminary. Rizvi's first volume records that in 1346 AH, after Anwar Shah Kashmiri resigned as dean of Darul Uloom Deoband and the students called a ten-day strike — the first such stoppage in the institution's history — it was through the efforts of Kifayatullah and Ahmad Saeed Dehlawi that a compromise was reached and the strike called off. That history is candid that the settlement held only for a time, and records that the underlying disagreement ran from about 1344 to 1347 AH.

Jamia Millia Islamia

Kifayatullah was a founding member of Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi and sat on its foundation committee, which was headed by Mahmud Hasan Deobandi. The institution was established as a national Muslim university independent of government patronage, and its creation drew together religious scholars and Western-educated Muslims in a single project — a combination that was unusual, given how sharply the two groups differed over education elsewhere. Zaman's account of the ulama and the modernists describes the general pattern of friction between them; the Jamia's founding committee is an instance of cooperation across that divide.

Writings

Kifayatullah wrote comparatively little in proportion to his learning, and the reason is not obscure: teaching, administration, legal rulings, and public affairs left him limited time for composition.

His first substantial undertaking was the periodical Al Burhan. His second was an Arabic poem, Raud al-Rayyahin, first presented at the annual convention of Madrasa Aminia in 1908 and published in 1909. Its reception led to requests for an Urdu rendering with notes explaining the more difficult vocabulary, which he supplied.

His best-known work is Ta'lim al-Islam, a four-volume presentation of Islamic belief and practice in question-and-answer form, written in deliberately plain language for children and adults alike. The four volumes function as graded stages of a single course, and the work has remained in continuous use as an introductory text.

Rizvi's history gives some measure of how far it travelled. It was written, that account states, for the pupils of Islamic schools, in very plain Urdu and in the form of questions and answers; it went through edition after edition, and it was translated into English and Hindi and into other languages besides. The history sets it beside Ashraf Ali Thanawi's Bihishti Zewar as one of the two Deobandi books most widely present in Muslim households of the subcontinent, and it reports that Qari Muhammad Tayyib, the seminary's long-serving rector, found Ta'lim al-Islam prescribed in the syllabus of the madrasas at Zanzibar when he visited. For a catechism written by a Delhi mufti for schoolchildren, that is a considerable reach, and it is the clearest indication of why his name was known far beyond the circle of scholars who read his rulings.

His collected legal rulings, Kifayat al-Mufti, preserve the body of fatwas on which his reputation principally rests. The compilation was the work of his son, Maulana Hafizur Rahman Wasif, who edited and published his father's rulings after his death; six volumes had appeared by the time Rizvi's history was written. Several of his other religious works are no longer in circulation.

Final Years and Death

Late in life he took a seat on the Majlis-e Shura of Darul Uloom Deoband, the consultative council that governs the seminary, and he held it until his death; Rizvi's history dates his membership from 1372 AH. The appointment closed a circle that had opened when he enrolled as a student at Deoband more than half a century earlier, and it placed him, at the end, among the men responsible for the institution that had trained him.

In his last months Kifayatullah suffered from a severe liver illness that did not respond to treatment. Rizvi's notice likewise records an illness of several months and gives his death as falling on the night of 13 Rabi al-Thani. He died on 31 December 1952, at the age of seventy-seven. He was buried at Mehrauli in Delhi, near the grave of Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki, the thirteenth-century Chishti shaykh whose shrine has been among the most visited in northern India for seven centuries. Accounts of his funeral record an attendance of around a hundred thousand people.

Among his students were Muhammad Taqi Amini, Izaz Ali Amrohi, and Mahdi Hasan Shahjahanpuri. His son, Hafizur Rahman Wasif Dehlavi, is also named in the biographical literature.

Historiographical Note

Four points in the record are worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over.

The first concerns the numbering of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind's presidents. Accounts differ on how the office should be counted, principally because the interim presidency of 1919 to 1920 is treated differently in different reckonings, and because Kifayatullah held the office twice in succession with Mahmud Hasan Deobandi between. Sources describing Kifayatullah as the second president and Madani as his immediate successor do not agree numerically with those that count Madani as the fourth. What is not in dispute is the sequence itself: Kifayatullah served as interim president from 1919, Mahmud Hasan followed, Kifayatullah then held the presidency from 1921 to 1940, and Madani succeeded him in 1940. This article gives the sequence and the dates, and leaves the ordinal aside.

The second concerns his year of birth. It is generally given as 1875, and his age at death as seventy-seven, which is consistent. Some accounts qualify the year as approximate, and no more precise date is established.

