Muhammad Yaqub Nanautawi

Who is Muhammad Yaqub Nanautawi?

Muhammad Yaqub Nanautawi - alternately, Nanotvi - was an Indian Islamic scholar, and one of the earliest teachers of Islamic Madrassa in Deoband, famously called Darul-uloom Deoband.

Muhammad Yaqub was born in 1833 in pre-Partition India, in the town of Nanauta, part of the Saharanpur district of the modern province of Uttar Pradesh. His father, Mamluk Ali, was one of the senior Muslim scholars of India at the time, and the head of Oriental Studies at Madrassa Gaziuddin Khan. Muhammad Yaqub studied most of the Islamic sciences under his father. His teachers in Hadith were Shah Abd al-Ghani Mujaddidi and Ahmad Ali Saharanpuri.

Muhammad Yaqub began his career working for the British government in the Department of Education. Later when Dar al-Ulum Deoband was founded, the founder Muhammad Qasim Nanautwi asked him to join as one of the first faculty members. Muhammad Yaqub was first sadr mudarris at Dar al-Ulum Deoband and held the position until his death. His students include most of the second-generation Islamic scholars such as Shaykh al-Hind Mahmud al-Hasan, Mufti Aziz al-Rahman Uthmani, and Ashraf Ali Thanwi.

Muhammad Yaqub trained in tasawwuf under Haji Imdadullah and received khilafah from him in the Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri, and Suhrawardi orders.