Mahmud Hasan Deobandi

Mahmud Hasan Deobandi (1851 – 30 November 1920) was an Indian scholar of hadith who was the first student enrolled at Darul Uloom Deoband, taught there for some forty years, and served as its principal and chief teacher of hadith from 1890 to 1915. He is generally known by the title Shaykh al-Hind, conferred on him by the Khilafat Committee after his release from imprisonment in Malta. He organised the movement known from its method of communication as the Silk Letter Movement, was arrested in 1916 and interned by the British at Malta until 1920, and in the last weeks of his life laid the foundation stone of Jamia Millia Islamia and was appointed president of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind.

Barbara Metcalf's history of the seminary describes him as "a man of extraordinary energy, teaching ten lessons each day, writing, and caring for Muhammad Qasim in his final illness", who "was devoted to the school and resisted all invitations to leave it". His reputation, she notes, was greatest in hadith, and over his career he taught more than a thousand students who came from as far as Kabul, Qandahar, Balkh, Bukhara, Mecca, Medina and Yemen. Among them were Anwar Shah Kashmiri, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani and Hafiz Muhammad Ahmad, whom Metcalf identifies as the leaders of the seminary's third generation of scholars.

Family and Birth

Mahmud Hasan was born in 1851 at Bareilly, in what were then the North-Western Provinces, into the Usmani family of Deoband. His father was Zulfiqar Ali Deobandi, one of those associated with the founding of Darul Uloom Deoband and a member of its first consultative council, who taught at Bareilly College and afterwards served in the colonial education department as an inspector of schools. Metcalf notes in passing the standing this conferred within the institution, referring to the advantage of having "a teacher like Mahmud Hasan, the son of a council member".

The family was a scholarly one on both sides. His paternal uncle, Mahtab Ali Deobandi, was his first teacher in the seminary curriculum, and his brother Hakim Muhammad Hasan would later lead the last of his funeral prayers.

Education

He studied the Qur'an with Miyanji Manglori and Persian with a teacher named Abdul Lateef. During the rebellion of 1857 his father was transferred to Meerut, and the boy was moved to Deoband, where he read Persian and Arabic literature in the Dars-i Nizami curriculum with his uncle Mahtab Ali.

When the seminary at Deoband opened, Mahmud Hasan was its first enrolled student — a fact of some symbolic weight in the institution's own account of itself. He studied with Mahmud Deobandi, its first teacher, and completed his formal studies in 1869.

He then did something unusual. Rather than treating his certificate as the end of his training, he went to Meerut to read the six canonical hadith collections with Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi, the seminary's principal founder. Metcalf's account conveys how this came about: Mahmud Hasan "had sought out Muhammad Qasim in the printing houses of Meerut and Delhi in order to be one of the few to undergo his demanding teaching of hadis". Nanautawi was then working in the printing trade, and the instruction was informal and hard to obtain. Mahmud Hasan attended his hadith discourses for two years, reading Arabic literature with his father during the vacations.

He graduated in 1872 and received the turban of honour in 1873, at the seminary's first convocation. In Sufism he was an authorised disciple of Imdadullah Muhajir Makki and of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, in the Chishti line in its Sabiri-Imdadi branch.

Forty Years at Darul Uloom Deoband

He was appointed to the teaching staff in 1873, the year he completed his studies, and remained for the rest of his working life. Metcalf records that for the following forty years he was "a dominating influence in its teaching and administration". He became principal in 1890, succeeding Sayyid Ahmad Dehlavi, and held the post until 1915, when his political work and then his imprisonment ended his tenure; Anwar Shah Kashmiri succeeded him as chief teacher of hadith.

His understanding of what the seminary was for went beyond instruction. He regarded it as an institution intended to make good what had been lost in the failure of the 1857 rebellion — that is, as a means of preserving and transmitting Muslim learning under a government that no longer patronised it. Metcalf's study describes the founders' organisational achievement in similar terms: a permanent staff, a fixed syllabus, formal examinations, and funding by public subscription rather than by a ruler's endowment, which together made the institution independent of political favour.

He founded a succession of bodies intended to extend the seminary's reach beyond its own classrooms. The Thamrat al-Tarbiyat, "the fruit of the upbringing", was established in 1878 as a centre for the further training of students and graduates. It developed into the Jamiat al-Ansar, which began in 1909 with a first session at Moradabad presided over by Ahmad Hasan Amrohi. In November 1913, with his student Ubaidullah Sindhi, he founded the Nizarat al-Ma'arif al-Qur'aniyya, an academy of Qur'anic learning whose purpose was to teach Islam to Muslims educated in English and in the modern subjects. Husain Ahmad Madani described its object as instructing and guiding western-educated Muslims in Qur'anic teaching in a manner they would find reasoned and persuasive.

