Syed Ahmad Khan bet the future of India's Muslims on modern science schooling
Syed Ahmad Khan grew up among Mughal courtiers, studying the Quran alongside astronomy and algebra in Delhi. Decades later, convinced that rigid orthodoxy was holding his community back, he founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, the first Muslim university in southern Asia, and argued that faith and science could be reconciled.
He was born in Delhi on 17 October 1817, into a family that had served the Mughal emperors for generations; his maternal grandfather was a minister, mathematician and astronomer, and his father advised Akbar Shah II. His mother raised him with strict discipline and a stress on learning. Tutors taught him Persian, Arabic, mathematics and medicine, and he mixed with poets such as Ghalib, whose style shaped his own prose. When his father died in 1838, money ran short, formal schooling ended, and he took a clerk's job with the East India Company instead.
Over the next two decades he rose through the courts as a sub-judge in Fatehpur Sikri, Delhi and Bijnor. When rebellion broke out on 10 May 1857 he sided with the British at Bijnor and helped officers and their families escape, though several of his relatives died and his mother did not survive the hardships. Afterwards he wrote a booklet blaming the uprising on a range of British policies, a bold critique from a loyal official.
Reform became his life's work. He opened a school at Ghazipur in 1863, set up a Muslim scientific society a year later, modelled his journals on Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator, and quoted John Stuart Mill often. His writing, mostly in Urdu, ran to at least 6000 pages and included a notable work on the archaeology of Delhi. He championed a rationalist reading of the Quran compatible with modern knowledge and pushed Urdu as a shared language for Indian Muslims.
Politically he moved from calls for Hindu-Muslim unity to Muslim nationalism, and he is widely called the father of the two-nation theory later taken up by Iqbal and Jinnah. Edinburgh awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1889. He died on 27 March 1898, and Aligarh marked his 200th birth anniversary in 2017.
Source: Syed Ahmad Khan
