Shah Wali Allah al-Dihlawi

Shah Wali Allah al-Dihlawi (1703-1762) was one of the most influential Muslim scholars of Mughal India, remembered above all for reviving the study of hadith (reports of the Prophet Muhammad's sayings and deeds) in the subcontinent. Born in a village called Phulat in the Muzaffarnagar district near Delhi, he was educated by his father, Shah Abd al-Rahim, a jurist and Sufi (Islamic mystic) who had helped compile a major Mughal legal digest and founded the Madrasa-i Rahimiyya in Delhi. Wali Allah began teaching there in his teens and led it for some years.

Around 1730-31 he travelled to the Hijaz for the pilgrimage (hajj) and remained roughly fourteen months in Mecca and Medina, studying hadith and law with scholars including Abu Tahir al-Kurdi al-Madani. He returned to Delhi about 1732 and devoted the rest of his life to writing and teaching, producing some fifty works. His best-known book, Hujjat Allah al-Baligha ("The Conclusive Argument from God"), seeks the underlying purposes of Islamic law.

He sought to reconcile the four Sunni legal schools (madhhabs) and is regarded by later admirers as a mujaddid, a "renewer" of the faith — a status asserted by his followers rather than a neutral fact. His Persian translation of the Qur'an (Fath al-Rahman) was, it is reported, sharply opposed by some scholars who held that the Qur'an should not be rendered out of Arabic. He died in Delhi in 1762; two of his sons later translated the Qur'an into Urdu.