In one of the first interviews I conducted in Aligarh, retired Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) professor of English Asloob Ahmad Ansari described Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan ‘as the greatest benefactor of the Muslims in the last several years’. He quickly edited the scope of his comment by adding, ‘or centuries, I should say’. This temporal slip of the frame is more than incidental, and it reappears in much of the current thinking among those sympathetic to Sir Sayyid's educational mission. It captures the perception that Sir Sayyid's work is temporally transcendent – it was born of his moment and remains relevant to the current one. He represented the Aligarh ideal – faithful, educated, generous, dedicated to the cause of Muslim uplift, and progressive – as he pushed against lurking conservatism within the Indian Muslim community. In the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College, which became AMU in 1920, Sir Sayyid sought to cultivate Muslim men, who embodied these characteristics and were well prepared for public life.

The lasting legacy of Sir Sayyid's work is best exemplified by AMU, as one respondent said, ‘He IS AMU.’ When graduates and well-wishers of AMU reflect on the role and legacy of Sir Sayyid, his objective of Muslim uplift seems as vital to Indian Muslims today as it was when he founded MAO College in 1875. Responses from surveys and oral history interviews with former students and professors demonstrate that Sir Sayyid's mission to develop a modern educational system for Muslims was both visionary and resilient. While the university has been indispensable in advancing the cause of Muslim education, through their attachment to the need to advance Sir Sayyid's educational agenda continually, these former students suggest that his goals remain unfulfilled.

AMU graduates, distinguished by the appellation, ‘Alig,’ are spread among all South Asian states, and indeed, the world. The oldest surviving generation of Aligs comprises those who were students during the upheavals of independence and partition in the 1940s, who settled in the newly independent states. The younger generations of Aligs, since the 1960s, are primarily Indian or they are from outside the subcontinent. Since the 1950s, few Aligs have been from Pakistan or Bangladesh.

Sir Sayyid considered both Hindus and Muslims as one qaum (nation) – arguing that qaum should be used to describe the inhabitants of India even if they have individual characteristics. Explaining further, he wrote, ‘By the word qaum I mean both Hindus and Muslims. That is the way in which I define the word nation (nation).’ This is in contrast to his opinion on the Hindi–Urdu debate and the participation of Muslims in the programmes of the Indian National Congress (INC). To understand the rationale underlying the positions of Sir Sayyid, situating his ideas in the context of the developments of his times is essential.

This chapter aims to understand Sir Sayyid's political thought by examining how Sir Sayyid responded to the political concerns of his times and contributed to a broader conversation about society, democracy, and political participation. The attempt is to investigate his ideas on two important issues: his response to the Hindi–Urdu controversy and his position regarding the INC.

The first part of this chapter discusses the Hindi–Urdu controversy. Through the Hindi movement, we discover an important facet of the growth of Hindu nationalism in north India and see how the Hindi movement was successful in differentiating Hindi from Urdu and making Hindi a symbol of the Hindu culture. It also shows how people like Sir Sayyid had practically no option but to oppose this movement.

The second part addresses the political participation of the Muslims of India. Sir Sayyid regarded the INC as a step towards the creation of a more advanced ‘nation’ of Bengali specifically, not of Hindus in general. Like many others, he considers this a consequence of the asymmetrical impact of colonial policies in different parts of India, which resulted in a significant section of Hindu and Muslim middle classes – including many zamindars and taluqdars – coming together to oppose the INC. Only a short time before this, many of these protesters had been standing against each other on the Hindi–Urdu issue.

Should religion and science be reconciled? As one of India's foremost public intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Sayyid Ahmad Khan inhabited the great transition, a hinge period in the shift from the Ptolemaic geocentric to the Copernican heliocentric view of the universe. Sayyid Ahmad Khan is highly regarded as the ‘Father of Modern Islam’ worldwide. His interests spanned across diverse fields of enquiry, and no study of this towering figure can be considered complete apart from a careful evaluation of his religious ideas. However, this is not an easy task. Sayyid Ahmad was a complex thinker living in a complicated context during a period when significant political, social, and intellectual changes occurred. The primary concern of Sayyid Ahmad was to articulate religious knowledge in the light of advancements in science; he attempted this through necharī philosophy, which is addressed in detail elsewhere in this volume.

Although numerous insightful studies have been conducted on Sayyid Ahmad's religious writings in general and on his rationalist and naturalist conclusions in particular, the purpose behind this ‘social revolutionary's’ concern regarding the interrelation of prophetic and natural revelation remains unclear. This concern persisted throughout his extensive literary career. Sayyid Ahmad examined nearly every aspect of religious practice in the light of the Qur’ān and of plain reason. He argued that if the clutter of tradition is removed, then pristine religion would emerge to be consistent with the ‘new sciences’ and compatible with the highest orders of human intellect. Pure (thet) Islam, which was understood and announced by prophets, was revealed through both prophetic and natural revelation. The prophetic revelation of pure Islam never contradicts its natural revelation.

