Aligarh Movement and Reforms in

Muslim Society and the Rise of AIML

1
 Lecture Outlines
 Aligarh Movement and the Role of Sir Syed
Ahmad Khan in Social Reforms in Muslim Society
 Deoband Movement and its Role in the
Development of the Muslim and its Stand against
Syed Ahmad
 Formation of All India Muslim League (AIML)
 Weaknesses of AIML and its Impacts on Politics in
Independent Pakistan
 AIML and Bangladesh

2
 Aligarh Movement and AIML
 After 1757, the Muslims emerged as a backward nation;
they were illiterate and hopelessly ignorant in every walk of
life.
 They were deprived of their basic rights and were neglected
in every sphere of life.
 In such conditions, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan came forward
and tried to help the Muslims come out from such
deplorable and miserable conditions.
 He started a movement in order to give respectable position
to Muslims in society as they had in past, this movement is
known as Aligarh Movement. The main focus of the
Aligarh movement was:
3
 Aligarh Movement and AIML
 Loyalty to British Government.
 Modern western education for the Muslims to compete with
Hindus.
 To keep away the Muslims from politics.
 Sir Syed realized that this miserable and deplorable condition
of Muslims was due to the lack of modern education. He took
concrete steps for his education plan.
 The movement′s name derives from the fact that its core and
origins lay in the city of Aligarh in Northern India and in
particular, with the foundation of the Mohammedan Anglo
Oriental Collegiate School in 1875. 
 The founder of the oriental college, and the other educational
institutions that developed from it, was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.
4
 Aligarh Movement and AIML
 He came from a family of nobles of the Mughal court. He joined
the services of the East India Company as a judicial officer and
remained loyal to them during the revolt of 1857.
 He strove hard to remove the hostility of the British rulers
towards the Muslims.
 He opposed the activities of the Indian national congress. He
believed, like many other leaders at that time that Indians were
not yet ready to govern themselves and that their interests would
be best served by remaining loyal to the British rule.
 He founded the Indian patriotic Association with the support of
some Hindu and Muslim leaders to oppose the congress and
tried to dissuade the Muslims from joining the congress.
 He emphasized the unity between Hindus and Muslims.
5
 Aligarh Movement and AIML
 He became the leading light of the wider Aligarh Movement.
 The educational reform established a base, and an impetus, for
the wider Movement:
 an Indian Muslim renaissance that had a profound implications
for the religion, the politics, the culture and society of the Indian
sub-continent.
 Aligarh Muslim University is the creation of the movement.
 It provided for education in humanities and science through
English medium and many of its staff members came from
England.
 In 1886 Sir Syed Ahmad Khan founded the All India
Muhammadan Educational Conference in order to promote more
broadly the educational objectives of Aligarh Movement. 6
 Aligarh Movement
 The Aligarh Movement had a profound impact on the Indian society,
particularly on the Muslim society compared to the other powerful but
less adaptable movements of the 19th century.
 It influenced a number of other contemporary movements to a great
extent that it caused the emergence of other socio-religious
movements during the 19th century.
 The impact of Aligarh Movement was not confined to the Northern
India only, but its expansion could be seen on the other regions of the
Indian sub-continent during the 20th century.
 The Aligarh Movement was made a weighty and lasting contribution
to the political emancipation of Indian Muslims. The movement was
political in nature from the very beginning.
 The Deoband school was opposed to the movement as Aligarh
Movement was pro British.
7
 Aligarh Movement
 In the line of this thought Muslim elite like Nawab Abdul
Latif, Syed Amir Ali and others established cultural
organizations for propagation of English education among
the Muslims in the absence of which the community
remained deprived of the benefits of the colonial state.
 Thus the Muslim cultural organizations like
the MOHAMMEDAN LITERARY
SOCIETY (1863), CENTRAL NATIONAL
MUHAMEDAN ASSOCIATION (1877), Sir Syed's United
Indian Patriotic Association (1888) and many other local
anzumans became more active in social regenerative
activities than in politics.
8
 Aligarh Movement
 Syed Ahmed tried to convert upper-class Muslims of western
U.P. to the virtues and benefits of English education through a
Scientific Society (1864), a modernistic Urdu journal Tahzib
al-akhlaq (1870), and the Aligarh Anglo-Muhammadan
Oriental College (1875).
 His interpretation of Islam emphasized the validity of free
enquiry (ijtihad) and the alleged similarities between Koranic
revelation and the laws of nature discovered by modern
science.
 Yet the theology classes in Aligarh were directed by orthodox
Mullahs, and the modernistic elements in the Aligarh
movement came to be considerably toned down over time,
particularly under Muhsin al-Mulk.
9
 .
 British Support for Aligarh Movement
 His program dovetailed neatly with the aims of the new British
policy as formulated by Hunter's Indian Mussalmans
commissioned by Mayo in 1871-combination knowledge of
the west and acquaintance with religious code to command the
respect of their community.
 Aligarh consequently got a quite unusual amount of British
patronage, including a personal donation of Rs 10,000 from
the Viceroy, Lord Northbrooke.
 As Francis Robinson has pointed out, it was through British
support, above all, that 'a man whose religious views were so
unorthodox that the majority of his co-religionists branded him
an infidel was raised up as the advocate of his community'.
 ,
10
 British Support for Aligarh Movement
 The initial British support for Aligarh was due not so much
to the need for a counterpoise against Congress-type
nationalism
 but to official fears concerning certain other trends within
Indian Islam-the so-called 'fanaticism' and anti-foreign
mentality preached by some religious leaders
 which often seemed to find a ready response among the
'pre-industrial lower middle class of petty landholders,
country-town mullahs, teachers, booksellers, small
shopkeepers, minor officials and skilled artisans... men
literate in the vernaeular ... quick to be seized by religious
passion.
11
 Deoband Movement
 A more muted kind of anti-British temper survived in the religious
seminary started at Deoband in 1867.
 Rigidly orthodox, unlike the Wahhabis, and hostile to Syed Ahmed
for his theological innovations and political loyalism alike, Deoband
attracted relatively poor students who could not afford Western
education, remained influential through the madrasah teachers it
produced and in the twentieth century provided fairly consistent
support to Congress nationalism.
 What alarmed the British more, however, was the occasional evidence
of pan-Islamic sentiments aroused by the distant figure of the
Ottoman Sultan-Khalifa particularly during the Balkan war of 1876-
78 and the Greco-Turkish war of 1896-97.
 The founder of modern pan-Islamism, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, was
himself in India between 1879 and 1882, writing and giving lectures
in Hyderabad and Calcutta. 12
 Deoband Movement
 Though Jamal al-Din made a violent attack on Syed Ahmed in a
Refutation of the Materialists (1882), modern research has established
that his real quarrel was against the latter's subservience towards the
British.
 Al-Afghani's own theological ideas were at least as heterodox, and he
passionately pleaded for Hindu-Muslim unity in lectures to Calcutta
students. Khilafat leaders built Jamia Milia Islamia in 1920.
 By the late 1890s, there is evidence that even Calcutta Muslim jute
workers were being taught to look upon the Sultan as a distant but
mighty protector.
 Pan-Islamism contributed to the Calcutta riots of 1897; twenty years
later it was to become for some time a powerful anti-imperialist force
through the Khilafat movement.

