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The Aḥrār Movement, or Majlis-i Aḥrār-i Islām (MAI, “Society of the Free Men of Islam”), was a small Panjabi Islamist movement founded in 1931. It grew out of the response of the Punjāb Khilafat (Panjāb Khilāfat) Committee (PKC, founded in the wake of the movement to safeguard the Ottoman caliphate after the Sèvres Treaty of 1920) to the 1928 Nehru Report, which did not provide for separate electorates (as had been demanded by Muslim League to safeguard Muslim political interests), but allowed for…

[German Version] I. Social Sciences – II. Religious Studies – III. Christianity – IV. Judaism – V. Islam I. Social Sciences Minorities are groups whose members perceive themselves or are perceived by others as a (related) portion of society distinct from the rest. The distinction is based on actual or supposed features divergent from the characteristics of the rest, often with negative connotations. Sometimes relative powerlessness in comparison to the dominant group, exclusion, and discrimination are considered constitutive. The term is used in different ways. (1) I…

[German Version] (Abū l-Fatḥ Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad, 1542–1605), the third and probably the most important emperor of the Mughals of southern Asia, expanded the empire and established the autonomy of the Mughal empire over against the Islamic courts. Far-reaching reforms were to produce a cultural and internal domestic integration. In the context of religion th…

ʿAbd al-Malik b. ʿAbd al-Ghafūr, called Shaykh Amānallāh Pānīpatī (b. 876/1471, d. 957/1550 or 958/1551), was a member of the widespread Qādiriyya Ṣūfī order. He lived in Panipat, an ancient city on the banks of the Yamuna, some ninety kilometres from Delhi. Its strategic location, on the easiest route from Afghanistan to central India, made Panipat the scene of decisive battles: in 932/1526, the Mughal conqueror and future emperor Bābur (r. 932–7/1526–30) defeated the army of the Delhi sultan Ibrāhīm L…

Sayyid Ghulām ʿAlī Āzād Bilgrāmī (d. 1200/1786) was a major biographer of Muslim scholars, historiographers, and functionary elite in South Asia. He was born on 20 Ṣafar 1116/24 June 1704, in the flourishing qaṣba (garrison “town”) of Bilgram, in Awadh, North India. He claimed, as a sayyid, descent from the Prophet and belonged to the Ḥanafī school of Sunnī Islam, which prevails throughout North India. In 1150/1737–8 he performed the ḥajj, and he studied ḥadīth at the feet of renowned scholars such as Muḥammad Ḥayāt al-Sindī (d. 1163/1750), the chief justice of Medina…

Faḍl-i Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (1797–1861) belonged to the functional elite in British India, hailing from Khairabad (Khayrābād), a famous qaṣba (garrison town) in Awadh, about eighty kilometres northwest of Lucknow, the residence of many public officers in the British service. Khairabad was attractive for the elite’s investment because of its many Hindu temples, mosques, shrines, markets, and manufacturers, but, after the 1857 revolt was crushed, it became the objective of colonial encroachment (on Khairabad, see Husain 1979; Khayrābādī, Dār al-khayr; ʿAllāmī, 2:93, 176, 278; Ne…

Aḥmad Jīvan (d. 1130/1718) was a staunch Ḥanafī jurist in the times of Awrangzīb, who was known for his excellent faculty of memorisation. Because of his major contributions to the field of uṣūl al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence), he made it to the royal court. In his voluminous exegesis, Tafsīrāt Aḥmadiyya, he wrote about those verses from which could be derived juristic commands, basic principles, and scholastic problems. Aḥmad’s basic rule was that everything is permissible unless it is explicitly forbidden in the Qurʾān. Aḥmad Jīvan was born in 1047/1638 in the small ma…

Early Muslim social differentiations in South Asia developed into caste categories and, by early modern times, even reflected structural analogies to the highly stratified Hindu varṇa system with regard to legal punishments that favoured the gentry (ashrāf, pl. shurafāʾ), as laid out in the Fatāwā-yi ʿĀlamgīrī. Competition amongst various interest groups in South Asia led, over the course of time, to numerous divisions in the social composition of an arguably egalitarian Islam in a hierarchical Hindu majority social system. 1. The emergence of social differentiation Early Muslim…