Siddiq Hasan Khan

Siddiq Hasan Khan
Born	14 October 1832 Bareilly, United Provinces of British India, Mughal Empire, now India
Died	26 May 1890 (aged 57)

Siddiq Hasan Khan (14 October 1832– 26 May 1890) was a both celebrated and controversial leader of India's Muslim community in the 19th-century, often considered to be the most important Muslim scholar of the Bhopal State. He is largely credited with founding the reformist Ahl al-Hadith movement, which became the dominant strain of Sunni Islam throughout the immediate region.

Khan's controversial nature has led to contrasting assessments of his personality, having been described by contrasting sources as a radical fundamentalist, an underhanded and scheming politician and one of the first heroes of the Indian independence movement.

Khan's family were said to be descendants of Ali, the fourth leader of Islam and the Rashidun Caliphate. Initially settling in Bukhara, they migrated to Multan and later to the Shi'ite strongholds of Bareilly and Kannauj. Khan himself was born in Bareilly on 14 October 1832.

Khan grew up in a family which was impoverished despite its history of Islamic scholarship; his father converted from Shi'a Islam to Sunni Islam in the early 1800s. Religiously, he was initially influenced by the ideas of Syed Ahmad Barelvi. Khan received much of his education in Farukhabad, Kanpur and Delhi under the care of friends of his father, who died when Khan was only five years old.

After pursuing Islamic studies with two Yemeni clerics who had emigrated to Bhopal, Khan came under the influence of the works of prolific Yemeni author Muhammad ash-Shawkani. The reformist influence on Khan's thinking only increased with his performance of the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, whereby he became familiar with the works of Syrian polemicist Ibn Taymiyyah; Khan brought back a large amount of books with him upon returning to Bhopal and began writing commentaries. Khan relocated to Bhopal in 1854 initially selling perfume but later working as a schoolteacher, where his religious views gained him the ire of traditionalist locals. He was expelled to Tonk in 1857, but soon returned to Kannauj to protect his family during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

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