Remembering Muhammad Hamidullah​​

It was a damp fall morning in Paris. The year was 1983. I had wandered through the streets for almost an hour and had finally found the apartment where Professor Muhammad Hamidullah lived a solitary life. I knocked at the door but there was no answer. I waited for a while and knocked again. When no answer came, I left a note and returned to my hotel. Later that day, when I came back to my hotel after a long stroll, I found a small note on the door of my room: “I am sorry to have missed you. I was in my apartment, but my hearing is not good anymore. Please accept my apologies. Hamidullah.”

I was touched by the humility of tone and by the fact that the old Professor had taken the trouble to come to my hotel and leave the message; we had never met before and he did not even know me. I went back to his apartment and had a memorable meeting. He was as lucid in his thoughts as in his books and his grasp of contemporary realities of the Muslim world was amazing.

On Tuesday, Shawwal 13, 1423/December 17, 2002, the 94-year-old Professor Hamidullah awoke in Jacksonville, Florida, USA, in the house of his brother’s grand-daughter, Sadida, said his Fajr prayer, had breakfast, and after a while went back to sleep, never to awaken again in this life. He was laid to rest in the Muslim cemetery in Jacksonville on December 19, 2002 at about 1:30 pm. Funeral prayer was led by his long-time friend Dr. Yusuf Ziya Kavakçı, an eminent Turkish scholar and Imam of Islamic Association of North Texas; about 75 people attended his burial.

His distinguished academic career, numerous books and articles testify to a life devoted to scholarship in the grand tradition of his ancestors. He discovered a very old hadith manuscript in a Damascus library and published it in a bilingual Arabic-Urdu edition. This discovery of Sahifah Hammam bin Munabah was to have a great impact on the course of Islamic studies.

In the early 1950s, Professor Hamidullah helped draft the first Islamic constitution of Pakistan but resigned from the commission over differences with vested interests. He was awarded the highest civil award of Pakistan in 1985, but turned over the cash award to the Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad, Pakistan, saying “If I take it here, what would I get there?”

The following memorabilia by Mahmud Rifat Kademoğlu, one of Professor Hamidullah’s Turkish students, highlights numerous aspects of the life of an extraordinary scholar. 

Journal of Islam & Science, Vol. 1 (Winter 2003) No. 2

Mahmud Rifat Kademoğlu​