Shah Waliyullah Dihlavi (d. 1762) was a highly renowned and influential scholar of Islam who produced works on the Qur’an, Islamic law and jurisprudence, Sufism, philosophy and politics. He sought to reconcile seemingly competing strands of Muslim intellectual thought and practice, pursuing a cosmopolitan Islam marked not by dogmatism and finality but by debate and flexibility. In South Asia today, virtually every school of Islamic thought, even those bitterly opposed to him, claim to be his rightful heirs. Setting his life and intellectual career in the context of India on the eve of British colonisation, SherAli Tareen explores Shah Waliyullah’s work and its reception among later scholars and reform movements in South Asia and beyond.
