student of Muhaddith Shah Muhammad Ishaq (1782–1846), the grandson of Shah 'Abd al-Aziz and his Khalifa (successor). With the aim of restoring Islamic unity and strengthening Muslim faith, they called for a return to original sources of religion, "Qur'an and Hadith" and eradicate what they perceived as bid‘ah (innovations), shirk (polytheism), heresies and superstitions. Siddiq Hasan’s father Sayyid Awlad Hasan was a strong supporter of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid and had accompanied him to Afghanistan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to participate in his famous Jihad movement. Another major source of influence on Khan was the "Najdi Sheikh" 'Abd al-Haqq Benarasi who had returned from Yemen and became the first scholar to teach the doctrines of Yemeni theologian Al-Shawkani in South Asia. Benarasi was Khan's Hadith master in Delhi; teaching him doctrines such as rejection of shirk, bid'ah, Taqlid, etc. and became influential in laying the doctrinal foundations of the later Ahl-i Hadith. Khan also had studied under the tutelage of other notable students of Shawkani such as Nāṣir al-Ḥāzimī, ʿAbd al-Qayyūm Buḍhānawī and the Bhopali scholar Ḥusayn b. Muḥsin al-Yamanī. Syed Nazeer Husain from Delhi and Siddiq Hasan Khan of Bhopal drew primarily on the work of hadith scholars from Yemen in the early years of the movement, reintroducing the field into the Indian subcontinent. Their strong emphasis on education and book publishing has often attracted members of the social elite both in South Asia and overseas. Alongside the Yemeni reformers, the teachings of Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl Dehlvi (1779–1832 C.E) also became highly important in Ahl-i Hadith circles. Shah Muhammad's ground-breaking theological works like Taqwiyat al-īmān (Strengthening of the Faith), al-Ṣirāṭ al-Mustaqīm (The Straight Path), Yak Rūzī (One Dayer), etc. elucidated the core doctrines of the Ahl-i Hadith movement. All these works called upon the believers to uphold the principle of Tawhid (montheism), and condemned various practices associated with saint-venerations, visitations to tombs, Sufi rituals, etc. as shirk (polytheism). Following the teachings of Shah Ismail, Ahl-i Hadith also rejected Taqlid to works of classical Sunni Fiqh (jurisprudence) and believed in direct understanding of Qur'an and Hadith. Due to their connections with Shah Ismail and Sayyid Ahmad's Jihad movement, Ahl-i Hadith were considered as "Wahhabi" conspirators by the British administration. The anti-colonial activism of Ahl-i Hadith religious reformers as well as their sympathies for Jihad made them the primary target more than any other reform movement. For the British imperial statesmen, their endeavours