That last aim is worth dwelling on, because it complicates the familiar contrast between the seminary and the modern college. Muhammad Qasim Zaman's study of the modern ulama examines at length their relations with Muslim modernists, and the Nizarat al-Ma'arif shows Deoband's most senior scholar deliberately addressing the products of an English education rather than writing them off.

Scholarly Work

The translation and commentary on the Qur'an

Mahmud Hasan produced an interlinear Urdu translation of the Qur'an. He later began to add explanatory notes, and had reached the end of the fourth chapter, al-Nisa, when he died. The exegesis was completed by his student Shabbir Ahmad Usmani and published as Tafsir-i Usmani, one of the most widely used Urdu commentaries of the twentieth century. It was subsequently translated into Persian by a group of scholars under the patronage of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan.

The chapter headings of al-Bukhari

He taught Sahih al-Bukhari at Deoband for many years, and while interned at Malta he began a treatise on the collection's chapter headings. The assignment of headings in a hadith compilation is treated in this tradition as a distinct science, al-abwab wa al-tarajim, on the reasoning that al-Bukhari's arrangement of his material carries meaning in itself. Mahmud Hasan set out fifteen principles governing the subject and then worked through the chapter on revelation and part of the chapter on knowledge before the work broke off. It runs to some fifty-two pages. The same question later occupied Muhammad Zakariya Kandhlawi, who wrote a work of his own under a closely similar title.

The exchange with the Ahl-i Hadis

His first book arose from a public exchange with scholars of the Ahl-i Hadis. Metcalf gives the sequence. Muhammad Husain Batalawi, an Ahl-i Hadis scholar resident in Lahore, issued a circular addressed to the Hanafi scholars calling on them to justify ten specific points of Hanafi law from the Qur'an or hadith, and offering a reward of ten rupees for each point they could establish from the revealed sources. A Punjabi Hanafi replied first, in terms his own school found unsatisfactory. Mahmud Hasan then wrote a response himself.

The result was Adilla-i Kamila, his first written work and one often reprinted since. Metcalf's assessment is that its standing rested not on originality — it was a standard exposition of Hanafi belief and practice, setting out the school's juristic position — but on the care of its argument and the confidence of its manner. Batalawi announced a final reply in the newspaper he edited; the reply, written by an associate, did not satisfy the other side; and Mahmud Hasan wrote a second answer under Nanautawi's supervision, which concluded the exchange from the Deobandi side. That second work was published as Izah al-Adilla, a commentary on his own earlier book. Metcalf observes that this pattern of pamphlet and counter-pamphlet, each answer prompting a further response, was characteristic of religious debate in the period and frequently ran to more exchanges than these four.

Other works

Ahsan al-Qira fi Tawzih Awthaq al-'Ura concerns whether the Friday congregational prayer may be held in villages and rural settlements, a question on which Rashid Ahmad Gangohi had written a ruling that Mahmud Hasan set out at length to explain and support.

Juhd al-Muqill, in two volumes, is a work of theology on the attributes of God, written in the vocabulary of ilm al-kalam and following the manner of al-Taftazani's commentary on the creed of al-Nasafi. It was composed in defence of Shah Ismail Dehlvi and other scholars of the earlier reform movement whose views had been questioned.

The edition of Sunan Abu Dawud

He also worked as a textual editor. The manuscripts of the six canonical collections were held mainly in the libraries of Mecca and Medina, and the Indian scholar Ahmad Ali Saharanpuri had copied those at Mecca and begun issuing corrected editions from his own press in India; Nanautawi continued the work. When attention turned to the Sunan of Abu Dawud, the printed editions were found to diverge substantially from the manuscripts. Mahmud Hasan collected the available manuscripts, edited the text, and published it; the editions appeared in 1900 from the Mujtabai Press in Delhi.

The Silk Letter Movement

From about the middle of the 1910s Mahmud Hasan worked to organise opposition to British rule in India, and the effort became known as the Silk Letter Movement, or Reshmi Rumal Tehrik, from the silk cloth on which some of its correspondence was written.

The plan had two fronts. The first lay in the tribal territory between Afghanistan and India, known as Yaghistan, which became the movement's centre; the second lay within India, where the aim was to win the support of established leaders. Those who worked on the frontier included his students and associates Ubaidullah Sindhi, Muhammad Mian Mansoor Ansari, Abdur Rahim Sindhi, Uzair Gul Peshawari and Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Within India the work involved Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, Abdur Rahim Raipuri and Ahmadullah Panipati. A provisional government of India was formed by Ubaidullah Sindhi and his associates, with Mahendra Pratap as its president.

