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...