Siddiq Hasan Khan

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Sayyid Muḥammad Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān al-Qannawjī

Khan's family were said to be descendants of Ali, the fourth Caliph of Rashidun Caliphate.^[15] Initially settling in Bukhara, they migrated to Multan and later to Kannauj (also sometimes spelled as Qannawj). Khan was born in Bareilly, which was the natal home of his mother, on 14 October 1832.^[18][19][20] After few days, his mother brought him to his ancestral city Kannauj^[18]

Khan grew up in a family which was impoverished despite its history of

Siddiq Hasan Khan took up a job as an archivist and state historian in 1859 under Shah Jahan, who at the time was notable as a woman in the Kingdom of Bhopal who was heir apparent to the throne.^[16] For the first time in his life, Khan was financially well-off and brought his sister and mother to live with him in Bhopal. Khan married for the first time in 1860, to the daughter of the prime minister who was eleven years his senior. Siddiq Hasan Khan eventually married Begum on suggestion of his father-in-law (father of his first wife). Upon Shah Jahan's coronation in 1871, Khan was promoted to the position of chief secretary, began spending longer periods of time alone with Shah Jahan and the two were eventually married; with his second marriage, Khan had become the male consort of the female monarch.^[9][25][26]

According to Lepel Griffin, the marriage was in part to quash the rumor mongering, and officials made it clear that Khan was merely the Sultan's husband and would not function in any executive role.^[27] The marriage was controversial due to Indian beliefs regarding the remarriage of widows; ironically, the stated justification for support of the marriage by British officials – themselves predominantly Christians – was that Islam encourages widows to remarry. Despite remaining the spouse of the actual monarch, Khan's wife began to observe purdah and corresponded with male diplomats with Khan as her representative.^[16] Shāh Jahān Bēgum's daughter Sulṭān Jahān Bēgum was one of her stepfather's fiercest opponents, often labelling him as a "Wahhabi"; for forcing her mother to be in purdah.^[28] Khan's mother-in-law held rather negative reviews of her daughter's new husband, and there was friction between the two families.^{[citation needed]}

Once in power, Siddiq Hasan Khan began enforcing his reformist ideas through the authority of the state. Under his wife's reign, the doctrines of the

After reviewing Khan's treatises that incited to

Deposal and House Arrest (1885–1890)

Wary of Khan's influential position in the

Indian Muslims against the British administration. For his part, Siddiq Hasan Khan firmly denied any Wahhabi influence on the Indian reformists. Furthermore, Khan had directly criticised the Najdi Wahhabis for their religious fanaticism, which caused bloodshed among fellow Muslims. Despite this, the British dismissed all his titles and sentenced him to house-arrest until his death in 1890. He was forbidden to visit his wife Shāh Jahān Bēgum during the day, but was permitted to spend the night in her palace, the Tāj Maḥal.^[36][28] Both before and after his removal from the royal court by the British in 1885, Shah Jahan defended her husband to the very end as shown in the meeting minutes of a heated, vehement exchange between herself and Sir Griffin.^[37] On behalf of her husband, Shah Jahan denied that Khan held any executive power and merely advised her on some issues, arguing that the claims of her husband controlling her were based on jealousy on the part of her son-in-law and personal problems between Khan and Lepel.^[38]

Death

After forcing Ṣiddīq Ḥasan to retire, the British authorities would also destroy his personal networks across the

Resident Francis Henvey, Griffin's replacement, dispatched a medical officer but refused to administer medicine for fear that, given the terminal nature of Khan's illness, the British would be accused of poisoning him.^[37] Khan died on 20 February 1890.^[39][40]

Reception

According to University of Erfurt professor Jamal Malik, the British overthrow of Khan was due to a number of political concerns rather than wrongdoing on Khan's own part. The start of the Mahdist War in Sudan in 1881 (which Khan ironically openly opposed), diplomatic ties between Khan's wife and the Sharif of Mecca and Khan's letter exchanges with Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II all caused the British authorities to fear a pan-Islamist uprising.^[16][41] To withdraw the accusations against Khan, however baseless they were, would have weakened the British Empire's position in the wider Muslim world.^[42] Eventually, British officials admitted that they had overreacted based on rumors and intrigues among Bhopal's political elite and that Khan had been falsely accused;^[15] regardless, the Indian nationalist movement still regarded him as a hero in the anti-colonialist struggle. Upon Khan's death, his widow Shah Jahan negotiated with British authorities to have all of his official titles restored posthumously; Shah Jahan saw this as vindication of her belief that her husband had been falsely slandered, and filled her new court with Khan's relatives and associates.^[43] Among other details, Siddiq Hasan Khan had accused the Wahhabis of engaging in inter-religious violence and bloodshed and still clinging to the same traditionalist views for which Khan also criticized the Indian Sufis and Shi'ites.^[15]

