Chiragh Ali

Moulvi Cheragh Ali (1844–1895) was an Indian Muslim scholar of the late nineteenth century, a colleague of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan in the Aligarh circle and a leading voice of Muslim modernism in British India. ¹ He presented reforming thought about the Qur'an in works such as A Critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad and Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms Under Moslem Rule, and was known for his criticism of hadith. ¹ He spent his career in government service, rising in the state of Hyderabad, and let his books make his arguments for him. ¹

Cheragh Ali was born in Meerut in 1844 into a family originally from Kashmir, the eldest of three brothers — Wilayat Ali, Inayat Ali and Mansib Ali. ^{1 2} Their father, Muhammad Bakhsh, died at 35, when Cheragh was twelve, and the family's education fell to their mother and grandmother; his wife was Abbadi Begum. ¹ He was educated exclusively at home, and his early accomplishments included the acquisition of Persian, Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Greek. ¹ His studies led him to offer a new reading of the text and message of the Qur'an, and of the Prophet Muhammad's battles. ¹

In his early working years Cheragh Ali was a clerk in Gorakhpur, then moved to Lucknow looking for a better post and became a collector in the Office of Settlement. ¹ He was already contributing to papers such as Mukhbir-i Sadiq and Manshur-i Muhammadi when Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan recommended him for a position in the government of the Nizam of Hyderabad; when Salar Jang I, the prime minister of Hyderabad, asked Sir Sayyid for a translator, Cheragh Ali was the man invited. ¹ He met Sir Sayyid in 1874 at Lucknow, and remained associated with him for the rest of his career, sharing his religious and political beliefs and supporting his Aligarh movement, though as a prominent civil servant in Hyderabad he avoided political action and let his literary works speak for themselves. ¹ In 1888, on the occasion of the victory celebration of the Hyderabad contingent that had fought in Burma, he received the honorary war title Azam Yar Jung, with a mansab of two thousand officers, a thousand riders and a flag. ¹

He died in 1895 at the age of 51, during treatment, and is buried in Bombay. ^{1 2}

Cheragh Ali sought in his writings to correct what he perceived to be misperceptions of Islam and of jihad. ¹ These misunderstandings, he argued, came from the historical development of hadith and the work of the Muslim jurists, who in his view had taken justice into their own hands and misused or ignored the Qur'an. ¹ He therefore committed himself to a fresh interpretation of the Qur'an and a moderated version of jihad. ¹

His redefinition was precise: the wars of Muhammad were strictly defensive. ¹ All of those wars, he argued, were local and temporary, and so defensive, because the Qur'an does not teach a war of aggression; Muhammad engaged in battle only in response to acts that contradicted the Qur'an's teachings. ¹ His debates with Christian critics in British India were likewise focused particularly on the Prophet's wars. ³ His great Urdu work, A'zam-ul-Kalam fi Irtiqa-il-Islam ("The Greatest Discourse on the Progress of Islam"), appeared only after his death, in 1910. ¹

This section presents assessments as the sources give them; they are not the museum's verdict.

Within the Aligarh school. The scholarship the sources rest on places him squarely inside Muslim modernism: Charles Kurzman's sourcebook Modernist Islam, 1840–1940 prints him among the modernists, Juan Eduardo Campo's Encyclopedia of Islam treats him under that movement, and Wahidur Rahman's study calls his approach to hadith "the Aligarh school" method — the Qur'an read directly, against the accumulated authority of hadith and the jurists. ¹

The contested points. The same positions that made him a modernist made him a target: his scepticism toward hadith contradicted the jurists' tradition he accused of distortion, and his thesis that the Prophet's wars were defensive by definition — local, temporary, and never aggressive — was an argument against both European critics of Islam and Muslim advocates of the "popular jihad" of his book's title. ¹ The record states his arguments as he made them; it does not adopt them.

Principal works: Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms Under Moslem Rule (1883); The Administration Under Salarjung, Prime Minister of Hyderabad (1884); Hyderabad (Deccan) Under Sir Salar Jung, three volumes (1884–1886), the official history of Salar Jang's administration; A Critical Exposition of the Popular 'Jihad' (Calcutta, 1885); and A'zam-ul-Kalam fi Irtiqa-il-Islam, two volumes in Urdu (posthumous, 1910). ¹

• English Wikipedia, "Chiragh Ali", revision 1362332749. ¹
• Arabic Wikipedia, «شيراغ علي», revision 73778242. ³
• Wikidata, Q5101801. ²