1856–1921 · India (Bareilly) · Hanafi jurist, theologian, Sufi and poet; leading figure of the Barelvi movement
Ahmed Raza Khan was born in 1856 in Bareilly, in the North-Western Provinces of British India, into a family of Pashtun origin with a tradition of religious learning. His father, Naqi Ali Khan, was himself a scholar and was his first teacher. He studied the standard Islamic sciences at home and with visiting teachers, and in 1877 became a disciple of Shah Aal-e-Rasul Marehrawi in the Qadiri Sufi order, from whom he received authorisation in several orders. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca twice and obtained teaching licences from scholars of the Hijaz.
He spent most of his life in Bareilly as a jurist and writer, answering questions from across India in the form of legal opinions (fatwas) in Urdu, Arabic and Persian. His collected rulings, the Fatawa Razawiyya, fill dozens of printed volumes. His other writings cover theology, hadith, Sufism, devotional poetry, mathematics and astronomy, and traditional bibliographies credit him with several hundred titles. His Urdu rendering of the Qur’an, Kanz ul-Iman (1910), remains widely read in South Asia, and his poetry collection Hadaiq-e-Bakhshish contains some of the best-known Urdu devotional verse in praise of the Prophet.
He defended Hanafi law, the veneration of the Prophet and the saints, and customary devotional practice against Deobandi, Ahl-i Hadith and other reformist critics. His treatise Husam al-Haramayn, supported by endorsements he gathered from scholars in Mecca and Medina, declared several reformist leaders to be outside Islam, a judgement that deepened sectarian divisions and is still contested. Followers of his teachings came to be called Barelvis, a label they often reject in favour of Ahl-e-Sunnat wa Jama’at. He died in Bareilly in 1921, and his shrine there is a centre of pilgrimage.