Khan lived during an era when repercussions of the defeat of the

Sayyid Ahmad at the Battle of Balakot (1831) were felt widespread across South Asia. Followers of Sayyid Ahmad were being threatened and punished for various practices, such as saying "Ameen" loudly in prayer rituals. As an Islamic scholar who was able to attain a position of high political authority, Khan began facing numerous rivals as well as threats from the British government who accused him of spreading Wahhabi doctrines, which were criminalised. Since Khan was unable to defend Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab and his doctrines, his main concern was to protect the Muwahhidin (Ahl-i Hadith) in India, who were accused of being Wahhabis. He argued that the beliefs of Ahl-i Hadith of India were based on Qur'an and Sunnah, and were not derived from Najdi scholars; attempting to distinguish them from the Ahl-i Hadith. Yet Khan had also rebutted various claims made against Wahhabism, by bringing up Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's responses as well as defenses made by various supporters of the movement.^[44] Giving a resume of the life and reform efforts of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, Khan traced the political rise and subsequent defeat of the Muwahhidun movement in the Arabian Peninsula in 1818. Khan asserts that followers of Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab and Sayyid Ahmad were labelled "Wahhabis" due to ulterior motives of imperial powers. Since the works of the Arabian reformer were not published by the followers of Sayyid Ahmad, labelling them as "Wahhabis" was a policy of religio-political abuse. Khan asserts that the apt term for Sayyid Ahmad's followers was Ahl al-Hadith (followers of the Hadith), since the term was as old as the early eras of Islam.^[45]

Additionally, Khan had based his religious views on the

anti-colonial struggle and cultural environment of the Middle East. Khan elaborated that the Wahhabi movement had no relevance to the situation and experience of reform-minded Muslims in India:^[46]

"Those who worship one God object to being called Wahhabis in the Ibn Abdul-Wahhab kind of way not only due to his belonging to a different nation and all of its politics, but because they consider God as the ruler and the protector of the whole world and this universalistic stance is blunted if they are said to be followers of a terrotorially rooted Abdul-Wahhab."

By denying any communications with the inhabitants of Najd and stressing that he did not publish the works of Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab; Khan sought to publicly delink his Indian followers from the Wahhabi movement and thereby avert the potential repercussions from the British government. However, the British eventually took action against Siddiq Hasan Khan, accusing him of involvement in Pan-Islamist anti-British agitation. This was after the British authorities had discovered various treatises of Khan elucidating his stance on Jihad and detected several Najdi scholars under Khan's tutelage in Bhopal.^[47] Despite his own defense and the efforts of his wife to protect him, Khan was deposed by the British in 1885 and spent the remaining five years of his life living in privacy.^[15][16]

Outside politics Khan's efforts to preserve and revive Hadith studies, focusing on the statements and actions of Muhammad, were well received. Due to his large amount of edited and original published works, he has been dubbed "the Indian Al-Suyuti."^[48]

Legacy

Views

Theology

See also:

Traditionalist theology

Khan's theological views were very much a product of Shah Waliullah's

Ibn Taymiyya's legacy in South Asia by undertaking the publication of a number of treatises that either elucidated his doctrines or provided theological arguments defending his ideas. He also reconciled Ibn Taymiyya's thought with what he regarded as authentic Sufi spirituality.^[50] Coupled with the reformist ideas of Yemeni theologian Muhammad ibn 'Ali Al-Shawkani, Khan and his Ahl al-Hadith movement established similar iconoclastic ideas to the mainstream at the time.^[26]

As an

Mu'tazilites". Through the publication of his works as well as classical creedal manuscripts across South Asia and the Arab world, Khan considered the spread of Taymiyyan theology as one of the central aspects of his religious programme.^[53]

