Syed Ahmad Khan

Syed Ahmad Khan saved the lives of Europeans in 1857, then wrote the pamphlet telling the British it had been their own fault, and spent forty years building a college. He came from a Mughal service family in Delhi and was a judicial officer of the East India Company at Bijnor when the rising began; he protected the European families there at real risk, and afterwards found his own family scattered and his city sacked. The Causes of the Indian Revolt, written in 1858 and sent to London, argued that the rebellion came from the exclusion of Indians from government, from ignorant interference in religion, and from the Company's refusal to listen - an extremely dangerous thing to publish in the year of the reprisals. His conclusion was that Indian Muslims had to acquire English education or be left permanently behind, and in 1875 he founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, which became Aligarh Muslim University. He wrote a commentary on the Bible arguing that Islam and Christianity were closer than either side allowed, and rationalist Quranic exegesis that the ulama condemned. He opposed the Indian National Congress, holding that elective majority rule would leave Muslims permanently outvoted. He was knighted in 1888 and sat on the viceroy s legislative council. His journal Tahzib al-Akhlaq argued for social reform among Muslims and was boycotted by clerics who declared him an unbeliever. He translated and published the Ain-i-Akbari and wrote an archaeological history of Delhi s monuments before the rising, several of which were destroyed shortly afterwards, so his book is the only record of some of them. Aligarh became the training ground of much of the leadership that later argued for Pakistan, which is a consequence he did not live to see and which is still debated as his legacy.

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