Comment in 150 words: Syed Ahmed Khan as a modernizer. (2013, 10 Marks)
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) is the founder of Muslim modernism in South Asia. After 1857 the north Indian Muslim gentry had lost its state, its Persian-based offices and the rulers’ trust. He concluded that the community would fall behind unless it took up modern knowledge, and that education had to come before politics.
Modernising Belief: Reason and Revelation
- His governing principle was that the Word of God (the Quran) and the Work of God (nature) cannot contradict each other; an apparent clash signals faulty interpretation, not faulty science.
- He attacked taqlid, blind adherence to received legal opinion, and defended ijtihad, independent reasoning, as open in every age. Critics called his followers nechari (naturalists).
Modernising Education: Institutions
- The Scientific Society (Ghazipur, 1864) translated Western works on science and history into Urdu.
- The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental School (1875, a college from 1877) at Aligarh, modelled on Cambridge, combined English and the sciences with religious instruction. It became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920.
- The Muhammadan Educational Congress (1886, renamed Conference in 1890) carried the message from town to town, asking Muslims to raise their educational standing before entering agitation. Together these formed the Aligarh Movement. David Lelyveld reads Aligarh’s first generation as a new Muslim solidarity built on association rather than inherited rank. The contrast is Deoband (1866), which met the same crisis by renewing religious learning outside the colonial state.
Modernising Society: Custom and Conduct
Through Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq (from December 1870) he wrote Urdu essays against extravagant ceremonies, superstition, quarrelsome disputation and fatalism, separating true religion from accumulated custom. He also argued that the Quran heavily restricts polygamy. In each case reason, not clerical authority, was his test.
Limits
- The modernity was class-bound, aimed at sons of the ashraf gentry rather than the Muslim poor.
- He defended purdah and opposed modern schools for girls, a gap his successors filled.
- His loyalism and later case for separate Muslim interests made him suspect to nationalists.
Continuing Relevance
The deficit he diagnosed has not closed. The Sachar Committee (2006) found Muslims, about 13% of the population, holding only about 3% of IAS and 4% of IPS posts, and it linked the gap, among other causes, to lagging educational attainment.
Conclusion
Sir Syed was a modernizer in method and institution: he reconciled faith with science and built an institution that produced a Muslim professional class. His modernity stopped at gender and class, and his politics divided opinion, but he gave Indian Islam a rational, reformist vocabulary that endures.