Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi

Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi (1797–1861) was an Indian Hanafi mufti, Maturidi theologian, philosopher and poet from Khairabad in Awadh, known as Allama Fazl-e-Haq. A scholar of the rational and transmitted sciences, he wrote Tahqeeq al-Fatwa fi Ibtal al-Taghwa in refutation of Shah Ismail Dehlvi's Taqwiyat al-Iman, and in 1857 he issued a fatwa supporting military jihad against British colonial rule, for which he was exiled to the Andaman Islands and died there in prison. ^{1 2}

His birth year is given as 1796 by the Indian History Congress and as 1797 by Asir Adrawi and other sources; the record follows 1797 and marks the year debated. His death day likewise splits the sources: the English article gives 19 August 1861 on Asir Adrawi's authority, the Arabic article and Wikidata 20 August 1861. ^{1 3 2}

He was born at Khairabad, in present-day Sitapur district. His father, Fazl-e-Imam Khairabadi, was Sadr al-Sudur, the Mughal court's chief adviser on religious matters, and a leading authority in the intellectual sciences, known as Imam-i Maqulat. Fazl-e-Haq began his education under his father; he studied hadith with Shah Abd al-Qadir Muhaddith Dehlavi and with Shah Abd al-Aziz Dehlvi. In Sufism, the English article records, he was a student of Hafiz Muhammad Ali Khairabadi, with whom he also studied Ibn Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam; Hafiz Khairabadi was a spiritual representative of Shah Sulaiman Tonswi, a leading Chishti of the subcontinent. He had memorised the Qur'an in a little over four months and completed the Arabic, Persian and religious curriculum by the age of thirteen. ^{1 3}

He became a teacher by the age of thirteen, and in 1828 was appointed a mufti in the Department of Qaza. He was a literary figure in Urdu, Arabic and Persian, with more than four hundred Arabic couplets attributed to him, and he edited the first diwan of Mirza Ghalib at Ghalib's request; the two men's repartee became famous. With his son Abdul Haq he founded the Madrasa Khairabad in northern India. He was regarded as the final authority on fatwas in his circle and was given the title Allama. ¹

His works include Tahqeeq al-Fatwa fi Ibtal al-Taghwa (1825), his refutation of Shah Ismail Dehlvi — in particular of Dehlvi's doctrine of imkan al-kidhb, that it is possible for God to lie, which Khairabadi answered by holding that lying is a flaw and a flaw is impossible for God — and al-Thawra al-Hindiyya, his Arabic account and analysis of the 1857 rebellion, described as the first book written on those events, composed during his imprisonment. ¹

In this museum his faith is recorded as sunni-hanafi, documented. The English article's text states that he followed the Hanafi school of thought and was a theologian of the Maturidi school, citing his own al-Rawdh al-Mucawwad and Siddiq Hasan Khan's Abjad al-Ulum, and the Urdu article's infobox gives the same fiqh and denomination. The Maturidi creed is carried in his data note rather than as a value, since the museum's faith values include no Maturidi value and no compound. His Sufi discipleship — study under the Chishti khalifa Hafiz Muhammad Ali Khairabadi, recorded on a single institute source, and Anil Sehgal's statement that he was venerated as a great Sufi, repeated in the Arabic article from the same book — is likewise preserved in the data note as a single attestation family, not recorded as a segment. ^{1 4}

Through the spring of 1857 he held private meetings with the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. On 26 June 1857, after Bakht Khan reached Delhi with his army, Khairabadi preached the Friday sermon before an assembly of scholars and issued a religious edict supporting jihad against the colonial government, signed by Sadruddin Azurda, Abdul Qadir, Faizullah Dehlavi, Faiz Ahmed Badayuni, Wazir Khan and Syed Mubarak Shah Rampuri. ¹

He was arrested at Khairabad on 30 January 1859 and tried for inciting violence and for his role in the rebellion. Acting as his own counsel, he defended himself so convincingly, the sources report, that the presiding magistrate was writing a judgement to exonerate him when Khairabadi confessed to issuing the fatwa, declaring that he could not lie. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Andaman Islands, his property was confiscated, and he arrived there on 8 October 1859 aboard the steam frigate Fire Queen. He died in captivity in August 1861, leaving eyewitness accounts of the rebellion in Arabic verse and in al-Thawra al-Hindiyya. The Urdu article's lone claim that he was hanged in February 1861 rests on a single devotional website and is not supported by the other sources. ^{1 3 4}