Shah Ismail Dehlvi

rdf:langString Shah Ismail Dehlvi

rdf:langString Shah Ismail Dehlvi

rdf:langString Shah Ismail Dehlvi

rdf:langString Grave of Shah Ismail in Balakot

rdf:langString Shah Abdul Ghani

rdf:langString Taqwiyatul Imaan

rdf:langString Dr. Mubarak Ali, “Almiyah-e-Tarikh”, Chapter 11, pp.107-121, Fiction House, Lahore .

rdf:langString A second group of Abuses Syed Ahmad held were those that originated from Shi’i influence. He particularly urged Muslims to give up the keeping of ta’ziyahs. The replicas of the tombs of the martyrs of Karbala taken in procession during the mourning ceremony of Muharram. Muhammad Isma’il wrote, ‘a true believer should regard the breaking a tazia by force to be as virtuous an action as destroying idols. If he cannot break them himself, let him order others to do so. If this even be out of his power, let him at least detest and abhor them with his whole heart and soul’. Sayyid Ahmad himself is said, no doubt with considerable exaggeration, to have torn down thousands of imambaras, the building that house the taziyahs

rdf:langString After the conquest of Peshawar, Syed Ahmad launched a violent policy to enforce Shari’ah and announced the abolition of all tribal rituals that he considered illegal. The most important of these rituals were: the bride was paid a regular price for marriage, the wives of the deceased were divided among his heirs, more than four marriages were practiced, women could not inherit property, internecine wars were considered jihad and plunder was considered booty. Therefore, after the conquest of Peshawar, orders were issued that those who can give half of the agreed money to the brides can take them. The young girls who are eligible for marriage should be married immediately. To enforce Shari’ah law, he appointed Imam Qutbuddin as an ombudsman, accompanied by 30 armed soldiers, who accompanied him to nearby villages to beat up the people who had abandoned prayers. Beatings and flogging had become the norm, that if the ombudsman went to any village, panic would spread. Punishment was carried out with extreme violence and people were even hanged on tree branches. Even among women, those who missed prayers were punished in the women’s quarters, so people soon became fed up with these polices because these judges and ombudsmen started harassing people and imposed fines on them beyond their means.

rdf:langString Sayyid Ahmad's reformist teachings were set down in two works that, when printed on the new lithographic press of the day, soon achieved wide circulation. The Sirat'ul Mustaqim was compiled by Muhammad Ismail in 1819. Written initially in Persian, it was translated into Urdu in order to reach a wider audience. The second work, Taqwiyatul-Iman or the strengthening of the Faith, was written directly in Urdu. The two works stressed above all the centrality of tawhid, the transcendent unity of God, and denounced all those practices and beliefs that were held in any way to compromise that most fundamental of Islamic tenets. God alone was held to be omniscient and omnipotent. He alone, entitled to worship and homage. There were, the followers of Sayyid Ahmad argued, three sources of threat to this belief: false sufism, Shiá doctrines and practices, and popular custom.

rdf:langString Shah Ismail Dehlvi (26 April, 1779 – 6 May, 1831) was an Indian Islamic scholar and Salafi-oriented Sufi reformer. He was an active member in the jihad proclaimed by Sayyid Ahmad of Raebareilly with the support of Pashtun tribes against the Sikh Empire, which ruled northwest India with their base in Punjab in the early half of the 19th century. He is considered as an important influence on the Ahl-i Hadith and Deobandi reform movements.