[4] His father, Mamluk Ali, was one of the senior Muslim scholars of India at the time, and the head of Oriental Studies at Madrassa Gaziuddin Khan.
Muhammad Yaqub studied most of the Islamic sciences under his father and Shah Abd al-Ghani Mujaddidi.
[citation needed] Muhammad Yaqub was trained in tasawwuf under Haji Imdadullah and received khilafah (authorization) from him in the Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri, and Suhrawardi orders.
[4] Concerning his appointment in the Deoband seminary, Muhammad Miyan Deobandi writes that, "Seeing the increase in students day to day, it became a concern to get good teachers and thus Maulana Muhammad Yaqub was called to be the principal who was then teaching either in Ajmer or somewhere else.
"[6] Students of Muhammad Yaqub include most of the second-generation Islamic scholars[3] such as Mahmud Hasan Deobandi, Aziz-ur-Rahman Usmani, Sayyid Mumtaz Ali,[7] Hafiz Muhammad Ahmad, Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri and Ashraf Ali Thanwi.