Obituary - Muhammad Mustafa Azmi

By Ahmet Sait Akcay

ANKARA

Muhammad Mustafa Azmi, who died on Wednesday in Saudi capital Riyadh at the age of 87, was one of the leading Muslim scholars in modern days.

Born in India in 1930, he completed his primary, middle and high school education in homeland. He received his B.A degree from Darul Ulum Deoband in India. After obtaining his M.A degree at the Al-Azhar University in Egypt, he pursued his PhD at Cambridge University in 1966.

He worked on hadith (saying of prophet), literature, and held many academic positions at various universities including Ummul Qura University in Mecca, University of Michigan, Princeton University and University of Colorado.

He was also awarded the International King Faisal Islamic Research Award in 1980.

Azmi is mostly known to have dealt with orientalists claims against the hadith. He rejected all claims, which are questioning the way the tradition handed down for centuries. He mostly articulated the right way to place the tradition, shedding the doubts on the authenticity of the Quran and Sunna (the practice of the Prophet).

He dedicated his entire life to understanding of hadith and thanks to his huge contributions to methodology in Islamic literature that brushed aside the allegations of western scholars including Ignác Goldziher, David Margoliouth, and Joseph Schacht, who targeted authenticity and reliability of the main Islamic sources.

Azami used the modern instruments to debunk the Manichean definitions against the Islamic literature.

In his interview with Recep Senturk, rector of Istanbul-based Ibn Haldun University, he was quoted as saying: “Debates about the research methods sparked in my mind and then I told myself why I don’t write on hadith at western universities. By doing this I would be able to fence off allegations, suggesting those who are writing on this issue are not aware of modern research techniques.”

He is author of well-known book, “The History of the Qur'anic Text from Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments.”