The late 19th century was a moment of unprecedented polemical activity in Muslim South Asia. Marked by immense political and moral uncertainty, the colonial period in South Asian Islam generated an unprecedented degree of intellectual fermentation on the part of Muslim scholars ('ulama). In responding to the political catastrophe of the demise of the Mughal Empire and the ensuing new conditions of colonialism, Indian Muslim scholars mobilized the canonical tradition of Islamic law in novel ways. But the fundamental question of how one should engage the historical legacy of norms and values in Islamic law with the new conditions of colonialism remained a subject of tremendous controversy. Rival factions of the Muslim learned elite participated in a fury of contestation, often leading to pronouncements of blasphemy and unbelief against one another. These ideological battles were animated by a fundamental ethical question that has captured the imagination of Muslim thinkers for several centuries: what are the limits of innovation (bid‘a) to the normative model of the Prophet? Bid‘a (heretical innovation) refers to new practices that oppose the prophetic norm. But what are those practices, how should that be decided, and who has the authority to make that decision are unsettled questions that continue to haunt South Asian Muslims even today. In this paper, I examine a polemical moment that centered on precisely these questions, a polemic that began in colonial India but one that continues to inspire bitter debates and disputes among South Asian Muslims even today. The players who participated in this polemic were the pioneers of two major Sunni reform movements/ideological orientations in South Asia; the Deobandis and the Barelvis. The Deobandis and Barelvis were among the most prominent Sunni Hanafi scholars in colonial India. At the heart of their polemic was the following question: how should a community honor the Prophet’s memory and normative example in modernity? More specifically, they mobilized competing interpretations of Hanafi law to debate the legitimacy of popular practices such as the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid), the transmission of blessings to the deceased by distributing food (isal-i sawab) to the community, and others. Conceptually, this paper interrogates the relationship between law, theology, and everyday practice as presented in rival Muslim legal discourses in colonial India. I argue that the Barelvi-Deobandi polemic was animated by competing theological imaginaries each of which generated discrete and competing imaginaries of law and boundaries of ritual practice.