ALIGARH

The north Indian city of Aligarh, site of Aligarh Muslim

University, has played a leading role in the political life and
intellectual history of South Asian Muslims since the middle
of the nineteenth century. The importance of Aligarh
arose initially under the leadership of Sayyid Ahmad Khan
(1817–1898). Through a series of organizations and institutions,
the “Aligarh movement” (the social, cultural, and
political movement founded by Sayyid Ahmad Khan) sought
to prepare Muslims for changes in technology, social life, and
politics associated with British rule, the rise of nationalism,
and the conditions of modernity. In 1865, Aligarh became the
headquarters of the Aligarh Scientific Society, and, in 1875,
the Mahomedan Anglo-Oriental College, the forerunner of
Allah
I s l a m and the Muslim World 39
the university established there in 1920. Aligarh was the first
headquarters of the Muslim League, a party established in
1906 to secure recognition of Muslims as a separate political
community within India, a concept that ultimately led in
1947 to the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan as a
separate nation-state for South Asian Muslims. After partition,
the Aligarh Muslim University remained one of a small
group of national universities in India.
In its early years, the Aligarh College attracted patronage
and recruited students from Muslim communities throughout
India, both Sunni and Shi_a, as well as significant numbers
of Hindus. Aside from some short-lived efforts to include
Arabic studies and Urdu as a language of instruction, the
college followed the standard British imperial curriculum.
Official British patronage became more significant after 1887,
when Sayyid Ahmad Khan called for Muslim opposition to
the newly founded Indian National Congress. In the twentieth
century, Aligarh became an arena for opposing political
tendencies among Muslims, including supporters of Indian
nationalism and international socialism, as well as of Muslim
separatism. Aligarh graduates achieved prominence as writers,
jurists, and political leaders. At the same time, Aligarh
was the target of much opposition, particularly for its association
with social reform and religious modernism. In 1906 the
Aligarh Zenana Madrasa provided separate education for
girls, and became the Aligarh Women’s College in 1925.
When Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan died in 1898, his successors
initiated a campaign to establish an autonomous, all-
India educational system for Muslims under the auspices of
an affiliating university. The university established in 1920,
however, was confined to Aligarh and remained under British
control. In response, Mohandas K. Gandhi and two Aligarh
graduates, the brothers Shaukat _Ali and Muhammad _Ali, led
a noncooperation campaign that established an alternative
nationalist institution, the Jami_a Milli_a Islamiya, outside the
campus gates and subsequently relocated to Delhi. In the
final years before independence and partition, Aligarh students
toured India on behalf of the Pakistan cause, though
others devoted themselves to the ideal of a united and
secular India.
Zakir Hussain, the first postindependence vice chancellor
of Aligarh Muslim University, and later president of India,
succeeded in preserving the university’s Muslim identity as a
way of preparing Muslims for full participation in national
life. A center for Urdu writers and historians of Mughal India,
many of them Marxists, the university has so far been able to
fend off efforts to undermine its role as an national center for
Indian Muslims.
See also Ahmad Khan, (Sir) Sayyid; Education; Modernism;
Pakistan, Islamic Republic of; South Asia,
Islam in; Urdu Language, Literature, and Poetry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Graff, Violette. “Aligarh’s Long Quest for ‘Minority’ Status:
AMU (Amendment) Act. 1981.” Economic and Political
Weekly 25, no. 32 (1980): 1771–1781.
Hasan, Mushirul. “Nationalist and Separatist Trends in
Aligarh, 1915–47.” The Indian Economic and Social History
Review 22, no. 1 (1985): 1–34.
Lelyveld, David. Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity
in British India. 2d ed. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1996.
David Lelyveld
ALLAH
Allah is the Arabic equivalent of the English word God, and is
the term employed not only among Arabic-speaking Muslims
but by Christians and Jews and in Arabic translations of the
Bible. A contraction of al-ilah, meaning “the god,” Allah is
cognate with the generic pan-Semitic designation for “God”
or “deity” (Israelite/Canaanite El, Akkadian ilu) and is particularly
close to the common Hebrew term Elohim and the
less frequent Eloah. It is thus, strictly speaking, not a proper
name but a title.
In the Islamic context, as in Jewish and Christian usage,
Allah refers to the one true God of monotheism. This is how
the term occurs in the shahada or “profession of faith,” the
simplest, earliest, and most basic of Islamic creeds, in the first
part of which the believer affirms that there is no “god” (ilah)
but “God” or “the god” (Allah). However, the shahada itself
seems to imply that Allah was already known to the first
audience of the Islamic revelation, and that they were called
upon to repudiate other deities. And this is precisely the
picture given in the Qur_an. “If you ask them who created
them,” the Qur_an informs the prophet Muhammad regarding
his pagan critics, “they will certainly say ‘Allah.’” (43:87;
compare 10:31; 39:38). Pagan Arabs swore oaths by Allah (as
witnessed at 6:109; 16:38; 35:42).
