Question

Which one of the following Muslim thinkers persuaded the Ulamas in India to work for Independence in cooperation with the Indian National Congress ?
1. Jamal-al-Din Afghani
2. Muhammed Iqbal
3. Syed Ahmed Khan
4. Ghulam Mahmud

Answer 1

Correct Answer - Option 1 : Jamal-al-Din Afghani

Jamal-al-Din Afghani

Sayyid Jamal al-din al-Afghani, who visited India for the second time after his expulsion from Egypt by the Khedive Tewfiq Pasha in 1878 (4). Al-Afhgani spent over a year in Hyderabad (Deccan) and in Calcutta, and wrote a number articles in which he violently attacked Sayyid Ahmad Khan's religio-political approach to the problems facing Muslim India. He persuaded the Ulamas in India to work for Independence in cooperation with the Indian National Congress.

The disagreement between Jamal al-din al-Afghani and Sayyid Ahmad Khan consists of three cardinal points:

1. al-Afghani did not agree with the extremist rationalism of a least some of Sayyid Ahmad Khan's views, and regarded his new 'Ilm al-Kalam as a heresy in so far as it seemed to falsify the words of Qur'an.
2. He regarded Sayyid Ahmad Khan's religious views and his educational programme as ancillary to his political servi- tude to British interests in India, whereas al-Afghani himself was bitterly anti-British.
3. As a logical consequence of the second point, he saw Sayyid Ahmad Khan as his main adversary in India, opposed to Pan-Islamism, isolating the Indian Muslims from the rest of Ddr-al Islam, especially from the Turks, and hostile to the conception of a universal Muslim Khilaf

Muhammed Iqbal

• Iqbal was a poet and philosopher known for his influential efforts to direct his fellow Muslims in British-administered India toward the establishment of a separate Muslim state, an aspiration that was eventually realized in the country of Pakistan.
• He was knighted in 1922.
• His thesis, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, revealed some aspects of Islamic mysticism formerly unknown in Europe.

Ghulam Mahmud

• Ghulam Mahmud was an Indian religious leader and the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement in Islam.
• He claimed to have been divinely appointed as the promised Messiah and Mahdi—which is the metaphorical second coming of Jesus, in fulfilment of Islam's latter day prophecies, as well as the Mujaddid (centennial reviver) of the 14th Islamic century.