Abdul Aleem Siddiqi

Muhammad Abdul Aleem Siddiqi (3 April 1892 – 22 August 1954) belonged to the Barelvi movement of Sunni Islam; he was an Islamic scholar and a spiritual master of the Qadiri order, a student of Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi and the co-founder of the World Muslim Congress.¹ The Arabic article records his spiritual development under the guidance of Maulana Ahmed Raza Khan.² His son was Shah Ahmad Noorani; no record for the son exists in the museum yet, so the relationship is stated in prose only.

He was born on 3 April 1892 into a reputed scholarly family of Meerut; his father, Maulana Abdul Hakeem Siddiqi, was a mujtahid of his time and a descendant of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (may God be pleased with him).¹ Reportedly he had completed memorisation of the Qur'an before the age of four and obtained his advanced Islamic studies degree, the Dars-e-Nizami, at sixteen; he obtained a BA in comparative religion and an LLB from Meerut College, and is said to have mastered thirteen languages.¹ The Urdu article pairs his birth with 15 Ramadan 1310 AH, a Hijri pairing that does not convert to 3 April 1892; the Arabic article's own birth category gives 1309 AH, the year of the conversion.³²

He became a mureed of Imam Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi in the Qadiriyya Razviya order and got his khilafat from him; he also received khilafat from Maulana Shah Abdul Aleem Siddiqi's contemporary Syed Zafaruddin Sha Bihari and from Mufti Didar Ali Shah Alwari for various chains.¹ His name is connected to the development of the Bahawalpur Central Jamia Mosque in Pakistan, and he translated the first two chapters of the Qur'an into English with Syed Manzooruddin in 1950.¹

For over forty years he travelled propagating Islam in all parts of the world; in 1918 he visited East and South Africa, and in 1932 he founded the Malay Muslim missionary association in Singapore — the Arabic article calls it the All-Malaya Muslim Missionary Society — and built the first mosque in Singapore, the Abdul Aleem Siddique Mosque.² He visited Trinidad in 1933 and again in 1950 with his son Shah Ahmad Noorani, and arrived in Canada in 1939; in 1950 he launched the World Islamic Mission in Trinidad, and in 1948 and the years following he joined delegations for Pakistan at the United Nations and elsewhere and visited Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Nepal.¹³

He died in Medina, Saudi Arabia, on 22 August 1954, and was buried in Jannat al-Baqi, the graveyard where many relatives and companions of the Prophet ﷺ Muhammad are buried.¹ The Arabic article dates his death to 22 Dhu al-Hijjah 1373 AH and records that he was buried in Baqi near the tomb of Uthman ibn Affan (may God be pleased with him) and the mothers of the believers.²

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