The third concerns his salary at the various madrasas where he taught. Figures appear in the literature in rupees per month, but they are not internally consistent — one passage gives fifteen rupees at Madrasa Ainul Ilm and then describes a reduction from eighteen to sixteen. Because the discrepancy cannot be resolved from the available sources, this article records that his salary was modest and that it was reduced when the madrasa's finances deteriorated, without asserting particular figures.

The fourth concerns the chronology of his twenties and thirties, where the two principal accounts used here diverge. Darul Uloom Deoband's own institutional history gives the year of his graduation from the seminary as 1313 AH, which falls in 1895 and 1896 — the very year in which the other account has him enrolling — and it then has him teaching at Madrasa Ayn al-Ilm in Shahjahanpur, founding Al-Burhan in 1321 AH, and moving to Delhi and the principalship of Madrasa Aminia later in that same year, 1321 AH corresponding to 1903 and 1904. The other account has him enrolling at Deoband in 1895, graduating in 1898, and then remaining at Ainul Ilm for several years after Al-Burhan first appeared in Sha'ban 1321 AH, until the death of his teacher Ubaidul Haq. The two agree that the Deoband course came before the Shahjahanpur teaching post, that the periodical was founded in 1321 AH, and that Amin al-Din Dehlawi was the man he succeeded at Madrasa Aminia; they place the graduation about three years apart, and they differ over whether he reached Delhi in 1321 AH or some years later. The variance is recorded here rather than resolved, and the body follows the fuller of the two accounts. One further inconsistency belongs with it: Rizvi's notice dates his membership of the Majlis-e Shura to 1372 AH and gives the night of his death as 13 Rabi al-Thani, which in 1372 AH corresponds to 31 December 1952, but the Hijri year printed beside that day in the notice is 1379, seven years later, and cannot be reconciled either with the rest of its own account or with the death date the other sources give.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• The Qur'an — the foundational text of the curriculum Kifayatullah studied and taught, and the first subject of his maktab education
• Sahih al-Bukhari — a principal hadith collection of the dawra-i hadith, the culminating year of the Darul Uloom Deoband syllabus
• Sahih Muslim — a second canonical collection central to the same curriculum
• Kifayat al-Mufti by Kifayatullah Dehlawi — his collected legal rulings, the primary record of his juristic work
• Ta'lim al-Islam by Kifayatullah Dehlawi — his four-volume catechetical presentation of belief and practice

Classical Islamic Sources

• The Hanafi juristic tradition, within which Kifayatullah worked and issued rulings
• Sikandar Nama — the advanced Persian text he studied at Madrasa Azeeziya
• Qasidat al-Burdah and the classical Arabic literary canon taught in the Dars-i Nizami curriculum
• The fatwa literature of the Hanafi school, the genre in which Kifayatullah's own contribution was made

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change by Muhammad Qasim Zaman — for the ulama's relationship to colonial law, the fatwa as an instrument of authority, print culture, and the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama
• Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 by Barbara Daly Metcalf — for Darul Uloom Deoband, its curriculum, funding, and styles of religious leadership in the period of Kifayatullah's studies
• Wikipedia, "Kifayatullah Dehlawi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kifayatullah_Dehlawi — consulted with the owner's authorisation for the biographical framework, dates, offices, and works
• Wikipedia, "Idris Kandhlavi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_Kandhlawi — consulted with the owner's authorisation, corroborating Kifayatullah's leadership at Madrasa Aminia in 1921
• History of the Dar al-Ulum Deoband by Sayyid Mahboob Rizvi, translated by Murtaz Husain F. Quraishi — the seminary's own institutional history, consulted directly for this article. Its second volume carries a biographical memoir of Kifayatullah among the graduates of the Dar al-Ulum, and is the source of his teacher at Muradabad, his studentship under Mahmud Hasan, the alternative chronology of his graduation and of his move to Delhi, the imprisonments and the teaching at Multan, the delegations to the Hejaz and Egypt, the compilation of Kifayat al-Mufti by his son, the translations of Ta'lim al-Islam, and his membership of the Majlis-e Shura; its first volume records his mediation in the seminary's dispute of 1346 AH and the circulation of Ta'lim al-Islam

Further Reading

• Asir Adrawi, Tazkirah Mashahir-e-Hind: Karwan-e-Rafta (Darul Moallifeen, Deoband, 2nd edition, 2016) — a biographical notice in Urdu
• Mufti Azam Hind, Maulana Kifayatullah Shahjahanpuri Thumma Dehlawi (Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library, 2005) — a dedicated biography in Urdu
• Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (Columbia University Press, 1982) — for the political setting of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind's early years
• The Deobandi Movement — the wider school of thought and practice to which Kifayatullah belonged
• Darul Uloom Deoband — the seminary where he completed his training
• Husain Ahmad Madani — his successor in the presidency of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind