A089 - Shah Wali Allah

 Shah Wali Allah

Shah Wali Allah (Shah Wali Ullah) (Shah Waliullah Muhaddith Dehlvi)  (b. February 21, 1703, Delhi, India - d. August 20, 1762, Delhi, India).  Born into a strongly religious and learned family.  His father, Shah ‘Abd al-Rahim, was a noted jurist and scholar who founded an Islamic teaching institution, a madrasa,in Delhi.  He instructed his precocious son in Qur’anic studies, Arabic language, and the Naqshbandi mystical tradition, making him his successor at the tender age of seventeen.  Shah Wali Allah therefore assumed his father’s position at the time of the Shah ‘Abd al-Rahim’s death in 1719.

A powerful formative influence on Shah Wali Allah’s thought was the pilgrimage he made to Mecca in 1730.  He spent about a year and a half inthe Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina studying with most prominent and respected Sufi masters and hadith scholars of the time, who, recognizing his abilities, took him into their circle.  His fluency in Arabic was such that many of his major works were written in that language.  In addition, quite a number were composed in the Persian language, the major vehicle for prose among the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent until the twentieth century. 

The period spent in the intellectual, religious, and cultural hub of the Muslim world gave Shah Wali Allah a cosmopolitan outlook in matters of Islamic law and practice so that his works address Muslims as a whole, rather than a more parochial audience.  Since his Meccan masters were steeped in the tradition of hadith studies.  Shah Wali Allah embraced the concept that the study and interpretation of the sayings of the Prophet were the key to integrating and revitalizing the practice of Islam in his time.

After his return from Arabia, Shah Wali Allah pursued his scholarly and mystical activities in Delhi, teaching in the Islamic religious school founded by his father and guiding disciples in the intricacies of mystical path.

Shah Wali Allah lived during that period in the development of the Islamic tradition known as the “wisdom” period, when a synthesis of the traditional religious sciences of philosophy, theology, and mysticism had been effected.  In pre-modern times, however, this classical synthesis was showing signs of breaking down under various sectarian, political and social pressures.

The main thrust of Shah Wali Allah’s teaching and writing activities was therefore to re-integrate and revitalize the study of the Islamic religious sciences through coordinating the approaches of the main Islamic intellectual disciplines: law, theology, mysticisim, and especially Qur’anic and hadith studies.  To this end, he composed some forty books and treatises and served as a religious scholar and spiritual guide. 

Shah Wali Allah’s major work, Hujjat Allah al-Baligha (The Conclusive Argument from God), was composed after his return from the pilgrimage.  In this two-volume study he presents an overview of an entire cosmology.  In volume 1, he expounds on the underlying purpose of creation, the dynamics of human psychology, the higher significance of human thoughts and actions, the progressive development of human social and political systems, and ultimately the need for the religious revelation and its interpretation.  In volume 2, he applies his method for bringing out an understanding of the deeper spiritual aspects of the Islamic legal injunctions to specific hadith reports of the Prophet covered in the order of the topics featured in traditional hadith compendia.  Due to this enterprise of elucidating and reconciling the inner and outer dimensions of Islamic practice, he is often compared to the great thinker and mystic al-Ghazali (d. 1111).

His metaphysical system is also highly influenced by the philosophical Sufi tradition of both al-Ghazali and Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), who related the Platonic concept of a higher or ideal level of meaning to the events of this world.  This somewhat fluid layer, which seems to mediate between the purely spiritual and the purely material dimensions of reality, is known as the “World of Images.”  This was understood by him to be the realm at which religious symbols were formulated before their articulation in specific religious injunctions.  The essential understanding of what it means to follow these specific religious injunctions, then, must ultimately be sought at this higher level rather than in the particular instances of their external occurrence.  This led Shah Wali Allah to elaborate a theory of symbolization and its expressions in concrete historical situations of meaning and applicability, which argues that the symbols have a kind of objective validity of their own.  The conclusion is that the Islamic law must be practiced in its esoteric form in order to obtain its inner spiritual benefits.  

In the case of his theory of religious revelation, he conceives of Islam as a universal religion, which, however, naturally had to take on concrete form in the time of the Prophet in the context of seventh-century Arabia.  There is therefore somewhat of an unresolved tension in his thought between the concept of an ideal template of a universal religion termed the din, which is suited to the innate temperaments of all persons, and his asserting the applicability of its particular historical manifestation, Islam, to all times and places.

In his system, human beings are not merely passive receptors of religious laws.  Those who strive in the path of moral and spiritual development are able to participate in the shaping of the future course of destiny, for even after death the most evolved among them will join the angels of the “Supreme Assembly” to participate in the task of guiding further human social and spiritual progress.

Although Shah Wali Allah’s translation of the Qur’an from Arabic into Perian was not the first, as some have claimed, it was pioneering in his conscious intention to go beyond previous translations in striking a balance between an overly literal version and one conveying merely the gist of the text.  In the preface to this translation and in a later book called the Principles of Quranic Exegesis, he elaborated on the types of of divine discourse which constitute the Qur’an, including its legal import, its account of God’s favors to human beings, its evocation of God’s acts of intervention in human history, and its warning of the eventual reckoning at the end of time.

Shah Wali Allah’s sound training in law and hadith in the Holy Cities led Shah Wali Allah to favor the hadith methodology of the school of Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) and the theoretical tools of the Legal School of al-Shafi’i (d. 819).  In his own practice, like most South Asian Muslims, he followed the Hanafi School of Law.  Such eclecticism was known as tatbiq, or bringing diverse elements into correspondence.  Some of his works on law and hadith are technical studies of theory and interpretation.  In others, he considers the historical sources of the disagreements among the four major Sunni schools of law and suggests that the factors leading to these differences should be understood developmentally, so that differences do not become rigidified identifications.  His position on the ability of qualified individuals to interpret the main sources, Qur’an and hadith, of Islamic legislation is not entirely radical, but signals his willingness to allow a certain level of individual interpretation (ijtihad) on the part of the qualified jurist.