Like Ibn Taymiyya, Khan also condemned

Ash'ari school and did not follow him on this point. While the Ahl-i Hadith favoured the literalist, anti-speculative Atharite approaches, they also considered Ash'aris as part of Sunni Islam and did not seek to deteriorate relations with the Ash'arite scholarship in the Bhopal State. In his treatise Ḥujaj al-kirāma, Ṣiddīq Ḥasan asserts that the core differences between the Ashʿaris and Atharis were limited to three or four points, without naming those issues. According to Khan, these were merely "practical" divergences (khilāf-i taṭbīq) and "differences in terminology" (nizāʿ-yi lafẓī); which were of minor importance. At the same time, Khan attacked the foundational premises of both logic and Kalam through his treatises like Abjad al-ʿulūm; basing himself on the works of past scholars like Al-Shawkani, Al-San'ani and Ibn Taymiyya.^[54][14]

Reformist Vision

See also: Islah, Pan-Islamism, and Islamic fundamentalism

Siddiq Hasan Khan's writings had a striking tone of pervasive pessimism, a fear of the End of the World, which propelled him towards an emotional commitment to herald drastic reforms. He thought that the English rule over Muslims was a sign of the End Times and viewed rebellions and religious disorder across the Muslim world as evidence of a total decline. Proposing a solution to revert this decline, Siddiq Hasan Khan envisioned the revival of a unified Umma welded together by a singular interpretation of the scriptures. For Khan and his disciples, the horror of disorder drove them to establish a true and common standard on which all Muslims could unite. However, this forced exclusivity and vision of drastic reforms created dissension and sparked protest from the rest of the scholarly establishment.^[55]

The theological and intellectual attitudes of Khan and his

Shi'ites from which Khan himself was descended were all targets of Khan's reformist criticism.^[49] Khan's religious views have been described as centering on a desire to return to the pristine values with which Islam originally came, and to rid the Muslim world of the ills of charlatans, frauds and Hindu influence on Muslim practice.^[38]

Works

After his marriage to the Sultan, Khan began publishing his own original works in Arabic, Persian and Urdu; the number of his works eventually topped 200, and many of them were distributed by the state press for free in Bhopal's schools.^[57] His polemical and theological works are generally underlain by the principles of self-judgment, reason and rationality.^[41]

Khan has been noted as one of the first scholars to research the topic of

lexicons produced up to his time.^[60]

Khan also compiled a Qurʾānic commentary titled Fatḥ al-bayān fī maqāṣid al-Qurʾān, a seminal work in the field of Tafsir which inspired numerous Islamic revivalist movements. It drew extensively from Yemeni theologian Shawkani's 1814 work on Qur'anic exegesis, Fatḥ al-qadīr. Being written in Arabic, Fatḥ al-bayān was also widely circulated across the Arab world.^[61]

Original works

• Al-Bulgha fi Usul al-Lugha. Istanbul, 1879.^[59] Arabic.
• Hell-fire: Its Torments and Denizens. Trns. Saleh Dalleh. International Islamic Publishing House, 2005. English.
  ISBN 9789960850542
• Tarjuman-i Wahhabiya. Bhopal, 1884.[35] Urdu.
• Ash Shamama tul Anbarah min Mawlid al Khayr ul Barah (On Celebrating the Mawlid)
• Fatḥ al-bayān fī maqāṣid al-Qurʾān, 1874.^[61]

