and
Extremists had not yet been mended, there was much talk of reunion. Some
of the Moderates had grown once more faint-hearted. The Extremists who
knew their own minds still constituted a very formidable party, and they
were finding new allies in an unexpected quarter.

When the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and for nearly
thirty years afterwards, the Indian Mahomedans kept severely aloof from
it, partly because they had kept equally aloof from Western education
which had originally brought the leaders of the new political movement
together, and partly because most of those leaders were Hindus, and the
ancient antagonism between Mahomedans and Hindus led the former to
distrust profoundly anything that seemed likely to enhance the influence
of the latter. One intellectual giant among the Mahomedans had indeed
arisen after the Mutiny, during which his loyalty had never wavered, who
laboured hard to convert his co-religionists to Western education. In
spite of bitter opposition from a powerful party, rooted in the old
fanatical orthodoxy of Islam, who resented his broad-mindedness which
went to the length of trying to explain, and even to explain away much
of, the Koran, Sir Seyyid Ahmed Khan succeeded in founding at Aligurh in
1880 a Mahomedan College which soon attracted students from the best
Mahomedan families all over India. His idea was to create there a centre
which should do for young Mahomedans what he himself had watched Oxford
and Cambridge doing for young Englishmen. Education was not to be
divorced as in most Indian colleges from religion, and he was convinced
that a liberal interpretation of the Mahomedan doctrine was no more
incompatible with the essence of Islam than with that of Western
civilisation, with which British rule had come to bring India into
providential contact. Loyalty to British rule was with him synonymous
with loyalty to all the high ideals which he himself pursued and set
before his students. For a whole generation success appeared to crown
this work to which he brought all the fervour of missionary enterprise.
He died full of years and honour in 1898, and one of his last efforts
was an historical refutation of the Ottoman Sultan's claim to the
Khalifate of Islam. He already realised the reactionary tendencies of
the Pan-Islamic propaganda which Abdul Hamid was trying to spread into
India. So great and enduring was the hold of Sir Seyyid Ahmed's
teachings upon the progressi