Syed Ameer Ali

Syed Ameer Ali (born April 6, 1849 in Cuttack , Orissa ; died August 3, 1928 at Pollingfold Manor near Rudgwick , Sussex , England ) was an Indian Muslim lawyer, prominent political leader and author of several influential books on the history of Islam .

Live and act

He was born in Cuttack in Odisha towards the end of the Mughal Empire as the fourth of five sons of Syed Saadat Ali. The family moved first to Calcutta , then to Chinsura . He attended UK schools and after an LL.B. Graduated from the University of Calcutta and worked as a lawyer in Calcutta in 1869. Even at that time he was one of the few successful Islamic climbers of his generation.

In the same year he moved to London . He stayed there until 1873, when he became a member of the Inner Temple Bar Association and made contacts with leading English liberals such as John Bright , Henry Fawcett and his wife Millicent Garrett Fawcett . After returning to India, he continued to practice as a lawyer at the Calcutta High Court . In 1874 he became a fellow at the University of Calcutta and received a position as a lecturer in Islamic law at the Presidency College there. After another year-long visit to England, he became Professor of Law at the University of Calcutta in 1881, and in 1883 a judge at the High Court there. As early as 1877 he had founded the Central National Muhammedan Association , which in the following years set up dozens of branches from Madras to Karachi , with the “promotion of a good relationship between the races and beliefs of India as well as the protection and safeguarding of Muslim interests and assistance their political training ”as their main objectives. In 1909 he received a seat on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on the proposal of Secretary of State John Morley , which he retained until his death, and thus became the first Indian member of the Privy Council .

In 1910, a public meeting was held in the Ritz Hotel in London , calling for the establishment of a mosque in London worthy of the tradition of Islam and the capital of the British Empire . A fund was set up, and alongside Syed Ameer Ali, celebrities such as Aga Khan , the Koran translators Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Marmaduke Pickthall , Lord Lamington , Earl Winterthon and Nathan Rothschild participated in its administration. But it was only after several decades that the East London Mosque could be opened.

In 1904 he resigned from his position at the High Court in Calcutta and moved to England with his English wife, Isabelle Ida Konstam, whom he had married in 1884. He died on August 3, 1928 at Pollingfold Manor near Rudgwick, Sussex, and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery .

In the literary field, he has emerged as the author of two major works: on the one hand through his Mohammed biography, which first appeared in 1873 under the title A Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mohammed and in 1891 with Support from English experts such as the philologist Isaac Taylor (1829–1901) when The Spirit of Islam was reissued in an expanded version. Orientalist David Samuel Margoliouth praised the second version of the work as a "charming and eloquent treatise" and added that it was "probably the best performance of an apology by Muhammad in a European language". A second important work is A Short History of the Saracens , "Brief History of the Saracens ". This book covers the rise and fall of Saracen power and the economic, social and intellectual development of the Arab nation from the earliest times to the destruction of Baghdad and the expulsion of the Moors from Spain .

Syed Ameer Ali had a special relationship with Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), an important figure in reform Islam and founder of the Aligarh movement , from which the later Muslim University of Aligarh emerged . While both Muslim thinkers campaigned for the spread of Western education on the Indian subcontinent , Ameer Ali placed increasing emphasis on English as the language of communication in order to spread his ideas.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Short biography , Center for Islamic Sciences (Canada), accessed April 4, 2019
2. ↑ From scholarship, sailors and sects to the mills and the mosques ( The Guardian , June 18, 2002)
3. ↑ open.ac.uk
4. ↑ Eminent Mussulmans

Publications (selection)

• The Spirit of Islam, or the Life and Teachings of Mohammed. Calcutta, 1902. Online
• A Short History of the Saracens . Macmillan, London 1951. Online
• The Rights of Persia. London 1919.
• Shan Muhammad (Ed.): The Right Hon'ble Syed Ameer Ali. Political Writings . New Delhi, 1989. Contents

Web links

• Dictionary of Indian Biography
• Iranica Online
• Newspaper article about Syed Ameer Ali in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .