Sayyid Abul Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī's Use of Sayyid Aḥmad Shahīd
A presentation by Mohsin Ali
Thursday, February 18, 201611:00 AM - 1:00 PM
11372 Bunche Hall
In the great pantheon of Sufi saints of India, Sayyid Aḥmad Shahīd (d. 1831) occupies a controversial position. In the communal memory of Muslims, he ranges from Sufi reviver of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, to an anti-Sufi enemy of Prophet Muhammad. This paper examines an Arabic hagiographical book devoted to him by the Indian scholar Sayyid Abul Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī (d. 1999), titled When the Winds of Faith Blow. Why did ʿAlī Nadwī choose this figure to memorialize, and what function did the text serve? This paper contends that ʿAli Nadwī bestowed Sayyid Aḥmad Shahīd with a literary life partially to increase the prestige of Nadwatul ʿUlamā (called Nadwa for short), the madrasa he presided over and used as a base for the scholarly and reformist movement known by the same name. Since its inception in 1894, the Nadwatul ʿUlamā movement struggled to gain scholarly acceptance within India and gain recognition internationally. In light of this history, there are three important ways ʿAli Nadwī’s text attempts to tie a nineteenth-century saint to a twentieth-century institution. Firstly, it positions ʿAli Nadwī as the latest in a long line of famous Hasanī Sayyids in India that included Sayyid Aḥmad Shahīd. Secondly, it casts Sayyid Aḥmad, as a Sufi reformer. And thirdly, it positions Nadwa as the inheritor of Sayyid Aḥmad Shahīd’s movement of Islamic reform