13
 All India Muslim League (AIML)
 The Muslim leaders of India met informally once a year in a
conference to discuss educational problems of the Muslim
community and to disseminate the thought of loyalty to the
raj.
 Such a conference (All India Muslim Education
Conference) was held at Shahbag in Dhaka in 1906 against
the backdrop of the Congress sponsored agitation against
the PARTITION OF BENGAL (1905) and the SWADESHI
MOVEMENT.
 Previously, a deputation of Muslim leaders met Governor
General lord Minto at Simla in order to ventilate problems
special to the Muslim community of India. 
14
 AIML
 NAWAB SALIMULLAH of Dhaka, the staunchest
supporter of the Partition of Bengal, felt the need to form a
political party to counter the anti-partition agitation
launched by the Congress cadres.
 He proposed in this conference to make a political platform
with the objectives of safeguarding the interests of the
Indian Muslims.
 Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk, chairman of the conference,
supported the motion and thus the All India Muslim League
(AIML) came into being.
 The Muslim League remained in a moribund condition for
full one year after its inception in December 1906.
15
 AIML
 In the 1910s, the League adopted a creed similar to that of
the Indian National Congress.
 When the Hindu-Muslim relation improved considerably,
for instance during the period of Lucknow Agreement
(1916) and the period of Khilafat and Non-cooperation
Movement, AIML became almost a dead organization.
 For several years since 1920, the Muslim League was in a
state of suspended animation as the Khilafat organization
had taken up all the work of the community at the time, and
the League had practically nothing to do.

