Ahl-i Hadith
A living tradition within Sunni Islam. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Ahl-i Hadith is a living tradition within Sunni Islam. Also written Ahl-e Hadith, Ahl al-Hadith (South Asian movement), Muhammadi (early self-designation).
Origin
No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. Modern Asian Studies records that members first called themselves 'Muhammadi' and that the name 'Ahl-i Hadith' was 'first used in writing by Sayyid Nazir Husain in 1864'. That is a first-attestation date for the name, not a founding date, and is not treated as one. Barbara Metcalf describes the movement as 'one of the most visible of the Muslim intellectual movements of the late nineteenth century'.
Continue reading this article
Sign in free to read in full. Become a member to join the discussion without limits.
Sign in free to read- ✓Read every article
- ✓Comment and reply (up to 100 words, 10/month)
- ✓Browse the community
- ✓Reader badge
- ✓
Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Ahl-i Hadith.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-ahl-i-hadith.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-ahl-i-hadith-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Ahl-i Hadith},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-ahl-i-hadith},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.