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Mawlānā Qiyām al Dīn Muḥammad ʿAbdul Barī Farangī Maḥalli* (قيام الدين عبد الباري فرهنگی محلی ) was born on 10th Rabiʿ al Thānī 1295/14th April 1878 in Lucknow, India. He belonged to the illustrious Farangi Mahallī family of Lucknow who were India's greatest continuous family tradition of Islamic scholarship. The family traced their pedigree to the famous Companion of Prophet Muḥammad, Abu Ayyūb Anṣarī, through the medieval saint of Herat, Khwāja ʿAbdullāh Anṣarī. Mawlāna ʿAbdul Bari was the last towering spiritual and intellectual figure of this family-cum-institution, dubbed “the Cambridge of the East”, that produced some of the most renowned Islamic scholars of India from 1700-1900. He is also, perhaps, the most understudied figure of early 20th century India, whose intellectual and political contributions to galvanize the Muslim masses of India from a century of political slumber, has been less scrutinized by native as well as western academia, compared to other Muslim luminaries of the time. He was the driving force behind some ambitious Indian Muslim political movements such as the inconsequential Anjuman e Khuddām e Kaʿba and Jamʿiyat Khuddam al Ḥaramayn, and the more impactful, Khilafat Movement, and one existing to our day in India and Pakistan, albeit in slightly different incarnations, the Jamʿīyat al ʿulema al Hind. He also established a seminary called Madrasa e ʿAliya Nizamiyyah at his famous ancestral grounds to resuscitate the classical religious curriculum called Dars e Niẓamī—which his ancestor Mulla Niẓam al Dīn is credited for formalizing in the Indian Subcontinent— as a reaction to what he saw was the growing influence of ‘reformist’ Islam represented by the burgeoning seminaries of Deoband and Nadwat al ʿUlema on the one hand, and the Western oriented Muslim institutions such as Syed Ahmed Khan’s Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, on the other. On the political front he was, along with Abul Kalām Azad, the most influential Muslim scholar of his time, even commanding Mahatma Gandhi’s respect and participation in Muslim specific political initiatives like the Khilafat Movement. He died on January 19th, 1926 after suffering an attack of paralysis some days earlier. It is said that it was caused by the news of ʿAbdul ʿAziz Ibn Saʿūd’s declaration of his lordship over the Holy Shrines of Makka and Madīna. He was only forty eight years old.

Mawlāna ʿAbdul Bari is often mistaken with another contemporary scholar, Mawlāna ʿAbdul Bārī Nadwī, a member of Dar ul Muṣannifīn in Azamgarh, who authored a well-know book on the philosophy of the Irish philosopher, Bishop Berkeley.

The famous political activist and founder of the Khilafat Movement, Moḥammad Ali Jouhar, was the spiritual disciple of Mawlāna ʿAbdul Bāri. Mahatma Gandhi also had a special liking to the Mawlana, and would often reside in his house when visiting Lucknow.

Private Life
Mawlāna ʿAbdul Bārī married twice. His first wife was the daughter of Munshi Bahāʾ al Dīn Kakori, the Deputy Collector of Kakor, whom he married in 1897. It was a short-lived marriage. From her he had a son, Muhammad Hafīẓ ʿAbdul Kāfī. The mother and the child both died in 1898. He, then, married the daughter of Sayyid Mahfūz Husayn Naqvi of Dogawan in 1900. From her he had many children but only two daughters and a son, Jamāl al Din Abdul Wahhāb or Jamal Mian, as he was called, survived. The Mawlāna’s surviving descendants seem to be from Jamāl Mian only. Jamāl Mian himself was an accomplished political personality in pre and post Separation Muslim politics. Mawlāna ʿAbdul Bārī’s eldest daughter, Sughra, died childless. She seemed to be an accomplished poet in her own right. Her poems were published posthumously by Jamāl Mian.

Scholarly Contributions
Mawlāna ʿAbdul Bārī was a prolific writer. His student and biographer, Mawlawī ʿInayat ullāh Anṣārī, mentions in Tadhkira-i `Ulamā-i Farangi Mahall— an account of the history of the Firangi Maḥall family— the number of his books, epistles and glosses at over one hundred. Some of the subjects he wrote about were Nahu(Grammar), Ṣarf(Morphology), Mantiq(Logic), Hikma(Philosophy), Fiqh(Jurisprudence), Uṣul(Jurisprudential Methodology), Kalam(Scholastic Theology), Ḥadith(Prophetic Traditions) and Tasawwuf(Sufism). He wrote a thirty-four volume book called Science wa Kalam(Science and Theology), which unfortunately has not be published.