1908–2002 · Hyderabad (British India) / France · Jurist, historian of early Islam, hadith scholar, Qur'an translator
Muhammad Hamidullah was born in Hyderabad, then capital of the Nizam’s state, in 1908, into a family of scholars. He completed the traditional course at the Jamia Nizamia and then studied law at Osmania University, where he obtained degrees in law and international law. Research in Europe followed: a doctorate at Bonn on the Islamic law of neutrality and, in 1935, a doctorate at the Sorbonne on Muslim diplomacy in the time of the Prophet and the first caliphs.
Returning to Hyderabad, he taught international law at Osmania University. When India annexed the state in 1948 he was abroad as part of its delegation, and he chose to remain in Paris as a stateless refugee rather than accept Indian or Pakistani citizenship. From 1954 until 1978 he worked as a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, while lecturing regularly at universities in Turkey. In 1996 he moved to the United States, and he died in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2002.
Hamidullah’s scholarship centred on the documentary foundations of early Islam. The Muslim Conduct of State presented the classical law of siyar as an Islamic contribution to international law, and his collection of the Prophet’s treaties and letters, together with his study of the Medina charter as “the first written constitution in the world”, reconstructed the political institutions of the first Muslim community. His edition of the Sahifa of Hammam ibn Munabbih, an early written collection of hadith, was used to argue that hadith were recorded in writing from the first generation. He also edited Ibn Ishaq’s biography of the Prophet.
For a wider readership he produced Introduction to Islam, translated into many languages, a two-volume French life of the Prophet, and the first French translation of the Qur’an by a Muslim. His Urdu lectures at Bahawalpur in 1980 summarise his views on the Qur’an, hadith, law and the early state.