Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi محمد زكريا الكاندهلوي

Shaykh al-Hadith Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi rahimahullah (1897-1982) was born in Khandhla, Uttar Pradesh, India, into a deeply religious family. He was privately tutored by his father, Shaykh Yahya, in the Islamic sciences and completed the six canonical books of hadith under his instruction. He remained in the company of his shaykh, the hadith master Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri, for seventeen years until the latter's passing in 1927. Together they worked on an eighteen-volume commentary of Abu Dawud; Shaykh Zakariyya later independently composed a twenty-three-volume commentary of Muwatta Imam Malik over a span of thirty years. He began teaching the Islamic sciences at age twenty and taught hadith for 46 years (1923-1969). His other celebrated works include Fada'il al-Amal, Khasa'il-e-Nabawi (a commentary on Shama'il al-Tirmidhi), and al-Abwab wa al-Tarajum (an explanation of the chapters of Sahih al-Bukhari). He was granted spiritual successorship (khilafa) in the Chishti-Sabriyya order.