AMEER ALI, SYED (1849–1928), Indian Muslim historian, jurist, and politician. Ameer Ali was born in Chinsura, Bengal, a suburb of Calcutta. His family spoke Urdu, having migrated from Avadh shortly before his birth to join a small community of fellow Shīʿī Muslims of Iranian descent. Ameer Ali never had any significant contact with Bengali or substantial training in Arabic; his education was in English, supplemented with Persian and Urdu. He was also greatly influenced by Sayyid Karāmat ʿAli (1796–1876), a family friend who had written an Urdu treatise in the rationalistic Muʿtazili tradition of Shīʿī scholasticism. After receiving degrees in law and history from Calcutta University in 1868, he went to London on a government scholarship and qualified as a barrister in 1873. From 1890 to 1904 he was a judge of the Calcutta High Court, after which he retired to England, where he served from 1909 until his...