Ahl-i Hadith

Ahl-i-Hadith or Ahl-e-Hadith (Urdu: اہلِ حدیث, "people of hadith"), also rendered Ahl al-Hadith (transl. 'People of the Tradition'), is a comparatively small but vigorous Salafi Islamic reform movement that developed in the Indian subcontinent. It presents itself as continuing the tradition of the prophetic and early caliphal period and professes the same outlook as the early Ahl al-Hadith school. Its modern roots are associated with the 18th-century tradition of Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, the Wahhabi movement, and the 19th-century Indian Tarīqah-i Mūhammadiyyāh, while its development and subsequent prominence were particularly associated with the teachings of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, Syed Nazeer Husain, and Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan. Sources variously place its emergence as a distinct modern movement around 1864, in the early 1870s, or toward the end of the 19th century. Initially largely coterminous with those described in British India as "Wahhabis", the movement adopted the designation Ahl-i Hadith to emphasize both its commitment to the corpus of ḥadīth, understood as statements attributed to Muhammad and authenticated through chains of transmission, and its political quietism. Its adherents have also described themselves as Muwahideen, Ahl-us Sunnah wal Jamaah, and Ahl e-Hadith. The movement's religious principle has been summarized as the conviction that "whatever the Prophet Muhammad taught in the Qurʾān and the authentic traditions, that alone is the basis of our religion". It accordingly gives particular emphasis to tawḥīd, the unity of Allah, and rejects claims that created beings possess occult powers or knowledge of hidden things. This position is directed especially against claims of supernatural powers attributed to mystics and saints and against what the movement regards as excessive saint-veneration. It likewise seeks to eradicate practices understood as religious innovation, bidʿa, or as deriving from non-Islamic influences. In jurisprudence, Ahl-i-Hadith rejects taqlid, or binding adherence to established legal precedent, in favour of...