Sir Syed Ahmad Khan: Life, Works and the Aligarh Movement

Syed Ahmad was born in Delhi in 1817 into a family close to the Mughal court. He joined the East India Company's judicial service in 1838. During the uprising of 1857 he was a judicial officer at Bijnor, where he protected the English residents.

In 1869–70 he spent more than a year in England, and returned convinced that Indian Muslims needed modern Western education. In 1875 he founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, which became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. He was knighted in 1888 and died in Aligarh in 1898.

Asar-us-Sanadid (1847): a survey of the monuments of Delhi.

Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind (The Causes of the Indian Revolt, 1859): a bold argument that British policy, not Indian treachery, caused the uprising.

Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq (from 1870): the journal of reform, and his essays in it. See our guide to the essays or read them here.

Commentaries on the Bible and the Qur'an, and many lectures and letters.

Sir Syed's influence runs through everything that followed: Hali wrote the Musaddas at his urging and his biography, Hayat-e-Javed; Nazir Ahmad satirised the extremes of his movement in Ibn-ul-Waqt. His prose, written to persuade ordinary readers, remains a model of clarity.