Although prophetic messages provide instructions, the original sharī`ah, which is the nature's message, is no less recognized for being inarticulate. Then, the prophetic message must harmonize with the nature's message without contradiction. Thus, if a belief contradicted a basic common sense, then it was dismissed. If a scriptural passage contravened a simple reason, then that passage required a figurative rather than a literal interpretation.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, a novelist and historian, captured the complexity of this legacy by stating that ‘Sayyid Ahmad Khan was a saviour, a sage, and a political-social leader of tremendous credibility. His theology didn't enter into the matter at all’.

Sir Sayyid's long and adventurous life contained two or three ordinary lifetimes full of activity. In the larger societal arena, his beloved Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (1878) at Aligarh was his supreme achievement, but in other domains, he consistently saw himself, and was seen, as a mediator between the British and ‘native’ ideas and interests. Not surprisingly, his literary output was voluminous – he has left us records of his antiquarian interests (Ā ār-ul ṣanādīd, 1854 [1847]), his religious views (a commentary on the Qur'an), and his journalistic commitments (Tahżīb-ul a hlāq), along with numerous letters, essays, reviews, and speeches on a wide variety of topics.

Undoubtedly, the greatest watershed in his life was the Indian Rebellion of 1857. As an East India Company administrator posted in Bijnor, he was emphatically true to his salt, risking his life repeatedly in defense of British lives and interests. Then, in 1858, almost before the rebellion was over, he recorded his personal experiences and local impressions in ‘History of the Bijnor Rebellion’. However, the Bijnor account – as fascinating as it is – has always been obscured by his greater achievement during this intensely turbulent year: his famous work, really a sort of long pamphlet, called ‘The Causes of the Indian Revolt’ (Asbāb-e baġhāvat-e Hind).

In writing a work with such a title, at so fraught a time, Sir Sayyid knew that he was courting trouble. Still, he was determined. Once Sir Sayyid had gotten 500 copies of his Urdu pamphlet printed, the result was a dramatic scene:

In February 2017, a heated discussion broke out among a section of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) students, especially on social media. The issue was of blasphemy following a first information report filed by a member of AMU Students’ Union (AMUSU) against Shehla Rashid, a student leader from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Shehla Rashid was invited to an event in Aligarh, organized by AMUSU, which was postponed in the wake of this controversy. Shehla Rashid was accused for one of her Facebook posts, in which she had allegedly used blasphemous language against the Prophet. She had drawn a distinction between hate speech and hateful speech, essentially in the legal perspective, by using sentences about religious figures like Ram and the Prophet to illustrate her points.

The post offended and enraged numerous young Muslim students and many others associated with AMU – many missing the point that these were not Shehla Rashid's opinions about the Prophet or Lord Ram but simply examples of hateful epithets and offensive remarks about the Prophet, which are common on the Internet. Nevertheless, her nuanced distinction between hate speech and hateful speech did find several supporters among AMU students who clearly saw her line of argument.

At the macro level, this incident becomes a metaphor to understand the shrill responses of many Muslims to anything they consider a threat to their religion – whether it is the Shah Bano case of 1985 or the more recent debates in India about the practice of triple talaq. All hell certainly breaks loose when it comes to the reaction of the Muslims to the real or alleged insult of the Prophet.

How did Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the founder of AMU, react to such situations during his time? He faced many similar issues, including the dishonouring of the Prophet and the charge of irreconcilability of Islam with modernity, but his response to these issues was never emotive, knee-jerk, or irrational. His articles and books written on Islam, the Prophet, and the cultural life of Muslims acquire a prescient quality when seen in the context of many twenty-first century debates.

His responses to the contents of a book or article he considered offensive or blasphemous have relevance beyond his time. In an analytical article titled ‘Blasphemy and Conversion Debate and Sir Syed’, Shafey Kidwai refers to two incidents from Sir Sayyid's life when he very thoughtfully addressed blasphemy.

BEGINNINGS

In 1846, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), a young munsif in Delhi, took on the ambitious task of documenting all of the city's monuments. The result of his labour was a 600-page encyclopaedic survey of Delhi's monuments and biographical excerpts of the city's major personalities titled Āṣār-us Ṣanādīd (Traces of Noblemen; hereafter Āṣār). Nothing as comprehensive had been attempted before and it took another seventy years for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to produce a comparable list of Delhi's historic structures. By bearing witness to Delhi's urban heritage, Sayyid Ahmad Khan struggled with reconciling past and present, tradition and modernity, science and myth, materiality and poetics, observation and belief. The importance of Āṣār as a thorough survey of Delhi's built environment cannot be overstated, especially given that many of the structures discussed in the book were destroyed by the British military during and after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Yet Āṣār occupies an ambivalent position in Sayyid Ahmad's larger oeuvre. His work on the built environment and material culture of Delhi appears as an outlier to his later rich philosophical and political contributions and his social reform programmes following the events of 1857.