Mahmud Hasan himself travelled to the Hejaz in 1915 to seek Ottoman and German support. He left Bombay on 18 September 1915 in the company of Muhammad Mian Mansoor Ansari, Murtaza Hasan Chandpuri, Muhammad Sahool Bhagalpuri and Uzair Gul Peshawari, and reached Mecca on 18 October. There he met Ghalib Pasha, the Ottoman governor, and Anwar Pasha, the Ottoman minister of war. Ghalib Pasha gave him three letters of support, addressed to the Muslims of India, to the governor at Basra, and to Anwar Pasha. He also met Djemal Pasha, the governor of Syria, who took the same position.

The correspondence was intercepted and the plan became known, and its participants were arrested. Mahmud Hasan was detained in December 1916, together with Husain Ahmad Madani and Uzair Gul Peshawari, by Sharif Hussain of Mecca, who had by then risen against the Ottomans and allied with Britain. The Sharif handed them to the British, and they were interned at Fort Verdala in Malta.

Release, the Khilafat Movement and Jamia Millia Islamia

He was released in May 1920 and reached Bombay by 8 June. Those who met him included Abdul Bari Firangi Mahali, Hafiz Muhammad Ahmad, Kifayatullah Dehlawi, Shaukat Ali and Mahatma Gandhi. The Khilafat Committee conferred on him the title Shaykh al-Hind, the leader of India.

He issued a ruling on the boycott of British goods, sought by students of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, advising them to withhold cooperation from the government, to leave government-funded schools and colleges, and to decline government employment. A large proportion of the students left the college. The ruling gave religious sanction to the Non-cooperation movement, and he travelled to Allahabad, Fatehpur, Ghazipur, Faizabad, Lucknow and Moradabad in its support.

The departure of those students created the need for an institution to receive them, and Mahmud Hasan was asked to preside at the founding of what was then called the National Muslim University, established with Muhammad Ali Jauhar and Hakim Ajmal Khan. He was by then physically weakened by his years of internment, and those close to him urged him not to travel. He was brought to Deoband railway station in a palanquin and went on to Aligarh.

Unable to write, he asked Shabbir Ahmad Usmani to prepare his presidential address, then corrected it himself and sent it for printing. Usmani read it aloud at the ceremony on 29 October 1920, after which Mahmud Hasan laid the foundation stone of the institution that became Jamia Millia Islamia. In the address he was careful to record that the scholars he had learned from had never held the study of a foreign language, or the acquisition of the sciences of other nations, to be a departure from the faith. The position is a measured one, and it accounts for his willingness to found a university teaching modern subjects under Muslim direction while simultaneously urging students to leave a government college.

The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind

He presided over the second general meeting of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, held at Delhi over three days from 19 November 1920, and was appointed its president. Shabbir Ahmad Usmani again read his address for him. In it he argued for unity among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, holding that if the communities acted together the attainment of freedom would not be difficult. It was the last public meeting he attended, and he died within days of his appointment, so that he never exercised the office.

Zaman's study describes the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama as the body through which the Deobandi scholars acted collectively in public affairs for the following decades, and the position Mahmud Hasan took at this meeting — that the communities of India should seek a common political future — is the one his student Husain Ahmad Madani would later develop into the doctrine of composite nationalism.

Death

On 30 October 1920, the day after the ceremony at Aligarh, he travelled to Delhi at the request of Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari. His health declined over the following weeks and Ansari treated him at his house in Daryaganj. He died there on 30 November 1920, aged sixty-eight or sixty-nine.

When his death was announced, Hindus and Muslims alike closed their shops and gathered outside the house. His brother was asked whether he should be buried in Delhi or taken to Deoband, and Deoband was chosen because Mahmud Hasan had wished to lie near the grave of his teacher Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi. Funeral prayers were offered five times over: outside Ansari's house, at Delhi railway station, at Meerut City station, at Meerut Cantonment station, and finally at Deoband, where the prayer was led by his brother Hakim Muhammad Hasan. He was buried in the Qasmi cemetery, in the same ground as Nanautawi and as his own father.