16
 AIML
 Though founded as a political organization, the Muslim
League did not develop any noticeable political program
even within the framework of loyalty to the raj.
 It was never a meaningful organization politically until
Muhammad Ali Jinnah took up its leadership in 1935.
 Implored by many Muslim leaders, Jinnah returned from
London to India and took up the presidency of the Muslim
League.
 In view of the ensuing general elections under the India Act
of 1935, Jinnah reorganized and restructured the central and
provincial branches of the Muslim League and asked the
new committees to get ready for electoral politics ahead.
17
 AIML
 In the elections held in 1937, the Muslim League had an
astounding performance in Bengal.
 Of the total 482 seats reserved for the Muslims in all nine
provinces, the League could secure only 104.
 As high as 36 seats, more than one third of the total, were
bagged from Bengal alone.
 Party-wise, the Muslim League emerged as the second
largest group in the legislature, the first being the Congress.

18
 AIML
 The Bengal victory of the League was said to have been
scored on account of the combined support of the Western
educated Bengal Muslim professionals and the Muslim
landed gentry.
 In 1937, AK FAZLUL HUQ, Chief Minister of Bengal,
joined the Muslim League and with that his ministry had
become virtually a Muslim League one.
 Using the immense personal popularity of Huq, Bengal was
made the fortress for the League.

19
 AIML
 Fazlul Huq as the leader of the Bengal Muslims moved
the LAHORE RESOLUTION for independent 'homelands'
for the Indian Muslims from the platform of the Muslim
League.
 The Lahore Resolution of 1940 had a tremendous effect on
the Bengal Muslim public opinion.
 The Muslim League had formed the ministry under the
leadership of KHWAJA NAZIMUDDIN in 1943 when
Fazlul Huq tendered his resignation on the advice of the
Governor, JOHN HERBERT.

