THE REFORM MOVEMENTS 261ing accessible to Indian Muslims by translating and publishing the impor-
tant books ofWestern cultures into Urdu and Persian. After his return
from England, Sir Sayyid Ahmad developed the Scientific Society into a
university, which he hoped to make into the "Cambridge of the Muslim
World." In addition to the "religious sciences" and other traditional sub-
jects of Islamic learning, the curriculum at Aligarh University offered
courses in physics, chemistry, biology, and other "modern" subjects.
Even though many of the Indian ulama attacked Sayyid Ahmad's views,
the university prospered and attracted students. Aligarh University students
and faculty formed the seeds of a secular movement which, in the twenti-
eth century, lobbied for Muslims to separate from India and build a nation-
state of their own, a movement that finally resulted in the birth of Pakistan.
Sayyid Ahmad's specific ideas failed to create any widespread move-
ment associated with his name, but modernist intellectuals in other Mus-
lim lands were exploring similar ideas and coming up with similar
conclusions. In Iran, a prime minister working for the Qajar Shahs estab-
lished a school called Dar al-Funun, which offered instruction in all the
sciences and in the arts, literature, and philosophies of the West. Graduates
of that school began to seed Iranian society with modernists who sought to
reshape their society along European lines.
Similar modernists were active at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. In
the later nineteenth century, the modernist faction in the Ottoman gov-
ernment promoted policies called Tanzimat, or "reforms," which included
setting up European-style schools, adopting European techniques of ad-
ministration in the government bureaucracies, reorganizing the army
along European lines, dressing the soldiers in European style uniforms, en-
couraging European-style clothes for government officials, and so on.
ISLAMIST MODERNISMWe come now to the dominant Muslim reformer of the nineteenth century,
a volcanic force named Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan. Afghans believe he was
born in Afghanistan, in 1836, about fifty miles east ofKabul, in a town called
Asadabad, the capital of Kunar province. His family was connected to
Afghanistan's ruling clan through marriage but did something to offend the
royal and had to move to Iran in a hurry when Jamaluddin was a little boy.