Legacy

Metcalf's estimate of his position rests on his teaching: more than a thousand students over a career of four decades, drawn from across Central Asia, Arabia and the Indian subcontinent, and including the scholars who led Deoband into its third generation. Ebrahim Moosa's study of the madrasa observes that this body of students went on to distinction in religious scholarship, in politics, and in the building of institutions across South Asia. His pupils included Ashraf Ali Thanawi, Anwar Shah Kashmiri, Husain Ahmad Madani, Kifayatullah Dehlawi, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, Mufti Muhammad Shafi, Manazir Ahsan Gilani, Sanaullah Amritsari, Izaz Ali Amrohi, Asghar Husain Deobandi and Ubaidullah Sindhi — a list that includes the founders or leaders of institutions in India, Pakistan and beyond.

Ashraf Ali Thanawi referred to him by the still wider title Shaykh al-Alam. The Shaikhul Hind Academy, a department of Darul Uloom Deoband, is named after him, as is an Islamic studies programme at Darul Qasim College in Illinois. In January 2013 the President of India released a commemorative postage stamp marking the Silk Letter Movement.

Historiographical Note

Two points call for comment.

The first concerns the presidency of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind and the way its holders are numbered. Mahmud Hasan was appointed president at the meeting of November 1920 and died on 30 November, so his tenure was a matter of days and he never acted in the office. Kifayatullah Dehlawi had been interim president from the body's foundation in 1919, and became president again in September 1921. Because accounts differ over whether to count the interim appointment, and over whether to count a presidency that death cut short before it began, the ordinals attached to the early presidents vary between sources: the same man may be described as first, second or fourth president in different works. The sequence of officeholders is not in dispute, and this article gives the sequence and the dates rather than the ordinal.

The second concerns his date of birth and age. The year 1851 is consistently reported, which makes him sixty-eight or sixty-nine at his death in November 1920 depending on the month of his birth, which is not established. Sources differ on the corresponding Hijri years, and his dates are sometimes given as 1268–1339 AH.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• The Qur'an — the subject of his interlinear Urdu translation and of the commentary completed after his death as Tafsir-i Usmani
• Sahih al-Bukhari — taught by him for many years, and the subject of his treatise on the chapter headings
• Sunan Abu Dawud — the collection whose text he edited from manuscript and published in 1900
• The six canonical hadith collections, read by him with Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi at Meerut
• Adilla-i Kamila by Mahmud Hasan Deobandi — his first work, setting out the Hanafi juristic position

Classical Islamic Sources

• The Hanafi school of law, whose positions he expounded and defended
• The creed of al-Nasafi and al-Taftazani's commentary upon it — the model for his theological work Juhd al-Muqill
• The Dars-i Nizami curriculum, which he studied under his uncle and later taught for forty years
• The Chishti tradition in its Sabiri-Imdadi line, in which he held authorisation from Imdadullah Muhajir Makki and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi
• The science of al-abwab wa al-tarajim, the study of chapter arrangement in hadith collections

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 by Barbara Daly Metcalf — for his pursuit of Nanautawi's hadith teaching, his forty years at the seminary, his students and their origins, and the pamphlet exchange with the Ahl-i Hadis
• The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change by Muhammad Qasim Zaman — for the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama, the ulama's engagement with modern education, and the later development of composite nationalism
• Wikipedia, "Mahmud Hasan Deobandi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_Hasan_Deobandi — consulted with the owner's authorisation for the biographical framework, the Silk Letter Movement, the internment at Malta, the founding of Jamia Millia Islamia, and his writings
• Ebrahim Moosa, What is a Madrasa? (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) — on the seminary and the later careers of his students; cited in the source consulted rather than read directly for this article
• Syed Tanvir Wasti, "The Political Aspirations of Indian Muslims and the Ottoman Nexus", Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 42 no. 5 (2006), pp. 709–722 — on the Ottoman dimension of the period's politics; cited in the source consulted rather than read directly for this article

Further Reading

• Asir Adrawi, Hazrat Shaykhul Hind: Hayat awr Karname (Shaykhul Hind Academy, Deoband, 2012) — the fullest Urdu biography
• Sayyid Asghar Husain, Hayat-i Shaikh al-Hind (Deoband, 1920) — the earliest biography, written by a student in the year of his death
• Muhammad Miyan Deobandi, Silk Letter Movement, translated by Muhammadullah Qasmi (Shaikhul Hind Academy with Manak Publications, 2013) — a study of the movement in English
• Farhat Tabassum, Deoband Ulema's Movement for the Freedom of India (Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind with Manak Publications, 2006)
• Zulfiqar Ali Deobandi — his father, and a founder of the seminary
• Darul Uloom Deoband — the institution he entered as its first student and later led
• Husain Ahmad Madani — his student, interned with him at Malta
• The Deobandi Movement — the tradition he did much to shape