Mufti Muhammad Sadruddin Khan Azurda

Mufti Muhammad Sadruddin Khan Azurda (1804–1868) of Delhi was, at once, the city's Grand Mufti, one of its leading scholars of hadith and Islamic law, and a poet of the Delhi school. Son of Lutfullah, he studied under Shah Abdul Aziz — Delhi's great authority on hadith — and Fazl-e-Imam Farooqi Khairabadi, served as Sadr Amin of Delhi from 1827 to 1846, then as Sadr-us-Sudur (Grand Mufti) from 1846 to 1857, and examined Arabic at the Anglo-Oriental College. His Delhi house was a meeting place of rebel leaders, scholars, poets and literary men, and he was an acquaintance and admirer of Ghalib. In 1857 he was one of the thirty Delhi scholars who signed the declaration calling the uprising a jihad; he mediated between the British, the Mughal court and the sepoys, was tried after the fall of Delhi, spent six months in detention, and lost his property — his house was restored through Lord Lawrence's intercession, his library was lost for good. Syed Ahmed Khan counted him an accomplished scholar; Hakim Abdul Hai called him the pride of India. He wrote in Persian and Urdu under the takhallus "Azurda" — the distressed one — a name his later years earned twice over. He died in Delhi in 1868.