Aligarh: the Modernist Response

In 1875 (1292 AH) Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (rahimahu Allah) founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in northern India, the institution that gave its name to the Aligarh movement and the most influential expression of the Muslim modernist response to colonial rule. Where the scholars of Deoband had answered the loss of Muslim power by withdrawing into a self-funded network of traditional madrasas, Sir Sayyid concluded that the Muslims of India could only recover their standing by mastering the modern English education and the natural sciences that underpinned British power, and he set out to provide it in a form that kept faith and community at the centre. Modelled openly on the English colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the Aligarh college taught mathematics, the sciences and English alongside Islamic studies, kept a mosque and a strongly Muslim communal life within its walls, and aimed to form a modern-educated leadership for the community. It grew into Aligarh Muslim University in 1920 and shaped Indian Muslim politics for generations, including the movement that would lead to Pakistan. Sir Sayyid was a controversial figure: his rationalist approach to the interpretation of the Qur'an and his political accommodation with the British were sharply criticised by many traditional ulama, and the Aligarh and Deoband responses are often set against each other as the two faces of the Muslim encounter with colonial modernity, the one engaging it, the other guarding against it. This scene depicts the new college around its founding, the European-style quadrangle, the science laboratory and the library, with the mosque and the Muslim students that gave it its character.