Syed Nazeer Husain Dehlawi (1805 – 13 October 1902) was a scholar of the reformist Ahl-i Hadith movement. Earning the appellation shaykh al-kull (teacher of all, or the shaykh of all knowledge) for his authority among early Ahl-i Hadith scholars, he is regarded, alongside Siddiq Hasan Khan (1832–1890), as the founder of the movement and has been described as "perhaps the single most influential figure in the spread of the Ahl-i-Ḥadīth". Biography Early life Husain was born into an aristocratic ashraf family in the northern Indian city of Monghyr, Bihar. He was raised a Shi'ite, but later abandoned that faith. He began his studies in Sadiqpur in Bihar where he first came into contact with the revolutionary preacher Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831) in the 1820s. He later moved to Delhi in 1826 where he studied under Shah Abdul Aziz (1746-1824), son of the revivalist theologian Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762), and then Abdul Aziz's grandson and successor Shah Ishaq Al-Dihlawi (1778–1846), the renowned muhaddith in India. When Shah Ishaq Al-Dihlawi emigrated to the Hijaz, Husain took his place as a teacher. Self-consciously identifying himself with Shah Waliullah, and viewing himself as spiritual heir to his legacy, Husain took on the title miyan sahib, a title closely associated with Shah Waliullah's successors. At Delhi's prestigious Madrasah-i Rahimiyah seminary, which had broken up into a number of interlinked schools following Shah Ishaq Al-Dihlawi's death in 1846, Husain led the most Wahhabi-oriented school. Attitude towards the British Nazeer Husain advocated political quietism and was among a large number of Muslim scholars from both the Sunni and Shia sects, who supported British rule and rejected calls for armed jihad against it. He was also among a number of Muslim scholars, including the muftis of Mecca, who declared British India to be dar al-Islam (abode of peace) and not Dar al-harb (abode of war). During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, he resisted pressure from the mutineers to call for a jihad and instead declared in favour of British rule, viewing the Muslim-British relationship as a legal contract which could not be broken unless their religious rights were breached. Despite having denied any involvement in the rebellion in its aftermath and having strongly opposed the declaration of jihad as sinful and a faithless breach of covenant, Husain was widely believed to have been among a group of Delhi ulema pressured into signing a jihad fatwa. He was