Abdullah Yusuf Ali

Indian writer and thinker; author of The Holy Qur'an-Text, Translation and Commentary, one of the best-known English translations of the Qur'an in the West and in the Muslim world. His life in law, administration and education was spent between India and England.

He was born on 14 April 1872 in the city of Surat in the state of Gujarat in western India, into a family belonging to the Dawoodi Bohra community. After learning to read the Qur'an he began his first Arabic studies with his father, Yusuf Ali Allahbakhsh, and then enrolled in a school of the Anjuman-i Islam society in Bombay. In 1882 he entered Wilson College, a missionary school. With a scholarship from the University of Bombay he went to England in September 1891 and studied law at St John's College, University of Cambridge. On enrolment he used the name Abdullah Khan Bahadur Yusuf Ali, drawing on the title "Khan Bahadur" that had been granted to his father; after the 1920s he used the name Abdullah Yusuf Ali.

In 1894 he passed the civil service examination of the Indian Civil Service under British administration and returned to India; in 1896 he took up duty in Saharanpur as assistant magistrate and collector, and held administrative posts at various levels of that service. When posted to Bareilly near Aligarh he met Sayyid Ahmad Khan and followed his line of thought, especially on loyalty to British rule. In 1906 his lecture "The Indian Muhammedans: Their Past, Present and Future" at the Royal Society of Arts drew the attention of the English elite, and he spoke of cooperation between Hindus and Indian Muslims. In 1915 he left the service and went to England. During the First World War he wrote and spoke in favour of British rule; in 1918 he lectured in Sweden, in Stockholm, Uppsala and Lund, and in 1919 he attended the Paris Peace Conference.

In 1900 he married Teresa Mary Shalders; from this wife, whom he divorced in 1911, he had three sons and a daughter. In 1920 he married for the second time, Gertrude Anne Mawbwey, whom he named "Masuma"; he divorced her too in 1941.

Travel held an important place in his life; from the 1920s onward he shuttled back and forth between England and India. In 1928 he went to Turkey and described his impressions of Ankara in an article; the same year he was elected India's representative to the League of Nations. In 1935 he performed the Hajj. On his second visit to Canada in 1938 he opened the Edmonton mosque, known as the first mosque in Canada, and named it the Rashid Mosque after his son. Education was also one of his main fields: he served as a senate member and administrator at the universities of the Punjab and Aligarh and as an academic at the University of London, and was principal of Islamia College, Lahore, in 1925-1927 and 1934-1936. He also wrote entries for The Encyclopaedia of Islam.

He was in England when the Second World War ended and spent the rest of his life in that country, far from his family and old friends, in loneliness. He died in Fulham on 10 December 1953 and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.

His Poetry and Sufi Line — This slot carries not his poetry but his scholarly and intellectual line. According to the source he shaped his conception of religion in keeping with the idea of loyalty to British rule, defended an Islamic thought unconnected with politics, and saw religion mostly as a system of faith and ethics concerned with spiritual experience at the individual level; for him what Islam demands is that government be just, and Muslims are obliged to obey every just political authority. He sought to build a ground of cooperation between East and West based on culture, art and literature, and valued interfaith dialogue; he founded the Lahore Art Circle and played an active role in the World Congress of Faiths. It is also recorded that, out of the ideal of world brotherhood, he supported the League of Nations and encouraged freemasonry in India. In exegesis, unlike Sayyid Ahmad Khan and other Muslim modernists, he showed little interest in rationalist and apologetic scientific interpretation; in his notes on many verses he referred to mystical meanings and interpreted some verses allegorically and symbolically. For example, he takes the word "hut" (fish) in Surat al-Kahf as a symbol of the fruit of secular knowledge, and the word "saq" (shin) in Surat al-Qalam as a symbol of the most hidden unseen.

His Works — His principal work is The Holy Qur'an-Text, Translation and Commentary; Fazlur Rahman regards it as one of the best translations of the Qur'an in Western languages. Its first part was published in Lahore in 1934 by Shaykh Muhammad Ashraf, and publication of the remaining parts was completed in 1937. The translation contains more than 6000 explanatory notes, and appendices follow some surahs. In two revised editions published in Maryland in 1989 and 1992 some notes and appendices were removed and the original text of the translation was also altered; an introduction by Mawdudi was added to the Riyadh edition. His other works include his first book, A Monograph on Silk Fabrics Produced in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1900), Life and Labour of the People of India (1907), India and Europe (1925), The Making of India (1925), Outlines of Indian History (1928), Medieval India: Social and Economic Conditions (1932) and Modern India and the West (1941).