Muhammad Ali Jauhar

He was born at Rampur in 1878 into a wealthy family with roots in Najibabad; his father Abdul Ali Khan died when he was five, and his mother Abadi Bano Begum, known as Bi Amman, drove her sons' education and their later struggle ¹. He attended Aligarh Muslim University and Allahabad University, then moved to England in 1898 to study modern history at Lincoln College, Oxford ¹². On his return he served as education director of Rampur state and then in the Baroda civil service, writing for major British and Indian newspapers ¹.

He launched the English weekly The Comrade in Calcutta in 1911, which quickly gained international circulation and influence; moving to Delhi in 1912, he launched the Urdu daily Hamdard in 1913 ¹. The Urdu biography notes that his prose was read eagerly inside and outside India, and that Hamdard became a byword for fearless expression ³. He worked to expand the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh and co-founded Jamia Millia Islamia in 1920 ¹.

He attended the founding meeting of the All-India Muslim League at Dacca in 1906 and served as its president in 1918, remaining active in it until 1928 ¹. In 1919 he travelled with the League's delegation to England over the future of the Ottoman caliphate; the British rejection of the demands led to the Khilafat committee and movement ¹. In 1921 he built a broad coalition with Shaukat Ali, Abul Kalam Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari and Gandhi; he was arrested and imprisoned for two years for a speech at the Khilafat Conference, and punished again with two and a half years in Karachi central jail ¹. He was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1923, but his tenure lasted only a few months amid disagreements over the ending of the Non-Cooperation Movement ¹.

Disillusioned by the collapse of the Khilafat movement, he restarted Hamdard, left Congress, opposed the Nehru Report and supported Jinnah's Fourteen Points ¹.

Sick with diabetes and weakened by his imprisonments, he attended the first Round Table Conference in London in 1930; his reported words to the British government were that he would not return to India alive unless the country was set free: "I would prefer to die in a foreign country so long as it is a free country, and if you do not give us freedom in India, you will have to give me a grave here." ¹ He died of a stroke in London on 4 January 1931 and was buried in Jerusalem, in the Khatuniyya Madrasa near the Dome of the Rock, by the choice of his relatives, friends and admirers ¹³.

The articles present a Muslim political leader whose cause was the defence of the caliphate and of India's Muslims: the Arabic article calls him an Indian Muslim leader, politician, journalist and poet ², and the English and Arabic infoboxes give his religion as Islam ¹²; Wikidata gives Islam only ⁴. No source read names a legal school, order or branch for him, and the museum's data record says so.

He also wrote Urdu poetry under the pen name Jauhar; the Urdu article quotes his ghazals and poems in a mujahid spirit ³. India Post and Pakistan Post both issued commemorative stamps for him in 1978, and universities, colleges and neighbourhoods in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh carry his name ¹.

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