An Awakening in the East 225due the uprising they were compelled, somewhat reluctantly, to
unleash the full force of their colonial might. There were mass arrests
throughout the country; demonstrators both young and old were
beaten on the streets. Most major cities were ravaged. In Allahabad,
British soldiers indiscriminately killed everyone in their path, leaving
the dead bodies to rot in piles on the streets. Lucknow was sacked,
Delhi practically razed. Approximately five hundred Sepoys of the
14th Native Infantry were massacred at Jhelam. In Benares, the bod-
ies of civilian sympathizers were hung from the trees. Entire villages
were looted, then set aflame. It took less than two years of carnage and
plunder before full colonial control was restored. With the rebellion
crushed and the East India Company dissolved, the administration of
the Subcontinent became the direct responsibility of the Queen, who
could now proudly proclaim that “the sun never sets on the British
Empire.”
The violence with which colonial control was reasserted in India
forever shattered any illusions of British moral superiority. For most
Muslims, Europe’s civilizing mission in the Middle East was revealed
for what it truly was: an ideology of political and economic dominance
achieved through brutal military might. The ideals of the Enlighten-
ment, which the British never tired of preaching, could no longer be
separated from the repressive imperialist policies of the colonizing
government. In short, India became the paradigm of the colonialist
experiment gone awry.
Even so, a large number of Muslim intellectuals remained con-
vinced that the adoption of European values, such as the rule of law
and the pursuit of scientific progress, was the sole means of overcom-
ing the rapid decline of Muslim civilization in the face of European
imperialism. This group became known as the Modernists, and per-
haps no intellectual better represented their reformist agenda than Sir
Sayyid Ahmed Khan.
Born to a family of Mughal nobility, Sayyid Ahmed Khan was a
devoted follower of the Indian neo-mystic Shah Wali Allah, though
by the mid-nineteenth century he had begun to distance himself from
the puritanical overtones of an ideology that had already sparked a few
anti-Hindu, anti-Sikh rebellions in India. During the Indian Revolt,
Sir Sayyid worked as an administrator in the East India Company and