Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

With respect to socio-legal and religious reforms in South Asia, this research particularly focuses on the role and impact of Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi, the doyen of eightennth century Islamic reform, who has been looked into in terms of his educational and mystical ideas while his views on Islamic reforms from the socio-legal and cultural perspectives have been overlooked, from within as well as from without. I revisit the various sources in order to trace trajectories of the discourses that led to the silencing of this part. I look critically into the question that why obscurity in his socio-legal thought prevails despite his popularity as a reformist. Though Shah Wali Allah was a traditionalist intellectual who made great influence on religious thought of South Asia in several ways, many of his ideas could not attract much attention of the traditional ‘Ulama’ due to several reasons which discussed in this paper. In this way I reconstruct his socio-legal ideas and make them available to a larger readership expounding how the study may convince South Asian Muslim thought to take wali Allah’s idea of socio-legal reforms into serious consideration. Thus, it will be helpful to modernize the religious landscape in South Asia in general and in Pakistan in particular.