Ahmad Khan, Sayyid
AHMAD KHAN, SAYYID (1817–1898), also known on the Indian subcontinent as Sir Sayyid; educational reformer and religious thinker. He was born in Delhi on October 17, 1817, and died at Aligarh on March 27, 1898. Raised in the house of his maternal grandfather, the Mughal noble Khwājah Farīd al-Dīn Khan (1747–1828), he received the traditional education of a Delhi gentleman, reading the Qurʾān in Arabic and Saʿdī's Gulistān and Bustān and the dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz in Persian, together with a smattering of works on mathematics, astronomy, and Greco-Arab medicine.
At the age of nineteen Ahmad Khan entered the judicial service of the East India Company, where he was to rise, in the course of his thirty-eight years of service, to the highest ranks then open to native Indians. From the 1840s onward he published a number of short scientific and religious works, but it was his historical scholarship, and especially his Urdu-language topographical work on Delhi, Ᾱthār al-ṣanādīd (1846; rev. ed., 1852), that made him known internationally.
He always considered the British the legitimate rulers of India, but a major turning point in his life came with the failure of the Indian Revolution, known as the Mutiny of 1857.
This page contains 201 words.
Ahmad Khan, Sayyid article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 1,593 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Syed Ahmed Khan Article
