Shāh Walī Allāh

Indian religious leader

• Born: February 21, 1703
• Birthplace: Delhi, India
• Died: 1762
• Place of death: Delhi, India

A Muslim religious teacher and thinker who advocated tolerance, Shāh Walī Allāh served as a bridge between the ancient Muslim theologians and Muslim modernists.

Early Life

Shāh Walī Allāh was educated at home by his father, ShāhՙAbd al-Rahim (1644-1718), who was a Muslim religious teacher and moved from Agra to Delhi, where he had his own school, the Madrassah-i-Rahimiyah. Walī Allāh is associated with that city, and he is known as Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi. He was given the name Ahmad and the nickname “Walī Allāh” (God’s protégé). Later the name Qutb al-Din was added, as his father had a vision at the tomb of the Delhi saint, Khwaja Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki. As a child, therefore, he was often called Qutb al-Din Ahmad Walī Allāh. He called himself Ahmad, but he is known to history as Shāh Walī Allāh.

Walī Allāh was a precocious child. By the age of eight, he had read the entire Qur՚ān, and then he learned Persian. At the age of ten, he was studying Arabic grammar. At the age of fourteen, he was married. On January 4, 1719, when his father died, he had already been declared an independent teacher, and he took over the running of his father’s school, mostly working as a teacher. He did so for the next dozen years before going on the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca in April, 1731. While he was in Arabia, he also visited Medina. In Mecca, he attended lectures, and he received a certificate, dated 1731-1732, for attending lectures on the Ḥadīth (the sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad).

Life’s Work

During the eighteenth century, the Mughal Empire, which was Muslim, collapsed. This collapse created a crisis of confidence and identity among Muslims: They tried to account for the loss of power and the rise of immorality, indolence, and ignorance among many Muslims. Shāh Walī Allāh believed that these phenomena were caused by the fact that many Muslims could not understand the true nature of Islam. They needed an education system that was based on the Qur՚ān and the Ḥadīth. He believed that, because the Muslim community had become divided among different sects and because different groups were struggling against each other, Muslims as a group were losing power. Non-Muslims took advantage of the situation, defeating Muslims militarily and acquiring powerful positions in government and society that Muslims once held. Walī Allāh particularly blamed Hindus for usurping Muslim positions.

He also believed that a number of non-Muslim customs, again especially Hindu beliefs and practices, had entered into the way many Muslims practiced Islam. This was true among both the ulama (Islamic theologians or men learned in Islam) and the Islamic laity. In other words, according to Walī Allāh, Islam had become corrupted and needed to be purified. He believed that people were uncritically following the Islamic schools of law (fiqh) and popular consensus (ijma), and this led them to accept practices that were contrary to a true understanding of Islam.

Walī Allāh accepted only two religious authorities. One was the prophetic tradition as delineated in the Qur՚ān, and the other was the Ḥadīth. Through individual inquiry and reasoning (ijtahid), a person could understand the correct and unadulterated Islamic forms of worship and behavior and restore Islam to its pure form as it existed at the time of the Prophet Muḥammad. This was a very controversial stance, as Muslims had long believed that the “doors to ijtihad are closed.” That is to say, four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence had developed (the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii, and Hanbali), and these could not be interpreted anew by every Muslim scholar who came along. Walī Allāh, by contrast, believed that they could be reinterpreted, if only by learned men.

In his attempt to unify the Muslim community, Walī Allāh dealt with the issues raised by Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and the largest sect apart from the orthodox Sunni, the Shia. He accepted mysticism and the meditative practices of Sufism, which claimed to allow people to experience the divine, and he had numerous mystical experiences himself, about which he wrote. He believed that experiencing the divine directly was a valid approach to religious knowledge.

As for the Shia, who believed that the descendants of Ali were the true leaders of Islam, Walī Allāh rejected Shiite beliefs, although, contrary to many orthodox Muslims, he accepted the Shia as Muslims and believed they should not be persecuted but taught the error of their ways. Nonetheless, he was a strong advocate of the Sunni. Walī Allāh penned at least seventy pieces of writing, covering every area of traditional Islamic learning. Some scholars believe he wrote more than two hundred tracts. Some of these were short treatises of four to five pages. In addition, about 350 of his letters have been published. He also wrote poetry.

One of Walī Allāh’s most important contributions was his translation of the Qur՚ān into Persian as the Fath-al Rahman fi Tarjuman-al-Qur՚ān (1743), as Persian was more widely known among South Asian Muslims than Arabic, and it was the official language of India at the time. This translation was opposed bitterly by orthodox Muslims, and as a result, Walī Allāh’s life was in danger for a time. Two of his sons, Rafi՚-al-Din (1750-1818) and ShāhՙAbdul Qadir (1753-1814), went even further and translated the Qur՚ān into Urdu.

Upon Walī Allāh’s death, his sonՙAbdul Aziz (1746-1824) replaced him as the head of the Madrassah-i-Rahimiyah, and Muslims from all over India continued to travel to Delhi to study at the school made famous by Walī Allāh. One of these students was Sayyid Nazir (d. 1902), who became the leader of a school himself, the Ahl-i-Hadith. After Walī Allāh’s death, his sons and grandsons continued running the school. During the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the school building was sacked and everything looted; it was then leveled by gunfire, and the site was purchased by a Hindu. Research on the life and ideas of Walī Allāh continues in Pakistan at the Shāh Walī Allāh Academy located in Hyderabad (Sindh). It has annotated and published many of Walī Allāh’s works and has published the journals al-Hikma, al-Rahim, and al-Walī.

Significance

When modernist Muslims in the middle of the nineteenth century attempted to defend Islam from Western criticism, they developed a new body of writing in Urdu and English. Shāh Walī Allāh’s translation of the Qur՚ān into Persian inspired them. His ideas and writing also inspired the greatest of the Muslim modernists of the nineteenth century, Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898), who studied Walī Allāh’s writings and founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875 at Aligarh. In 1921, it became Aligarh Muslim University, and it educated generations of modernist Muslims and continues to do so today.

Bibliography

Ahmad, Aziz. Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1964. This book is considered a classic. It offers a comprehensive overview of the different Islamic sects and the varieties of Islamic thought and practices in South Asia. It is still a useful book to consult.

Jalbani, G. N. Teachings of Shah Waliyullah of Delhi. Lahore, Pakistan: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1967. This short introduction was first published in Sindhi in 1961 and in Urdu by the Shāh Wali Ullah Academy in 1963. This is the English translation from the Urdu with some minimal changes and additions.

Jones, Kenneth W. Socio-Religious Movements in British India. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Part of the New Cambridge History of India series, this work places Shāh Walī Allāh’s thought in comparative perspective with the numerous other reform movements from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

Metcalfe, Barbara Daly. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. Looks at one of the most famous modernist schools in South Asia, the Deoband ul-Ulum, which looked to the Delhi school emanating from Walī Allāh for some of its ideas.

Muztar, A. D. Shah Wali Allah: A Saint-Scholar of Muslim India. Islamabad: National Commission on Historical and Cultural Research, 1979. A straightforward guide to the life and work of Walī Allāh, which is unlike many of the books dedicated to him. It can be used as a convenient reference book and includes a syllabus of the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya.

Rizvi, Saiyid Athar Abbas. Shah Wali-Allah and His Times: A Study of Eighteenth Century Islam, Politics, and Society in India. Canberra, Australia: Ma’rifat, 1980. This is a comprehensive study of more than four hundred pages of Walī Allāh’s life, thought, and the political conditions of India in the eighteenth century. Explores subjects such as his political and social ideas as well as his religious beliefs.