December 30, 2006

The nineteenth century represents one of the most dismal and depressing periods in the annals of Islamic/Muslim history. A period of political decay, economic instability, social disintegration, cultural apathy and intellectual despair. Yet, despite this desolate scenario till about the 1850s, the world of Islam witnessed a new surge in the second half. A surge that has had an immense significance for that world, and has ever since shaped its history.

Stirred to its very depths by internal chaos and external challenge, that world of Islam had spawned a host of reformers, revolutionaries, and romanticists, who were gravely concerned with the apparently “hopeless” situation.

Temporal Islam’s decline and degeneration must be stemmed and the lost ground retrieved if Islam were to come into its own, they felt alike. And the sum-total of Muslim energies and resources should be mobilised, and set along constructive channels. To this supreme objective was directed the efforts of these men of thought and action in their own respective countries for the most part. They constituted, as it were, the only streak of light on the otherwise dark horizon, and the only ripple of hope in the otherwise somnolent waters of Islam.

In a list of about a dozen names, four stand out as the symbol of Muslim response to the challenge of the West: Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-”Afghani” (d.1897), Muhammad Abduh (d.1906), Nemik Kemal (d.1887), and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (d.1898). They hailed from four regions, spanning the entire Islamic heartland - Iran, Egypt, Turkey and India respectively.

Perhaps the most remarkable of them all was Afghani – a revolutionary, stimulator and “catalyst” rather than a deep and profound thinker. And he represented, as it were, the first throb of modernism in Islam. Abduh was his pupil and colleague. A thinker, theologian and educationist, he attempted to regenerate and rehabilitate the Egyptian society, then in the debilitating process of disintegration under the impact of western ideas. This he did through a rational interpretation of Islam. Nemik Kemal was the Turkish revolutionary, reformer and romanticist. He fought and died for constitutional rights and democratic institutions, who paved the way for the spectacular rise of Midhat Pasha (d. 1883), the father of Turkish constitutionalism, who gave the Ottoman Empire (and Turkey) the first constitution in 1876. And Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was the Indian educationist, social reformer and statesman. In terms of the multifarious trends he released in Indian Islam,which eventuated in, among others, the momental emergence of Pakistan in 1947, ensuring freedom for some sixty million Muslims in the Islamic world’s peripheral edge, he was perhaps the most practical and successful in his mission among them all.

Sir Syed’s significance for Indian Islam can be truly assessed if only against the backdrop of the plight of the Muslims in the post-1857 traumatic period. The 1857 Rebellion had written an ignominious finis to a long chapter of Muslim rule, their flourishing culture, their civilization and prosperity. It had as well left behind, “a great chasm personified in the mutual distrust of the de jure rulers of the land and the followers of the religion of the ex-Emperor”.

Consequently, the British suspected the Muslims as the potential danger to their colonial rule in India, engendering a deep distrust of them, with disastrous consequences to their fate and future. In British eyes, they were responsible for the Revolt of 1857. More alarming they were still hatching fresh plots to win back their lost empire. It was, therefore, time for them to be taught a lesson, the British had irrevocably decided.

No wonder, the Muslims came to be victimised, penalised and punished on the flimsiest of pretexts. To get them stew in their own juice, their lands were forfeited and they debarred from all government services. In economic terms, they were turnned into a broken reed. In power terms, they were made to kiss the dust in the land they had ruled for so long. And in psychological terms, this sudden confrontation of the harsh post-1857 realities on Muslim hopes and aspirations was devastating, to say the least.

Into this desperate and bleak situation stepped in Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. To rehabilitate his fallen people was the immense task that awaited him, and which he dedicated himself to. The first step in that direction was to bring about a political rapprochement between the ruling British and the hated and oppressed Muslims. With this end in view, Sir Syed produced two consequential treatises. In the Asbab-i-Baghawat-i-Hind (1858) he put down the British ignorance of the Indian mind as the most important cause of the “Mutiny”, and advocated, as an antidote, remedy, the representation of Indians in the Viceroy’s Legislative Council. The second was the Loyal Muhammadans of India (1860-61). Therein he defended the Musalmans against reckless charges of disloyalty and sedition. Simultaneously, he tried to impress upon his co-religionists the desirability of social intercourse and friendship with non-Muslims.

