Syed Ahmad Khan

Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), born Syed Ahmad Taqvi on 17 October 1817 in Delhi, was the reformer and educationist who led the Aligarh Movement and founded the college that became Aligarh Muslim University. Born into a family close to the fading Mughal court, he entered the Company's judicial service as a young man and rose to sub-judge; at Bijnor in 1857 he sheltered European lives during the uprising, and afterwards wrote his searching account of the revolt's causes. Convinced that his people's future lay in modern learning, he founded the Scientific Society in 1864 to carry Western knowledge into Urdu, visited England in 1869–70 to study its universities, and in 1870 began the journal Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq, which taught a new plain prose and a rational, questioning temper. In 1875 he founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, and in 1886 the Muhammadan Educational Conference. His great works — the survey of Delhi's monuments, his history of the revolt, and his commentary on the Quran — sit beside a lifetime of essays urging reason, science and education. Knighted in 1888, he died at Aligarh on 27 March 1898 and lies buried in the college mosque.