Israr Ahmed

Israr Ahmed (26 April 1932 – 14 April 2010) was a Pakistani Islamic scholar, theologian and orator, born in Hisar in British India and died in Lahore. ^{1 2} A physician by training, he left Jamaat-e-Islami over its turn to electoral politics and founded Anjuman Khuddam-ul-Quran (1972) and Tanzeem-e-Islami (1975), preaching a Qur'an-centred revival and the restoration of the caliphate. ¹

Israr Ahmed was born in Hisar, in the Punjab Province of British India, into a Ranghar family of Muslim Rajputs. After the creation of Pakistan he moved to Lahore, took his MBBS at King Edward Medical University in 1954 and began practising medicine; he also obtained a master's degree in Islamic studies from the University of Karachi in 1965. ^{1 2}

As a student he worked for the Muslim Students Federation and Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, and in 1950 joined Jamaat-e-Islami under Abul A'la Maududi. He left the party in 1956, as the articles give it, over its decision to enter electoral politics, which he considered a degeneration from its revolutionary method, and with others who resigned he founded the nucleus of Tanzeem-e-Islami the same year. ^{1 2} In 1971 he gave up his medical practice to launch a movement for the revival of Islam: the Markazi Anjuman Khuddam-ul-Quran was founded in Lahore in 1972 and Tanzeem-e-Islami in 1975, with himself as its first ameer until 2002; he also launched Tehrik-e-Khilafat Pakistan in 1991. ^{1 2}

From 1981, at the request of President Zia-ul-Haq, the state channel PTV gave him a weekly show — one of the first in Pakistan in which a scholar sat before an audience and lectured on Islam — and his following grew across the country. ¹ He sat in the National Assembly under Zia (1981–1982) and in 1981 received the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's third-highest civilian award. ^{1 2}

He stepped down as ameer of Tanzeem-e-Islami in October 2002 because of ill health, appointing his son Hafiz Akif Saeed as his successor, and died in Lahore on 14 April 2010, aged 78; he was buried in the Garden Town cemetery in Lahore. ^{1 2}

He wrote around sixty books in Urdu on Islam and Pakistan. The English article's own counts of translations differ — its lead gives twenty-nine translated into several languages, its publications section nine into English and other languages — and both figures are recorded here as the article gives them. ¹ Among his works is The Call of Tanzeem-e-Islami, and he left hundreds of recorded lectures on the Qur'an and the Prophet ﷺ's biography. The sources name Zakir Naik and Nouman Ali Khan among his students and those influenced by him. ^{1 2}

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

Israr Ahmed opposed modern democracy and the prevalent electoral system, arguing that in a true Islamic state the ruler may overturn the majority decisions of an elected assembly; he called for the restoration of the caliphate and held, distinctively, that its foundations should be laid in Pakistan rather than in the Hijaz or Baghdad. ¹ The article also records his 1982 view that women should be barred from all professions except medicine and teaching. ¹

His organisation's website, as quoted in the article, holds that an Islamic state can be established in Pakistan by a popular non-violent movement and that a coup can never produce stable change; the critic Farhan Zahid, in the same article, notes that a number of Tanzeem-e-Islami members have reportedly been arrested in connection with the Islamic State group. ¹

The scholar Vali Nasr argues, as the article reports, that in the 1980s Israr Ahmed became part of a Saudi-backed anti-Shiite campaign, particularly through his popular Friday sermons in Bagh-e-Jinnah park in Lahore, and that the campaign turned doctrinal disputes into communal ones. This is Nasr's analysis as reported, not a verdict of the museum. ¹

No cited source names a madhhab for him: the Urdu infobox gives his sect as Ahl-e-Sunnat, a single infobox, and the English article describes his exegesis as in the genre of Mahmud Hasan Deobandi and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, the tradition of his teachers. His faith field therefore stays unknown, with every reading preserved in his record. ^{1 2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.