Shah Muhammad Sulaiman

Shah Muhammad Sulaiman (3 February 1886 – 12 March 1941) was an Indian judge and physicist, the first Indian to serve as Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court (1932–1937), later a judge of the Federal Court of India and Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University (1938–1941). ^{1 2} The Urdu article is a short stub derived from the English one. ³ No Arabic Wikipedia article exists for him, so the Arabic entry is written from the English and Urdu sources.

He was born at Waleedpur village in Jaunpur district, into a family of lawyers and scholars — an ancestor, Mulla Mahmud Jaunpuri, had been a philosopher of Shah Jahan's time, and his father Muhammad Usman practised at the Jaunpur bar. ¹ He graduated from Allahabad University in 1906 at the head of his list, then read at Christ's College, Cambridge, placing in the Mathematical Tripos in 1909 and the Law Tripos in 1910, and took a doctorate of laws at the University of Dublin the same year. ¹ He began practice at Jaunpur in 1911 and moved to Allahabad in 1912. ¹

He was made a judge of the Allahabad High Court in April 1923 and was knighted in the 1929 Birthday Honours. ¹ From 16 March 1932 to 30 September 1937 he was the court's chief justice — the first Indian and one of the youngest to hold the post. ¹ On 3 August 1933 he delivered the appellate judgment in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. ¹ On 1 October 1937 he joined the new Federal Court of India and sat on it until his death. ¹

He succeeded Ziauddin Ahmad as Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University in 1938 and held the office until 1941. ^{4 1} He had presided over the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference at Ajmer in 1928 and delivered convocation addresses at Dacca, Aligarh, Hyderabad and Agra, and he edited and introduced an edition of Shauq Qidwai's masnavi Alam-e-Khiyal. ¹

He died on 12 March 1941 and was buried at the Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi, beside Amir Khusrow. ¹ C. V. Raman wrote his obituary in Nature, and both Sir Shah Sulaiman Hall at Aligarh and Sir Shah Sulaiman Road in Karachi carry his name. ¹ Wikidata gives his religion only as Islam generically and no article names a school, so the museum records his affiliation as unknown. ²