Pre-Islamic Arabs believed in supernatural intercessors
with God (10:18; 34:22), for whom they appeared to claim
warrant from Allah. (See, for example, 6:148.) Indeed, Allah
seems (in their view) to have headed a pantheon of pre-
Islamic deities or supernatural beings, not altogether unlike
El’s rule over the Canaanite pantheon, and, like El, he seems
to have been rather distant and aloof. While the data are
fragmentary and open to some question, pre-Islamic Arabs
seem to have paid more attention to Allah’s daughters and to
the jinn (or genies) than to him. Even the Qur_an seems to
concede genuine existence to a divine retinue (as at 7:191–195;
10:28–29; 25:3). However, just as the Canaanite gods are
Allah
40 I s l am and the Mus l im Wor ld
This tilework at the tomb of Baba Qasim in Isfahan, Iran, spells Allahu Akbar, or “God is Great.” Allah, the Arabic name for God,
appears
frequently in Islamic art and architecture in calligraphic script. © ROGER WOOD/CORBIS
replaced by an angelic court in Israelite faith, Islam rejects the
independent deities of pagan Arabia in favor of a very much
subordinated “exalted assembly” (see 37:8; 38:69) that exists
to carry out the decrees of the one true God, who is, says the
Qur_an, nearer to the individual human than that person’s
jugular vein (50:16). In this, as in other respects, Islam regards
itself as a restoration of the religion taught by earlier prophets
but marred by successive human apostasies (see 42:13).
The Qur_an identifies Allah as the creator, sustainer, and
sovereign of the heavens and the earth. (See, for example,
13:16; 29:61, 63; 31:25; 39:38; 43:9, 87.) Following the
scriptural text, Muslims characterize him by the ninety-nine
“most beautiful names” (7:180; 17:110; 20:8), which serve to
identify his attributes. (Eventually, repetition of and meditation
upon these names became an important practice in the
tradition of Sufi mysticism.) They portray a being who is selfsufficient,
omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, merciful yet just,
benevolent but terrible in his wrath. The picture of Allah in
the Qur_an employs distinctly anthropomorphic language
(referring, for example, to the divine eyes, hands, and face),
which, virtually all commentators have long agreed, are to be
taken figuratively.
Allah has revealed himself throughout history via messages
to various prophets by means of both the seemingly
routine processes of nature and the periodic judgments and
catastrophes directed against the rebellious. He will reveal
himself even more spectacularly at the end of time when, as
judge of humankind, he pronounces doom or blessing upon
every individual who has ever lived. The faith of Muhammad
and the Qur_an is centered on absolute “submission” (islam)
to his will.
The Qur_an describes God as “Allah, one; Allah, the
eternal refuge. He does not beget nor is He begotten, and
there is none equal to Him” (112:1–4). In subsequent Islamic
thought, such straightforward denial of divine family life
(probably aimed at both the pre-Islamic pantheon and Christian
concepts of God the Father and God the Son) was
expanded into a much broader doctrine of the divine unity,
denoted by the non-Qur_anic word tawhid (“unification” or
“making one”). Philosophers and theologians debated such
questions as whether God’s attributes were identical to God’s
essence, or whether, being multiple, they must be additional
and in a sense external in order not to compromise the utter
and absolute simplicity of the divine essence. They debated
how the undeniably manifold cosmos had emerged out of the
pure oneness of God. The issue of whether God’s speech (i.e.,
the Qur_an) was coeternal with him, or subsidiary and created,
rising to political prominence in the second and third
centuries after Muhammad. The overwhelming personality
depicted in the revelations of Muhammad became the Necessary
Existent (wajib al-wujud), and the obvious dependence of
life on his will (particularly apparent in the harsh desert
environment of Arabia) was taken to point to the utter
contingency of all creation upon a God who brought it into
being out of nothing. Perhaps not unrelated was the rise to
dominance in Islam of a doctrine of predestination or determinism,
which had obvious roots in the Qur_an itself (as, for
example, at 13:27; 16:93; 74:31). In the meantime, though,
American Culture and Islam
I s l a m and the Muslim World 41
while the philosophers were elaborating a view of Allah
tending to extreme transcendence, Sufi theoreticians were
emphasizing his immanence and experiential accessibility
and, in practice, often breaking down the barrier between
Creator and creatures—and occasionally shocking their fellow
Muslims.
The famous “Throne Verse” (2:255) offers a fine summary
of basic Islamic teaching regarding God: “Allah! There
is no god but he, the Living, the Everlasting. Neither slumber
nor sleep seizes him. His are all things in the heavens and the
earth. Who is there who can intercede with him, except by his
leave? He knows what is before them and what is behind
them, while they comprehend nothing of his knowledge
except as he wills. His throne extends over the heavens and
the earth. Sustaining them does not burden him, for he is the
Most High, the Supreme.” The depth of Muslim devotion to
Allah is apparent virtually everywhere in Islamic life, including
even the use of elaborate calligraphic renditions of the
word as architectural and artistic ornamentation.