Rahmatullah Kairanawi al-Hindi (Urdu: رحمت اللہ کیرانوی ہندی; 1818–1891) was a Sunni Muslim scholar and author who is best known for his work, Izhar ul-Haqq.
[6] In 1837 the Church Mission Society appointed Karl Gottlieb Pfander, described by Eugene Stock as "perhaps the greatest of all missionaries to Mohammedans",[7] to Agra in Northern India, where in 1854 he engaged in a famous public debate with leading Islamic scholars.
The main Muslim debater was Kairanawi,[8][9] being assisted by English-speaking Muhammad Wazîr Khân and influential Islamic writer Imad ud-din Lahiz.
[10] Kairanawi used arguments from recent European theologically critical works that Pfander was unfamiliar with, having left Europe before these were published, though his main source of reference was the apocryphal sixteenth-century Gospel of Barnabas, which he held to be authentic.
Christine Schirrmacher, a German scholar of Islamic Studies, states in an article on the Pfander-Kairanawi debate: "The Demonstration of the Truth' (izhâr al-haqq) served as a summary of all possible charges against Christianity and was therefore used after al-Kairânawî's death as a sort of encyclopaedia since al-Kairânawî extended the material of former polemicists like 'Ali Tabarî, Ibn Hazm or Ibn Taymiyya to a great extent.
Rahmatullah Kairanawi was appointed as a lecturer at the Masjid-e-Haram by the Sheikh-ul-Ulama (The Leading Scholar) Sheikh Ahmad Dahlan As-Shafiee.