Was there any interface between Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the modernist impulse that sprouted from the Delhi College (its original name was Madressah Ghaziuddin)? The question remains unanswered to this day. That serves as an entry point for us to venture into an uncharted area of Muslim intellectual history in South Asia.

In the adolescence and youth of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the Delhi College near the Ajmeri Gate had emerged as a symbol of North Indian modernity, extracted primarily from the Muslim plural tradition. I call North Indian Muslim tradition plural because it had come about as a convergence of Indian, Persian, Turkish and Arabic epistemic as well as cultural streams. Besides, as one can infer from Margrit Pernau’s edited volume, The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857, there was a prominent fifth stream - that of Western epistemology.

One can’t rule out the plausibility of Sir Syed having imbibed influence from an institution that functioned in his native city. Urdu was the medium of instruction and translation of the Western sources of knowledge was the mainstay of Delhi College. Several Europeans were teaching there and along with humanities and classic literature, education in science subjects was emphasised. Dr Sprenger who took charge of the college in 1845 as its principal and acted in that capacity for two and a half years, was one such example.

Intezar Husain, while shedding light on the Delhi College states, “In 1824, a non-religious educational madressah under the name of Delhi College was founded in Delhi. It was the first secular educational institution in India where all subjects, Eastern as well as Western, scientific, and non-scientific, were taught in Urdu. This required collaboration among the European administrators, local teachers, and students to translate and publish texts on scientific, social and literary subjects.”

These initiatives, taken ab intio by the Delhi College management, seemed to have inspired Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Margrit Pernau writes, “The very establishment of the (Delhi) college can be read as an attempt to translate British culture and scholarship for an Indian audience.” What it means is that Delhi College was acting as a locus for synthesis between the Eastern and Western intellectual traditions so that the indigenous ethos might gain a new impetus to rejuvenate itself.

Sir Syed shared this conviction. His thoughts are spelt out by the thinker and writer, Christian W Troll. He writes, “best of Western civilisation could be and should be assimilated by Muslims since Islam, properly understood, the ‘pure’ Islam of the Prophet (peace be upon him), his Companions and early Followers, did not clash with it. Thus, his endeavours practically aimed at replication of Delhi College in Aligarh. The only difference might be the anti-British stance of some of Delhi College’s alumni like Mullah Muhammad Baqir, the father of Muhammad Hussain Azad. That primarily was the reason that Delhi College was closed down after the War of Independence. But that great institution kept on living in the reform process, triggered by Sir Syed from the 1860s onwards.

It must be borne in mind that the social sensibility professed by Sir Syed remained entrenched in tradition. He wanted to employ (instrumental) modernity to invigorate tradition. To put it differently, Sir Syed remained committed to lend sustenance to Muslim ‘nation’ and the idea (Islam) underpinning it (he used nation as a category rather than ‘civilisation’) by re-inventing it through rationality.

Altaf Hussain Hali’s view about Sir Syed needs to be noted here. He considered him ‘the heroic’ revitaliser of his community (qaum) who restored to his community self-respect and honour within the British India and, thus, an exemplar for the rising young Muslim Indian generation. He did not approve of ‘rationality’ to pervade the inner (socio-moral) sanctum of the Indian Muslim society.

Unlike the Hindu reform movements, like Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj, Sir Syed was far too conservative when it came to the education for Muslim women. Socially, he belonged to the Muslim ashrafia and represented their viewpoint instead of devising a strategy to include lower (or middle) classes in his reform agenda. In view of this, what Sir Syed Ahmad Khan propounded in the 1870s and 1880s was an ‘arrested modernity’.

Another important point was Sir Syed’s acceptance of ‘the results of post-Newtonian natural science as established truth.’ He used those results to justify the need for metaphysical interpretation (tawil) of Biblical and Quranic texts as the revealed word of God, which were, as Troll maintains, “freed from the distortions of an erroneous dogmatic interpretation, and in the light of the uniquely clear Quranic message of God’s unity, the gospel of Jesus continues to be relevant.” That ignited a storm of protests by the traditional ulema across North India.

Since each religion claims the exclusive possession of final ‘saving’ truth, that persuaded Sir Syed to postulate reason (aql) as the ultimate criterion of the truth. For Sir Syed, reason is nothing but the “law of nature”, at least potentially accessible in full to the human rational faculty. Therefore, any contravention of the “law of nature” would mean a breach of God’s promise, which obviously is beyond the realm of possibility.

Such all-inclusive, fully determined set of natural laws would mean refutation of miracles or any supernatural events. For him, the credibility of the Quran is based not on miracles but on the intrinsic value of its content. In the same way, unsurpassable greatness of the Prophet (peace be upon him) lies in the essential nature of his teaching and the way he made a valiant moral effort to disseminate it.

Here, it must be clarified that Sir Syed segregated ‘theological’ from ‘social’. Rationality’s domain was confined only to the ‘theological’ whereas he kept on pleading ‘social’ to be regulated through the customs and the conventions of yore. Rationality for him was instrumental to the hilt.

(To be continued)