This chapter is significant because it depicts the communal structure of education in northern India that collapsed during Mualānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s lifetime. I offer observations about the three key texts of this study.

Chapter one summarizes Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s rich educational upbringing and his professional career as a physician, historian, and director of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’. How then might a Muslim’s approach to history – a view from within – offer a different way? Thus this study explores three historical texts written by Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy in order to offer the reader a view into his social world and the material conditions to which he reacts, an introduction to the Islāmic historiographical tradition, and the significant historiographical intervention that he makes in light of dramatic changes brought to the India by Western colonialism and modernity. This distrust has legitimized countless acts of violence and continues to prevent nations from building bridges of understanding and mutual respect. In providing a short biography of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy and a cursory examination of three of his important works, I venture to ask three questions: What material conditions animate Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s historical writings? What message does he try to convey? Whom does he seek to reach? What techniques does he employ to achieve his goal? Why are these questions worth pursuing? For centuries, Western historians have portrayed the Muslim world in ways that have led the West to view Islām with an eye of fear and suspicion.

In creatively engaging the practice of the Islāmic historiographical tradition, he implicitly invites all Muslims to resist Western epistemic pressures and reclaim past Muslim glory, offering a path to liberation through the preservation and revival of traditional, indigenous curricula. As a late nineteenth-century, Islāmic historiographer of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’ in British India, Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy explicitly calls upon all Muslims to learn about the intellectual heritage of Indian ‘ulamā’. Moreover, the life-story and writings of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy promoted resistance to imperialist agendas, especially those focused on controlling the ways indigenous groups understood their own history and would carve out their futures through education pursuits. The life and work of a historian steeped in Islām’s fourteen-century, intellectual tradition, Maulānā Ḥakīm Sayyid ‘Abdul Ḥayy al-Hasanī, serves as a model for rethinking the history of Muslims in India during the British Colonial period.

Sindhi poetry for teachers