India under Ripon: A Private Diary

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

APPENDIX I

THE MOHAMMEDAN UNIVERSITY

Scheme for a University, forwarded to the Nizam, January 24, 1884

The lamentable decline, during the last forty years, of the Mohammedan community of India in wealth and social importance, while at the same time it has been numerically an ever-increasing body, makes it a matter of anxious consideration with those who love their religion to consider by what means best to avert the danger attending such a condition of things, and to restore prosperity to the community and its activity as a living and beneficial influence in the progress of the Empire.

It is acknowledged that the evil has been principally brought about by the changed condition of the country. From a ruling and favoured race, the Mohammedan community has become only one of many bodies unfavoured by the State; and the fall from their high station was at the time accompanied by a corresponding collapse of energy; while, later, accidental circumstances, such as the change of the official language from Persian and Urdu to English, still further aggravated their misfortunes.

These, though they may regret them, the Mohammedans now know that it is useless to complain of. They have ceased to look for any reversal of the political settlement of India as a British province; and accepting the fact, they are fully aware that a new departure is necessary for them in correspondence with their new circumstances. Nor is this conviction lessened by the consideration that it would seem to be the tendency of the age to put every year more and more administrative power back into native hands, so that in the future there may be expected to be an ever-increasing competition between the various sections of Indian society for advantage under the imperial rule.

Again, it is no less acknowledged that, in the modern conditions of Indian life, that which principally conduces to the advantage of each community is its superiority in education. The force of natural character is no longer a sufficient element of success, and acquired intelligence is daily asserting itself more strongly as the condition of all participation in public life. Instruction in the arts and sciences of the Western world is at the present day an absolute necessity for high success; and even in the lower walks of life a certain knowledge of these things has become desirable for all perhaps but the lowest class bound to agricultural labour. Certainly no large community, such as is the Mohammedan in India, could hope to hold its own without a general increase of learning; and it is no longer contended by any section of the community that secular knowledge can be dispensed with, or that it is, if rightly directed, at all opposed to the best interests of religion.

On the other hand, it is equally certain that the vast majority of those who profess the faith of Islam look upon that faith as the most precious inheritance bequeathed them by their fathers, and decline to put it in peril for the sake of any worldly advantage. They consider that, in seeking the general good of a Mohammedan community, the first and absolute essential to be considered is the good of the Mohammedan religion; and this is their first thought, too, when the practical question of individual education comes before them. All Mohammedan fathers are desirous that, before everything else, their sons should inherit their own gift of faith in the one true God and the teaching of His apostle.

Thus, then, it happens that, while recognizing fully the necessity there is for worldly knowledge, the mass of respectable Mohammedans have held back, and still hold back, from the purely secular education afforded in Government schools and colleges to Hindus and Christians with themselves. They look with suspicion on the teaching, and with more than suspicion on the teachers. They refuse to believe that any education can be a sound one which is without a religious basis. They see that neither history nor philosophy nor Western literature can be taught by unbelievers in the divine mission of their Prophet without serious risk of undermining their pupils’ faith; and they find no institution in India in which these necessary branches of human learning are taught to Mohammedans wholly by Mohammedans. Neither the Indian University, nor the Calcutta Madraseh, nor the Hooghly College, nor even the College of Aligarh entirely fulfil this condition. In the Indian University there is at the present moment no single Mohammedan professor. At the Madraseh, the president and many of the professors are Englishmen; and at Aligarh also the principal is an Englishman, and there are English and Hindu teachers. In none of them is there the certainty that religious influence other than Mohammedan shall not be brought to bear upon the students.