In the twenty-first century, two events occur in the life of Aligarh Muslim University: the Supreme Court decision confirming its status as a minority institution, and the publication of Sir Syed: a personal lifeEnglish translation of Sir Syed Darun-e Khana By Iftikhar Alam Khan. A book that contains almost everything needed to understand the life of the AMU founder, this translation makes available valuable material that might otherwise have been inaccessible to scholars at a time when Urdu became foreign to the elite and when most historians rely only on translations, many of which are imprecise.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) is one of the most influential personalities of nineteenth-century India, a man whose intellectual and institutional interventions changed the course of Muslim life in the Indian subcontinent. Their presence was not merely local; His ideas resonated globally, shaping Muslim thought beyond the borders of undivided India. At a time when the very term ‘Muslim’ has become suspect, it is worth remembering that he envisioned nothing less than a Muslim renaissance, which was the redirection of a disillusioned community towards learning, rational inquiry and modern science. Although his academic work focused on North India, especially western Uttar Pradesh, his concerns were never narrow. He accurately diagnosed the decline of Muslims in the subcontinent after 1857 and chose modern education as a means of renewal. In the changing political scenario and modern science, English, the language of power, became the medium through which he attempted to reinvigorate Muslim society. It was not simply a program of education, but a cultural project that has left its mark on Islamic thought throughout South Asia and, by extension, wherever Muslims have carried on their intellectual heritage. Today, although the region shaped by Sir Syed’s movement is divided between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the influence of his vision endures.
It is therefore not surprising that every section of Indian society, including nationalists, religious reformers and historians, have tried to appropriate his legacy. However, the reality is more complex. Indian Muslims were never culturally homogeneous; Their social practices were highly localised, and tied to the area in which they lived. Religious interpretation further intensified these divisions. Sir Syed recognized this division but emphasized education as a unifying thread that could prepare Muslims to face the modern, colonial world.
His own life went through different phases: as a historian, a reformer, and a translator of both the Quran and the Bible. He was not a man held to dogma, but rather a man willing to modify his beliefs. At one time, their decision to publish Aine Akbari Ghalib’s famous satirical preface faced resistance; and his authorship of Pioneering asurassandid The monuments of Delhi reveal both his curiosity and intellectual flexibility. he changed the text of Asar In response to changing political winds, especially the language policy of the British rulers, the influence of Persian was reduced in its second edition in 1854.
The Urdu–Hindi controversy was an important development in nineteenth-century politics, as the British aimed to create a new language for Hindu identity. His strategy included changing the Hindi script to Nagari, incorporating Sanskrit words to give it a Hindu character, while denigrating the existing script as Arabic-Persian and promoting the same Hindi as Urdu, an exclusive language of Muslims. Both were absolutely wrong. When the matter deepened in 1882, Viceroy Lord Ripon appointed an Education Commission under the leadership of Sir William W. Hunter. Sir Syed addressed the matter with remarkable insight but did not accept membership of it; Instead, he founded an organization to promote the Urdu language, which was renamed as Anjuman Taraqi Urdu in 1903, to which the word ‘Hind’ was later added in 1936. However, his successors supported the British move to declare Urdu as the language of Muslims and the Islamic language. After his death, one of his former colleagues, Shibli Nomani – who had been expelled from the college during his lifetime – reorganized the organization with a nationalist outlook and character and with the active support of his disciple Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. In 1903, Nomani became the secretary and assistant secretary of Azad Anjuman. His foresight is evident from the fact that only three years later, in 1906, the Muslim League emerged as a newly formed political party from Sir Syed’s Muslim Educational Conference, while the Anjuman continued on the nationalist path and severed its ties with the Muslim League.
If the Anjuman had not asserted its autonomy in 1903, it would have easily been absorbed into the Muslim League. Its independence preserved the cultural roots of Urdu within the overall civilization of India. Nevertheless, Sir Syed’s writings have also been cleverly exploited. Commentators supporting the idea of ​​Pakistan seized on the unverified comments in his work, and considered them the ideological basis for a new Muslim nation. This interpretive leap is more fiction than history. This is not a properly researched statement, which turned isolated lines into prophetic declarations, crafting a narrative that was and will be convenient for Pakistan’s supporters but is extremely misleading. According to this legend, in a purported conversation, Sir Syed had said with a British officer that he found it difficult for Muslims and Hindus to live together in peace. Even if this is true, another diametrically opposite interpretation is also possible: blaming the prophecy for rapidly growing Hindu separatist tendencies, which certainly existed in the nineteenth century alongside Muslim separatism, which in many ways was growing rapidly. In the 19th century, due to the deliberate intentions of the British rule, both the separatist tendencies became politically decisive, which gave them an opportunity to grow.
