Turangzai Haji Saheb

Fazal Wahid, known as the Haji Sahib of Turangzai (1858 – 1937), was born at Turangzai in Charsadda district, into a Muhammadzai family, and received his early religious education at home before studying at Darul Uloom Deoband, where he grew attached to Sheikh Mahmud Hasan and in 1890 accompanied him on the Hajj.¹ The English article does not mention the attachment that two scholarly accounts place at the centre of his religious life: Edwards, writing from the oral histories of the disciples' descendants, lists the Haji Sahib of Turangzai among the disciples and principal deputies of Najm al-Din Akhundzada, the Mulla of Hadda, and preserves the Haji's own story of recognising Hadda Sahib and becoming his disciple.² The Tribal Analysis Center report, drawing on Sana Haroon's study of the frontier, likewise records that Najmuddin's disciple Haji Turangzai inherited his teacher's blend of the four Sufi orders' teaching.³

On his return from the Hajj he fought against the British in the frontier revolt of 1897.¹ After a second Hajj in 1908 he turned to social work, above all education, touring the villages and towns with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan; the movement founded almost 120 schools within a few years.¹ The British accused the two men of running a parallel government and arrested him; released for lack of evidence, he was chosen by Sahibzada Abdul Qaiyum in 1913 to inaugurate the foundation-laying of the Darul Uloom Islamia in Peshawar, the present Islamia College.¹

In June 1915 the British issued a warrant for his arrest; he slipped away from Peshawar at midnight and reached Mohmand territory, from where his followers, with the mujahideen of Chamarkand, attacked British positions, among them the camp at Rustam in Mardan in August 1915.¹ A British expedition into Mohmand in 1923 ended in a truce rather than a battle, and he settled in Mohmand Agency, occupied with building a mosque.¹ He fell seriously ill in 1936 and died on 14 December 1937.¹⁴ The article is internally inconsistent about his birth — its lead and text give 1858, its infobox 1842 — so his birth year is carried as debated.

His Sufi affiliation is attested personally, not only by role: two independent texts, Edwards' oral-history-based account and the Tribal Analysis Center report drawing on Haroon, name him as the Mulla of Hadda's disciple and deputy, and Edwards preserves his own narration of becoming a disciple.²³ No single named order is attested for him personally, so his faith is recorded as sufi, without an order value — the same settlement as his teacher's. His Deoband studies are formation, and no source names a legal school for him.