Art. XII.-AN INDIAN RENAISSANCE.

1. A History of English Education in India, 1781-1893. By Syed Mahmood. M.A.O. College, Aligarh, 1895. 2. The History of the M.A.0. College, Aligarh. By the Principal. Aligarh, 1903.

3. The Sayings of Muhammad. Edited by Abdullah AlMamun Al-Suhrawardy, M.A. London: Constable, 1905. 4. The Sword of Islam. By Arthur N. Wollaston, C.I.E. London: Murray, 1905.

And other works.

CONTACT with Western thought has, in the last hundred years, kindled a new life in each of the great communities of India; unrecorded and, for the most part, unperceived, this renaissance is yet the most momentous consequence of the British occupation. Our railways, our roads, and our canals will endure only so long as the 'British Peace' is maintained; but the English ideas which are transforming Indian society to-day have a vitality which does not depend upon our presence; they are a leaven which would continue to ferment even if the political connexion with England were to be destroyed. No single formula will correctly summarise the different developments of this intellectual awakening; there has not, indeed, been one renaissance in India, but a series of renaissances, each peculiar to a definite community. The clerkly castes, such as the Kayasths, learned English, as they had under other masters learned Persian, for professional purposes. Maratha and Bengali Brahmans were captivated by the liberal spirit of European culture, and embraced the English conceptions of liberty, patriotism, the dignity of man and his individual responsibility, with the ardour of a new gospel. To the few daring spirits who in early days ventured to read English, the world seemed transformed by the new teaching; and, uplifted by a generous enthusiasm, they went among their countrymen as apostles of European ideas. The Parsis appear to have been most influenced by the social organisation of the West; they were brought by the course of trade into personal contact with Englishmen; and they have, to a greater extent than any other Indian people, remodelled their society upon English lines. The only general remark

which can be made about these different movements is that in no class were the old ideals abandoned without a struggle; no community has been without its martyrs for European culture; and everywhere European ideas have so far prevailed that all the most hopeful movements in Indian society to-day are more or less directly inspired by the Western spirit.

For a long while the Muhammadans stood aloof from this Europeanising tendency. Although a large proportion of them are descendants of Hindu converts, they are very little influenced by the ideas prevailing among their Hindu fellow-countrymen. They feel and behave as a distinct community; they are aliens in India, with a civilisation and intellectual heritage of their own; they draw no inspiration from Sanskrit literature, but derive their ideals from the culture of Baghdad and Cordova; they do not look upon themselves primarily as Indians, but as members of the brotherhood of Islam; and consequently their sympathies are with the Afghan and the Arab, rather than with the Hindu and the Sikh, with whom they share the soil of India.

It was as Moslems rather than as Indians that they entertained a dislike of European civilisation; a dislike and distrust of Christendom was part of their Moslem heritage. For thirteen hundred years Islam, of which they were a detached fragment, had been at war with Christendom, and each side had come to look upon the other as its natural enemy. By the nineteenth century the Indian Muhammadans perceived that the long warfare had ended in the complete triumph of Christendom; they were obliged to confess that 'the sword had departed from Islam'; but this bitter reflection only made them the more averse from recognising any merit in Frankish civilisation, and the more determined to resist European influence. The most bigoted carried their devotion to the lost cause of Islam so far as to refuse to take service under the British Government; and, even to this day, there are some unbending Puritans who boast that no member of their family has ever eaten the salt of the English.

The bulk of the community, however, could not afford to be so scrupulous. Employment under Government was the natural occupation of the great majority of well-born

Muhammadans; under Pathan and Moghul rule they had filled almost all the appointments in the public service; and before the establishment of British authority they had come to look upon employment by the State as their hereditary calling. From this profession, which was no less honourable than lucrative, they were gradually ousted in the latter half of the nineteenth century. So early as 1844 the Government of India announced the intention of giving preference in the public services to those who had attended English schools and had passed certain examinations in Western arts and sciences. Even at the cost of exclusion from their ancestral, calling the Muhammadans refused to comply with these conditions. Their religious teachers, the Maulvis, told them that they would become kafirs (infidels) by the bare act of learning English; and the terrifying suggestion became current that the Moslem who knew English might, with his dying breath, utter English words instead of the Muhammadan confession of faith. To these ill-grounded convictions they sacrificed their worldly prosperity. They suffered themselves to be superseded by Hindus in the public services; the other liberal careers were being closed against them for the same reason; forensic pleading, medicine, and engineering were all being revolutionised by the introduction of English principles, with which Muhammadans refused to become familiar. The whole community was in evident decay; wealth and social esteem were passing from them; and their intellectual activity had shrunk to the composition of artificial erotic poetry or the annotation of theological commentaries. Such were the conditions out of which the Muhammadan renaissance took its rise.

