Historical Place

Khidr or al-Khidr (Arabic: الخضر‎ al-Khiḍr, also transcribed as Khidr, Khizr, Khyzer, Qeezr, Qhezr, Qhizyer, Qhezar, Khizar, Xızır, Hızır) is a revered figure in Muslim and Islam-influenced areas who is believed to be described in the Quran as a righteous servant of God and he possessed great wisdom or mystic knowledge. In different Islamic and non-Islamic traditions, Khidr is variously described as a messenger, prophet, wali or in some cases, as a "non-abstract" deity[1] who takes the worldly place of the God as a deus otiosus.[2] The figure of al-Khidr has been syncretized over time with various figures including Vishnu in India,[3] Sorūsh in Iran, Saint Sarkis the Warrior and John the Baptist in Armenia,[4] Saint George in Asia Minor and the Levant, etc.[5]


The name "Khidr" is taken colloquially (and sometimes within more scholarly literature) to mean "the Green One" or "the Verdant One" in Arabic; however, this definition is only a popular etymology with no linguistic connection between Khidr and al-akhdar, the Arabic word for green.[6] Another opinion refers to a short or Arabized form of Hasisatra (Atra-Hasis).[7] Hasisatra is the nickname of the "Sumerian Noah" Utnapishtim. He is a character in the Gilgamesh epic who is asked by Enki (Ea) to abandon his world possessions and create a great ship. Therefore he is a survivor of the flood on whom the gods had conferred immortality, at the source of waters.[8] According to Dutch Orientalist Arent Jan Wensinck (1882-1939) the story of Khidr and Alexander the Great is connected with the Gilgamesh Epic. Because, like Alexander the Great, Gilgamesh has searched for immortality and he has tried to find Atrahasis who lived on an island and had the secret of eternal life.[9]

Although there are many common or similar elements between the Gilgamesh epic and the Alexander romance in which 'Khidr' plays a role, Hasisatra is not the prototype of Khidr. Khidr originally comes from Ugaritic mythology and his prototype is Kothar-wa-Khasis (Chusor in Greek), the god of smith and builder;[10] but he is actually associated with Kothar's syncretic forms. The name Khidr has also been compromised with some epithets or personal names from ancient Near Eastern cultures and later may be with Arabic al-akhdar. For example like personal names Hi-zi-ri, Hu-zi-ru (Asur), Aziru, Haziru (Akkad), Ha-zi-ru-um, Hisr (Amorit), Hi-zi-ri (Amarna) which Aramian dr and Hebrew zr means to help. In the texts of Ras Shamra Kothar was known as a helper of Baal; thus he might be hi-zi-ri.[11] But there are more than this possibility; also transforms of the name Kothar are similar the transforms of the name Khidr.[12] One of them is

Deoband, a country town ninety miles northeast of Delhi, has given its name to ulema associated with the Indo-Pakistani reformist movement centered in the seminary founded there  in 1867. A striking dimension of Islamic religious life in colonial India was the emergence of several apolitical, inwardlooking movements, among them not only the Deobandis but the so-called “Barelwis,” the much smaller Ahl-e Hadis/Ahl-I Hadith, and the controversial Ahmadiyya. The Deobandi, Barelwi, and Ahl-e Hadis ulema not only responded to Hindu and Christian proselytizing, but engaged in public debate, polemical writings, and exchanges of fatawa among themselves.


Each fostered devotion to the prophet Muhammad as well as fidelity to his practice; each thought itself the correct interpreter of hadith, the guide to that practice. All depended on means of communication, above all print, as well as on institutional changes that came with British colonial rule. The Dar al-_Ulum at Deoband utilized the organizational model of British colonial schools. Its goal was to hold Muslims to a standard of correct individual practice in a time of considerable social change, and, to that end, to create a class of formally trained and popularly supported ulema to serve as imams, guardians, and trustees of mosques and tombs, preachers, muftis, spiritual guides, writers, and publishers of religious works. At the end of its first centenary in 1967, Deoband counted almost ten thousand graduates, including several hundred from foreign countries. Hundreds of Deobandi schools, moreover, have been founded across the Indian subcontinent and now in the West as well.