Three days have passed since I received news of the death of Mawlānā Dr. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Shahīd al-Nuʿmānī (raḥimahullāh), and I have struggled to put any thoughts to paper since. I had known he was ill in the days before his death, but I had intensely hoped for his full recovery and looked forward to continuing some work together on a few projects.

My first correspondence with Ḥaḍrat Dr. ʿAbd al-Shahīd Ṣāḥib came shortly after the publication of the Urdu edition of the Muqaddimāt-i Nuʿmānī in Ramaḍān 1445, approximately two years ago. I had for some years been preparing an Arabic edition of his father’s Muqaddimāt, his father being the renowned ḥadīth scholar and critic ʿAllāmah Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Rashīd al-Nuʿmānī (may Allah have mercy on him). The appearance of the Urdu version raised the discomforting possibility that those many years of transcription, editing, and translation work had been redundant.

I first consulted Mawlānā Taḥmīd al-Mawlā Ṣāḥib, the scholar and instructor at Jāmiʿat al-ʿUlūm al-Islāmiyyah in Dhaka who had supervised the Urdu project and the editorial work of its editor, Mawlānā Shihāb Thāqib ibn ʿAbd al-Quddūs. Mawlānā Taḥmīd al-Mawlā assured me that, despite some overlap with a projected second volume collecting the Arabic muqaddimāt, my own Arabic-only edition, which additionally translated the Urdu muqaddimāt into Arabic, would be a relatively distinct and worthwhile undertaking.

I then called Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Shahīd al-Nuʿmānī Ṣāḥib, whose brief biography of his father had been included in the Bangladeshi publication, to consult with him about next steps. That first conversation is still vivid in my mind. He was incredibly warm and encouraging about the distinct Arabic edition, and, most notably, he was genuinely animated by the discussion of various scholarly projects, most of which surrounded his father’s work and that of his uncle, my mentor, Mawlānā Dr. ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Chishtī al-Nūʿmānī.

Over the following year, we spoke several times by telephone, at least two of those calls extending well beyond half an hour. One conversation, having already passed the forty-minute mark, was cut short by the start of my next class. Within that next hour, I received two missed calls from him. I returned his call immediately after class. He had further thoughts he wished to share before they slipped his mind, and the conversation continued for another twenty to thirty minutes. That a scholar of his standing would pursue a novice researcher with such urgency, and that he was concerned only that some useful observation not go unrecorded, was at the same time a lesson in humility and a testament to his dedication to the intellectual legacy of his father.

There is much from those conversations that I hope to recover over time. What follows below is an attempt to set down what remains before offering a brief biography and several accounts from others who knew him.

My first memory of our conversations was how pleased Mawlānā seemed, maybe even one could say tickled, to learn that researchers in the United States were taking an interest in his father’s legacy. I informed him of the presence of one of ʿAllāmah ʿAbd al-Rashīd al-Nuʿmānī’s students in the United States, Muftī Rūḥ al-Amīn Ṣāḥib, a name that clearly brought warm recognition, though he noted they had not been in touch for some time. Muftī Rūḥ al-Amīn had told me that during his years of study in Karachi he had gathered ʿAllāmah al-Nuʿmānī’s scattered articles and handed them over to Dr. ʿAbd al-Shahīd Ṣāḥib, and that I should retrieve them from him. My memory of Dr. Ṣāḥib’s response on this point is unfortunately not very precise. I can not remember whether he had indicated that he possessed the articles himself or that they had been stored elsewhere, perhaps with his late uncle ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ghaẓanfar Ṣāḥib. I cannot now say with confidence. I regret not having recorded his response at the time.

What I do remember with some clarity is his general disappointment at the modest extent of scholarly work produced on his father’s legacy, and his happiness to find that activity in service of it was underway in Bangladesh, and to a degree in Pakistan, and now also in the United States. He remarked that for some years, he had felt that several of his father’s most gifted students had been comparatively quiet in terms of intellectual production. I offered whatever little reassurance I could, that in some cases, limited resources or non-research obligations were the constraint, and that in others, it was simply a matter of time before their contributions became known to the wider academic world. He also mentioned that Shaykh Muḥammad ʿAwwāmah had benefited from his father, and that a circle of students in Turkey connected to Shaykh Amīn Sirāj, himself a student of Imām Zāhid al-Kawtharī, were actively engaged in scholarly work.

I mentioned to him that a specialization in ḥadīth studies was being planned at Darul Qasim here in the United States. The prospect genuinely animated him. Despite my own protestations of inadequacy and want of the requisite competence to supervise such a program (which is a hesitation I have not fully resolved) his encouragement was unequivocal. I have come to regard the encouragement of scholars such as Dr. ʿAbd al-Shahīd, my mentor Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm al-Nuʿmānī Ṣāḥib, and Shaykh Amīn Kholwadia as sufficient grounds to proceed.

These phone conversations also touched at length on the many editorial questions I had regarding the Arabic edition of the Muqaddimāt al-Nuʿmānī. I mentioned that, in the absence of a purpose-written introduction, I had been considering including Muftī Rūḥ al-Amīn Ṣāḥib’s biography of ʿAllāmah al-Nuʿmānī entitled Ghāyat al-Amānī (part of his larger work al-Kalām al-Mufīd), for which I had already obtained Muftī Ṣāḥib’s permission to edit and include. I had hoped, given that Dr. ʿAbd al-Shahīd had generously permitted the use of his biographical essay on his father for the Urdu edition, that he might similarly permit an Arabic translation of it for my edition. Before I could make any formal request, however, he preempted me and enthusiastically offered to send me a detailed Arabic biography of his father that he had himself composed. He sent two versions: one nearly one hundred pages in length and also a seventy-page light abridgment, and permitted me to use either. When I lightheartedly remarked that even the abridgment could use an abridgment, he kindly and humbly proposed that I cut it as the need dictated. I have subsequently done so and also edited the biography for punctuation and language.

My only regret is that, having completed the abridgment and revised the language, I was unable to show him the finished text for his explicit approval before his death. Allāh willed otherwise, and He is surely the best of planners. The edits had been completed only weeks before he fell ill. I had intended to call him the very following week, the week in which he fell ill and passed to the next world. This is perhaps the main reason why I have been so shocked by his death. I wanted to pen these memories the day of his passing, but I’ve needed at least two days just to gather my thoughts.

On one occasion, during our conversations, I raised uncertainty about the inclusion of several muqaddimāt, some because of their having been published separately at substantial length, such as his Mā Tamassu ilayhi al-Ḥājah, and others on account of the difficulty of rendering the Urdu and Persian prefaces into Arabic. His advice was to prioritize the ḥadīth and fiqh prefaces. When I pressed the case for the history and taṣawwuf-oriented prefaces, he conceded that they too should be included, provided their translation did not significantly delay publication.

As further details from our conversations return to my poor memory, I will add them here in subsequent revisions.