Amir ‘Ali, Sayyid; 1849-1928), Indian jurist and author of Islamic modernist apologia. Syed Ameer Ali was born in Chinsura,Bengal into a Shi’i family with a history of service to Persian and Mughal rulers and to the nawabs of Awadh, as well as to the British East India Company. He was educated at Hooghly Collegeoutside Calcutta, then studied law in London and was called to the Bar in 1873. Returning to Calcutta to practice law, he also lectured in Islamic law at Presidency College of Calcutta University. In the 1870s he served as presidency magistrate. In 1881 he was appointed to the Bengal Legislative Council, and in 1883 to the Viceroy’s Legislative Council. In 1890 he was named a judge of the Bengal High Court, where he served until his retirement in 19o4. Thereafter he settled in England, his wife’s home, serving as a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council from 1909 until his death in 1928.
Ameer Ali’s distinguished public career was punctuated by frequent writings on Islamic topics for such British journals as Nineteenth Century. His books on Islamic religion and history were written in English with a Western readership in mind and established his reputation as a modern apologist for Islamic culture. His best-known works are A Short History of the Saracens (1889) and The Spirit of Islam (1891). He viewed Islam as the vehicle of rationality and dynamism during the age of European barbarism, and the Prophet Muhammad as a messenger of moral humanism and progress entirely in tune with the modern age. These works had considerable influence on the thinking of Western educated Muslims in India in their efforts to refute British or Christian missionary criticisms of their faith, and in their sense of an emerging political and religious identity.
Ameer Ali’s position and politics allied him with the British, but throughout his career he endeavored to represent Indian Muslim opinion, as he saw it, to the government. In 1877 he founded the Central National Muhammadan Association with the purpose of petitioning the British government to safeguard Muslim interests. He also established the London branch of the All-India Muslim League in 19o8; he lobbied for the establishment of separate electorates for Muslims, a provision of the Morley-Minto constitutional reforms of 1909. Ameer Ali also lobbied the British government for fair treatment of the Ottoman sultan-caliph in the treaties ending World War I, even though he took no part in the Khilafat movement in India[see Khilafat Movement]. His efforts on behalf of the Ottoman caliph included a letter that he and the Aga Khan wrote to the prime minister of Turkey in 1923, urging a restoration of the caliph’s temporal powers. Ironically, this letter from the two Indian Shi’i leaders had the opposite effect: the Turkish National Assembly, indignant at this foreign meddling, voted to abolish the caliphate early in 1924.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmad, Aziz. Islamic Modernism inIndiaandPakistan, M57-196¢.London, 1967. Good general guide to intellectual modernism in Indian Islam.
Ameer Ali, Syed. The Spirit of Islam: A History of the Evolution and Ideals of Islam with a Life of the Prophet. Reprint,London, 1965. Ameer Ali’s best-known work of apologetics.
Aziz, K. K. Ameer Ali: His Life and Work.Lahore, 1968. A brief biography, plus reprints of many of Ameer Ali’s articles from scattered journals; a very helpful compendium together with Wasti’s, listed below.
Hardy, Peter. The Muslims ofBritish India.Cambridge, 1972. The best short intellectual history of Muslims in nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryIndia.
Wasti, Syed Razi, ed. Memoirs and Other Writings of Syed Ameer Ali.Lahore, 1968.
Wasti, Syed Razi, ed. Syed Ameer Ali on Islamic History and Culture.Lahore, 1968. Collected articles by Ameer Ali, some also contained in the Aziz work, listed above.
GAIL MINAULT
