Ashraf Ali Thanwi

Ashraf Ali Thanwi (1863-1943), widely titled Hakim al-Ummat ("physician of the community"), was a leading scholar of the Deobandi reform movement in British India and a Sufi master of the Chishti-Sabri order. He was born in Thana Bhawan, a town in present-day Uttar Pradesh, and reportedly given the name Abdul Ghani at birth. He studied at the Darul Uloom Deoband, the seminary at the centre of a reformist current within South Asian Sunni Hanafi Islam, graduating in the early 1880s.

On his first pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca in 1884, he was drawn into the spiritual circle of Haji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki, a Chishti Sufi guide, and became his disciple (a relationship of bay'ah, or oath of allegiance). For roughly fourteen years he taught the religious sciences in Kanpur before retiring around the late 1890s to Thana Bhawan, where he revived his teacher's Sufi lodge (khanqah) and directed it until his death.

Thanwi wrote prolifically. His Quran commentary Bayan al-Quran and especially Bihishti Zewar ("Heavenly Ornaments"), a guide to belief and daily practice aimed at Muslim women and households, became enormously influential. His project sought to reform popular customs he judged contrary to the scholars' understanding of Islamic law. In the independence era he corresponded with the Muslim League, unlike many Deobandi peers aligned with the Congress. He died in Thana Bhawan in 1943.