Book Review: Hadith Scholarship in the Indian Subcontinent: Aḥmad ʿAlī Sahāranpūrī and the Canonical Hadith Literature by Muftī Muntasir Zaman,
The table of contents of this 60-page booklet is deceptively simple: It lists only chapters, aside from prefaces, bibliographies, and the like. However, any lover of the study of ḥadīth, Islāmic intellectual history, the history of the Indian Subcontinent, or general Muslim bibliophile will find a mesmerizing attraction in the wealth of information Muftī Muntaṣir arranges masterfully, which will help augment one’s knowledge of how and why the texts and study of ḥadīth in the Subcontinent are the way they are and how they have reached us, as well as how they compare to similar efforts exerted in the preparation and proliferation of ḥadīth knowledge and texts in the other lands of Islām, yielding particular insights into this process in the colonial and post-colonial eras and both coping with and thriving in modernity.
By Shaykh Ḥamzah wald Maqbūl