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.

INTRODUCTION

The gentry to which Sir Sayyid Ahmad (1817–1898) belonged considered education a vehicle for cultivating the mind, while service under the state mainly a duty for men born in the concerned families; in other words, they believed that military and executive service under the state was noblesse oblige. Initially, Sir Sayyid Ahmad's thoughts on education were, quite predictably (and naturally), lofty and idealistic. He feared that education was primarily treated as a mere tool of livelihood. Rather than continuing his familial tradition of serving in the Mughal court (for which his rather rambling education had prepared him), he chose to serve the East India Company: this arguably marked the beginning of the process through which the youth from old elite families came to terms with the increasingly disorienting new world. During their lifetime, humans go through distinct phases wherein their conceptions of higher and nobler ultimate purposes of education undergo modifications and adaptations. Originally, education is the process of cultivating thinking and intellect; there is a discernible trend of the process coming closer to the realities of Sir Sayyid's time when the reins of command and control ceased to be even nominally with the ancient regime of the Mughals – the baton passed indubitably to the East India Company. Thus, to test Western education's ability to cultivate minds and enhance the learners’ future material well-being, Sir Sayyid Ahmad started experiments of establishing Western educational institutions at Moradabad in 1859 and Ghazipur in 1862. However, the character-building ability of this type of education was affected by the mediocre curriculum of universities to which his labour of love, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College, was affiliated.

Over the years, educational projects metamorphosed to involve various paradigms – from using Persian as a dominant medium for attaining knowledge to including useful sciences (kaar aamad or mufeed uloom), such as agriculture, soil sciences, and allied disciplines, suitable for upgrading the overwhelmingly agrarian economy, and establishing conventional universities with the elusive vernacular as the medium of instruction. Thus, Sir Sayyid Ahmad initiated the translation of Western knowledge from various disciplines, such as philosophy, political economy, logic, and history; however, after making some progress, the pragmatic entrepreneur realized that the time available for translation was very short, and hence he stopped the translation work.