Socio Political Thought Of Shah WaliAllah Rahmatullahi Alaihi

vi Foreword
the various domains of human activity. This schema was structured within
the overarching cosmology of classical Islamic religious thought, and had
as its guiding principle, concern with the ultimate purpose and religious
meaning of all spheres of human activity. Shiih Wali Allah therefore strove
to find the organising ethos, conscience, and principle of movement and
development that pulsed through all aspects of individual and collective
experience, drawing humanity toward its greatest felicity and highest di-
vinely ordained purpose. He combined the sources of reason, tradition, and
intuition in his search for a comprehensive vision which could integrate
the increasingly fragmented approaches to religious and political authority
tearing apart the Islamic polity.
Shah Wali Allah understood himself as living in an age of crisis in
which the integrity of the various Islamic sciences was threatened by the
tendency to abandon broader vision and principles in favour of narrow
disciplinary specializations and polemical rejection of other perspectives.
One of Shah Wali Allah's goals was the achievement of an ideally moral,
altruistic, and perfectly civilized society. Therefore Professor al-Ghazali
is particularly concerned with exploring the possibilities of Shih Wali
Allah's thought as an early macro-sociological theory. Accordingly, he
gives considerable attention to the author's doctrine of the irtgaqdt, or the
progressive stages in the development of human social configurations and
their concomitant political orders.
Shah Wali Allah was influenced by Islamic Sufism and philsophical
ethics in envisioning a similar process of progressive development of the
inherent potential of the human individual. This model of inner develop-
ment incorporated increasing refinements of consciousness conceived of as
stages of drawing closer to God (iqtirdbht}. The usefulness and relevance
of Professor al-Ghazali's scholarly contribution lies not only in its consti-
tuting an important resource for locating Shah Wali Allah's socio-political
thought within the Islamic intellectual heritage but also in its suggestive-
ness regarding Muslim responses to contemporary social, political, and
theological issues.
For those Musims who are today striving for the recovery of elements
of tradition which can inform contemporary struggles for authenticity in
the ethical, political, and intellectual domains, Professor al-Ghazali's char-
acterization of Shah Wali Allah's contribution in Hujjat Allah al-Bdlighuh
as a new approach to Muslim theology ('ilm al-kaldm) suggests a produc-
tive direction. This renewal of Islamic theology ('ilm al-kaldm) would find
its home neither in dry scholastic reasoning nor in the flat assertion of liter-
alist legalism. Encompassing and reaching beyond exclusively social and