Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi was born in 1914 in the village of Takiya Kalandar Shah in the Rae Bareli district of Uttar Pradesh, India, into a family distinguished by its tradition of Islamic scholarship. His father, Sayyid Abd al-Hayy al-Hasani, was a noted historian whose Nuzhat al-Khawatir remains a major reference work on the scholars of the Indian subcontinent. Nadwi received his early education in classical Islamic sciences before enrolling at Lucknow University, where he pursued formal academic study alongside his continuing religious formation. By his late twenties he had come to occupy a position of intellectual influence at Nadwatul Ulema, the institution with which he would remain associated for the rest of his life.

His scholarly reputation in the Arabic-speaking world was established primarily through Madha Khasira al-'Alam bi-Inhitat al-Muslimin, first delivered as a series of lectures and subsequently published to wide acclaim across the Middle East. The work attracted the attention of prominent Arab scholars, including Hasan al-Banna, and was received as a major contribution to the discourse on Islamic renewal. Nadwi's Arabic prose style ? spare, precise, and suffused with Quranic resonance ? earned him a distinctive reputation among Arabic literary and scholarly readers, for whom it was unusual to encounter an Indian scholar writing with such command of the classical tradition.

Western Civilization: Islam and Muslims originated as a detailed paper in Arabic that Nadwi began writing in the early 1960s. As he noted in the foreword dated June 1969, the paper grew into a full volume; it was published in Arabic in 1963 and subsequently rendered into Urdu. Dissatisfied with the initial Urdu manuscript, Nadwi undertook an extensive revision that drew upon research conducted during a tour of Europe ? including material gathered at the British Museum ? and the volume more than doubled in length before the Urdu edition from which the present English translation was made. Dr. Mohammad Asif Kidwai, M.A., Ph.D., produced the English translation published by the Academy of Islamic Research and Publications in Lucknow.

Over the course of his career, Nadwi served on numerous international scholarly bodies, including the Islamic Fiqh Academy and the founding council of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. He received the King Faisal International Prize for Islamic Studies in 1980 and the Grand Prize of the Islamic Development Bank in 1999, the year of his death. He wrote prolifically in both Arabic and Urdu across biography, history, spirituality, and Islamic thought, and his works have been translated into numerous languages. He passed away in December 1999 in Lucknow, where he is buried within the precincts of Nadwatul Ulema.