Aligarh Must Begin Again

Sir Syed was neither a prophet nor a messenger. Yet much of his life was spent in work that belonged, in spirit, to the prophetic vocation: clearing away the layers of human confusion that had gathered around Revelation, and trying to bring the divine word back into direct conversation with the human mind.

This became especially true in the final years of his life, when he poured what remained of his intellectual energy into tearing through the veils of inherited assumptions that had settled over the Qur’an.

Unlike his contemporary Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who was at times persuaded that revelation or divine inspiration had descended upon him, and whom Sir Syed nevertheless regarded as a pious and well-meaning man, Sir Syed never presented himself as an inspired figure beyond criticism, a muhaddath, or one whose insights enjoyed some supernatural immunity from scrutiny.

Islamic history, of course, had seen no shortage of revered figures who strengthened their claims, or gathered disciples around themselves, by invoking some version of alhamani rabbi, “my Lord inspired me.” Shah Waliullah of Delhi remains one of the most striking examples.

Sir Syed knew this tradition well. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s claims did not greatly surprise him. But for himself he felt no need for mystical disclosure, visionary experience, or a private channel to heaven.

The new ʿilm al-kalam he wished to build was to rest on something at once more demanding and more democratic: the revealed and determinate pages of the Qur’an, approached through human reason, disciplined understanding and intellectual courage.[1]

What he sought was a world of tadabbur, taʿaqqul and tafakkur: reflection, reasoning and thought. A world formed at the meeting point of Revelation and reason, where the two did not cancel each other out but sustained one another.

That choice was more radical than it now appears.

Sir Syed lived in an age in which spiritual exercises, mystical unveilings and visions of the Divine enjoyed enormous prestige, and in which claims of heavenly communication were not necessarily regarded as unbecoming in men of piety. Against that background, one of his greatest achievements was his refusal to appear as anything more than a student in search of Islam in its unadorned form.

And precisely that humility became his misfortune.

A society accustomed to imagining its sages as men nourished by mystical illumination had learned to fall silent before the ecstatic utterances and theological excesses of figures from Ibn ʿArabi to Mujaddid Alf Thani and Shah Waliullah, lest, after all, their wires really did reach heaven.

But Sir Syed came without such protection.

He came as a student.

A student who admitted that there were moments when he felt drawn toward God and other moments when even his prayers suffered from negligence.

Such a man was easy to attack.

He could be criticised, diminished, accused of irreligion, even pushed toward the outer edges of Islam, because he had never claimed sanctuary in revelation of his own.

Sir Syed wanted to establish a rational attitude toward religion. Had he presented his interpretations under the halo of “my Lord inspired me,” the birth of a genuinely rational, questioning and student-like approach would have become impossible.

That is why, in the decaying Muslim society of the nineteenth century, when Muslim political power had collapsed and the old civilisational confidence had almost gone dark, his attempt to return the Qur’an to ordinary human beings as a living charter, and to illuminate lost roads through the light of Revelation, was nothing less than an act of renewal.[2]

Yet Sir Syed’s place as a religious renewer has rarely been understood, and even more rarely acknowledged.

For all his intellectual stature, Sir Syed remained a human being. Human error, strategic misjudgement and the compromises of circumstance inevitably entered his movement.

He travelled westward in search of modern knowledge and visited universities that, in a deeper historical irony, had themselves emerged from intellectual traditions profoundly indebted to the Muslims of the medieval world.

But Sir Syed lived at a time when the scientific and civilisational history of Islam had been so thoroughly eclipsed by the triumphal noise of nineteenth-century Europe that even perceptive Muslim thinkers, deprived of any living consciousness of their own historical grandeur, could look at the British social order and regard even its lowest-ranking functionaries as representatives of a civilisation immeasurably superior to their own.

Imagine, then, the burden upon a man whose civilisational history had effectively been stolen from his sight; whose political order had been destroyed before his eyes; whose Prophet and religion were under sustained attack from Christian missionaries; and who watched a new Muslim generation becoming estranged from its faith, overawed by its conquerors, and drawn toward disbelief.

To begin again under such conditions was no small undertaking.

The first phase of the Aligarh Movement was one of the most electrifying episodes in the history of Muslim decline.

For the first time, Muslim leadership had passed into the hands of a man who did not claim unveiling or inspiration, but who placed reason and Revelation at the centre of his intellectual universe.

His insistence was uncompromising: that which truly contradicts reason cannot be upheld by Revelation.[3]

For centuries, irrational interpretations, implausible tales and inherited commentaries had been allowed to stand guard over the clear spring of Revelation, often merely because they arrived under the authority of the ancestors or under the label of tafsir bi’l-ma’thur. Sir Syed challenged this inheritance as an ordinary student of the Qur’an.

When his friend Mehdi Ali Khan accused him of indulging in tafsir bi’l-ra’y, interpretation by personal opinion, Sir Syed protested sharply.

