In such circumstances the Extremists saw their opportunity to pour ridicule on the new Councils and preach once more the futility of constitutional agitation.  The Indian National Congress, overshadowed for a time by the new Councils, began to recover its popularity, and though the split which had taken place at Surat between Moderates and Extremists had not yet been mended, there was much talk of reunion.  Some of the Moderates had grown once more faint-hearted.  The Extremists who knew their own minds still constituted a very formidable party, and they were finding new allies in an unexpected quarter.

When the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and for nearly thirty years afterwards, the Indian Mahomedans kept severely aloof from it, partly because they had kept equally aloof from Western education which had originally brought the leaders of the new political movement together, and partly because most of those leaders were Hindus, and the ancient antagonism between Mahomedans and Hindus led the former to distrust profoundly anything that seemed likely to enhance the influence of the latter.  One intellectual giant among the Mahomedans had indeed arisen after the Mutiny, during which his loyalty had never wavered, who laboured hard to convert his co-religionists to Western education.  In spite of bitter opposition from a powerful party, rooted in the old fanatical orthodoxy of Islam, who resented his broad-mindedness which went to the length of trying to explain, and even to explain away much of, the Koran, Sir Seyyid Ahmed Khan succeeded in founding at Aligurh in 1880 a Mahomedan College which soon attracted students from the best Mahomedan families all over India.  His idea was to create there a centre which should do for young Mahomedans what he himself had watched Oxford and Cambridge doing for young Englishmen.  Education was not to be divorced as in most Indian colleges from religion, and he was convinced that a liberal interpretation of the Mahomedan doctrine was no more incompatible with the essence of Islam than with that of Western civilisation, with which British rule had come to bring India into providential contact.  Loyalty to British rule was with him synonymous with loyalty to all the high ideals which he himself pursued and set before his students.  For a whole generation success appeared to crown this work to which he brought all the fervour of missionary enterprise.  He died full of years and honour in 1898, and one of his last efforts was an historical refutation of the Ottoman Sultan’s claim to the Khalifate of Islam.  He already realised the reactionary tendencies of the Pan-Islamic propaganda which Abdul Hamid was trying to spread into India.  So great and enduring was the hold of Sir Seyyid Ahmed’s teachings upon the progressive elements in Mahomedan India that the All-India Moslem League was founded in 1905, almost avowedly in opposition to the subversive activities which the Indian National Congress was