Chiragh Ali (1844–1895) 19th-century Indian
religious reformer and secularist thinker
Chiragh Ali was a Kashmiri Muslim who served in
the British government of north india in his early
career. In 1877, he was appointed to the court of
the nizam (ruler) of Hyderabad, where he served as
the revenue and political secretary. He was a close
ally of sayyid ahmad khan (d. 1898), the leading
advocate for modern Islamic reform in India after
the 1857 uprising against British rule that resulted
in the end of the mUghal dynasty and marked
the demise of Muslim rule in that land. Ali is best
known for books and essays that articulated the
Aligarh program for Islamic modernization in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. He maintained
that the qUran was authoritative in matters of
worship and morality but denied that it provided
an infallible blueprint for government or legisla-
tion. He objected to British Orientalists, Chris-
tian missionaries, and Muslim traditionalists who
claimed that Islam endorsed theocratic govern-
ment (the combination of religion and the state)
and that Islamic law was unchangeable. Instead,
he insisted that Islamic government and the
sharia were largely human creations that adapted
to changing historical circumstances in different
localities. His interpretation of Jihad was that it
was a defensive strategy used by mUhammad and
the first Muslims when threatened with attack;
it was never intended to legitimate aggression in
the name of religion. He was critical of British
colonial rule in India, for he charged them with
having turned the country into a great prison—a
situation that would only bring about the “decay”
of the people. He called for political liberty and
thought it could best be achieved under the sov-
ereignty of the Ottoman sUlta n, who at that time
was trying to resuscitate the Ottoman Empire in
order to hold off the European powers. This does
not mean that he wanted a return to the old ways
of Muslim rule in India, however. He charged that
traditional Islamic legal rulings concerning gov-
ernment, slavery, concubinage, marriage, divorce,
and the status of non-Muslims were not suited to
the needs of modern Muslims, and he called for
their revision or elimination. Ali recognized that
his views were controversial but believed they
provided a basis upon which Muslims could erect
a platform for progressive change and freethink-
ing in the modern era. His life’s work, therefore,
contributed significantly to the formation of the
modern Islamic liberal tradition in South Asia.
See also orientalism; ottoman dynasty;
reneWal and reForm movements; secUlarism.Further reading: Aziz Ahmad, Islamic Modernism in
India and Pakistan, 1857–1864 (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1967); Chiragh Ali, “The Proposed Politi-
cal, Legal, and Social Reforms.” In Modernist Islam,
1840–1940: A Source-Book, edited by Charles Kurzman,
277–290 (New York: Oxford University Press, Septem-
ber 2002).Chishti Sufi Order
The Chishtis are one of the largest Sufi brother-
hoods in South Asia (india, pakistan, and ban-
gladesh) and help give Islam in this region its
distinctive identity. They take their name from
a remote village called Chisht, which had been
a Sufi center as early as the 10th century. It
was Muin al-Din Chishti (d. 1236), a man from
Chisht, who established the brotherhood in India.
In genealogies of their Sufi masters, however, they
trace their ancestry all the way back to mUhammad
(d. 632), ali (d. 661), and the 11 other Shii imams
and include such famous non-Indian Sufis as ibn
al-arabi (d. 1240), rUzbihan baqli (d. 1209), and
Jalal al-din rUmi (d. 1273). After Muin al-Din
and his contemporary, Bakhtiyar Kaaki (d. 1235),
the Chishti spiritual lineages consist predomi-
nantly of Sufi masters born in India, which makes
this order distinct from most other Sufi groups in
the region.
The foremost Chishti ritual practice is the dhikr
(zikr in local dialects), as it is in other Sufi orders.
The Chishti dhikr combines repeated pronounce-
ments of the names oF god (especially allah,Chishti Sufi Order 139 J