Hamiduddin Farahi

Hamiduddin Farahi (18 November 1863 – 11 November 1930) was an Indian scholar of the Qur'an, originator of the theory of nazm — the coherence of the Qur'an, each surah a unified structure with its own central theme — after whom the Farahi school of Qur'anic thought is named.¹ His given name was Abd al-Hamid; Hamiduddin was a laqab that became his common name, and on his Arabic books he wrote himself as al-Mu'allim Abd al-Hamid al-Farahi.²³

He was born at Phariha village in Azamgarh district on Wednesday 6 Jumada al-akhira 1280 AH; the Arabic article pairs that date with 17 November 1863, while the English and Urdu articles give 18 November, which the conversion supports and which is followed.²¹³ He memorised the Qur'an at about ten and composed Persian verse at sixteen, then moved to Azamgarh and from the age of fourteen learned Arabic and read most of the Dars-e-Nizami books under his cousin Shibli Nomani.³² He attended the Lucknow circles of Abul Hasanat Abdul Hayy Lakhnawi and Fazlullah Ansari, then read Arabic literature at Lahore under Faizul Hasan Saharanpuri of the Oriental College.² He then took up English and modern philosophy, studied philosophy under Thomas Arnold at the MAO College, Aligarh, and graduated from Allahabad University in 1895.²¹

From 1897 to 1906 he taught Arabic at Sindh Madressatul Islam College, Karachi, then at the MAO College — where he learned Hebrew from Josef Horovitz — and at Darul Uloom, Hyderabad, whose dean he became in 1914; the university scheme he prepared there later materialised as Osmania University.¹² He resigned in 1919 and from 1925 devoted himself to Madrasatul Islah at Sara-e-Mir, an institution built on his and Shibli Nomani's educational ideas, teaching there until his death; Amin Ahsan Islahi was among the students he specially trained.¹

For almost fifty years the Qur'an was his chief interest; his discovery was its coherence — order, proportion and unity within each surah — set out in the introduction to his commentary Nizam al-Qur'an, left unfinished at his death.¹ His works, mostly in Arabic and more than fifty in number, include Mufradat al-Qur'an, Asalib al-Qur'an, Jamhara-tul-Balaghah, Im'an fi Aqsam al-Qur'an, Dala'il al-Nizam and al-Takmil fi Usul al-Ta'wil.¹²

Sulaiman Nadvi called him the Ibn Taymiyya of the age, and Abul Kalam Azad counted him among the scholars whose learning was matched by practice.¹² On the madhhab question, the Urdu and Arabic articles both quote Taqi al-Din al-Hilali, who met him: he was a mujtahid in creed and practice who did not belong to a fiqh school and disliked attribution to one, though he prayed in the Hanafi manner because he had been raised in it.³² His record therefore leaves his school unclassified: the only naming is the English article's infobox denomination field and category filings, which are structured values, not text attestations.¹⁴

He died at Mathura on 19 Jumada al-akhira 1349 AH (11 November 1930), after surgery, and was buried there.²¹

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