Mufti Muḥammad Taqī ‘Usmānī and his scholarly contribution to the Qur’anic studies

Mufti Taqī ‘Usmānī of Pakistan is one of the most prominent contemporary Muslim scholars from Deobandi and Waliyullah’s School of Thought. He is not only a leading living scholar of Islamic Jurisprudence and Islamic finance, but also a scholar and an intellectual of the Quran, the Hadith, Islamic law, and comparative religion. He has always been placed among the top fifty in “The 500 Most Influential Muslims” in the world from 2009 until 2016. His works on the sciences of the Quran and the interpretation of the Holy Quran show his scholarship in this field. The writing of “Ulūm Al-Qur’ān” (An Approach to the Quranic Sciences in Urdu), “The Meanings of the Noble Qur’ān” (English translation of the Quran) and “Āsān Tarjamah Qur’ān” (The simple translation of the Quran with notes in Urdu) are his major works in the field of Quran. His supervision of translating the “Ma‘ārif al-Qur’ān” of his father, Maulānā Mufti Shāfi‘, from Urdu to English is considered as his magnificent endeavor and contribution to this field. This paper aims to discover the biography of Mufti Taqī ‘Usmānī and his scholarly contribution towards the interpretation of the Holy Quran in the above-mentioned works. The paper uses a descriptive-analytical approach to discuss his biography and his contributions. The analysis shows that Mufti Taqī ‘Usmānī is a continuity of Waliyullah’s tradition and Deobandi scholars’ in contributing Quranic teaching to ordinary people as well as scholars through his writings and his other scholarly works.