Muhammad Hamidullah: Bringing a Heritage to Light - Maydan “Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, Hamidullah’s uncle and Mufti of the Hyderabadi High Court, Muhammad Saʿīd al-Shāfiʿī al-Madrasi (d. 1895), financed the purchase and copying of rare manuscripts for sale from major booksellers throughout the Middle East. They amassed over time one of the largest personal libraries in the sub-continent, the Saʿīdiyya Library as it came to be known,..” Included among the most important of its rare holdings is The Virtues of Abū Ḥanīfa and his Two Companions Abū Yūsuf and Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan by ḥāfiẓ Muḥammad al-Dhahabī (d. 1348). It was partially edited by the last Ottoman deputy sheikh ül-Islam Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari (d. 1951) and chiefly edited by Abū al-Wafāʾ al-Afghānī (d. 1975), one of Hamidullah’s teachers in the art of manuscript editing with whom he studied at the Jamia Nizamia, one of the oldest Sunni Islamic seminaries in India. Published in 1947 by the Committee for the Revival of Ḥanafī Scholarship based in Hyderabad, it was translated into English in 2010 by Khalid Williams for Visions of Reality Books. Another rarity is the single extant copy of Regulations for the People of the religions (Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma) by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), the first annotated edition of which was produced by the Lebanese scholar Subhi Salih (d. 1986), an advocate of Christian-Muslim reconciliation who during its civil war was considered a “symbol of national unity and an advocate of dialogue between the Lebanese factions.”[1] Salih and Hamidullah worked closely together in France in the 1950s both as graduates of the Sorbonne and active contributors to French academia. They were also community leaders for the Institute of Islamic Culture in Paris, and Hamidullah acquainted Salih with the manuscript and wrote a detailed introduction to Salih’s edition published in 1961.
The Ghost-Obsessed Professor Who Became Haunted By the Living James Hervey Hyslop was not a superstitious man. His was a life dedicated to research and education, and he served as Professor of Logic and Ethics at Columbia University in the 1890s. Hyslop hated myths so much that he refused to read a novel until the age of 30, and when he finally did he came away agitated that something would serve a purpose beyond the establishment of facts. “His life,” said H.N. Gardiner, Chair of Philosophy at Smith College, “was one of arduous and unselfish devotion to truth.” For him, the truth to which he was so devoted was inarguable, though he spent his life feverishly arguing for it just the same: He believed with all his heart that our spirits live on after we die, and that certain members of the living can speak with the dead. The fiercely intelligent professor spent almost all his days hunched over various texts, mustache tips pointing outward like curious antennae (he had a noteworthy mustache, even for the mustache-rich era in which he lived). His lonely search for an imagined truth made him, in the words of a friend, “somewhat of a Don Quixote.” It may seem ridiculous now, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was common for respected intellectuals to believe in spirits and life beyond the grave. W.B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Upton Sinclair, Sir Oliver Lodge ... they all, like Hyslop, were convinced of it. The key difference, however, is that Hyslop was a full-time believer. He did not hedge one bit, and this dedicated stubbornness would come to define—and end—his life. When he died in 1920, Hyslop was, in the words of an acquaintance, “worn out, wearied, and completely exhausted from his long and continuous efforts, alone and unaided by but a few.”
The Rise and Fall of William James Sidis: From the Smartest Man Alive to a Social Reject The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy A concise bio Sidis Archives
