Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (educational reformer, 1817–1898)

Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) was an educational reformer and the founder of Islamic modernism in India. He founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, sought reconciliation with the British after 1857, and is regarded as a forerunner of Pakistan.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.) describes Ahmad Khan, often called Sir Sayyid after his titles of honour, as sprung from an ancient family of high nobility whose forefathers came from Persia and Afghanistan and settled in India in the reign of Shah Jahan. He was born at Delhi on 6 Dhu'l-Hijja 1232/17 October 1817. His father died in 1838 and the emoluments of his court posts ceased, so he entered the service of the East India Company as a clerk, and was promoted to munsif. His first writings were religious treatises in defence of Sunni belief, and his Athar al-sanadid (1847) on the monuments of Delhi, translated into French by Garcin de Tassy, made his name. ¹

The rising of 1857 changed his outlook. He wrote Asbab baghawat-i Hind (1858) and Loyal Muhammadans of India (1860–61) to calm passions and to seek reconciliation between the British and the Indian Muslims, whom the British had regarded as the chief rebels. He put the blame on both sides. He kept aloof from political agitation and sought the uplift of his nation by the moral means of nineteenth-century European life, which had impressed him in England in 1869–70. He founded the periodical Tahdhib al-akhlaq, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1878, modelled on Oxford and Cambridge (raised to a university in 1920), and the Muhammadan Educational Conference in 1886. ¹

He argued that religious ideas needed to be reconsidered in the westernising process, and called for a modern kalam; his re-interpretation of Islam, which saw the work of God in nature as identical with the word of God, provoked the 'ulama, who attacked him, and his teaching about the effect of prayer. By the 1880s he was the acknowledged leader of his community. In 1887 he advised Muslims not to join the National Congress, and most of them followed him. He was nominated to the Viceregal Legislative Council in 1878, knighted as Knight Commander of the Star of India in 1888, and received an honorary degree from Edinburgh in 1889. His religious writings include a Bible commentary, Tabyin al-kalam (1862), Essays on the Life of Mohammed (1870) and a Qur'an commentary (1880–95). ²

The article judges his greatest service to be that he restored to faith Muslims who had despaired in his age, and that in this respect, rather than in any communalism attributed to him, he may be seen as a forerunner of Pakistan. ²