Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi

Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi (1832-1880) was an Indian Sunni scholar of the Hanafi school of law (madhhab) and Maturidi theology (kalam), and a Chishti Sufi. He is remembered above all as a principal founder of Darul Uloom Deoband, the seminary (madrasa) established in 1866 that gave its name to the worldwide Deobandi movement.

Sources trace his family — the Siddiqis — to the town of Nanauta near Saharanpur in north India, where he was born. From about age nine he studied at Deoband, then Persian at Saharanpur, and from the mid-1840s at Delhi College, where his teacher Mamluk Ali Nanautawi grounded him in logic and the rational sciences. He later worked as an editor at Muslim printing presses, including at Meerut, and performed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Tradition holds that Nanautawi took spiritual allegiance (bay'a) to the Chishti master Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, and that both were drawn into the failed anti-colonial resistance of 1857 associated with Thana Bhawan and Shamli; the details of his personal role are reported rather than firmly documented. In 1876 he took part in a celebrated inter-religious debate at Chandapur, near Shahjahanpur. After the 1857 defeat, the Deoband school channelled energies into religious education under colonial rule. He died at Deoband on 15 April 1880, aged about 47, and is buried beside the seminary he helped create.