Sanaullah Amritsari

Abul Wafa Sanaullah Amritsari (12 June 1868 – 15 March 1948) was a Muslim scholar, debater, writer and journalist of Amritsar in Punjab, and a leading figure of the Ahl-e-Hadith movement in British India and then Pakistan. ¹ He served as general secretary of the All India Jamiat-i-Ahl-i-Hadith from 1906 to 1947, edited the weekly Ahl-e-Hadith for some 44 years, and was known for his debates and books against the Ahmadiyya and the Arya Samaj. ^{1 2}

His ancestors came from Doru Shahabad, a town in Jammu and Kashmir; his father had settled permanently at Amritsar, where Sanaullah was born in 1868. ¹ He received his early education at Madrasa Ta'id al-Islam in Amritsar, then moved to Wazirabad to study hadith under Abdul Mannan Wazirabadi, then studied with Syed Nazir Hussain in Delhi. ¹ He joined Mazahir Uloom for higher education and completed his studies at Darul Uloom Deoband, where his teachers included Mahmud Hasan Deobandi; he had entered Deoband in 1890 to study logic, philosophy and fiqh, and afterwards attended the lectures of Ahmad Hasan at the Madrasa Faiz-e-Aam in Kanpur. ¹

He began by teaching at his own first school, Madrasa Ta'id al-Islam in Amritsar, in 1893, teaching the books of the Dars-i Nizami, and then became director of education at the Madrasa Islamiyyah in Maler Kotla. ¹ He then entered polemics, debating the proponents of the Arya Samaj and especially of Ahmadism. ¹ In 1903 he established the Ahl-e-Hadith Press and published the weekly journal Ahl-e-Hadith, which continued for about 44 years; the LUMS digital archive project dates the weekly from 13 November 1903 to 1 August 1947 and puts its archive at more than 35,000 pages. ^{1 2} He also launched the monthly Muraqqa-i-Qadiyan in 1907 and again from 1931 to 1933, and Musalman in 1908, to counter the propaganda of the Arya Samaj and Christian missionaries. ²

He was a leading figure of the Ahl-e-Hadith movement, general secretary of the All India Jamiat-i-Ahl-i-Hadith from 1906 to 1947 and president of the Anjuman Ahl-e-Hadith Punjab; he co-founded the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, and was given the title Sher-e-Punjab, "Lion of the Punjab", for his services to Islam in Punjab. ¹

Sanaullah was a major antagonist of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and the early Ahmadiyya movement. ¹ According to Ahmadiyya sources, he initially accepted a mubahalah (prayer challenge) proposed by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, under which the false claimant would die during the lifetime of the truthful one; Ahmadiyya publications state that he later clarified that he had intended only to take an oath and did not proceed with the mubahalah under the conditions originally proposed, so Ahmadiyya scholars maintain that the prayer challenge was never formally completed, and that later criticism based on the order of the two men's deaths does not invalidate the challenge. ¹ This dispute is reported here as the sources give it; it is not the museum's verdict.

He wrote pamphlets and books mostly in refutation of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the most prominent of them Tareekh-e-Mirza (History of Mirza). ¹ Syed Mehboob Rizwi names as his important works the Tafsir al-Quran bi-Kalam al-Rahman (a commentary explaining the Qur'an through the Qur'an), the Tafsir-e-Sanai — his eight-volume Urdu commentary, which the LUMS project says took him 36 years to complete — and Taqabul-e-Salasa. ^{1 2} When Rangila Rasul was written about the Prophet ﷺ Muhammad, Sanaullah wrote Muqaddas Rasool in reply, and he wrote Haq Prakash in answer to Dayananda Saraswati's Satyarth Prakash. ¹

After the Partition of India in 1947 he migrated to Gujranwala in Pakistan; the LUMS project records that he lost a son to the Partition violence in Amritsar in August 1947 and suffered a paralysis attack shortly afterwards. ^{1 2} He died on 15 March 1948 in Sargodha. ¹

The entity data records his faith as documented Sunni: the English article's infobox gives his denomination as Sunni Islam, his jurisprudence as Salafi and his movement as Ahl-i Hadith, and the LUMS Ahl-e-Hadith archive project, an independent university source, states his affiliation with the Ahl-i-Hadis denomination. ^{1 2} The museum's faith enum holds no Ahl-e-Hadith value, so the Ahl-e-Hadith (Salafi) specification appears in the faith note and in this prose only.

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.