The awakening assumed the shape of a religious reform; and the man to whom it was due was Syed Ahmad Khan. Himself a descendant of the Prophet, he was born and brought up in Delhi, among the Muhammadan grandees, who still followed the fallen fortunes of the Great Moghul; but, in defiance of the traditions of his family, he entered the service of the British Government in the subordinate judicial department, and behaved with courageous loyalty during the Mutiny of 1857, saving several British lives at the imminent risk of his own. He was repeatedly appointed a member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council,

was the intimate friend of Sir John Strachey and other English statesmen, was knighted by the Government in recognition of his great services both to the Crown and his own people, and died in March 1898 at the advanced age of eighty-one. I had the privilege of knowing him intimately for the last eight years of his life; and neither in England nor in India have I met any man who inspired me with so strong a feeling of reverence. His life-work was the inspiration of new hopes and of a new ideal into the minds of the Indian Muhammadans. Like Moses, to use a parallel that has occurred to many Englishmen, he lived to bring his people within sight of the Promised Land; one of his Muhammadan friends expressed a similar thought when he said, 'Other men have written books and built colleges, but to have arrested, as with a wall across their path, the decline of a whole people was the work of a Prophet.'

Sir Syed was before all things a religious reformer. To summarise his message very shortly, he sought to return to the simplicity and common-sense of primitive Islam; he denounced the traditions and glosses with which theologians had overlaid the Word of God, and appealed to the Koran to prove that the essence of Islam was the acknowledgment of one God and obedience to His law; this law, when properly understood and disencumbered of fabulous accretions, being in absolute harmony with reason. Sir Syed thus originated a rationalistic movement in the Islamic Church; his own belief in reason and his dislike of the marvels by which religion was obscured made him always prefer a natural to a miraculous explanation of the occurrences of holy writ; and he loved to insist upon the fact that Muhammad himself had expressly disclaimed any miraculous power. Owing to his insistence upon natural law and his belief that God does not interfere with the order of Nature, Sir Syed was called by his critics a 'necheri' (i.e. believer in Nature).

There can be no doubt that his desire to find a rationalistic explanation sometimes drove him to strain the obvious meaning of the Scriptures. Although, for instance, he acknowledged the inspiration of our Bible, he attempted to explain away the miracles of the Old Testament. He said to me upon one occasion: Why do

your writers insist that the ark rested upon the very summit of mount Ararat? There was no doubt in the time of Noah a very considerable flood, but that does not mean that the water covered mount Ararat to its topmost peak. I believe that the ark came to rest upon the top of one of the lower spurs of the mountain.' This intermediate position between the Muhammadan belief in verbal inspiration and modern scientific agnosticism was peculiar to Sir Syed himself. It was an unsatisfactory compromise, in which only a few minds could find rest; and, although Sir Syed effected a profound modification of the religious opinions of his time, his own views were never shared by any considerable number of persons. It was another set of opinions, corollaries of his religious faith, which were destined to exercise a great and lasting influence upon Muhammadan society.

Sir Syed's appeal from tradition to reason disposed him to set a high value upon good sense and scientific knowledge wherever he found them; and consequently he appreciated at their full value the intellectual achievements of European scholars. He denounced as an ignorant prejudice the ordinary Muhammadan aversion from Frankish learning, and declared that the true teaching of Islam was that Moslems should learn from any people who excelled them in knowledge. Of this he found many apt illustrations in early Muhammadan history. The Prophet himself is reported to have said, 'Go even to the walls of China for the sake of learning'; and the great Caliphs of Baghdad are known to have collected books from all the neighbouring countries and to have kept a regular staff of translators to render them into Arabic. Indeed, even at the present time, the Muhammadans confess the great obligations which their civilisation owed to the Christian Greeks; the Hakims, who practice medicine in Lucknow and Delhi, to this day call their art Greek medicine.

Sir Syed urged his people to show the same liberality towards the arts and sciences of Europe as the Arabs had shown to Greek learning. It was owing, he said, to their education that the English were superior to the Moslems both intellectually and morally; and the Moslems could only hope to rise to the European level by acquiring the Vol. 204.-No. 407.

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