Mohammad Ali Jauhar

Mohammad Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) was an Indian Muslim leader, journalist, scholar and Urdu poet, a leading figure of the Khilafat Movement. Born on 10 December 1878 at Rampur, he studied at Aligarh and at Lincoln College, Oxford, then served the Rampur state and the Baroda civil service before turning to journalism — founding the English weekly The Comrade in 1911 and the Urdu daily Hamdard in 1913. He co-founded the All-India Muslim League and Jamia Millia Islamia, led the Khilafat delegation to Europe in 1920, was imprisoned for sedition, and presided over the Indian National Congress in 1923. His Urdu poetry, collected in Deewan-e-Jauhar, carries the same fire as his politics: faith, sacrifice and resistance — above all his Karbala couplet, "the killing of Husain was in truth the death of Yazid", quoted for decades. He died of a stroke in London on 4 January 1931, days after the first Round Table Conference, and was buried in Jerusalem as he had wished.