The ultimate creation of Pakistan was due less to Sir Syed’s ideas and more to the contingencies of twentieth-century geopolitics. British strategic planning, intensified by the pressure of World War II, proved decisive. Indian Muslim separatism, which had remained as a minor undercurrent, was brought to prominence through imperial manipulation and the political miscalculation of Mahatma Gandhi, whose misguided support for the Khilafat movement further inflamed these divisions, lending an unexpected mass character to an elite discourse. In this sense, Pakistan was not the inevitable fulfillment of Sir Syed’s vision, but a by-product of subsequent political crises, imperial strategy and nationalist folly.
The watershed of 1857 was a turning point in Sir Syed’s life. For the British, rapprochement with the Muslim elite was essential if their rule was to survive. Fearing loss of status and property, the landlords were eager for a negotiator. Sir Syed, who was already trusted by the colonial establishment, became the person through whom this accommodation could be obtained. Out of this difficult context emerged his most enduring project: the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, which later became Aligarh Muslim University. The college embodied his attempt to negotiate between the Muslim past and the British present, linking tradition with the promise of modern knowledge.
In line with AMU’s argument, the absence of any definitive biography of Sir Syed so far is probably strategic, partly because each group has tried to appropriate his image. Perhaps for this reason, the home he founded, Aligarh Muslim University, did not publish his complete works for a long time. his comment on Bible Was recently published by Sir Syed Academy of the University. Only fragments exist as records of his life: Maulana Altaf Husain Hali’s affectionate Hayat-e Javid, Lelyveld’s Sathi Aligarh’s first generation 1978and Lawrence Gautier’s recently published quite general treatise, Between nation and community: Muslim universities and Indian politics after partition.and a scattering of inadequate or biased studies. should also mention one Aligarh Movement by Mumtaz Moin (1976), which appears to be a Pakistan Government project aimed at presenting a comprehensive account of Sir Syed’s work in support of Pakistan. Another notable book is by Hafeez Malik Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Muslim modernization in India and Pakistan (1980). Unfortunately, it also suffers from the inherent shortsightedness of Pakistani scholars. The most authentic and objective work on Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, titled Sir Syed Ahmed Khan: Reason, Religion and NationNot published by Shafi Kidwai until 2021. Before that is Anil Maheshwari’s Aligarh University, the perfect past and the uncertain present (2001), An Objective History of the Institution. The book was updated and republished in 2025, but people in the relevant fields hardly know about it. Only Malik and Kidwai have used rich sources on the subject, primarily in Urdu and thus not easily available to Western scholars. A book on MAO College, titled History of MAO College S.K. The book written by Bhatnagar was also excellent, despite the author not having access to all the resources available to later authors, especially Lelyveld and Kidwai.
Unless Sir Syed’s entire collection is made available through careful editing and translation, at least in English and Hindi, our understanding of the Muslim imagination in North India before and after 1857 will remain partial.
Sir Syed’s intellectual courage was often balanced by political compromise. His uneasy interactions with the Deobandi ulema, which culminated in Shibli Nomani’s expulsion from the college, showed the price he was willing to pay for the survival of the institution. Such concessions do not diminish his stature, but they remind us that the road to reform is never easy. To meet Sir Syed again today is to come face to face with his achievements and silences. He was at once a pragmatist and a visionary, a man who was shaped by colonial needs, yet determined to lead his community toward modernity. Their legacy is neither the property of so-called nationalists nor separatists, but a living intellectual challenge: how to combine faith with reason, tradition with change and memory with current demands.
Sir Syed scholarship in English is almost negligible. The primary reason is lack of awareness of the sources, primarily in Persianized Urdu. Iftikhar Alam Khan accessed the sources in their original language and dedicated his life to Sir Syed studies by writing 17 books. Sir Syed Darun-e Khana used the sources effectively and addressed aspects that are not covered in other texts. Ather Farooqui’s translation gives it a new life. A scholar in the field of Urdu language and education in post-Partition India, who has studied the Aligarh Movement from the perspective of language politics, Farooqui is also the General Secretary of Anjuman Taraqi Urdu (Hind). This gives added importance to this endeavor as it revives the historical and ideological ties between Anjuman and Aligarh Muslim University.
Sadaf Fatima has done her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University. His expertise is the history of Delhi in the 18th and 19th centuries.
