Background
Kairanawi was born in Kairana of Uttar Pradesh, India during the last years of the Mughal Empire.
Kairanawi was born in Kairana of Uttar Pradesh, India during the last years of the Mughal Empire.
Later he moved to Delhi where he studied different disciplines including mathematics and medicine.
A full family tree that goes back to the third Caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, is mentioned in family sources. Participant of the family wealth, a large property in Kairana, was granted by Akbar the Great. Many family members held high positions and/or were intellectuals.
Kairanawani began receiving traditional Islamic education at the age of 6, memorizing the Qur"an at 12.
He also learned Arabic and Persian. Working as a Mufti and Sharia teacher, he founded a religious school in Kariana.
In 1837 the Church Mission Society appointed Karl Gottlieb Pfander, described by Eugene Stock as "perhaps the greatest of all missionaries to Mohammedans", to Agra in Northern India, where in 1854 he engaged in a famous public debate with leading Islamic scholars. Kairanawani used arguments from recent European theologically critical works that Pfander was unfamiliar with, having left Europe before these where published, though his main source of reference was the apocryphal sixteenth-century Gospel of Barnabas, which he held to be authentic.
Following armed uprisings against the British in which he personally took part, Kairanawani had to leave all his property (auctioned later), run for his life, and board a ship in Bombay.
Arriving at the port of Mocha, Yemen, he walked to Mecca. The journey took two years. While residing in Mecca, Kairanawi founded a religious school there, Madrasah as-Sawlatiya.