Barelvi movement
South Asian Islamic revivalist movement
The Barelvi movement, is a Sunni revivalist movement that generally adheres to the Hanafi and Shafi'i schools of jurisprudence, the Maturidi and Ash'ari creeds, a variety of Sufi orders, including the Qadiri, Chishti, Naqshbandi and Suhrawardi orders, as well as many other orders of Sufism, and has hundreds of millions of followers across the world. They consider themselves to be the continuation of Sunni Islamic orthodoxy before the rise of Salafism and the Deobandi movement.
The Barelvi movement is spread across the globe with millions of followers, thousands of mosques, institutions, and organizations in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, South Africa and other parts of Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States.
As of 2000, the movement had around 200 million followers globally but mainly located in Pakistan and India.
The movement claims to revive the Sunnah as embodied in the Qur'an, literature of traditions (hadith) and the way of the scholars, as the people had lapsed from the Prophetic traditions. Consequently, scholars took the duty of reminding Muslims to go back to the 'ideal' way of Islam. The movement drew inspiration from the Sunni doctrines of Shah Abdur Rahim (1644-1719) founder of Madrasah-i Rahimiyah and one of the compilers of Fatawa-e-Alamgiri. Shah Abdur Rahim is the father of Shah Waliullah Dehlawi. The movement also drew inspiration from Shah Abdul Aziz Muhaddith Dehlavi (1746 –1824) and Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi (1796–1861) founder of the Khairabad School.
Fazle Haq Khairabadi Islamic scholar and leader of 1857 rebellion issued fatwas against Wahhabi Ismail Dehlvi for his doctrine of God's alleged ability to lie (imkan-i kizb) from Delhi in 1825.
“Barelvi movement” enters the record as south Asian Islamic revivalist movement. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Barelvi, movement and South can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q284479. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 1644, 1719 and 1746.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barelvi movement” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.