Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi

Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi (1856-1921), widely known by the honorific A'la Hazrat ("the exalted presence"), was a Hanafi jurist (faqih, specialist in Islamic law) and Sufi-aligned scholar from Bareilly in north India. Born into a family of religious scholars, he studied chiefly under his father, Naqi Ali Khan, and was initiated into the Qadiri Sufi order (a devotional path tracing to Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani) by Shah Al-i Rasul of Marehra around 1877. He became a prolific jurist, issuing fatwas (legal opinions) and writing across many fields, including an Urdu translation-commentary of the Qur'an. He founded the seminary Manzar-e-Islam in Bareilly in 1904.

Ahmad Raza defended popular Sunni devotional practices, such as veneration of the Prophet Muhammad and the saints and observance at their tombs, against reformist currents that sought to curb them. His followers crystallized into what is now called the Barelvi movement, a major strand of South Asian Sunni Islam.

He is also a central and contested figure in the polemics between Indian schools: in works compiled around his 1905-1906 pilgrimage he declared certain Deobandi and Ahmadi leaders to be unbelievers, and they replied in kind. These mutual condemnations are positions held by rival schools, not settled facts; the site presents them as such. He died in Bareilly in 1921, where his shrine remains a site of pilgrimage.