Shabbir Ahmad Usmani

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani (11 October 1887 – 13 December 1949) was a scholar of hadith and Qur'anic commentary who taught at Darul Uloom Deoband and later at Dabhel, and who in the last years of his life led the group of Deobandi scholars who supported the creation of Pakistan. He completed the Qur'anic commentary his teacher Mahmud Hasan Deobandi had left unfinished, published as Tafsir-e-Usmani, and began the Arabic commentary on Sahih Muslim known as Fath al-Mulhim, which was completed half a century later by Muhammad Taqi Usmani.

Barbara Metcalf's history of Deoband names him, with Anwar Shah Kashmiri and Hafiz Muhammad Ahmad, as one of the leaders of the seminary's third generation of scholars — the students of Mahmud Hasan who carried the institution into the twentieth century. Muhammad Qasim Zaman records his part in what followed: "Shabbir Ahmad 'Uthmani had himself played an influential role in the early debates on an Islamic constitution for the new state."

Family

He was born on 11 October 1887 at Bijnor, in the North-Western Provinces of British India. His father, Fazlur Rahman Usmani, was a deputy inspector of schools and is named among those associated with the founding of Darul Uloom Deoband. His brother, Azizur Rahman Usmani, was the first to hold the office of Grand Mufti at the seminary, and among his nephews were Atiqur Rahman Usmani and Shams Naved Usmani.

The pattern is a recognisable one in the history of Deoband: a father in the colonial education service whose sons entered religious scholarship. Zulfiqar Ali Deobandi, also an inspector of schools and also a founder of the seminary, was the father of Mahmud Hasan, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani's own teacher.

Education and Teaching

He was educated at Darul Uloom Deoband, where he became a disciple of Mahmud Hasan Deobandi, and graduated in 1908. He was appointed to the teaching staff immediately afterwards.

In 1915 Mahmud Hasan left India for the Hejaz, on the journey that ended in his arrest and internment at Malta, and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani took over his teaching of Sahih Muslim. He was then twenty-seven, and the assignment placed one of the canonical collections in the hands of a young teacher because the senior man was absent — a pattern of promotion by circumstance that recurs in the seminary's history.

In 1925 he was among the scholars from India who took part in a conference of religious scholars convened in the Hejaz by Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud.

In 1926 he moved to Dabhel, in what is now Gujarat, to teach at the Jamia Islamia Talimuddin. He taught hadith there for many years, and his students included Badre Alam Merathi, who compiled Anwar Shah Kashmiri's lectures on al-Bukhari into the commentary Fayd al-Bari, together with Athar Ali Bengali, Azizul Haque, Shah Abdul Wahhab and Sharif Hasan Deobandi.

He later returned to Deoband as its chancellor, sadr muhtamim. It was in that capacity that, with Qari Muhammad Tayyib, he invited Muhammad Idris Kandhlawi back to the seminary in 1939 to hold the chair of Qur'anic commentary.

Jamia Millia Islamia

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani was a member of the foundation committee of Jamia Millia Islamia, which met on Friday 29 October 1920. Its other members included Mahmud Hasan Deobandi, Husain Ahmad Madani, Abdul Bari Firangi Mahali, Kifayatullah Dehlawi and Abdul Haq Akorwi.

His part in that day's proceedings was more than formal. Mahmud Hasan, weakened by his years of internment, was unable to write his own presidential address, and asked Shabbir Ahmad Usmani to prepare it; Mahmud Hasan then corrected the draft, and Usmani read it aloud at the ceremony. He performed the same service at the general meeting of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind the following month, at which Mahmud Hasan was appointed president and where he died within days. For those two occasions Shabbir Ahmad Usmani was, in effect, his teacher's voice.

Writings

Tafsir-e-Usmani

Mahmud Hasan had produced an interlinear Urdu translation of the Qur'an and had begun adding explanatory notes, reaching the end of the fourth chapter, al-Nisa, when he died in 1920. Shabbir Ahmad Usmani completed the commentary, and the finished work was published as Tafsir-e-Usmani. It became one of the most widely used Urdu commentaries of the century and was later translated into Persian under the patronage of Mohammed Zahir Shah of Afghanistan.

Fath al-Mulhim

His major work of hadith scholarship is Fath al-Mulhim bi-Sharh Sahih al-Imam Muslim, an Arabic commentary on Sahih Muslim. Zaman's bibliography records it in two volumes. He did not finish it, and its completion, many years later, fell to Muhammad Taqi Usmani, the son of his own student Mufti Muhammad Shafi. Rafi Usmani, Taqi's elder brother, wrote annotations upon it.

The history of this single book therefore runs across three generations and two countries: begun by a teacher at Deoband and Dabhel before partition, completed and annotated by two brothers at Karachi long afterwards. It is a useful illustration of how the commentarial tradition Zaman describes was sustained — not by individual authorship so much as by a chain of scholars taking up work left unfinished.

The Pakistan Movement and the Constituent Assemblies

In 1944 Shabbir Ahmad Usmani joined the All-India Muslim League and led the group of Deobandi scholars who supported the demand for Pakistan.

This placed him in opposition to the position taken by the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, whose president, Husain Ahmad Madani, argued for composite nationalism and a common political future for the communities of India. The disagreement was among the most consequential within the Deobandi tradition in the twentieth century, and it divided scholars who had been trained in the same institution, often by the same teachers. Shabbir Ahmad Usmani and Madani had both been students of Mahmud Hasan. This article records the division and the positions taken; it does not adjudicate between them.

