Syed Sulaiman Nadvi

Syed Sulaiman Nadvi (1884–1953) was a historian, biographer and scholar of Islam from Desna, a village in Bihar, whose life's work was the life of the Prophet — the great Sirat-un-Nabi, begun by his teacher Shibli Nomani and completed by Nadvi in six volumes. Born on 22 November 1884 into a learned Sayyid family — his father, Hakim Syed Abul Hasan, was a Sufi — he was schooled in Urdu and Persian in his village and nearby towns, then joined the Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama at Lucknow in 1901 and graduated in 1906. He worked on the seminary's journal An-Nadwa, taught Arabic literature and theology there from 1908, and for two years assisted Shibli himself on the Sirat; in 1910 he joined Abul Kalam Azad's Al-Hilal as assistant editor and lead writer. When Shibli died in 1914 leaving the Sirat unfinished, Nadvi took up the work and carried it through, volume by volume, until 1938. In 1914 he founded the Darul Musannifeen — the House of Writers, the Shibli Academy — at Azamgarh, and became the founding editor of its journal Ma'arif in 1916; from 1923 he chaired the seminary's education committee for over twenty years. His other books range across history, biography and literature: the eight Madras lectures on the Prophet's life, published as Khutbat-e-Madras; a study of Omar Khayyam (1933); a life of Aisha; the life of his teacher, Hayat-i-Shibli; and his essays, Naqoosh-e-Sulaimani. His Urdu poems were gathered after his death as Armaghan-e-Sulaiman. Iqbal, who consulted him on religious questions, called him Ustad-ul-Kul — Teacher of All — and Aligarh Muslim University conferred an honorary doctorate on him. In 1946 he served as chief justice of Bhopal. In June 1950 he moved to Pakistan and settled in Karachi, where he chaired the board advising on the Islamic provisions of the constitution. He died in Karachi on 22 November 1953, his sixty-ninth birthday, and Pakistan Post honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 1992.