Syed Ameer Ali: A Modern South Asian Thinker
By
Mohammad Ali, New Age Islam
25 August 2022
Ameer
Ali Set Out To Remove Them By Introducing Prophet Muhammad Not Solely As An
Object Of Attraction Of The Divine Revelation But Also As A ‘Seer’ A ‘Teacher’,
And A ‘Philosopher’ Who Contributed The Most To The Uplift Of Humanity
Main
Points:
• This essay discusses the salient points
of the thoughts of one of the most prominent and earliest Muslim modernists of
South Asia.
• This essay derives ideas from his
seminal book, Spirit of Islam, and his memoirs, Memoirs and Other Writings of
Syed Ameer Ali (ed. S. Raza Wasti).
------
Syed
Ameer Ali (1849-1928)
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Biographical
Account
Syed Ameer
Ali was a jurist, Islamic scholar, and political activist. He is almost the
forgotten literary-activist figure who served India during the British Raj. His
excellent life-spanning efforts, may be regarded, were aimed at making Muslims
able to present themselves in political, social, and religious arenas globally.
His time witnessed the political and social degradation of Muslim society, and
chaos prevailed for finding a way out of this situation. The assaults of
Christian missionaries on Islam and the Prophet Muhammad were adding to the
exacerbation of the condition.
Being
instructed in modern and traditional education along with having a good
acquaintance with Western literature, Ameer Ali considered himself capable
enough to answer the challenges on behalf of his community. His remarkable,
‘The Spirit of Islam (1891)’ in addition to other articles which he contributed
to the journals are the embodiments of the answers to the accusations against
Islam, the Prophet, and Islamic history, plus a thorough survey of Islamic
history for digging out the causes that led Muslim civilization to its zenith,
and later on to fall. Unlike his contemporary Syed Ahmed Khan, the great
reformist, and proponent of modern education among Muslims, Ameer Ali was an advocate
of political activism among the Muslim community.
Therefore,
he established the Central National Muhammadan Association in 1877 for the
political advancement of Muslims, seven years before the birth of the Indian
National Congress. This made a great deal of influence over the subsequent
Muslim movements and activism.
Syed Ameer
Ali (1849-1929) was born in Chinsura, Bengal, in a Shia Muslim family. He was
educated at Hooghly College, and in 1869 sailed for London for studying Law;
thence he was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1873. He successfully
served his Indian career holding various legal positions and retired in 1904 as
a Judge of the Calcutta High Court; during these days, he gave lectures in
Islamic Law at Presidency College of Calcutta University as well. After his
retirement, Ameer Ali settled in England for the rest of his life; there he
served Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the Royal Asiatic Society
holding prestigious positions until his death.
Main
Body of Thought
On Sirah
Writing: Ameer Ali,
as a pioneer Muslim, ventured to establish a new tradition, and find new
vocabularies and idioms in the complete foreign atmosphere of the English
language for presenting Islam to the new world, combining traditional
narrations with the modern values and ideologies together. His first exposition of Islam was the
biography (sirah) of the Prophet Muhammad entitled, ‘The Critical Examination
of the Life and Teachings of Muhammad (1873).’ It became the first commentary
on Islam in English by a Muslim author. Later on, he revised the book and
published it with some additions under a new title, ‘The Spirit of Islam’
(1891). This book is the most celebrated and important among the oeuvre of
Ameer Ali which I have primarily referred to for this article as a source of
his ideas.
Disappointed
with the constructed misconceptions that prevailed in the writings of the
orientalists about the Prophet Muhammad, Ameer Ali set out to remove them by
introducing Prophet Muhammad not solely as an object of attraction of the
divine revelation but also as a ‘seer’ a ‘teacher’, and a ‘philosopher’ who
contributed the most to the upliftt of humanity.
