Delhi

Akbar Shah II (r. 1806-1837) was the penultimate Mughal emperor, holding a Delhi court that kept its ceremonial and literary life while the East India Company reduced its standing and revenue. He tried for thirty years to make Mirza Jahangir his heir instead of the future Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Aruna Asaf Ali (1909-1996), born Aruna Ganguly, hoisted the Indian flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan on 9 August 1942, marking the start of the Quit India Movement. She spent four years underground, became Delhi's first mayor in 1958, and was awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1997.

Asaf Ali (1888-1953) was an Indian barrister and Congress leader who defended Bhagat Singh and the INA officers at the Red Fort trial. He served in the Interim Government of 1946, became independent India's first Ambassador to the United States in 1947, and was Governor of Odisha to 1952.

Aurangzeb Alamgir (1618-1707 CE) was the sixth Mughal emperor, ruling nearly fifty years over the empire at its greatest extent. He commissioned the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, annexed Bijapur and Golconda, and spent his last decades campaigning in the Deccan.

Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837-1857) was the last Mughal emperor, a calligrapher and celebrated Urdu poet reigning over a Delhi court stripped of real power. Reluctantly made figurehead of the 1857 Uprising, he was tried and exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862, ending the Mughal dynasty.

The Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526 CE) was a series of five successive Islamic dynasties that ruled northern India for over three centuries, establishing Muslim political power in the subcontinent, creating a unique Indo-Islamic culture, and leaving an enduring architectural and administrative legacy.

Hakim Ajmal Khan (1863-1927) was an Indian physician and nationalist who founded the Ayurvedic and Unani Tibbia College in Delhi, was the first Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, and presided over the Indian National Congress in 1921. A Unani practitioner from a family of court physicians.

Hamdard Laboratories (India) is a Unani pharmaceutical company and welfare institution founded in Old Delhi in 1906 by Hakeem Hafiz Abdul Majeed. Converted into a waqf in 1948 under his son Hakeem Abdul Hameed, it produces Rooh Afza and established Jamia Hamdard university in Delhi.

Jamia Millia Islamia was founded at Aligarh on 29 October 1920 by nationalist Muslim leaders and students who left the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College during the Non-Cooperation movement. It moved to Delhi in 1925, to Okhla in 1935, and became a central university by Act of Parliament in 1988.

An Indian Hanafi jurist widely titled Mufti-e-Azam, or Grand Mufti of India. He led Madrasa Aminia in Delhi for nearly half a century, was a founder and twice president of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, and left some four and a half thousand legal rulings collected as Kifayat al-Mufti.

The Indian scholar who founded the Tablighi Jamaat in the Mewat region during the 1920s. Trained at Darul Uloom Deoband under Mahmud Hasan, he built a movement of lay religious preaching that later spread across the Muslim world.

The second leader of the Tablighi Jamaat, who directed it from 1944 to 1965 and oversaw its spread beyond South Asia. A graduate of Mazahir Uloom Saharanpur, he compiled Hayat al-Sahaba, a three-volume Arabic collection on the lives of the Prophet's Companions.

Nizam al-Din Awliya (1239-1325 CE) was the Chishti master whose hospice outside Delhi became the centre of Sufi life in the subcontinent. He outlived a dozen sultans, defended the practice of sama before the court, and admitted Hindus to his assemblies without requiring conversion.

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703-1762 CE), pioneering Indian Islamic scholar and reformer who revitalized Islamic thought through synthesis of Islamic sciences, emphasis on ijtihad, and efforts to bridge sectarian divisions.

A nineteenth-century Indian Sunni movement that set aside the authority of the historic schools of law in favour of direct recourse to the Qur'an and hadith. Led by scholars at Delhi and Bhopal, it was marked by its manner of prayer and an austere standard of interpretation.

The Mughal Empire (1526-1857) ruled most of the Indian subcontinent for three centuries, from Babur's victory at Panipat to the deposition of Bahadur Shah Zafar. At its height it was among the wealthiest and most populous states in the world.