Almost universal was Muslim prejudice against the British and Christianity at the moment. To have it diluted, Sir Syed wrote a pamphlet on the rules of eating with the people of the scriptures, and started writing a commentary on the Bible, called the “Tabyin al-Kalam” - the first one to be attempted by a Muslim. Through another tract, he vigorously refuted W.W. Hunter’s contention that the Muslims were bound in conscience to rebel against the Queen. And all this and more in a bold attempt to effect political peace between Muslims and the British.

In the circumstances, however, mere political rapprochement would not do. The Muslims should as well qualify for government jobs, if they were really to raise themselves from their prevailing appalling poverty. Their boycott of British schools had made them unfit, to quote Hunter, “for any post above the rank of a porter, messenger, filler of ink-pots and mender of pens”. Their wretched backwardness in education called for immediate measures.

For this, Sir Syed’s panacea was modern education. He founded several schools; a Translation Society, later turned into a Scientific Society (1863) and charged with the task of translating standard English works into Urdu for the diffusion of modern knowledge; and The Scientific Society Paper, later turned into the Aligarh Institute Gazette.

His trip to England in 1869 won him over to the Ox-bridge residential system of education, and inspired him to found the Aligarh College in 1877, so that Muslims could work out their educational problems by themselves. This institution was Sir Syed’s greatest contribution and achievement since it attempted to meet the motley Muslim reservations against modern education. The College was designed to give the Muslim youth the benefits of modern education without impairing their faith, to meet their prejudice against missionary schools, and to redress their complaint of the absence of a steadying moral code in the universities.

To erode the Muslim prejudices all the more, the Aligarh edifice was erected on a happy blend of both the disciplines: western education coupled with religious education on the old lines. “Philosophy will be in our right hand, natural science in the left and the crown of the Kalimah on our head” – this was the credo of the new school. Understandably, English was adopted as the medium of instruction.

The singular success that attended this pioneering venture led Sir Syed subsequently to enlarge both his goal and target audience. For now, they were the national education of all the Muslims in the subcontinent. This led directly to the founding of the Mohammedan Educational Conference in 1887, so as to mobilize, channelize and centralize all available Muslim resources and energies for further education. And within the next two decades, the Conference was a going and growing concern: it made a tremendous impact on the fortunes of Muslims throughout the subcontinent, and especially in the Punjab.

By 1870, Sir Syed was drawn to social reform. During his trip to England, he became painfully aware of the striking contrast between the English and the Indians, and upon his return he founded The Tehzib al-Akhlaq (“Refinement of Morals or Social Reformer”) (f.1870). In conceiving it, he was inspired by the English magazines, The Tatler and The Spectator, which had played a leading role in raising the English society along the echelons of civilization in the eighteenth century.

In the Tehzib, Sir Syed donned the role of “a born moralist” who would never tire of expatiating on what people should do and shouldn’t. His writings included a delineation and advocacy of such basic things as civilization, education and training, women’s status and rights, female and child education. He raised his voice against anti-social customs and corrupt practices, the prevalent treatment of the womenfolk, prejudice and reactionism, flattery and hero-worship, superstition and legendary beliefs. He described in detail the standard behaviour pattern in a civilized society: how to eat, dress, and behave, what to barrow creatively and eclectically from the civilized nations and what not, the values and social mindset that characterize a civilized people.

Since his trip to England, Sir Syed had become an eloquent advocate of “civilization”, and a great admirer of western culture. His concept of civilization embraced both the material and the intellectual. Islam being a true religion could not possibly be against civilization, unless certain unsound ideas and customs had got inextricably mixed up with its principles. The remedy lay in discarding all those accretions and customs that had hampered the progress and development of the community.

