Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of the MAO College that ultimately became the Aligarh Muslim University, is one of the great figures of nineteenth-century India, not only because he founded an educational institution, but because behind this achievement there was a yet larger cause which he espoused and to which, despite many turns in his career, he remained passionately devoted.

The essential element in Syed Ahmad Khan’s thought from early years in his life (1817-98) was an acceptance of many of the basic principles of modern civilization — above of all, of science and reason. If the preference for a clerical (and then judicial) career under the British Government over a sinecure at the Mughal court at Delhi could be attributed mainly to a farsighted appraisal of the relative longevity of the two regimes, something more than this was involved in his choice of the first Persian work he edited in 1855, the A’in-i Akbari, an account of the Mughal emperor Akbar’s administration, empire and Indian culture, by Abu’l Fazl, one of the notable votaries of reason in Medieval India. After the 1857 Rebellion, Syed Ahmad Khan directed his efforts particularly to spread the message of science, establishing a Translation Society (1865) which was soon renamed the Scientific Society. He became convinced that if Indians could imbibe the teachings of science, they could be as great as any other nation in the world. In a letter to the Scientific Society at Aligarh from London in 1869, he wrote: "If Hindustanis can only attain to civilization, it [India] will, probably, owing to its many excellent natural powers, become, if not superior to, at least, the equal of England." Given the rate of illiteracy in India at the time (and even today), these are the words of an eternal optimist: but there was surely no basic error of judgement here. Civilization, of course, meant for him the realm of reason and science.

The fact that the path to this realm lay through English education was as patent in Syed Ahmad Khan’s day as in those of Ram Mohan Roy. Such persons can be called "Macaulay-putras" only by those whose mission today is to revel in superstition and obscurantism, the two major features of our past culture, which both Ram Mohan Roy and Syed Ahmad Khan felt to be the principal chains imprisoning the Indian mind. Only the spread of scientific ideas through the medium of English (and, then, though the vernaculars) could help to eliminate irrational and superstitious beliefs and customs. Both Ram Mohan Roy and Syed Ahmad Khan had to face strong opposition from those within their communities, who stood by the older values.

Like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Syed Ahmad Khan too took the ideological battle to the camp of his adversaries. If the Qur’an was the "Word of God", it could not possibly be at variance with the "Work of God" as established by methods of science and reason. In case there is apparently a variance, it can only be because we have misunderstood the Word of God, having taken, for example an allegory for an actual description. As late 1892 he took delight in affirming that as our knowledge of the Work of God improves, our understanding of the Word of God must change. There could be not bolder statement than this for the upholding of reason: to Syed Ahmad Khan the very perfection of the Word of God meant that beliefs too alter as reason advances.

Today, when we hear even from the highest tribunal that religion is the source of all values, and so our school education must be filled by values attributed to some deity or saint or religious figure, it is surely time that heed is also paid to what Syed Ahmad Khan had said. It is wrong to suppose that his message was only addressed to Muslims: the argument he advanced cuts across the lines of all faiths. If over a hundred years have passed, and we have not learnt his message, it can only mean that the days of India’s future greatness may be still farther off than this man had dared to dream in 1869. And yet the dream stands there: it is for all of us to try to make it come true, whatever the odds.