Ic.nA ~ ~~~,- ~ ;c ~/~ 4'~J~ ~~ - c -.. ~ <") -~-::­ c­ COMPILED RY <:" .C--o. Jiazi $irai-ua.-a.:in ::JI'h.me:1, C-.". C l3a.r.-a.t-La.w, C C-.>. RAWALPINDI. ,--.,. <::> ....., .C) c . c­ -­ ~ .C) BY ORDER OF CI ~ J't1ian .J!aa.:ir I):in, (3ontraotoZ', .C.-, .....-:> SARAI KALA, "...., ~ ~-.. RAWALPIJiDI DISTRICT. .r.. c This book can be had gratis in English, Urdu and ~C-­ ' C> Arabic, on application to the compiler. ~. a c­ c~ c­ .C) LAHORE: ~ ~c­ PRINTED AT THE RIP01· PRE~~. .cc:­> "'::l <::> 1916. <::> c -, .0 riLes 95/10551 PREFACE. On the conclusion of the Grecio-Turkish War in 1897, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the great Indian Musalman Reformer of the nineteenth century, felt the necessity of expressing his views on the subject of the Khilafat for the guidance of his co-religionists in this country. He wrote a series of seven Articles which were published in the Al£garh Institute Gazette. The substance of these articles was, no doubt, of very great importan~e, and one wonders to find no reference to it in the Huyat-i-Jawaid, a most exhausttve work on the life and works of Sir Syeu Ahmed Khan, in Urdu. This requires a few words of explanation. The first life of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, was compiled and published in English by Lieutenant·Colonel Graham, a friend and great admirer of the Syed in 1885. This book was very favourably received by the English COfl1mllOities in India and England, but it could not claim to be exactly a biography, being only a translation of such writings and speeches of Syed Ahmed Khan as Colonel Graham considered to be of importance and interest to the English readers. It contained of course accounts of Sir Syed's works regarding the education of the Indian Mllsaitnans, the founding of the Aligarh College, and other works of reform, but it lacked a good deal of what a biography should contain. At the instance of Nawab Haji ISIu,I:1 Khan of Datawali, I ulldertook to compile 't Life of Sir Syed Ahll1ed Khall in Urdu, and finished my work in 1892. It was thell proposed to publish the boo~ during his life time, provided the Syed agreed. 11 to read the manuscript and to correct it. But Sir Syed refused to do so, as he had done to give me any help in the preparation of it. He always, stubbornly maintained, out of modesty, that it was a useless task to write his biography, that is, his works were not worth taking any notice of. It is al!!o certain that he never gave any help to Colonel Graham, ",hich has led to the introduction of many errors in the accounts of his family and of his early life. Colonel Graham had to be content with such information as he could coIle~t from Sir Sy~d's friends, as I had to travel all over India to meet those gentlemen who were cons'idered likely to furnish information about the subject. The idea of publishing the book during Sir Syed's lifetime had to be abandoned and the manuscript remained with Nawab Haji Ismail Khan. Sir Syed died in March 1898, and as shortly after that, I left for England, the manuscript was made over to Shamsul-Ulama Khwaja Altaf Husain Bali of Panipat, the great Musalman poet of the century and an accomplished prose writer as well. There was surely no person in India, more suited to do justice to the subject and to edit the book. He rewrote the whole book, arranging the subjects according to his own ideas, but it appears that Sir Syed's articles on the Khilafat escaped his notice, in fact it seems, he did not take much trouble in collecting more material beyond what I had done. I had of course been carefully preserving all that Sir Syed wrote after 18~2, with a view to use it in future when necessity arose, and there were other admirers of Sir Syed, who did the same. As the present Great War gave rise to another occasion, similar to the one in 1897, and as I thought that the young Indian Musalmans, seemed to have no recollection or notion of what Sir Syed had written on the subject of Khilafat, I thought it,. fit to republish in Urdu, the artieles in a small •... III pamphlet. I selected five articles out of the seven, as the two were merely the repetition of what was contained in the five articles. Articles No.6 and No.7 werQ written by the Syed in his famous journal Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq (The Muhammadan Social Reformer) in early eighties, and I have g£ven them place in the pamphlet as they have an indirect reference to the subject in question. I added to these articles, what may be called a reVIew of Sir Syed's writings, and I need offer no apology for it, as I think it will make Sir Syed's articles more comprehensible to their readers. The present English translation of Sir Syed's articles, is as literal as it could be but I have omitted in this English version, the introduction to the Urdu pamphlet, as it was meant for young Musalman readers only, and I have also left out some thirty pages of my writings towards the end of the pamphlet which dealt with the present situation of the atfflirs or contained Sir Syed's views on sllch matters which have no direct hearing on the subject under discussion. But I have inserted at the end an article I had written on the " Revolution in Arabia" which was published partly in the Bombay Times of Ind£a of 25th July, and a full version of it appeared in the Morning Post of Delhi, in its issue of 28th July 1916. It is not necessary here Lo point out the worth and value of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's utterances and writings which will surely always serve as a guide to the right p:l.th for the right-minded Mn salmanfl ofIndia. English St.atesm~n ~f all degrees and shades of thought have expressed In theIr tllnes, their appreciation of the noble work performed by the Syed during his life time, but I am tempted to quote here, the shorL and sweet but perfectly true words spoken by Sir Michael iv O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, abou~ Sir Syed, in 'his reply to an address presented to him by the Anjuman Islamia, Rawalpindi, on 2nd August 1913. He said "No people at a critical time of their history ever had a wiser leader than the Muhammadan Community had in Sir Syed, and no Government had a sounder or more trusted adviser." RAWALPINDI ; } SIRAJ-UD-DIN AHMED. 22nd August I9I6.