Thus was Sir Syed drawn into the realm of theology, inspite of himself, since he was by no means a theologian by choice. In essence, this was an extension of his educational and social reform activities. Although his ideas and views in this realm had failed to receive the sort of reception his views in other fields had, yet his Quran-Tafsir and his essays on the Prophet (PBUH) had influenced both Syed Ameer Ali and Maulana Muhammad Ali (of Lahore), becoming the forerunner of their works. As Baljon says, his “undaunted confrontation of Islam with modern thought and his original method of Koran-exegesis … was no less than a revolution in the history of Muslim theology …”

Politically, Sir Syed had passed through two major phases (1857-84 and 1885-98). For his stance in the latter phase he has been called a “toady”, a “British agent”, a “political opportunist”, and what not. True: some of his utterances were rather difficult to defend in the post-Sir Syed, anti-British environment. He was also thoughtlessly vociferous in his praise of the British and the “benefits” of British rule, as were his contemporaries and as was even Gandhi till about 1920, as he confesses in his autobriography. Sir Syed had also opposed Muslims joining the Congress (f.1885) (see below). But, then, such a pro-British attitude was the order of the day and such praises were mouthed by the foremost Congress stalwarts at the time. In any case, these by themselves do not render him deserving of such epithets.

More important, when it came to national self-respect there was hardly any man in the whole of India in his age, who could excel him. His Risala on the causes of the Indian “Mutiny”, for instance, was the first effective political pamphlet ever written in an Indian language. This he got published during a period of Martial Law when he was still a subordinate judge at Moradabad (1858), so that some British officials in London had even suggested to get him prosecuted. In the Risala, he had laid the blame for the “Mutiny” at the British door and criticized them for having excluded Indians from the Viceroy’s Legislative Council. And it is extremely significant that the first Indian Councils Act of 1861, which admitted Indians to the Viceroy’s Council, came two years after the partial publication of the Risala.

More pronounced, bitter and bold was his rejoinder to Hunter. At one place, he retorts: “… Like begets like, and if cold acquiescence is all that the Mohammadans received at the hands of the ruling race, Dr. Hunter must not be surprised at the cold acquiescence of the Muhammedan community”.

During his speeches in the Supreme Legislative Council, of which he was a member during 1878-82, he had always espoused the cause and rights of Indians. On the Ilbert Bill, he said: “… The time has come when the people of India, whether Hindu, Mohammedan, European or Eurasian, will begin to understand that they are equally the subjects of the Queen, that there is no difference whatever between their political rights or constitutional position”.

He was also the first Indian to speak of “liberty” and of an Indian Parliament. This he did in his Badayun speech of May 10, 1866: “The word liberty has for us all a spell which causes the heart to beat more strongly, the breast to heave more proudly …. When we possess an Indian Parliament, legislating mainly for the good of the country, filled by men whose fidelity is beyond suspicion, then shall bright days of India return, or rather brighter days than ever she possessed in her best times.” And, in the Aligarh Institute Gazette of December 23, 1866, he actually advocated the institution of an Indian Parliament.

Initially, Sir Syed stood for a composite Hindu-Muslim nationality, describing India as “a beautiful bride blessed by two attractive eyes – the Hindus and Muslims”. There was, however, a gradual shift in his stance after 1867, when he was jolted by Hindu cultural ethnocentrism and their demand to oust Urdu from courts, and introduce Hindi in the Devanagri script in its place. The final break came in 1885 when, in the wake of an aggressive, anti-Muslim, Hindu revivalist movement, he became really afraid of the Hindus, who, besides numerically, were superior to Muslims in all mundane matters – in all the fields. For now, he became irrevocably convinced that Muslims had to work out their salvation by themselves. This because since the 1850s the Hindus had progressively withdrawn themselves from the common Indian cultural heritage and had severely disturbed the extant Indian cosmos integrating Hindus and Muslims.

Hence his opposition to joining the Congress. Its agitational methods, he feared, would deflect the Muslims from their overriding goal of education which was the remedy for their overall social development. Muslims’ appalling backwardness in terms of education and economic status, he felt, disabled them from indulging in the luxury of political agitation. After all, Muslims had a chronic penchant for getting worked up so easily and so impulsively, while the lingering British suspicion would bring a post-”Mutiny” type of retaliation should they venture to join the anti-government forces.

