THE REFORM MOVEMENTS 259British was not permissible since the British did not restrict or interfere
with Muslim devotions.
Finally, in 1874, he decided to see England for himsel£ It was the first
time Sayyid Ahmad had traveled beyond the confines oflndia. In London,
where his writings had earned him some affection, he lived beyond his
means, attending fashionable parties and hobnobbing with intellectuals,
artists, and aristocrats. He cut a striking figure in this milieu, resolutely
clad in Muslim robes, sporting a large beard, and wearing a small pillbox-
shaped religious cap, looking every inch the old-school Muslim gentleman
of Moghul high society. The queen herself awarded him a ribbon, making
him a "Companion of the Star oflndia," which led him ever afterward to
call himself Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan.
Then one day, there in London, he ran across a derogatory biography
of Prophet Mohammed written by some Englishman. He was devastated.
He dropped all his other concerns and began writing his own biography of
the Prophet to refute the one by the Englishman. He wrote in Urdu, be-
cause it was his mother tongue, but he was aiming his book at a European
public, so he paid to have it translated, chapter by chapter, as he was writ-
ing it, into English, French, German, and Latin. The job proved too im-
mense; he had to scale down his ambitions, in the end going for a
collection of essays about Mohammed. He ran out of money before he
could finish even that, and seventeen months after leaving India he
dragged himself home again, penniless and exhausted.
England had impressed him deeply, however-too deeply, said his crit-
ics. In comparison to England, he found his homeland painfully back-
ward. "Without flattering the English," he wrote, "I can truly say that the
natives oflndia, high and low, merchants and petty shopkeepers, educated
and illiterate, when contrasted with the English in education, manners,
and uprightness, are like a dirty animal is to an able and handsome man."
But what made his fellow Muslims so backward? What could he do to
elevate his community? Sayyid Ahmad decided that the problem lay partly
in the way Muslims were interpreting Islam. They were mired in magical
thinking, they were clinging to superstition and calling it Islam. Sir Sayyid
Ahmed Khan began elaborating a doctrine that offended his contempo-
raries among the Indian ulama. Religion, he suggested, was a natural field
of human inquiry and achievement. It was integral to human life. It