With a
peculiar lucid literary style, Ameer Ali begins by narrating a brief account of
the religions and civilizations cultivated before the birth of the Prophet
Muhammad with an obvious purpose to demonstrate the subsequent achievements
Muhammad could accomplish in his plan of the development of the human race
while the other religions and civilizations failed. However, nothing is new in
his retelling of the history of the preceding religions and civilizations—in
fact, he inherited it from the traditional Seerah writers. But, what
distinguishes Ameer Ali from the traditionalists is that he incorporated in his
story a theory of the spiritual and intellectual evolution of humankind which
took place in the course of several centuries, and after reaching the seventh
century had culminated into its perfect form in the person of the Prophet
Muhammad.
Therefore, the
system, i.e., Islam, the Prophet preached, according to Ameer Ali, was complete
in its form in comparison to the previous ones. Ameer Ali argued that before
the advent of Muhammad, the entire world was plunged into destitution and moral
laxity, and humanity, in the state of utter abject, was crying for the divine
help through a deliverer, a messiah—that Muhammad himself was destined to be.
As a solitary and humble orphan boy, Muhammad grew up, having many thoughts in
mind. He despised the immorality and licentious deeds of his people, their
indulgence in idolatry and superstitions, their belligerent nature, and the
wretched state of slaves and women in his society.
He set an
exemplary figure adorned with the highest virtues of love, compassion, steadfastness,
forgiveness, tolerance, and striving. Muhammad’s achievements in elevating the
dignity of mankind and rationalism, which he acquired within a short period of
his divine commission, Ameer Ali averred, revolutionized enormously the
subsequent development of humanity.
On Islamic
History and Culture: Ameer Ali’s writings on Islamic history, culture, and
civilization were the extension of his plan of furnishing a full-length view of
the Islamic past—the blaze of glory that Islam had produced. He eloquently and
more confidently presents Islam as a pro-humanitarian and progressive world
religion. To him, Islam played a vital role in engendering a great civilization
thriving on the three continents i.e., Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The values
of the Divine Unicity, the natural and practical equality of man, and man’s
accountability for the deeds that he does in this world in front of God in the
Hereafter. Islam infused into its adherents with the utmost civilized fashion,
freed man from the fetters of dogmatic formalism and sacerdotalism, and
educated him about the freethinking aired with the democratic spirit. For
underpinning his thesis, Ameer Ali went on to narrate the unprecedented
achievements the Muslim civilization accomplished in the field of science and
learning. Islam even succeeded in eradicating those cruel customs cursing
humanity since time immemorial, e.g. the institutions of slavery and polygamy,
whereas the other religions and civilizations had failed so far.
At the time
when the other religions and cultures recognized these institutions, Islam
restrained them by enforcing many conditions, which made them almost
impractical. Ameer Ali believes that it was impossible for Islam to outlaw
these customs at once, as they were deep-rooted into the thread of the social fabric,
it had to choose a way of gradual redemption from these practices. However, its
followers, Muslims, did not act in accordance with the spirit of the message of
Islam. Had they worked accordingly, these institutions would have been
extinguished many years ago.
To Ameer Ali, this wonderful civilization
based its foundation on reason and freethinking, which over time lost its
vitality by giving way to patristic formalism and orthodoxy. The eventual
prevalence of Asha’ri’s formalism, which represents today’s Ahle Sunnat
Wa-Jama’t and Tasawwuf’s quietism, he maintains, along with the inroads of the
hordes of the Crusaders and Mongols that destroyed the centers of learning and
civilization in North Africa, West Asia, and Central Asia, led to the decadence
and fall of the Islamic civilization. The lost glory of the civilization, he
prescribed, can only be restored through traversing the same path of
rationalism the earliest predecessors walked upon.
