Cherágh Ali

Cherágh Ali (1844–1895) was an Indian Muslim scholar and modernist, a close associate of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan in the movement that produced the Aligarh college. Born in Meerut, he served in the revenue administration of the British Northwestern Provinces and from 1877 in the government of the Nizam of Hyderabad, where he rose to high office. In The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other Mohammadan States, and in A Critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad, he argued that Islamic law as elaborated by the medieval jurists was a human construction open to reform and that the Koran sanctioned war only in self-defense.