Muftī Saʿīd Aḥmad Pālanpūrī

Senior teacher and later Shaykh al-Ḥadīth and principal of the Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband, whose lessons on Sullam al-ʿulūm were published as the Urdu commentary Irshād al-fuhūm (1433/2012).

Life

Saʿīd Aḥmad Pālanpūrī was born in 1940 in Kaleda, in the former Palanpur state of Gujarat. He studied at Maẓāhir-i ʿUlūm in Saharanpur and then at the Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband, where his teachers included Muḥammad Ṭayyib Qāsmī, Fakhr al-Dīn Aḥmad and Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Balyāwī, himself the author of a commentary on the Sullam. He taught at the Jāmiʿa Ashrafiyya in Rander from 1965 for about ten years and was appointed to the Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband in 1973; from 2008 until his death he was its Shaykh al-Ḥadīth and principal. He died in Mumbai on 19 May 2020. (These details come from Wikipedia and the Urdu obituaries it cites.)

He wrote mainly on ḥadīth, law and exegesis, including a five-volume commentary on Shāh Walī Allāh’s Ḥujjat Allāh al-bāligha. For logic and the rational sciences his books were written for the classroom. Asad Q. Ahmed lists Irshād al-fuhūm, based on his lessons and published in 1433/2012, among the Urdu commentaries on Sullam al-ʿulūm written by scholars of Deoband since the late twentieth century, and judges that such works served the teaching of a set curriculum in a formal institution rather than the old dialectical exchange between master and student. He also wrote Miftāḥ al-Tahdhīb, an Urdu commentary on the Tahdhīb, and Muʿīn al-falsafa, which the Deobandi examination board of Pakistan prescribes in its first ʿāliya year (see ‘The Dars-i Niẓāmī’).

Works

• Irshād al-fuhūm إِرْشَادُ الفُهُومِ — بر Sullam al-ʿulūmUrdu commentary on Sullam al-ʿulūm based on his lessons (afādāt); Deoband: Maktabat Ḥijāz, 1433/2012 (Ahmed’s bibliography).شرح
• Miftāḥ al-Tahdhīb مِفْتَاحُ التَّهْذِيبِ — بر Tahdhīb al-manṭiqUrdu commentary on al-Taftāzānī’s Tahdhīb al-manṭiq (as listed in this site’s Tahdhīb catalogue).شرح
• Muʿīn al-falsafa مُعِينُ الفَلْسَفَةِIntroduction to philosophy, prescribed in the Deobandi Wifāq al-Madāris syllabus (as reported in ‘The Dars-i Niẓāmī’).اثر

Reception

Irshād al-fuhūm is one of the modern Urdu commentaries through which the Sullam is now taught in Deobandi madrasas; Ahmed treats this group as evidence of how print and fixed curricula changed the genre.