Maulana Mohammad Ali

Date of Birth : 1878
Date of Death : 1931
Place of Birth : Rampur

Early life

Muhammad Ali, who later became well-known as Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar was born in Rampur state in 1878 to a family of Rohilla sub tribe of Yousafzai Pashtun ancestry. He was the brother of Maulana Shaukat Ali and Maulana Zulfiqar Ali. Despite the early death of his father, the family strived and Ali attended the [Deoband Madaressah]Aligarh Muslim University and Lincoln College, Oxford University in 1898, studying modern history.
Upon his return to India, he served as education director for the Rampur state, and later joined the Baroda civil service. He became a brilliant writer and orator, and wrote for major English and Indian newspapers, in both English and Urdu. He himself launched the Urdu weekly Hamdard and English Comrade in 1911. He moved to Delhi in 1913.
Mohammad Ali worked hard to expand the AMU, then known as the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, and was one of the co-founders of the Jamia Millia Islamia in 1920, which was later moved to Delhi.

Khilafat and Political Activities

Mohammed Ali had attended the founding meeting of the All India Muslim League in Dhaka in 1906, and served as its president in 1918. He remained active in the League till 1928.
Ali represented the Muslim delegation that travelled to England in 1919 in order to convince the British government to influence the Turkish nationalist Mustafa Kemal not to depose the Sultan of Turkey, who was the Caliph of Islam. British rejection of their demands resulted in the formation of the Khilafat committee which directed Muslims all over India to protest and boycott the government.
Now accorded the respectful title of Maulana, Ali formed in 1921, a broad coalition with Muslim nationalists like Maulana Shaukat Ali, Maulana Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari and Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi, who enlisted the support of the Indian National Congress and many thousands of Hindus, who joined the Muslims in a demonstration of unity. Ali also wholeheartedly supported Gandhi’s call for a national civil resistance movement, and inspired many hundreds of protests and strikes all over India. He was arrested by British authorities and imprisoned for two years for what was termed as a seditious speech at the meeting of the Khilafat Conference. He was elected as President of Indian National Congress in 1923.