If my interpretation, he argued, is merely opinion, what proof do you possess that the meaning you have inherited descended from heaven?

This was the real intellectual rupture.

Sir Syed understood what Muhammad ʿAbduh would later articulate with great force: Revelation is an inexhaustible gift to humanity, and every generation that approaches it honestly has the right, and the responsibility, to receive its own share of light.

Sir Syed placed the Qur’an back on the human table of inquiry with such force that no major exegete or religious thinker of the subcontinent who came after him could remain entirely untouched by his method, whether or not he admitted the debt.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad spoke with unusual warmth about the effect of Sir Syed’s thought upon his own intellectual formation.

Deputy Nazir Ahmad, whose Qur’anic understanding won admiration far beyond his immediate circle, belonged unmistakably among those who had gathered fruit from Sir Syed’s tree.

And in his correspondence, Abul Aʿla Maududi can be found searching for the commentaries of both Deputy Nazir Ahmad and Sir Syed.

Rafiullah Shahab records an illuminating episode. When Amin Ahsan Islahi’s work on the principles of Qur’anic interpretation had newly appeared and was being widely praised, Islahi happened to visit Mianwali. Shahab remarked to him that Sir Syed had already set out essentially the same principles in his own treatise on the principles of interpretation.

According to Shahab, Islahi was visibly taken aback and asked whether a copy of Sir Syed’s treatise was still available. When told that it was, Shahab recalls, the conversation went no further.[4]

Shahab likewise saw Maududi’s treatment of predestination and human freedom as bearing the direct imprint of Sir Syed’s thought.

The irony is difficult to miss.

A commentary that exercised such profound influence upon Qur’anic interpretation in the subcontinent remained largely inaccessible to ordinary readers. Whenever the possibility arose of bringing it back into wider circulation, guardians of orthodoxy appeared at the door.

And so the Aligarh project remained incomplete.

Education without the recovery of Revelation could never produce the transformation Sir Syed had imagined in those final years when he knew that time was running out, his strength was failing, and his Qur’anic commentary had barely reached the final verses of Surat al-Kahf before death arrived.

Sir Syed was a man of enormous resolve. He trusted his intellectual nerve.

In the closing years of his life, one concern increasingly consumed him: the Qur’an had to be presented to the new generation not as a book merely recited, nor as an object from which blessing was ritually extracted, but as a living manifesto to be read, understood and acted upon.

Yet the practical burdens of building the College, the fury of his opponents, and the relentless campaigns and fatwas of conservative religious scholars forced him into a tragic compromise.

He continued his Qur’anic project, but the religious instruction of the College was left largely in the hands of traditional clerics.

Iqbal, writing decades later in Islam and Ahmadism, saw Sir Syed as perhaps the first modern Muslim to discern the positive character of the age that was emerging. Sir Syed’s real greatness, for Iqbal, lay not merely in his advocacy of modern education but in being the first Indian Muslim to recognise the need for a fresh orientation of Islam and to work toward it. Indian Muslim conservatism, cut off from the realities of life, failed to understand the true significance of his religious attitude.[5]

That judgment matters.

The project of reconstructing Islamic thought did not die with Sir Syed. In Iqbal it returned, louder and more self-conscious.

In his lectures and correspondence, Iqbal left behind a formidable list of questions whose courageous reconsideration might have helped create a new and creative Muslim mind.

Iqbal, however, was the poet of Islam. He claimed the authority of one who knew the secrets of the house from within. He had already confronted one of the most established religious scholars of his time, Husain Ahmad Madani. His Islamic credentials, in the eyes of the Muslim public, stood largely beyond suspicion.

And yet even Iqbal’s bold lectures were too unsettling for certain orthodox sensibilities. Their implications were easier to admire from a distance than to allow loose in the religious life of ordinary Muslims.

The shadow of incompleteness had therefore fallen across the Aligarh Movement from its beginning.

Sir Syed’s religious thought had been postponed.

His educational programme survived.

His intellectual rebellion did not.

Few people identified the consequences of this postponement as sharply as Iqbal did. Why had a movement born with something of a prophetic method failed to create a new earth and a new sky?

Maududi, in one memorable criticism, compared Sir Syed to an engineer whose machine, instead of moving forward, ended up running backwards.

Iqbal located the failure elsewhere.

For him, the deeper problem was the extreme conservatism of Indian Muslims: a mentality increasingly detached from the realities of life and unable to recognise the real significance of Sir Syed’s religious thought.

And that unfinished business never went away.

The shelving of Sir Syed’s interpretive project left behind a permanent restlessness, the recurring intuition that another, more comprehensive movement was still required.

A century later, that restlessness returned in institutional form. Parliament enacted the Aligarh Muslim University (Amendment) Act in 1981.[6] In the period that followed, Syed Hamid, then Vice-Chancellor, revived Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq in February 1982, the journal Sir Syed had originally launched in December 1870 as an organ of his educational, ethical and social reform.[7]

The revival carried enormous symbolic promise.

