IN 1869 Saiyid Ahmad Khan was to write from London to a Muslim friend in Aligarh: ‘I am reading William Muir’s book, but it has “burned” my heart’. The next year, still in London, he published a collection of Essays on the Life of Mohammed designed to refute William’s damaging representation of the Prophet. If this episode rightly indicates the depth of his outrage at William’s views, the story is complicated by the need each had for the other’s co-operation in their own separate but intersecting agendas for addressing, mainly through education, what both articulated for different reasons as Indian Muslim ‘backwardness’. This chapter focuses on contestations between them over questions of religion and society, leaving until Chapter Nine the theme of symbiotic co-operation through educational innovations.

What had happened in the intervening 12 years since 1857, during which their professional careers had touched at several points, to explain the nature and circumstances of Saiyid Ahmad’s outburst against William? William had meanwhile spent several years on the provincial board of revenue, well placed there to try to redress some ‘injustices’ in the form of confiscations of land for alleged ‘rebellion’ already noted in the case of the sons of the Najibabad nawabs. Two years in Calcutta as Foreign Secretary to the Government of India in the mid-1860s, a sign of his rising star, were then followed by the award of a knighthood and in 1868 his return to NWP as Lieutenant-Governor (fig. 4).

Saiyid Ahmad, meanwhile, after four years in judicial service at Moradabad, in the Rohilla territory, also assisting in the pacification process, had been transferred in 1862 to Ghazipur, then to Aligarh two years later where he was responsible for several important innovations, notably a scientific society and a bilingual Urdu and English newspaper, the Aligarh Institute Gazette. His final judicial posting, after which he resigned from British service to concentrate on the educational projects to which we will return in the next chapter, was to Benares, remaining there from 1867 until 1876, the year that William also retired from government service. Saiyid Ahmad had taken special leave, in 1869, significantly with William’s particular blessing, in order to visit England, an experience that would have as important an effect on many aspects of his thinking as had ‘1857’.