Sayyid Ahmad Khan

Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), often called Sir Syed, was a Muslim reformer, jurist, and Qur'anic commentator in British India. He was born in Delhi into a family with ties to the Mughal court and, from 1838, served in the subordinate (lower) judiciary of the British administration, holding posts in a series of north Indian towns. During the uprising of 1857 he remained loyal to British rule and is reported to have sheltered Europeans; he afterward wrote Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind ("The Causes of the Indian Revolt"), which argued that British misgovernment, not mere mutiny, had driven the rebellion.

A trip to England in 1869–1870 convinced him that Muslims needed modern, Western-style education. On his return he built the institution that opened as a school at Aligarh in 1875 and became the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1877 — later Aligarh Muslim University. He also founded a Scientific Society to translate European works into Urdu and the reformist journal Tahzib al-Akhlaq.

In theology he held that God's word (the Qur'an) cannot conflict with God's work (nature), and his Qur'an commentary (tafsir) sought to read scripture in harmony with reason and natural law. Many traditional scholars (ulama) condemned these readings; the activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani derided him as a nechari ("naturist"). His admirers count him a pioneer of Islamic modernism. He was knighted in 1888 and died at Aligarh in 1898.