Keeping with the mandate of this volume, I offer an interpretation of Āṣār as an early example of Sayyid Ahmad's experimentations with key motifs of modernity and modernization. I define modernity as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phenomena where individuals struggled to articulate their singular place within a long arc of history. Modernity was seldom a neatly defined project that delivered resolution, but rather a messy and incomplete process with unexpected outcomes. It also did not travel linearly from a European core to the global South. Modernization, I define, as the material changes to built environments and social organization that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. In the words of Marshall Berman:

In an 1896 article in the Urdu journal Tahzib-ul Akhlaq, titled ‘Adna Halat se Aala Halat par Insaan ki Taraqqi’ (The Stages of Human Development from an Inferior to Superior State), Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) wrote, ‘The monkeys that exist today, orangutans and apes, are quite similar to humans in many ways. Darwin claims that middle chains are missing or extinct, but even if we found them, they would only prove similarities among kinds.’ Here, Sir Sayyid's reference to the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was not to discredit or defend Darwin's theory of evolution, but to support his own position on the topic, outlined in ‘Adna Halat’. In the article, Sir Sayyid argued that humans evolved overtime from a common animal ancestor and this process is guided by a divine creator. He also believed that this process was not antagonistic towards Islamic beliefs and the Qur'an. Overall, this position tied in with his general approach to the relationship between science and Islam, one where science was a part of Islam; the other part being the Qur'an. Although most of Sir Sayyid's views on evolution have appeared in various articles he wrote over the course of his life, ‘Adna Halat’ presents a detailed summary of his perspective regarding the origin and development of living things, including humans, from a common animal ancestor.

Today, the theory of evolution by natural selection is officially accepted by scientific establishments worldwide, including countries with a Muslim majority, but many people remain unconvinced or apprehensive about this theory. While the scientific community continues to discuss and debate issues in the field of evolutionary biology, such as the role of genetics in the evolutionary process, some individuals are attempting to disprove the evolutionary thought all together. Some of these individuals go back to Darwin and point out flaws in his theory of natural selection, like the lack of adequate understanding of inheritance, while others claim that life is too complicated to have developed by chance and to support various views of divine creation. Providing evidence against a scientific theory backed with empirical observation and evidence is one thing, but discrediting it based on misinformation may lead to greater issues in the public sphere, including how evolution is taught in schools. Currently, this issue is even more apparent.

INTRODUCING SIR SAYYID

Sayyid Ahmad, in Pierre Bourdieu's term, was a ‘collective individual’ who cannot be encapsulated in a single narrative. We can view his extraordinary life through different lenses, but each lens will seem inadequate. A towering figure revered and held in high esteem by his contemporaries in the late nineteenth century because of his unparalleled Muslim reform work that he undertook singlehandedly; Sayyid Ahmad still looms large in the collective imaginaire of the South Asian Muslims. Postcolonial scholars such as Hafeez Malik, Shan Muhammad, Christian Troll, Aziz Ahmed, and Mushirul Hasan have written extensively on Sayyid Ahmad's reformist activities and accomplishments. Others such as Ayesha Jalal, Francis Robinson, and K. M. Ashraf find in his reformist agenda the source for latter-day Muslim political ‘separatism’ and ‘communalism’, germinating the idea of an exclusive Muslim identity, leading to the creation of Pakistan. By contrast, Ajay Sinha provides a completely different interpretation, qualifying Sayyid Ahmad as a ‘forceful voice in the nationalist struggle against British colonial rule’ and one of the earliest ‘cosmopolitan’ Indians. Such a figure although he can be located in a time and a place is simultaneously beyond the fixed time and a place. He stands as his own evidence of a person who gave shape to a new history and was shaped by the historical structures and events of his time. He is ‘history in person’, in the terms of Holland and Lave, who continuously engaged with context and process creating pathways of new possibilities for self and others. His story inspires us even today.

What would have the Indian Muslims been today without Sayyid Ahmad Khan? This question warrants some reflection, particularly concerning the present day representation of the Muslims as an obscurantist community involved in terrorism and in need of a new makeover. In the late nineteenth century, Sayyid Ahmad Khan launched a community reform movement, which transformed the image of Muslims from violent and rebellious into that of a forward-looking community. By using tools of the British masters – modernization and Western education – Sayyid Ahmad Khan paved a path for a new Muslim future in India.