Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
BILIMNAME, cilt.51, sa.1, ss.253-286, 2024 (ESCI)
The British presence in India, which began to appear in the seventeenth century, turned into a huge colonial empire in the nineteenth century with the military policies followed by the East India Company. While the British unlimitedly exploited the underground and aboveground resources of the Indian Subcontinent, which gave them the Industrial Revolution, they also aimed to implement a number of cultural policies that would make the local people happy rather than complain about this situation. Orientalists employed for these purposes were pioneers in importing the thought and lifestyle that developed on the axis of nineteenth-century Western modernity to the region and spreading it as an ideal "value" among the locals. However, the fact that the Islamic faith encompasses the minds of believers and the central position of the words and deeds of the Prophet in regulating the daily lives of Muslims seems to have played a protective function in the spread of this value and lifestyle, accompanied by imperial expectations, among Indian Muslims. In this context, this study focuses on the claims by British orientalists employed in the subcontinent Aloys Sprenger (d. 1893) and Sir William Muir (d. 1905) about the words and deeds of the Prophet in the understanding of hadith of Sayyid Ahmed Khan, (d. 1893) a modernist thinker, and the criticism of Sayyid Ahmed Khan's understanding of hadith in the context of colonialism.