Shah Wali Allah’s approach to the practice of Sufism was both eclectic and reformist.  His attitude to Sufi practice and theory, as to the other Islamic disciplines, was that each Sufi order had its own unique history and strengths.  The individual spiritual aspirant should therefore be taught to practice those elements of Sufism most compatible with his of her inherent nature, whether contemplative, devotional, or intellectual.

Shah Wali Allah was influenced by the philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi, which featured the idea of an emanationist cosmology.  While many of his contemporaries felt that the implicitly monistic formulations of Ibn ‘Arabi and the more dualistic philosophy of the respected Indian Sufi, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1625), were insurmountably opposed, Shah Wali Allah argued that their differences were essentially those of perspective and orientation rather than rooted in true metaphysical incompatibility.

Shah Wali Allah claimed initiation in the major Sufi orders of his age and, rather than stressing affiliation to any one of them, may have attempted to establish his own eclectic sort of practice, which, however, did not take hold.  What seems to have been passed on to posterity was a diminishing emphasis on Sufism as a distinct form of practice and discipline, and an attempt by some of his descendants to incorporate Sufi elements so as to spiritualize more mainstream elements of Islamic belief and practice.  For example, the Deoband madrasa, a prominent Islamic institute of higher learning, was founded by followers of his son, Shah ‘Abd al-Aziz (d. 1823); his grandson, Shah Isma’il Shahid (d. 1831), initially composed highly technical works of mystical philosophy, but is most widely known for serving as the ideologue of a militant Islamic reform movement, the “Muhammadan Way” (Tariqa Muhammadiyya).

Living at a time of transition in the political situation of Muslims in India and experiencing the fragmentation of the Mughal empire and subsequent upheavals on the eve of the colonial period, Shah Wali Allah seems to exemplify certain of the trends typical of pre-modern Muslim reform movements.  Unlike the Wahhabis of Arabia, however, he did not reject the practice of venerating Muslim saints and believing that they, as well as the Prophet, had a continual spiritual presence that was accessible to the faithful.

In his discussion of human social and political development Shah Wali Allah coined the term irtifaqat from an Arabic root meaning “gaining benefit by.”  According to his view of human societal development, human beings make continuous historical progress through four levels, or irtifaqat, which correspond to the stages of nomadic life, urbanization, the establishment of states, and the consolidation of international empires such as the Islamic Caliphate.

It is interesting that today all major religious movements in Muslim South Asia invoke Shah Wali Allah as an intellectual progenitor.  His son, Shah ‘Abd al-Aziz, was a noted scholar and teacher with a wide circle of pupils.  Other South Asian Muslims who have a more anti-Sufi, puritan outlook -- such as the Ahl al-Hadith group -- and even the followers of Maulana Maududi (d. 1979) find in Shah Wali Allah’s return to the fundamentals of the Islamic legal system and political rejection of alien influences a precursor to their own reformist beliefs.  Islamic Modernists see in Shah Wali Allah a thinker who responded to the crisis of his time by accommodating divergent legal and ideological factions, calling for a renewed ijtihad, and searching for the spirit behind the literal injunctions of the religious tradition.

Walī Allāh received a traditional Islamic education from his father and is said to have

memorized the Qurʾān at the age of seven. In 1732 he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and he then remained in the Hejaz (now in Saudi Arabia) to study religion with eminent theologians. He reached adulthood at a time of disillusionment following the death in 1707 of Aurangzeb, the last great Mughal emperor of India. Because large areas of the empire had been lost to Hindu and Sikh rulers of the Deccan and the Punjab, Indian Muslims had to accept the rule of non-Muslims. This challenge occupied Walī Allāh’s adult life.

Walī Allāh believed that the Muslim polity could be restored to its former splendor by a policy of religious reform that would harmonize the religious ideals of Islam with the changing social and economic conditions of India. According to him, religious ideas were universal and eternal, but their application could meet different circumstances. The main tool of his policy was the doctrine of tatbīq, whereby the principles of Islam were reconstructed and reapplied in accordance with the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth (the spoken traditions attributed to Muhammad). He thereby allowed the practice of ijtihād (independent thinking by theologians in matters relating to Islamic law), which hitherto had been curtailed. As a corollary, he reinterpreted the concept of taqdīr (determinism) and condemned its popularization, qismat (narrow fatalism, or absolute predetermination). Walī Allāh held that man could achieve his full potential by his own exertion in a universe that was determined by God. Theologically, he opposed the veneration of saints or anything that compromised strict monotheism. He was jurisprudentially eclectic, holding that a Muslim could follow any of the four schools of Islamic law on any point of dogma or ritual.

The best known of Walī Allāh’s voluminous writings was Asrār ad-dīn (“The Secrets of Belief”). His annotated Persian translation of the Qurʾān is still popular in India and Pakistan.

Shah Wali Allah worked for the revival of Muslim rule and intellectual learning in South Asia, during a time of waning Muslim power. He despised the divisions and deviations within Islam and its practice in India and hoped to "purify" the religion and unify all Indian Muslims under the "banner of truth". He is also thought to have anticipated a number of progressive, social, economic, and political ideas of the modern era such as social reform, equal rights, labor protection, and welfare entitlement of all to food, clothing, and housing.


Shah Wali Ullah see Shah Wali Allah
Shah Waliullah Muhaddith Dehlvi  see Shah Wali Allah