On The
Legal Status of Women in Islam: Early in his career, while studying in London,
Ameer Ali encountered the revolutionary waves of feminism emerging out of the
sphere of Western society. He recounts, in his memoirs, the wonderment that
took over him when he heard of the legal position of women the British law
conferred on them, and his satisfaction over the legal position of women that
Islam has secured under its law many centuries ago. Ameer Ali was of the
opinion that only through the material and cultural advancement out of the
evolution of human enlightenment, absolute equality of sexes based on
practicality could be realized. And Muslims inspired by the injunctions of the
Muhammadan law were enjoying that state of advancement in the early years of
their prosperity. Muhammad raised the status of women from the abysmal depth of
degradation to such a lofty place underneath whose feet lies Paradise—
‘Paradise is at the feet of the mother’, said the Prophet. Washing out the
prevailing misconceptions regarding the injunctions of Islam which were thought
to be responsible for degrading the situation of Muslim women, Ameer Ali
reiterated the Islamic laws and instances from the Sirah (Prophet’s
biography), and Islamic history. ‘The reforms instituted by Mohammad, he wrote,
affected a vast and marked improvement in the position of women’… ‘(he)
enforced as one of the essential teachings of his creed, ‘respect for women’...
and ‘He placed them on a footing of perfect equality with men in the exercise
of all legal powers and functions.’
Ameer Ali
thinks that some political and social institutions are not at once possible to
be effaced from a society. Therefore, reformers strategize by planting
principles in the hearts of their followers expecting that when the time would
be ripe they would work out for their abolition. He thinks that the institution
of polygamy in Islam is one of the institutions of pre-Islamic society, which
Prophet Muhammad retained, but set some principles hoping that it would be
obliterated when the time would reach: ‘he restrained it (the institution) by
limiting the number of marriages and by making absolute equity towards all
obligatory on the man.’ These conditions, he said, therefore, cut down the
permission of its legitimate dimensions. He argues that the conditions of
limiting marriages and treating all the wives with equity were a pragmatic and
progressive strategy that the Prophet Muhammad adopted at that time, which,
after some time, should have been developed into the institution of monogamy if
Muslims had acted according to the spirit of the Quranic injunctions.
Going
through some historical occurrences, Amir Ali observes that until the age of
the Abbasid Caliph, Qadir Billah (d.1031), Muslim women relished the legal
rights of freedom, independence, self-respect, and dignity Islam had provided
them. But gradually, because of the growing influence of the orthodox
conformity and the infiltration of foreign influence in the form of Mongols and
Turks, not because of Islam, this noble image of the Muslim woman, a free and
independent woman, disappeared.
Ameer Ali
was perhaps the first Muslim who strived for carving out an image from the
Islamic past of such a dignified Muslim woman that was standing equally as
important to the other segment of the society.
In the time
of decadence and humiliation, Ameer Ali’s recitation from the past forms a
magnificent history of Islamic civilization which helped in generating a wave
of nostalgia among South Asian Muslims during the colonial period. By such an
analysis of the ebbs and tides of the entire Muslim history, Ameer Ali tried to
educate the Muslim community about the way out of the chaotic and confusing
situation they had been suffering from. Though his endeavours can be
interpreted as the earliest efforts to bring Islamic revival through the
restoration of the civilizational glory, which caught subsequent generations
into a trance, and the heroes whose achievements he described so eloquently
received full attention in the publications of the succeeding authors, such as
Shibli Naumani, who also wrote about Muslim heroes like Caliph Umar, and Mamun.
But the
later Islamic revivalists in South Asia sought revivalism of Islam through
puritanical measures with an emphasis on the necessity of the political
dominance of Islam. Thinkers like Maulana Maududi also rejected Muslim history
after the four immediate successors of the Prophet Muhammad by declaring it as
un-Islamic, which Ameer Ali took so much pain to glorify. Nevertheless, Ameer
Ali’s efforts for the affirmation of the cultural and religious identity of
Muslims had far-reaching effects and were the earliest motivations of Muslim
revivalist activism.
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Mohammad
Ali has been a madrasa student. He has also participated in a three-year
program of the “Madrasa Discourses,” a program for madrasa graduates initiated
by the University of Notre Dame, USA. Currently, he is a Ph.D. Scholar at the
Department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. His areas of
interest include Muslim intellectual history, Muslim philosophy, Ilm-al-Kalam,
Muslim sectarian conflicts, and madrasa discourses. He can be reached at
mohammad91.ali@gmail.
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-personalities/ameer-modern-south-asian-thinker/d/127796
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