See also

• Syed Nazeer Husain
• Salafism
• Ahl al-Hadith

Further reading

• Saeedullah. The Life and Works of Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan, Nawab of Bhopal, 1248–1307. Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf.^[62]
• Abu Nasr Syed Mohammad Ali Hasan Khan. Maasir e Siddiqui (in four parts), 1924.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Rahmatullah (2015). Contribution of Nawab Siddique Hasan Khan to Quranic and Hadith Studies. Aligarh, India: Aligarh Muslim University. pp. 3, 122.
2. ^ "Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan and His Tafsir Works" (PDF). Hazara Islamicus: 21–26. June 2014 – via hazaraislamicus.hu.edu.pk/.
3. ^ Uzundaģ, Sait (2014). "XIX. Asir Hindistan Hadi̇s Ali̇mi̇ siddîk hasan han'in ö.1307/1890 allah'in haberî sifatlari i̇le i̇lgi̇li̇ görüşleri̇" [19th-century Indian Hadith scholar Siddiq Hasan Khan's opinions d.1307/1890 on the Attributes of Allah]. Fırat Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi. 19 (1): 125–145 – via Dergipark Akademik.
4. ^
   ISBN 9783060043811
   .
5. ^
   ISBN 978-3-11-028534-5
   .
6. ^
   ISBN 978-3-11-028534-5
   .
7. OCLC 570589820
   .
8. JSTOR 26195671
   . Nawab Sayyid Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan (1832–1890)
9. ^
   ISBN 9004118020
10. ISBN 978-0-521-83006-5
    .
11. ISBN 9780521653947
12. ^ ^{a b} Malik, p. 72.
13. ISBN 9004113711
14. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-969670-3
    .
15. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Claudia Preckel, Wahhabi or National Hero? Siddiq Hasan Khan. International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, vol. 11, No. 1, p. 31.
16. ^
    ISBN 9004061177
17. ISBN 978-0-674-73533-0
    .
18. ^ ^{a b} Abu Nasr Syed Mohammad Ali Hasan Khan, Maasir e Siddiqui Part 2
19. ISBN 1860645283
20. ^ Seema Alavi, Siddiq Hasan Khan (1832–90) and the Creation of a Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the 19th century. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 54, No. 1, p. 4. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2011.
21. ISBN 978-0-674-73533-0
    .
22. ISBN 978-0-367-51483-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link
    )
23. ^ Khan, p. 121.
24. ^ ^{a b c} Alavi, p. 5.
25. ^ ^{a b} M. Khan, p. 122.
26. ^ ^{a b} Alavi, p. 6.
27. ^ M. Khan, p. 125.
28. ^
    ISBN 978-3-11-028534-5
    .
29. ISBN 9780195660494
    .
30. ISBN 978-3-11-028534-5
    .
31. ^ ^{a b c} Malik, p. 76.
32. ^ Khan, p. 127.
33. ^ ^{a b} Claudia Preckel, Wahhabi or National Hero? Siddiq Hasan Khan. International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, vol. 11, No. 1, p. 31.
34. ^ Seema Alavi, Siddiq Hasan Khan (1832–90) and the Creation of a Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the 19th century. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 54, No. 1, p. 8. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2011.
35. ^ ^{a b} Alavi, p. 8.
36. hdl:1887/16843
    – via Lieden University Scholarly Publications.
37. ^ ^{a b} M. Khan, p. 141.
38. ^ ^{a b} Khan, p. 148.
39. ^ "Biography of Allamah Nawab Siddiq Hassan Khan | Umm-Ul-Qura Publications". Retrieved 22 June 2017.
40. ^ Hamid, Razia. "Nawab Siddique Hasan Khan – | Rekhta". Rekhta. p. 38. Retrieved 22 June 2017.
41. ^ ^{a b} Alavi, p. 7.
42. ^ Malik, p. 77.
43. ^ Khan, p. 142.
44. ISBN 9960-29-500-1
    .
45. ISBN 978-0-367-51483-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link
    )
46. ^ Alavi, p. 9.
47. ISBN 978-1-4744-1757-0
    .
48. ^ Muḥammad Isḥāq, India's contribution to the study of Hadith literature, p. 175. University of Dhaka, 1955.
49. ^ ^{a b} Schimmel, p. 208.
50. JSTOR 26195671
    . After Shah Wali Allah, the most powerful advocate of Ibn Taimiyya's ideology was Nawab Sayyid Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan (1832–1890)...
51. ^ "Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan and His Tafsir Works" (PDF). Hazara Islamicus: 21–26. June 2014 – via hazaraislamicus.hu.edu.pk/.
52. ^ Uzundaģ, Sait (2014). "XIX. Asir Hindistan Hadi̇s Ali̇mi̇ siddîk hasan han'in ö.1307/1890 allah'in haberî sifatlari i̇le i̇lgi̇li̇ görüşleri̇" [19th-century Indian Hadith scholar Siddiq Hasan Khan's opinions d.1307/1890 on the Attributes of Allah]. Fırat Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi. 19 (1): 125–145 – via Dergipark Akademik.
53. ISBN 978-3-11-028534-5
    .
54. ISBN 978-3-11-028534-5
    .
55. ISBN 9780195660494
    .
56. ISBN 9780195660494
    .
57. ^ Malik, p. 75.
58. ^ John A. Haywood, Arabic Lexicography, p. 1. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1965.
59. ^ ^{a b} John A. Haywood, "An Indian Contribution to the Study of Arabic Lexicography." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, October 1956, pp. 165–180.
60. ^ Haywood, Lexicography, p. 61.
61. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-969670-3
    .
62. ISBN 9781850438540

External links

• Bibliography at
  GoodReads
• Burial site at
  WikiMapia