This book is a study of a Muslim religious orientation, the Ahl al-Qur'an, that emerged in colonial Punjab during the early twentieth century and continues to have its adherents in Pakistan. Prominent representatives of this orientation, viz., ʿAbdullah Chakralawi (d. 1916), Ahmad-ud-din Amritsari (d. 1936), Aslam Jayrajpuri (d. 1955), and Ghulam Ahmad Parwez (d. 1985), had significant differences with one another, which is why Qasmi prefers to see it as a cluster of related movements rather than as a single group. What the Ahl al-Qur'an have had in common is a rejection of the long-established Muslim view that traditions (that is, hadith-reports) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad are a source of religious norms second only to the Quran in authority. While some Muslim orientations emerging in colonial India sought to make the study of hadith the basis of their reformist ideas, with the Ahl-i Hadith going so far as to deny the authority of the medieval schools of law in favour of basing their norms exclusively on the Quran and the hadith, the Ahl al-Qur'an argued that the Quran alone ought to be taken as the source of Islamic teachings. As Qasmi shows, this view had much in common with the misgivings of nineteenth-century Muslim modernists towards hadith. That, in turn, had a good deal to do with the modernist effort to defend Islam against missionary polemicists, who tended to base their criticism of Islam, and especially of particular aspects of the life of Muhammad, on stories preserved in the form of hadith. Rejecting the authenticity of embarrassing hadith reports and, in case of the Ahl al-Qur'an, of the authority of hadith altogether, was one way of taking the sting out of many a polemic. Yet it exposed the Ahl al-Qur'an to sharp intra-Muslim polemics from those deeply committed to affirming the centrality of the Prophet to all facets of Islam.

A particularly difficult problem the Ahl al-Qur'an faced was to show that the Quran did, indeed, suffice as the source of Islamic norms and practices. Their opponents challenged them to demonstrate, for instance, that the manner of performing the ritual prayers could be learnt from the Quran itself. While some, like Chakralawi, took pains to delineate the contours of a “Quranic prayer”, such efforts carried little conviction and were abandoned by other Ahl al-Qur'an stalwarts. Aslam Jayrajpuri argued, for instance, that a distinction was necessary between hadith and widely followed facets of the Prophet's practice (sunnat-i mutawatir) which had come to be embodied in the Muslim community's way of doing things and of which ritual prayer was a prime example. This approach went some distance towards trying to remedy particular vulnerabilities in Ahl al-Qur'an positions without going so far as to acknowledge the authority of hadith itself. It did little, however, to appease the critics, and there has long been considerable bad blood between the Ahl al-Qur'an and the ʿulama of various other Sunni orientations in South Asia. Ahl al-Qur'an intellectuals such as Ghulam Ahmad Parwez sought refuge from the ʿulama's opposition in alliances with the modernist governing elite, notably the Ayub Khan regime in the 1960s, which was itself often at loggerheads with the traditionalist ʿulama. Such alliances tended, however, to exacerbate the traditionalist hostility towards the Ahl al-Qur'an.

Though the Ahl al-Qur'an have never enjoyed widespread support in colonial India or Pakistan, Qasmi argues that the importance of this orientation lies in helping provoke a debate, in conditions of modernity, on how to think of the Prophet and, more generally, of the religious history of Islam. This is a useful way of assessing the Ahl al-Qur'an's contribution to debates on religious authority in modern South Asia, and Qasmi has made an important contribution in this regard. There is, however, some uncertainty in this book about precisely how to understand the influence the Ahl al-Qur'an intellectuals may have exerted outside their ranks. Qasmi repeatedly notes some affinity between the Ahl al-Qur'an and particular intellectuals, reformers and government officials, and he frequently takes it to signify Ahl al-Qur'an influence on those other figures. Yet the fact that people sometimes expressed doubts about the authenticity of inconvenient hadith reports or even sought to take the Qur'an as the ultimate source of their reformist ideals does not necessarily mean that they were influenced by the work specifically of the Ahl al-Qur'an. Likewise, it is easy to exaggerate the influence of Ghulam Ahmad Parwez on the policies of President Ayub Khan. Ayub Khan was, indeed, in contact with Parwez, as Qasmi shows in drawing on some hitherto neglected archives; and the two men agreed in their vision of a Muslim state that was unencumbered in its modernizing reform by the ʿulama and their scholastic tradition. Yet such views are standard fare in Islamic modernism everywhere. While Ayub Khan sought religious support for his policies wherever he could find it, and Parwez clearly saw an opportunity to expand the Ahl al-Qur'an influence through official patronage, it does not follow that Parwez's influence loomed larger than anyone else's in guiding Ayub Khan's unsuccessful effort to take on the Pakistani ʿulama.

If the nature and scope of the influence the Ahl al-Qur'an were able to project on others remains rather unclear, so does the question of whom to count among the Ahl al-Qur'an. Ahmad-ud-din Amritsari's view that people of different faiths could agree on certain universals, best expressed by the Qur'an, without having to renounce their particular faiths, has notable affinities with those of Ubayd Allah Sindhi (d. 1944) as well as Abu'l-Kalam Azad (d. 1958), yet neither Sindhi nor Azad is usually thought to have belonged to the Ahl al-Qur'an. Conversely, there is insufficient reason to think that the rather more discriminating attitude Ja‘far Phulwarwi (d. 1982) took towards hadith as compared to many others among the ʿulama puts him, as Qasmi suggests, somewhere in the Ahl al-Qur'an camp. But if he was not quite a part of that group, then the suggestion that such ʿulama helped broaden the Ahl al-Qur'an's reformist reach becomes correspondingly weaker. On another note, it is not quite clear how to think of the Ahl al-Qur'an in relation to the Ahl-i Hadith. Qasmi argues against those who have seen the Ahl al-Qur'an as emerging from within Ahl-i Hadith circles. His point that there is a wider milieu in which the rise of the Ahl al-Qur'an ought to be placed is well taken, yet his own evidence continues to point to the importance of the Ahl-i Hadith in the immediate surroundings of several Ahl al-Qur'an intellectuals. Despite such uncertainties, however, this is an important contribution not only towards a better understanding of the Ahl al-Qur'an but also to the study of Islam in modern South Asia.