Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam
103. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan – Part 1
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Critical moments in history are like earthquakes. They manifest themselves as convulsions releasing the pent-up stresses of generations. When the tremors are over, they leave behind a legacy, which becomes a prelude to the next major event. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-1858 was one such event. With it, medieval India died and, in its wake, grew social and political movements that paved the way for the emergence of the modern nations of India and Pakistan.
India was the first country where Muslims were faced with a challenge to define their interface with two global civilizations from a position of political weakness. European arms and diplomacy had smashed their power. The Sepoy Uprising confirmed this loss of power. The initial response of the Muslims to this debacle was to stay aloof from the British, to shun their language, institutions, culture and methods. Withdrawal only increased their isolation and set them behind in the race for political and social re-awakening. At the same time, the Hindus whom the Muslims had dominated for 500 years appeared poised to dominate them. The changing relationships were most acutely felt in the Gangetic plain, in the populous region extending from Delhi to Calcutta. And it was this region that set the tone for the interaction between the Muslims, the Europeans and the Hindus in the years to come.
What was the appropriate relationship between Islam and Christian Europe? The legacy of the Crusades in the Mediterranean region was not an encouraging one. In the 7th and 8th centuries, the Muslims conquered vast areas of the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and southwestern Europe and displaced Christianity with their own faith. In a counter thrust, during the 12th and 13th centuries, the Christians wrested Spain and Portugal from the Muslims and in the succeeding centuries, completed extirpated Islam from the Andalusian peninsula. The English thrust at India in the 18th century was primarily mercantile and motivated by economic domination. Nonetheless, the history of interactions between Islam and Christianity did not provide a framework for a mutually satisfactory accommodation.
With the large Hindu population of India, the situation was somewhat different. In the 8th century, Muslim armies, after their swift advance through Persia, had paused at the Indus River. For 500 years thereafter, the Indus River roughly defined the geographical boundary between Muslim dominions and northern India, which was dominated by the Rajputs. The situation changed when Muhammed Ghori captured Delhi in 1192, and from that date onward until the arrival of the British, the Indo-Gangetic plain was ruled by successive Muslim dynasties. Some of the Muslim monarchs, such as AlauddinKhilji, Muhammed bin Tughlaq and Jalaluddin Akbar, treated their Indian subjects fairly. Most were content to collect taxes from Hindus and Muslims alike and made no attempt either to facilitate the spread of Islam or to deter it. Except in the northwest and the northeast, Islam remained a super-layer on a fossilized Hindu society. The two great communities continued to coexist but did not co-mingle. The powerful Islamic message of equality of man ensured that the Muslims were not submerged in the Hindu caste matrix, yet the rigidity of Hindu society was too tenacious for Islam to displace Hinduism.
Sufi Islam tried to bridge the gap between the various communities of India. The Sufis arrived in the Indo-Gangetic plain at about the same time they emerged in Central Asia and North Africa. The spiritual and physical space of the Sufi qanqahs was secular in which men and women of all faiths were welcome. With their emphasis on love, brotherhood, service and openness to local culture, they convinced a large number of Indians to accept Islam so that by the turn of the 19th century, Muslims constituted roughly a quarter of the total population of the subcontinent.
The numerical inferiority of the Muslims was compensated by their political and cultural dominance. Only in the field of economics did the Hindus fare better. The far-sighted among the Muslim monarchs found it wise to accept the services of Hindu ministers to rationalize their tax collection systems. With the advent of British rule, the advantages that the Muslims had enjoyed were chipped away. Political and military ascendancy was the first casualty. Bengal (1757), Oudh (1765) and Mysore (1799) fell one by one. Some of the potentates, such as the Nizam of Hyderabad, found it more expedient to accept the protection of the British than to fight them.
The second front was economic. The thriving manufacturing industry and the trade guilds of Bengal were ruined by the deliberate policies of the Company who saw Hindustan as a vast market for its goods. Where industry faltered, usury crept in. Since interest was forbidden in Islam, the Muslims stayed away from usury. Hindu moneylenders had no such taboo and they moved in as credit suppliers for the impoverished masses.
Language was the third front. In 1835, the East India Company introduced English medium schools and replaced Persian with English in the higher courts. Persian, the lingua franca of Muslim Asia, was the court language of Delhi for 500 years. The displacement of Persian as the court language not only severed intellectual contacts between Muslim India and Persia, it also stripped the advantage that Muslims had enjoyed in education. The Hindus had nothing to lose by this change and embraced English education with open arms and moved to fill in whatever government positions were offered by the British to Indians. The educational gap between the Hindu and Muslim communities increased. This in turn augmented mutual suspicions, jealousy and social tensions.
The Sepoy Uprising of 1857-1858 released the pent-up tensions between India and the British and proved to be a calamity for the Muslims. Defeat prompted withdrawal. It was the contribution of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan that he brought the Muslims of northern India from their cocoon and made them face the historical currents so they could participate in the molding of their own destiny. His response to the British and to the Hindus was markedly different. He foresaw, that British rule, no matter how entrenched it seemed at the time, was ultimately bound to disappear. But the Hindus were neighbors, living with the Muslims. Two global faiths, Islam and Hinduism, had arrived in India at different historical epochs and each claimed the same land as its homeland. In the dialogue to coexist and co-prosper, the adherents of the two faiths were largely unsuccessful and, in their failure, they left behind the legacy of partition and the accompanying holocaust of 1947.
In the aftermath of the Sepoy Uprising, the Muslim intelligentsia in northern India was decimated. Under the incessant hammer of British persecution, Muslims in the Indo-Gangetic belt recoiled from active participation in national life. Too proud to accept defeat at the hands of the “infidels”, mired in the glory of a bygone era, imprisoned in a paradigm of Persian-Arabic education, suspicious of an emerging Hindu educated class, exploited by money lenders and talukdars, they sank deeper into a despondency with each passing year. The British carried their vendetta into the succeeding decades. Open discrimination was practiced against the Muslims in government jobs. The result was a general decay in the economic and political status of the Muslims and an increasing gap between the Muslims and Hindus in education and social awareness. This chasm was to have a profound effect on the events that unfolded in the last quarter of the century when Sir Syed Ahmed Khan launched his educational reform movement (1875) and the Indian National Congress was founded (1885). Indeed, the increasing gap in the economic and educational well-being of Hindus and Muslims had a decisive impact on the shape of the struggle for the independent nations of India and Pakistan.
The thrust of European arms and ideas evoked a wide spectrum of responses in the Muslim world. The Ottomans resisted this thrust until the resistance was destroyed during the First World War. In Egypt and Turkey, the impact of European ideas influenced the reform movements of Muhammed Ali Pasha, Sultan Abdul Hamid and the Young Turks. In India it produced the reform movement of Syed Ahmed Khan.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
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