He became the amir of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam on its formation in 1945, holding the office until 1949, when he was succeeded by Zafar Ahmad Usmani — the son-in-law of Ashraf Ali Thanawi and author of the hadith commentary I'la al-Sunan, whom Zaman describes as having been active in East Bengal in support of the Pakistan movement before serving as the organisation's national leader.

He sat in the Constituent Assembly of India from November 1946 until 11 August 1947, and then in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan from 11 August 1947 until his death in December 1949. He raised the flag of Pakistan at Karachi on 14 August 1947, and led the funeral prayers of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in September 1948. In 1949 he held the title Shaykh al-Islam of Pakistan.

His work in the Constituent Assembly concerned the place of Islam in the new state's constitution, and it is this that Zaman identifies as his influential contribution. The debates of 1948 and 1949 established the terms in which the question would be argued for decades afterwards, and they were the occasion of the collaboration between religious scholars and Abul A'la Maududi that Zaman regards as one of the earliest instances of Islamists and ulama working together anywhere in the Muslim world.

Death

In October 1949 the government of Bahawalpur State invited Shabbir Ahmad Usmani to serve as chancellor of Jamia Abbasia at Bahawalpur, with Idris Kandhlawi as vice-chancellor, in order to reform the institution's teaching and administration. He fell ill shortly after arriving and died there on 13 December 1949, at the age of sixty-two. He is buried at Karachi.

His death came a little over two years into the existence of the state whose constitutional character he had done much to define, and before the first constitution was settled.

Historiographical Note

The departures from Deoband to Dabhel. The movement of senior teachers from Darul Uloom Deoband to the Jamia Islamia Talimuddin at Dabhel is dated differently in different accounts. Shabbir Ahmad Usmani's move is given as 1926. Anwar Shah Kashmiri's resignation from Deoband is given as 1927. The account of Idris Kandhlawi's life places the departure of Kashmiri and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, followed by other teachers and students, in 1929. Rather than one of these being simply wrong, the likeliest explanation is that the migration took place in stages over several years, with individual scholars leaving at different dates and the movement as a whole being remembered by the year in which it became conspicuous. This article gives the individual dates as its sources report them and does not assign a single year to the whole episode.

The claim of priority on the Islamic state. He is sometimes described as the first person to demand that Pakistan be constituted as an Islamic state. Claims of priority of this kind are difficult to establish and depend on what counts as the demand and where it was made. What the scholarly source establishes is narrower and better supported: that he played an influential part in the early debates on an Islamic constitution. That is the formulation used here.

The 1925 conference in the Hejaz. One account states that the Indian delegation chose him as its leader, but does so in hedged terms without a supporting citation. His participation in the delegation is recorded here; the leadership of it is not asserted.

The teaching of al-Bukhari after 1933. It is reported that he took over the teaching of Sahih al-Bukhari following Anwar Shah Kashmiri's death in 1933. The statement appears without a supporting citation in the account consulted and is therefore not asserted here.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• The Qur'an — the subject of Tafsir-e-Usmani, which he completed after Mahmud Hasan's death
• Sahih Muslim — the collection he taught from 1915 and the subject of his commentary Fath al-Mulhim
• Sahih al-Bukhari — among the collections of the dawra year in the curriculum he studied and taught
• Fath al-Mulhim bi-Sharh Sahih al-Imam Muslim by Shabbir Ahmad Usmani — his principal work of hadith scholarship
• Tafsir-e-Usmani — the Urdu commentary begun by Mahmud Hasan Deobandi and completed by him

Classical Islamic Sources

• The Hanafi school of law, the juristic tradition of his training and teaching
• I'la al-Sunan by Zafar Ahmad Usmani — the contemporaneous Hanafi hadith commentary produced within the same circle
• The Dars-i Nizami curriculum, which he studied at Deoband and taught at Deoband and Dabhel
• The classical commentarial tradition on Sahih Muslim, within which Fath al-Mulhim was written

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change by Muhammad Qasim Zaman — for his role in the early debates on an Islamic constitution, his commentary on Sahih Muslim, and the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama-i Islam
• Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 by Barbara Daly Metcalf — for his place among the students of Mahmud Hasan and the third generation of scholars at the seminary
• Wikipedia, "Shabbir Ahmad Usmani", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbir_Ahmad_Usmani — consulted with the owner's authorisation for his dates, family, education, offices, and public role
• Wikipedia, "Idris Kandhlavi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_Kandhlawi — consulted with the owner's authorisation for his chancellorship at Deoband and Bahawalpur and the circumstances of his death
• Wikipedia, "Mahmud Hasan Deobandi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_Hasan_Deobandi — consulted with the owner's authorisation for the completion of the Qur'an commentary and his reading of Mahmud Hasan's addresses

Further Reading

• Mahmud Hasan Deobandi — his teacher, whose commentary he completed and whose addresses he delivered
• Husain Ahmad Madani — his fellow student, who took the opposing position on the constitutional future of India
• Muhammad Taqi Usmani — who completed Fath al-Mulhim
• Mufti Muhammad Shafi — his student at Deoband
• Anwar Shah Kashmiri — his colleague at Deoband and at Dabhel
• Darul Uloom Deoband — the seminary where he studied, taught and later served as chancellor