شاہ ولی اللہ کا فقہی و اجتہادی مسلک: اہل روایت علماء کی آراء کا تجزیاتی مطالعہ

Shah Waliullah’s Jurisprudence and Ijtihadi Thoughts: An Analytical Study of the Opinions of Traditional Scholars

Abstract

Shah Wali Allah Dehlavi was an outstanding religious scholar of the 18th-century Muslim India who responded to the major religious issues of his time from an Islamic perspective. His proponents among the traditional Hanafite Muslims see his contribution simply as a conservative restatement of the Hanafite School. According to them, with a slight deviation from the existing positive law (furu/fiqh) of the school, he is as much a Hanafite scholar as were the medieval Hanafite jurists such as Ibn al-Humam and Ibn Ameer al-Hajj. Some others, relying upon the ijtihad principles and methods adopted by Shah Wali Allah, held that he reached the level of limited-mujtahid within the school of Shafite, but only theoretically. Practically, they say, he never departed from the dominant Hanafite School in the sub-continent because of the prevailing socio-religious and cultural impediments. Contrary to them, a few others consider him 'the founder of Muslim Modernism'. This paper attempts to evaluate the opinions of some notable traditional Islamic scholars.