Within South Asia, as well as among the South Asian Muslim diaspora in the West, Deoband represents the most influential Islamic scholarly tradition. In Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, which together host close to 500 million Muslims, the largest number of madrasahs belong to the Deobandi school of thought. Their graduates staff the mosques, teach children to read the Qurʾān, and impart knowledge of the sīrah and ḥadīth; these madrasahs are central to the successful transmission of knowledge of Islamic ‘aqīdah, and basic knowledge of the Islamic legal and moral code, from one generation to the next. Many Deobandi scholars are prolific writers and produce rich Islamic texts in vernacular languages, in particular Urdu (the language of Indian Muslims). In recent years many prominent Deobandi ‘ulamā’ have also begun to appear on mainstream television channels to share religious commentaries on matters of everyday routine. Similarly, many countries in the West, most noticeably the United Kingdom and the United States, host influential Deobandi madrasahs of their own. Established mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, often on the initiative of a leading Deobandi ‘ālim from India or Pakistan, these madrasahs are today strong in their own right.

Deobandi scholarly tradition follows the Ḥanafī madhhab, which under the Ottoman Empire became the dominant school of law in the Middle East; the Muslim invaders from Central Asia who were of Turkic origin took Ḥanafī Islam to the Indian sub-continent (Chapter 8). However, the Deobandi tradition from the time of its very origin in 1867 has had socially conservative undertones, adhering to a particular kind of taqlīd (following) of the Ḥanafī madhhab that endorsed societal outcomes quite opposed to those supported by religious bureaucracies maintained by the Ottomans or the Mughals. Within the genealogy of Islamic intellectual trends in South Asia, Deoband in fact marked a clear departure from the more rationalist-leaning Persian influences on South Asian madrasahs that were epitomized in the teaching of Farangi Mahall—the leading madrasah under the Mughal Empire—which was to lay down the foundation of Dars-i Niẓāmī, a curriculum of Islamic education that is to this day followed in South Asian madrasahs.