Kanz al-Iman (The Treasure of Faith): Qur'an Translation
Bareilly · 1911
A
Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi
Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi
1856 CE–1921 CE · Mecca
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.
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Stop 5 of 31905–1906Pilgrimage
Mecca
What they did here
Made his second Hajj to Mecca and Medina around 1905-1906 (1323 AH). There he circulated his theological positions among Hijazi scholars and gathered their endorsements, later compiled in the Arabic work Husam al-Haramayn (The Sword of the Two Sanctuaries), which condemned named Deobandi and Ahmadi leaders. This compendium and its condemnations are a position of his school, reported here as such, not as a neutral verdict.
About Mecca
Mecca (Makka), in the Hejaz of western Saudi Arabia, is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the site of the Ka'ba; it is Islam's holiest city and the destination of the annual hajj pilgrimage, toward which Muslims pray. As a centre of learning that drew scholars from across the Muslim world, it hosted many of the figures connected here during periods of study, teaching, or pilgrimage.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.