by RAZA NAEEM
Born on Oct 17, 1817, Syed Ahmad bin Muttaqi Khan began his career in service of the East India Company. After the war of 1857 he started working for educational reforms for the Muslims of India. In 1888 he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India and became known as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan emerged as a key leader of the Indian Muslim community in the aftermath of the War of Independence of 1857, as a thoroughly modern Muslim in a thoroughly pre-modern age. He is credited for originating the two-nation theory, founding the Aligarh Movement and being a founding father of Pakistan, but less celebrated are his achievements in providing a modern, scientific and rational interpretation of Islam and the Holy Quran, as well as his debates on culture that — in the face of stern opposition from fundamentalists and detractors — sowed the seeds of enlightenment and progress.
His views on culture
Sir Syed was probably the first intellectual to present the meaning of culture as it was prevalent in the West in the 19th century. When defining the aims of his journal Tehzeeb-ul-Akhlaq in its first edition, he wrote: “The objective of issuing this journal is to persuade Indian Muslims to adopt a complete degree of civilisation, meaning culture, so that the hatred with which the civilised (cultured) nations view them should go away and they may also be said to be [one of the] exalted and cultured nations of the world.”
October 17 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who exerted a defining influence on Indian Muslim thought. It is instructive to understand how his thinking evolved and the strong oppositions he faced during his time
Expounding on this, he wrote two detailed essays in Tehzeeb-ul-Akhlaq, ‘Culture and its Definition’ and ‘Civilisation or Sophistication and Culture’, based on a book by British historian Thomas Buckle.
Buckle had tried to write the history of human civilisation in the light of scientific knowledge and also fashioned a few ‘laws’ based on inductive reasoning; for example, the law of seasons, that showed that the physical environment greatly affected human culture. Although Buckle’s ‘ideologies’ went against historical facts (the physical environment of the ancient Indus Valley, Nile River Valley and Mesopotamia was different from Europe, but no one can deny the greatness of these cultures), the West enthusiastically welcomed them because Buckle had fashioned the dominance of the white nations and slavery of Asian nations into a natural law, thus presenting an ideological justification for Britain’s imperialist interests.
What Sir Syed wrote about man and human culture 150 years ago continues to hold true. For example, he said, “There is a close relationship between human actions and the laws of nature,” meaning that the laws of human society and the movement of nature are identical. Then, “human actions and the work of their mutual milieu are subject to some predetermined law and not coincidental.” Third, “Man’s actions are not the results of his wishes, but the results of past events.” Fourth, “Any human society is not free of culture” and fifth, “Man changes nature and nature changes Man and all events are made from this mutual exchange.”
In mentioning the specific qualities of man, Sir Syed wrote that man’s “organs and body are … not his only superiority, but the work he is able to do with the help of his intelligence, as well as with such hands, because of them he is able to live a happy, comfortable life … able to make his self into an artificial existence and, compared to the status of his natural life, is able to provide it with a lot of luxury.”
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