Amin Ahsan Islahi

Amin Ahsan Islahi (1904 – 15 December 1997) was a Pakistani Islamic scholar best known for his Urdu exegesis Tadabbur-i-Qur'an, based on Hamiduddin Farahi's idea of thematic and structural coherence in the Qur'an.¹²

He was born in 1904 at Bamhur village in Azamgarh, in the United Provinces of British India, into a landowning family.¹² He entered Madrasatul Islah at Sara-e-Mir on 9 January 1915, aged ten, completed its course in 1922 — the source of his nisba Islahi — and went into journalism, as associate editor of the Madinah newspaper at Bijnor, editor of the children's magazine Ghuncha, and a hand on Sach, the weekly supervised by Abdul Majid Daryabadi.³²¹

In 1925 Farahi invited Islahi to study the Qur'an with him, and Islahi left journalism to do so, learning from him the principles of direct deliberation on the Qur'an, while also teaching Qur'an and Arabic literature at the Madrasah; the Arabic article states that he continued studying tafsir with his teacher until Farahi's death in 1930.¹² After Farahi's death he studied hadith under Abd al-Rahman Muhaddith Mubarakpuri.¹² In 1936 he founded the Daira-i-Hamidiyyah to disseminate Farahi's Qur'anic thought and brought out the monthly Al-Islah, in which he translated portions of Farahi's Arabic treatises, until 1939.¹

Like Naeem Siddiqui, Manzoor Nomani and Abul Hasan Ali Hasani Nadwi, Islahi was among the founder members of Jamaat-e-Islami, founded by Abul A'la Maududi in 1941, though he had not attended its founding meeting; he remained a member of its central governing body for seventeen years and served on the Government of Pakistan's Islamic Law Commission from 1956 to 1958, then quit the party in 1958 after serious differences with Maududi — the Urdu article dates his leaving to 18 January 1958.¹³ He then wrote his commentary, publishing parts in the journal Mithaq and teaching a study circle, and finished Tadabbur-i-Qur'an on 29 Ramadan 1400 (12 August 1980) after twenty-two years of work; in 1981 he founded the Idara-i-Tadabbur-i Qur'an-o Hadith at Lahore and remained its centre until his death.¹ He also translated Farahi's commentary on fourteen surahs and several of his books from Arabic into Urdu.¹

Amin Ahsan Islahi died at Lahore on Monday 15 Sha'ban 1418 AH (15 December 1997), aged ninety-three.²¹ His students in Pakistan include Khalid Masud and Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, and Khalid Masud succeeded him in charge of his institute.¹

No consulted article names a school for him in its prose; the Sunni values appear only in the English infobox's creed field and the Urdu infobox's school-tradition field ('Sunni (non-muqallid)'), structured fields rather than text attestations, and his teacher's method and stance are the teacher's, never the student's — so his record leaves the school unclassified with the reading preserved in its faith note.¹³

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