Yet the irony continued.

The revolutionary journal that still carried the memory of the Mohammedan Social Reformer gradually came to resemble an ordinary literary magazine, often carrying its readers away from the hard intellectual and social questions that had once given it birth.

Syed Hamid was perhaps the most qualified person to lead what might have become the second phase of the Aligarh Movement.

His tenure coincided with a significant reworking of the legal framework of the University, and he did what he could to set Aligarh’s slow-moving caravan once again toward its destination.

Yet those familiar with the period recall that whenever the republication of Sir Syed’s Qur’anic commentary was raised, he preferred not to open another contentious intellectual front.

Perhaps he knew the cost.

And perhaps, by temperament and circumstance, he was too conciliatory to invite another storm of religious opposition.

He would later acknowledge that, by allowing Sir Syed’s commentary to disappear into neglect, Aligarh had done justice neither to Sir Syed, nor to itself, nor to the generations that followed.[8]

That confession should still trouble Aligarh.

The movement remains unfinished.

In the Indo-Pak subcontinent, Aligarh was meant to be the vanguard of a prophetic mission. Its vitality cannot be restored merely by expanding buildings, multiplying departments, or celebrating anniversaries.

Its renewal depends upon something more difficult: the creation of a new ʿilm al-kalam and a renewed, direct engagement with Revelation.

We cannot erase Sir Syed’s religious thought and still expect to inherit the full fruits of the Aligarh Movement.

When the University community celebrates its founder, surely the least it can do is bring together the complete writings of its benefactor in handsome, authoritative volumes.

More importantly, it must return to his intellectual legacy, above all to his Qur’anic effort, not as a relic to be garlanded, but as a body of thought to be studied, questioned, tested and, where necessary, surpassed.

Sir Syed does not need disciples.

He needs successors.

And succession, in matters of thought, does not mean repeating the master. It means recovering the courage that made the master possible.

Until we once again learn to turn the pages of the Qur’an with something of Sir Syed’s student-like mind and believing heart, Aligarh will remain suspended in a directionless sleep.

The buildings may stand.

The ceremonies may continue.

The name may survive.

But the movement will still be waiting to begin again.

Notes

1. See Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Al-Tahrir fi Usul al-Tafsir, his treatise setting out principles of Qur’anic interpretation, and his Tafsir al-Qur’an wa Huwa al-Huda wa’l-Furqan. Modern studies of his hermeneutics likewise emphasise the centrality of reason, natural law, and the attempted reconciliation of Revelation with contemporary knowledge.
2. For Sir Syed’s broader Qur’anic hermeneutic and its relationship to nineteenth-century Muslim intellectual reform, see Hamdan Maghribi, “Al-Tafsir al-ʿAqlani li’l-Qur’an: Mawqif Ahmad Khan min al-Tafsir bi’l-Ra’y,” DINIKA: Academic Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (2017); and Muhammad Umar Farooq and Muhammad Shah Faisal, “Sir Syed Ahmed Khan & the Prolog of His Tafsir ‘Tafsir al-Quran’: A Descriptive & Analytical Study,” Al-Wifaq, vol. 6, no. 1 (2023).
3. Sir Syed’s insistence on the compatibility of Revelation, reason and the laws of nature runs throughout the introductory methodological discussions of his Tafsir al-Qur’an. See also Muhammad Arif and Sher Ali, “An Analytical Study of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Principles of Tafseer,” Scholar Insight Journal, vol. 2, no. 2 (2024), pp. 96–114.
4. Rafiullah Shahab, Ahkam al-Qur’an men Tahrif (Lahore, 2000), for the episode concerning Amin Ahsan Islahi and Sir Syed’s principles of Qur’anic interpretation.
5. Muhammad Iqbal, Islam and Ahmadism: With a Reply to Questions Raised by Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru (Lahore: Anjuman-i-Khuddam-ud-Din, 1936). Iqbal describes Sir Syed as probably “the first modern Muslim to catch a glimpse of the positive character of the age which was coming” and locates his “real greatness” in recognising “the need of a fresh orientation of Islam” and working toward it.
6. The Aligarh Muslim University (Amendment) Act, 1981, Act No. 62 of 1981. The Act amended the statutory framework governing Aligarh Muslim University and provided, among other things, transitional provisions concerning the reconstitution of University authorities.
7. Aligarh Muslim University, “Tahzeeb-ul-Akhlaq: Brief Introduction.” Sir Syed Ahmad Khan established Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq in December 1870 as an organ of his educational, ethical and social reform. It was revived under Vice-Chancellor Syed Hamid in February 1982.
8. Syed Hamid, quoted in Fikr-o-Nazar, Special Issue on Sir Syed, edited by Rahat Abrar, on the neglect of Sir Syed’s Qur’anic commentary and the injustice thereby done to Sir Syed, to ourselves, and to succeeding generations.