Life of Ahmad — Page 377
377 CHAPTER 36 SIR SAYYID CORRECTED Apart from the curse of the mullahs there was another canker which was eating up the Faith. The Western impact 75 was responsible for producing in the minds 75 Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan was a 'brilliant and courageous' man. He visited England and was thoroughly westernised in his ways and lived like a European. He was a Naturalist. He did not believe in miracles. Angels, he said, were not separate beings, they were just the various laws of nature. Ahmad as refuted his ideas in A ’ i na Kam a l a t-e-Islam. An English writer says about Sir Sayyid: 'To the utter abomination of the orthodox, he mingled freely in English society, even dining with English ladies and gentlemen in their homes, and in his periodical, Tahz i bul Akhl a q (Reform of Morals), he urged upon his community the importance of female education and enfranchisement and of other advanced reforms. In religious matters he was a liberal and a rationalist, going so far as to place the Christian Bible on a par with the Quran, as no less, and no more, inspired, holding that the Bible has not been corrupted by the Christians, and that in the Quran, as in the Bible, there is a human as well as a divine element. He also wrote part of a commentary on the book of Genesis. One of his watchwords was, "Reason alone is a sufficient guide", and he quoted with approval the remark of a French writer that Islam, which lays no claim to miraculous powers on the part of the Founder, is the truly rationalistic religion. As Goldziher has pointed out, this represents a return to the old Mutazilite position, and in its universalistic outlook upon other religions is akin to Babism in Persia, which arose about the same period. ' Another European writer says that Sir Sayyid taught: 'Do not meddle in revolutionary politics; but thankfully recognise the advantage the British