Sayyid Ahmad Khan
Sayyid Ahmad Khan, born in Delhi in 1817 into a family close to the Mughal court, served the East India Company as a judicial officer and remained loyal during the rebellion of 1857. Afterwards he wrote an essay on the causes of the revolt, arguing that the British had misunderstood Indians, and set himself to reconcile Muslims with British rule and with modern learning. He was convinced that the Muslim elite of north India, which had lost power and position, would decline further unless it took up English education and modern science. He also wrote on religion, arguing that the Qur'an was consistent with reason and natural law, views that brought him fierce criticism from the ulama.
The college
After a visit to England in 1869–70, where he studied Oxford and Cambridge, Sayyid Ahmad founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, which began classes in 1875. The viceroy Lord Lytton laid the foundation stone in 1877. The college was residential, modelled on the English universities, and combined Western subjects taught in English with religious instruction. It was open to students of all faiths, and its early staff included British principals such as Theodore Beck.
The Aligarh movement
The college became the centre of a wider movement for Muslim education and reform, with the Muhammadan Educational Conference, founded in 1886, spreading its ideas. Sayyid Ahmad opposed Muslim participation in the Indian National Congress, arguing that representative government would leave Muslims at the mercy of a Hindu majority, a position later seen as a precursor of separate Muslim politics. Many founders and leaders of the All-India Muslim League were Aligarh graduates, and the university was an important base of the Pakistan movement in the 1940s.
Aligarh also produced nationalists. In 1920, during the Khilafat and non-cooperation movements, a group of teachers and students left to found the Jamia Millia Islamia, among them Zakir Husain, later president of India.
The university
The college became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. After independence it remained in India and continued as a central university. The question of whether it has the status of a minority institution under the constitution has been the subject of long litigation; in 1967 the Supreme Court held that it did not, and in 2024 a larger bench overruled that decision and sent the question back to be decided on new criteria.
Further reading
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1994
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
See also
- All India Muslim League — The All India Muslim League was a political organization founded in 1906 to safeguard Muslim political interests in British India, which by the 1940s had become the principal vehicle for the demand for a separate state of Pakistan.
- Revolt of 1857 — A large-scale uprising against East India Company rule that began among sepoys of the Bengal Army in May 1857 and spread across much of north and central India before being suppressed in 1858.
- Khilafat movement — The Khilafat movement was a pan-Islamic political campaign by Indian Muslims between 1919 and 1924 to pressure the British government to preserve the Ottoman caliphate after the First World War, which merged with Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement to form the broadest joint Hindu-Muslim mobilisation of the early nationalist period.
- Partition of India — The Partition of India in 1947 divided British India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan, ending British colonial rule and triggering mass migration and communal violence on a scale unmatched in modern history.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.