In spite of all this, he was far from being communal. His own College, though basically a Muslim one, was yet open to all communities. He told the Indian Association of Lahore (1884): “All rights at the College which belong to the one who calls himself Muhammadan belong, without any restriction, to him who calls himself a Hindu. There is not the least distinction between the Hindus and Muhammadans…. Both are equally treated as boarders.” The first Secretary of the College, Raja Jaikishan Das, was himself a Hindu, and he managed the Aligarh Institute Gazette when Sir Syed was away, sojourning in England.

Nor did Sir Syed display any parochialism when it came to Indians against the English. The address presented (1884) to him by the Indian Association of Lahore, primarily a Hindu-Sikh organisation, through its president, Sardar Dayal Singh, speaks of his all round popularity and “his liberal attitude towards other sections of the country other than” Muslims.

To sum up, then. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was the father of Muslim education in the subcontinent and their foremost social reformer in the modern period. He was a thinker, and one of the first Muslims to rethink and re-interpret the Islamic doctrines in the light of present day requirements. He thus represented the transition between the mediaeval and modern periods in Indo-Pakistan Islam.

He was also the first modern Muslim political leader in the subcontinent. His political lead was accepted by one and all, and by even those who differed violently with him on religious matters. To him may, also, be traced Muslim “separatism” and the “two-nation” theory. Indeed, in terms of the issues framed, propositions laid down, attitudes defined, postures taken and the pattern of Hindu-Muslim relations cast, he had laid, though not too consciously at the time, the sure foundations of a separate Muslim nationhood. In their parlous state of educational and economic backwardness and numerical inferiority, Sir Syed felt, the Muslims could by no means, compete with Hindus in elections, pure and simple. The Muslims would have one vote to Hindus’ four votes. “It would be a game of dice in which one hand had four votes and the other only one”, argued Sir Syed. Hence he stood for equal representation for Muslims and Hindus in the North-Western Provinces, for separate (communal) electorates and weightage, and for nomination where the Muslim quota was not filled in through election. Though not perceived at the moment, these proposals served as the blueprint for the Muslim proposals at Simla in 1906, and eventually sowed the “seed of Pakistan”, for without separate electorates there would have been no Pakistan.

Through his untiring efforts and prolific writings Sir Syed had collected around himself a band of devoted and selfless workers who subsequently became the makers of modern Muslim India. He was also instrumental in bringing about within his own lifetime a cultural revival among the Indian Musalmans. This period, according to Kraemer (1931), was “one of the most fascinating period in the dismal history of Indian Islam and the background on which all modern developments and achievements, its relative strength and weaknesses must be judged. Aligarh, with all the forces it organized, was the starting-point of a slow awakening of the Muslim community out of its listlessness. It has been the most potent factor in the breaking down of the crushing feeling of backwardness and despondency …. It has mobilised the forces that [had] changed the attitude of fatalistic acceptance to that of determined revolt.”

And as Baljon says, “Like a Moses, Ahmad Khan was suddenly faced with the immense task of uplifting a reluctant people from the depths of its existence to a better future. And just as that leader of the Israelites was fitted to fulfil his vocation on account of his many talents, so Ahmad Khan was equal to his task of uniting a divided community for a common purpose on account of the rare combination of mutually complimentary qualities of being organiser as well as statesman, preacher as well as practician, a hard worker himself as well as the stimulator of others.”

No wonder, Kraemer wrote in 1931: “Present day Indian Islam is unthinkable without him”. In the M.A.O. College (f.1877) and the Aligarh movement, in his stout defence and espousal of the Urdu cause, in his demand for proportional representation and weightage for Muslims in representative bodies, in his strident opposition to the Indian National Congress and the founding of the Muslim Educational Conference as the forum of Muslim intelligentsia to process, articulate, aggregate and press their demands and grievances (thereby doing the role of the Congress for Muslims), Sir Syed had initiated educational, intellectual, ideological, cultural and political trends and engendered tendencies that laid the groundwork for a Muslim renaissance in India, eventuating (i) in the demand for separate electorates and the founding of the Muslim League, both in 1906; (ii) in the crystallization of a pan Indian Muslim community for the first time in Islam’s encounter with India in the late 1930s; and (iii) in the demand and establishment of Pakistan. Thus he was one of the intellectual fathers of Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistan itself is unthinkable without him.

— Sharif al Mujahid

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