At the end of the First World War India was in the throes of great political change. In 1919 the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms, which devolved some powers on Indians in the provinces, and the Rowlatt Act, which restricted Indian civil rights, had changed the legal and political structure of British colonialism. The massacre of Indian civilians at a festival at Jullianwala Bagh by British troops had created a breach between British rule and its Indian subjects. All of these developments served to energise the independence movement. The intellectual and political trajectory of Islam in India after 1919 was shaped in this environment and by Muslim responses to the gradual end of British rule during the inter-war period. Those responses in turn had their roots in intellectual and political developments which had emerged during colonial rule in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Following the Mutiny Uprising of 1857 Muslims reacted to colonial rule in a number of ways. One of the most celebrated was the modernist project of Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (d. 1898), which sought to reverse the decline of Islam in India by adopting new curricula of education and modern interpretations of the faith that brought many Muslims into the ambit of the colonial order. Reforming Muslim education also influenced ʿulamāʾ in forming new educational formulations such as the Nadwī and Iṣlāḥī traditions centred on Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ (Council of ʿulamāʾ) and Madrasat al-Iṣlāḥ (School of reform).