Shah Waliullah Dehlvi

Shah Waliullah Dehlvi (1703–1762), born Qutb ud-Din Ahmad ibn Abd-ur-Rahim at Phulat, near Muzaffarnagar, on 21 February 1703, was the great scholar of eighteenth-century Delhi — hadith master, Quranic exegete, jurist and Sufi — whom his followers remember as the renewer of his age. His father, Shah Abdur Rahim, founded the Madrasa Rahimiyya in Delhi, where the boy memorised the Quran by seven and was initiated into the Naqshbandi path at fifteen; on his father's death in 1719 he became the madrasa's principal. In 1731 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca and spent fourteen months in Medina studying hadith, returning to Delhi in 1732 to teach and write for the remaining thirty years of his life. In that span he produced more than fifty works in Arabic and Persian — above all Hujjat Allah al-Baligha, his great argument for the wisdom behind the law, and Fath al-Rahman, the first Persian translation of the Quran made in the subcontinent, completed in 1738. He wrote for ordinary believers as much as for scholars, translating the Quran so that it could be read directly, and reconciling the schools of law and the Sufi orders in a single vision. He died in Delhi on 20 August 1762, aged fifty-nine, and lies in the Mehdiyan cemetery. His sons — Abdul Aziz, Rafiuddin, Abdul Qadir and Abdul Ghani — carried his school forward, and his thought runs through the reform movements of the next two centuries.