Abdul Majid Daryabadi

Abdul Majid Daryabadi (16 March 1892 – 6 January 1977) was an Indian Muslim scholar and writer, known mainly for his four-volume English commentary Tafsir-ul-Quran and his Urdu Al-Quran al-Hakim, both also called Tafsir-e-Majidi, and for the Urdu weekly Sach (later Sidq, then Sidq-e-Jadid), which he founded in 1925 and edited until his death.¹²

He was born at Daryabad in Barabanki district on 16 March 1892 (16 Sha'ban 1309 AH), the youngest of the five children of Abdul Qadir, a deputy collector who died at Mina during his Hajj in 1912; his grandfather Mufti Mazhar Karim had been exiled to the Andaman Islands for fourteen years for a fatwa issued during the 1857 uprising.¹³ He was at school in Sitapur from 1902 to 1908, took his BA (Hons) in philosophy from Canning College, Lucknow, in 1912 with second-class honours, enrolled for an MA at Aligarh and at St Stephen's College, Delhi, in 1913, and, influenced by the writings of Walter Raleigh and Dale Carnegie, studied briefly at the University of Oxford as a visiting scholar in 1913.¹³

During his youth, under the influence of Hume, Mill, Darwin and Huxley, he wrote "Rationalist" as his religion on his 1910 school examination form and even subscribed to the Rationalist Press Association; the reading of Akbar Allahabadi, Muhammad Ali Jauhar, Ashraf Ali Thanwi and Rumi's Mathnawi brought him back, and he said that his apostasy dated from 1909 to 1918 and that he had been turned by the reading of Muhammad Ali of Lahore's English Qur'an commentary.¹ Despite opposition within his family, he did not waver in the resolve to lead an Islamic life from 1918 onwards.¹

He worked as a translator in the translation department of Osmania University, Hyderabad, from September 1917 to July 1918, after which the university supported him with a lifetime stipend; in 1925 he founded the weekly Sach, which became Sidq and, in 1950, Sidq-e-Jadid, and edited it until his death.¹ He was president of the Oudh Khilafat Committee and a staunch supporter of the Deoband movement, and his more than sixty works in Urdu, Arabic and English include the Tafsir-e-Majidi commentaries, Aap Biiti (his autobiography), Hakim-ul-Ummat (1956), Murshid ki Talash, and Muhammad Ali — Zaati Diary (1943).¹³ He received the Arabic Scholar Award of the Government of India in 1966 and an honorary doctorate from Aligarh Muslim University in 1976, presented in person by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed.¹

The English article calls him a Hanafi scholar in its prose, holds that he took Ashraf Ali Thanwi as his spiritual mentor and took bay'ah at Thanwi's hands in 1928, renewing the bay'ah under Hussain Ahmad Madani after Thanwi's death, and that he chose to follow the Hanafi school; but both namings belong to this one text family, since the Urdu article states no school and no bay'ah at all, and the Arabic stub says only that he was strongly influenced by the two men.¹³² His record therefore leaves the school unclassified and preserves both readings in its faith note.⁴

He died at his home, Khatun Manzil in Lucknow, before dawn on 6 January 1977 (15 Muharram 1397 AH); the first funeral prayer was held at Nadwatul Ulama and led by Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, and he was buried in his family's graveyard at Daryabad beside the grave of Makhdum Abkash.¹³

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