Intention and Implication: The Disputed Legacy of Shāh Walī Allāh

Abstract

Abstract:This article advances an alternative approach to the academic dispute over the legacy of the eighteenth-century Sufi and scholar Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi (d. 1762 CE). It shows that largely as the consequence of a Weberian teleology of modernization, Orientalism, and nationalism, works on Shāh Walī Allāh produced between the 1940s and 1980s overwhelmingly considered him a progenitor of modern Islam in South Asia. Although some scholars continue to assert the same into the present, the influence of post-modern critical theory since the 1980s has refined the argument about Shāh Walī Allāh's legacy in various ways but has also led to the rise of another current of scholarship that denies him any substantive legacy, largely because he worked in an environment free of European influence. Common to such scholarship are assumptions about Shāh Walī Allāh's motivations with respect to his policy of Islamic reform. Critical of such an approach, this article turns from the debate about his motivations to the agreed-upon implications of his thought relative to the eighteenth-century intellectual and social context in which he lived. On this basis, this article finds that Shāh Walī Allāh's legacy has been extensive in the modern period insofar as the latter-day South Asian thinkers who reference him-whether Sufi, fundamentalist, or modernist-attempt to follow through on his principles.