Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi

Abu Hamid Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi (10 Shawwal 1272 AH / 14 June 1856 – 28 October 1921) was an Indian Hanafi jurist, theologian, hadith scholar, poet and Qadiri Sufi guide, regarded as the founder of the Barelvi movement in South Asia, a mass movement defending popular Sufism which the article estimates at more than 200 million followers today in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa and the diaspora. ^{1 2}

He wrote extensively in defence of his views against the Wahhabi, Deobandi and Ahl-i Hadith movements and the Ahmadiyya, and his writings became the nucleus of the Barelvi movement. His best-known works are the thirty-volume Fatawa-i Razawiyya and his Urdu translation of the Qur'an, Kanz ul-Iman (1911). ^{2 1}

He was born in the Jasoli quarter of Bareilly in northern India, into a family of the Barech Pashtun tribe whose ancestors came from Kandahar to Lahore and later settled in Bareilly. ^{1 2}

His father, Naqi Ali Khan, was a scholar who wrote fatwas and books, and his grandfather Raza Ali Khan was one of the leading scholars of Bareilly, so he grew up in a house of learning and Sufism. ²

He was named Muhammad at birth; his grandfather named him Ahmed Raza, and the name al-Mukhtar was chosen for him because its letters, by the abjad reckoning, matched the year of his birth. He later became famous across the subcontinent by the title A'la Hazrat ("the Great Presence"). ²

He studied the elementary books under Mirza Ghulam Qadir Beg, completed his studies under his father and graduated under him in 1286 AH at the age of thirteen, whereupon his father delegated fatwa-writing to him; for years he showed his fatwas to his father for correction before being allowed to issue them independently. ²

Among his teachers, the article names Syed Shah Aale Rasul Marehrawi, Ahmad Zayni Dahlan of Mecca, Abd al-Rahman Siraj of Mecca and Abd al-Ali Rampuri. ¹

He belonged to the Qadiri order. In 1294 AH (1877), at the age of twenty-two, he became a disciple (murid) of Shah Aale Rasul Marehrawi, who granted him succession (khilafa) in several Sufi orders. ^{1 2}

His writing and activity in defence of popular Sufism, countering the Deobandi and Ahl-i Hadith movements, produced the Barelvi movement. It was largely a rural phenomenon at first, then spread among urban, educated Pakistanis and Indians and the South Asian diaspora worldwide. ¹

In 1904 he founded the Manzar-i Islam school in Bareilly. ¹

On 17 December 1920 he founded the Jama'at Raza-i Mustafa, aiming at the progress, unity and religious education of the Ahl-e-Sunnat wal Jamat; after his death his eldest son, Hamid Raza Khan, succeeded him as its president. ^{1 2}

He wrote several hundred books and treatises in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, a number of which have been translated into European and South Asian languages. ¹

• Fatawa-i Razawiyya — his magnum opus, a thirty-volume compendium of his fatwas running to some 22,000 pages, treating questions from religion to business and from war to marriage, and regarded by his followers as a reference of the Hanafi school within Sunni Islam. ¹
• Kanz ul-Iman — his Urdu translation of the Qur'an (the English article's lead gives 1911; its works section gives 1910), associated with Hanafi jurisprudence and among the most widely read Qur'an translations in the subcontinent; it has been translated into English, Hindi, Bengali, Dutch, Turkish, Sindhi, Gujarati and Pashto. ¹
• Husam ul-Haramayn (1906) — a treatise declaring the founders of the Deobandi, Ahl-i Hadith and Ahmadiyya movements unbelievers, supported by the signatures of 268 scholars in South Asia and some scholars of Mecca and Medina, published in Urdu, Arabic, English, Turkish and Hindi. ¹
• Hada'iq-i Bakhshish (1907) — his book of devotional poetry in praise of the Prophet ﷺ; its couplet "Mustafa Jaane Rahmat pe Lakhon Salaam" is recited in mosques around the world. ¹
• Al-Daulat al-Makkiyya bil-Maddat al-Ghaybiyya — written in 1323 AH (1905) during his second Hajj, answering five questions put to him by the scholars of Mecca on the knowledge of the unseen, dictated while he was suffering a high fever. ¹
• Kifl-ul-Faqeeh il-Feheem fi Ahkam-e-Kirtas Drahim — a 1905 verdict on the permissibility of paper currency, written at the request of contemporaries in the Hijaz. ¹
• He also wrote a book arguing that the earth is stationary and does not rotate, offering more than one hundred arguments against the earth's movement. ¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

His positions, as the sources report them: He saw Sufism declining among the Muslims of British India, and his movement defended popular Sufism against the Deobandi and Wahhabi movements. He supported tawassul (seeking intercession), the celebration of the Mawlid, and the Prophet's knowledge of the unseen — practices and beliefs his opponents rejected. ¹

On the Ahmadiyya, he declared Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian a heretic and apostate and called him and his followers disbelievers. ¹

In the dispute with the Deobandis, he objected in writing to doctrines he attributed to Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Qasim Nanotwi and Ashraf Ali Thanwi, and on his 1905 pilgrimage he collected the verdicts of thirty-three scholars of Mecca and Medina in Husam ul-Haramayn. ¹

His opponents' reply, as the article reports it: The Deobandis claim that the evidence presented to the scholars of Arabia was fabricated and that his takfir of them was unjust; a reciprocal series of fatwas between Barelvis and Deobandis followed and has lasted to the present. ¹

He also wrote against Shia beliefs and practices, considered most Shia of his day apostates on the ground that, in his view, they repudiated necessities of the religion, and declared the Wahhabis disbelievers, collecting scholars' fatwas against them. ¹

In politics: Unlike other Muslim leaders of his region, he opposed the Indian independence movement because of its leadership under Gandhi, who was not a Muslim. He held that India was Dar al-Islam, where Muslims enjoyed religious freedom, so it could not be labelled Dar al-Harb, and neither holy war against it nor migration from it was admissible. Many of his followers later played an active role in the Pakistan Movement. ¹

He died on 28 October 1921 (25 Safar 1340 AH) at the age of sixty-five and is buried at the Bareilly Sharif Dargah, where his followers gather each year for his urs in the month of Safar. ¹

He was succeeded in the leadership of his path by his sons Hamid Raza Khan and then Mustafa Raza Khan. Among his disciples and successors were Amjad Ali Aazmi, Muhammad Abdul Aleem Siddiqi and Ziauddin Madani. ¹

Thousands of madrasas and seminaries teach his school of thought across the subcontinent. Institutions of his followers include Al Jamiatul Ashrafia, the Raza Academy publishing house in Mumbai and the Imam Ahmed Raza Academy in Durban, South Africa. The Indian government issued a commemorative postage stamp in his honour on 31 December 1995. ¹

The academic Francis Robinson described him as a polymath. The article quotes Muhammad Iqbal as saying that he had studied Ahmed Raza's decrees and found them testimony to his acumen and ocean-like Islamic knowledge, and that such a jurist had not emerged. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
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