Mawlānā Aḥmad ʿAlī Sahāranpūrī’s (d. 1880) editorial and commentarial work on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī has undoubtedly cemented his legacy in the annals of hadith scholarship. There is, however, another accomplishment of his that has drawn little attention: his impressive lithographic print of the Qurʾan. To be sure, Sahāranpūrī was not the first, let alone the only, scholar intent on printing the Qurʾan by utilizing the recently available print technology. The Qurʾan was first printed in his home country India in 1802, and subsequently, multiple editorial projects were carried out throughout the nineteenth century. What distinguished Sahāranpūrī’s project was his attention to the accurate orthography of the Qurʾan and the cadre of experts who reviewed his work.

Prior to their boom in recent decades, works of English hadith literature could be counted on one hand. Many of the authors of these works passed away within the decade, such as Zafar Ishaq Ansari (d. 2016),[1] Muṣṭafā al-Aʿẓamī (d. 2017), and Fuat Sezgin (d. 2018). One of the earliest and most accessible and informative primers of hadith studies in English is Hadith Literature: Its Origin, Development & Special Features by Professor Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi published in 1961.[2] By Siddiqi’s own admission, when authoring his introduction to hadith, he knew of only one other introductory study in English: the British Orientalist Alfred Guillaume’s (d. 1965) The Traditions of Islam, but that too was from a Western critical perspective.[3]