Ahl-i Hadith

Ahl-i Hadith or Ahl-e-Hadith (Persian: اهل حدیث‎‎, Urdu: اہل حدیث‎, people of hadith) is a religious movement that emerged in Northern India in the mid-nineteenth century. Adherents of Ahl-i Hadith profess to hold the same views as the early Ahl al-Hadith movement. They regard the Quran, sunnah, and hadith as the sole sources of religious authority and oppose everything introduced in Islam after the earliest times. In particular, they reject taqlid (following legal precedent) and favor ijtihad (independent legal reasoning) based on the scriptures.

In recent decades the movement has expanded its presence in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, and has drawn both inspiration and financial support from Saudi Arabia.

The movement has been compared to Saudi Wahhabism, or a variation on the Wahhabi movement, but the movement itself claims to be distinct from Wahhabism, and some believe it possesses some notable distinctions from the mainly Arab Salafis.

In the mid-nineteenth century an Islamic religious reform movement was started in Northern India that rejected everything introduced into Islam after the Quran, Sunnah and Hadith.Syed Nazeer Husain from Delhi and Siddiq Hasan Khan of Bhopal drew primarily on the work of hadith scholars from Yemen in the early years of the movement, reintroducing the field into the Indian subcontinent. Their strong emphasis on education and book publishing has often attracted members of the social elite both in South Asia and overseas;University of Paris political scientist Antoine Sfeir has referred to the movement as having an elitist character which perhaps contributes to their status as a minority in South Asia.Folk Islam and Sufism, commonly popular with the poor and working class in the region, are anathema to Ahl-i Hadith beliefs and practices. This attitude toward Sufism has brought the movement into conflict with the rival Barelvi movement even more so than the Barelvis perennial rivals, the Deobandis.

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