"The Ahl-i-Hadis have been an influential reform movement, one is almost tempted to say a self-righteous movement except for the fact that that expression would be true of almost all the other groups too—who could have excelled Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan in being certain that he alone was right? The Ahl-i-Hadis did not capture the masses, but their influence far exceeded the numbers who professed adherence to them. And there were good reasons for this: they had a large number of followers among the ‘aristocracy’, they had great influence at courts such as that of Bhopal; more important, they came in a sense to set the norms. This was because of their basic position: they taught that instead of going by the rulings of any of the law schools one should regulate one’s life by the Sunna of the Prophet, that is by what the Prophet himself had said, by the way he himself had acted. As the sayings and deeds of the Prophet are set out in the Hadis, they styled themselves as the Ahl-i-Hadis. They were also known as the Muhammadis and the Wahabis. They proclaimed that the world was about to end soon, in particular any time from 1884 as the fourteenth century of the Islamic era had begun that year and the Prophet had declared that the world would end in that century. This lent an urgency to their mission. They held that going back to the Hadis was the way to bring the Muslims together—for one could thereby vault over the feuds that had arisen among the law schools. They also introduced innovations in the manner of saying the namaz: some of these would appear trivial to the observer—should one lean on one knee or both, should one say Amin audibly or softly; but, as we shall see, these are exactly the sorts of things over which sects break each other’s heads; moreover, other changes which they decreed were not just in ritual—they taught, for instance, that nothing was to be gained by observing the urs etc., of pirs, that nothing was to be gained by namaz for the dead. Campaigns were always afoot, therefore, to prevent them from praying in mosques used by other Muslims."