20
 AIML
 The period from 1943 to 1946 was the period for making
the Muslim League a real national organization.
 Under the leadership of HUSEYN SHAHEED
SUHRAWARDY and ABUL HASHIM, the League became
so popular that in the elections of 1946 it bagged 110 seats
out of 117 reserved for the Muslims of Bengal.
 It established the fact that the Muslim League was the sole
spokesman of the Bengal Muslim community.
 The League performance in other Muslim dominated
provinces of India was equally enthusiastic besides the
North West Frontier Province which was still under the
Congress influence.
21
 AIML
 The performance of the League in the elections of 1946
made its leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah the undisputed
leader of the Indian Muslims.
 So far as the Muslim community was concerned, Jinnah was
now inevitably to be consulted with in all negotiations and
agreements concerning the transfer of power by the British.
 Six years after the Lahore Resolution, HS Suhrahardy
moved the resolution for 'a Muslim state' at the Delhi
Convention of the Muslim Legislators.
 The Muslim League became the organization for almost
every Indian Muslim when the independence came on 14
August 1947.
22
 AIML-Weakness
 The Muslim League was not as firmly institutionalized as Congress.
Neither did its leaders possess a similar experience of government.
 In the key areas that were to form Pakistan, the Muslim League was a
relative latecomer.
 Apart from Bengal, the party had failed dismally in the Muslim
majority provinces in the 1937 provincial elections.
 In order to achieve a breakthrough in the 1946 polls, it had been
forced to compromise with traditionalist systems of clientelist politics.
 Within its ranks there was much greater opportunism and lack of a
public service ideal than was evident in Congress.
 The party was thus less well equipped on a number of counts to
perform the tasks of political development.
 This was a crucial weakness in the light of the democratic deficit.
23
 AIML-Weaknesses
 It was only in Bengal that the Muslim League possessed a mass base
of support and an organization of full-time workers similar to that of
Congress.
 This was the result of the efforts of its dynamic secretary, Abul
Hashim.
 Full-time workers were trained and accommodated in party houses.
By the eve of the 1946 elections the Bengal Muslim League had one
million members.
 There was some organizational development in other “Pakistan areas”
after 1944, but in many districts, League branches existed only on
paper. In Punjab, the cornerstone of Pakistan, its membership stood at
just 150,000.
 Factional infighting in the Frontier League prompted an enquiry by
the All-India Committee of Action in June 1944 which admitted that
“there was no organization worth the name” in the province. The
24
Sindh Muslim League had just 48,500 members.
 AIML-Weaknesses
 The pyramid of branches stretching from the localities to the All-
India level, which was the hallmark of Congress, was thus noticeably
absent throughout most of the future Pakistan areas.
 The Muslim League was thus far less able to form a democratic pillar
of the postcolonial state than its Congress counterpart.
 In 1946 the Muslim League achieved the victories it required to lend
credibility to the Pakistan demand, despite this organizational
weakness.
 It had to compromise to do so. This involved accepting opportunistic
converts from rival parties such as the Punjab Unionists.
 It also had to mobilize support through existing power structures such
as biradari (kinship groups) and sufi networks.
 Loyal party officials were bypassed for election tickets in favor of
elite power holders.
25
 AIML-Weaknesses
 In Sindh, the Muslim League had to adapt itself to the
power of the large landowners who dominated the lives of
their laborers.
 Votes could not be obtained in Sindh’s interior without the
support of the landowners.
 but they were primarily concerned with their own factional
rivalries, rather than mobilizing support for the Pakistan
ideal.
 The Muslim League’s approach to electioneering in future
Pakistan areas was to be crucial in legitimizing its demand,
but stored up problems for the future.
 It endorsed clientelist politics with its accompanying
opportunism, factionalism, and corruption. 26
 AIML-Weaknesses
 Of equal concern was the inexperience of the provincial
Muslim League leaderships. The League never formed a
government in Punjab before Independence.
 Its politics were dominated by the cross-communal Unionist
Party, whose power relied on a combination of the personal
influence of the rural elites and legislative enactments to
prevent expropriation by the moneylenders.
 When the Coalition Unionist Government finally resigned
in March 1947, Punjab remained under governor’s rule until
the end of the Raj.
 While the Muslim Leaguers in Punjab entered the post-
Independence era with little experience of office,
27
 AIML
 their counterparts in Sindh were already well versed in
using power to feather their own nests through the
manipulation of wartime contracts and the control of
rationed and requisitioned goods.
 In the Frontier, it was only after the imprisonment of many
Congress representatives that it was able to form its first
government in May 1943.
 What ensued was an undignified scramble for power and
profit marked by bitter rivalries between the ministerial and
organizational wings of the party, rather than schooling in
the arts of government.
 Factionalism, corruption, and violence formed part of the
League’s everyday experience. 28
 AIML
 Together, inexperience, institutional weakness, and the low level
of political culture inherited from the freedom struggle militated
against Pakistan’s future democratic consolidation.
 The legacy of the freedom movement was ironically most
problematic in Bengal where the Muslim League had put down
the most roots.
 There was incipient conflict between the Urdu- and Bengali-
speaking elites even at the height of the freedom struggle.
 The former remained loyal to Jinnah’s conception of an East Pakistan
zone within a single Pakistan state.
 They also subscribed to the belief, expressed as early as July 1933 by
the All-Bengal Urdu association, that “Bengali is a Hinduized and
Sanskritized language” and
29
 AIML and Bangladesh
 that, “in the interests of the Muslims themselves it is
necessary that they should try to have one language which
cannot be but Urdu.
 This was, of course, in keeping with the Muslim League’s
official two nation theory, an ideology that viewed the
community as monolithic and set apart from the Hindus.
 These views were challenged by Bengali-speaking Muslim
Leaguers.
 In his May 1944 Presidential address, the Muslim League
journalist-cum-politician Abul Mansur Ahmed maintained
that Bengali Muslims were not only different from Hindus
but from Muslims of other provinces.
30
 AIMLand Bangladesh
 It was, however, the Urdu-speaking Bengalis who wielded
influence in the All-India Muslim League.
 Jinnah never nominated Abul Hashim to its working
committee.
 He preferred to deal with such trusted lieutenants as Hasan
and Ahmed Ispahani, who knew little of Bengal outside
Calcutta,
 or with the conservative Nawab of Dhaka whose
newspapers dubbed Hashim and his supporters as
communists.

31
 AIML and Bangladesh
 They indeed fought for liberation “from all forms of
oppression”.
 Moreover, their vision was for a sovereign East Pakistan
state.
 Indeed, Hashim prophetically warned that a united Pakistan
would result in the imposition both of Urdu and an alien
bureaucracy and reduce East Bengal to a stagnant
backwater.
 Both the language issue and the marginalization of Bengali
political influence were subsequently to dominate East–
West Pakistan relations and contribute to the Bangladesh
breakaway of 1971.
32