{
 "id": "source/encyclopedia-of-religion-syed-ameer-ali",
 "class": "source",
 "slug": "encyclopedia-of-religion-syed-ameer-ali",
 "label": {
  "en": "Ameer Ali, Syed — Encyclopedia of Religion entry (David Lelyveld)"
 },
 "summary": {
  "ar": "مدخلة «موسوعة الدين» (1987) عن سيد أمير علي بقلم ديفيد ليليفلد؛ تُستخدم لوقائع الكيان فقط. تنص على أن أسرته انضمت إلى جماعة صغيرة من مسلمي الهند الشيعة ذوي الأصل الإيراني، وأنه بقي «ملتزما في النهاية بالإمامة الشيعية الرسولية».",
  "en": "Encyclopedia of Religion (1987) entry on Syed Ameer Ali by David Lelyveld; used for entity facts only. It states that his family joined 'a small community of fellow Shīʿī Muslims of Iranian descent', and that Ameer Ali himself 'remained ultimately committed to the apostolic Shīʿī imamate'."
 },
 "stub": false,
 "wings": [],
 "regions": [],
 "periods": [],
 "tags": [],
 "aliases": [],
 "themes": [],
 "data": {
  "kind": "reference_data",
  "type": "web",
  "title": "Ameer Ali, Syed",
  "author": [
   {
    "family": "Lelyveld",
    "given": "David"
   }
  ],
  "issued": {
   "date-parts": [
    [
     1987
    ]
   ]
  },
  "publisher": "Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), via Encyclopedia.com",
  "URL": "https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ameer-ali-syed",
  "language": "English",
  "reliability_note": "A scholarly encyclopedia entry by a named historian of modern India, read in full on 25 October 2026 — one of the two independent attestations behind this record's faith segment, as the record's faith note sets out. It gives: born at Chinsura, Bengal (against the English Wikipedia article's and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's Cuttack, which the record follows, and Wikidata's Mohan — all three variants recorded in the record); his ancestors claimed descent from the Prophet through Imam Ali al-Rida, and 'the family settled permanently at Lucknow in the eighteenth century, joining a small community of fellow Shīʿī Muslims of Iranian descent'; he was 'greatly influenced' by Sayyid Karamat Ali's Arabic treatise 'expressive of the rationalistic Muʿtazili tradition of Shīʿī scholasticism'; education at Hooghly and the University of Calcutta, then the Inner Temple; posts through the Bengal Legislative Council (1878) to the Government of India's council (1883) and the Calcutta High Court (1890); founded the National Muhammedan Association at Calcutta in 1878 (a second dating, against the English article's 1877 and the Urdu article's 1879); The Spirit of Islam (1891) grown from the 1873 Critical Examination, whose first version the entry dates to 1872; that in The Spirit of Islam he argued for the Sunni caliphate as a 'pontifical' headship of the church yet 'remained ultimately committed to the apostolic Shīʿī imamate' — citing his own Mahommedan Law (1912 edition, vol. 1, p. 6), an attestation of Ameer Ali's own adherence, not merely his family's; his founding role in the Muslim League, the London association (1908), the London Mosque Fund (1910), the separate-electorates campaign, the Khilafat movement, and the 1924 joint appeal with the Aga Khan to Turkey to maintain the caliphate. Checked and silent on the sect question: the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry and the Rekhta biographical profile, both consulted on the same day, name no sect for him.",
  "open_access": true,
  "status": {
   "review": "published",
   "generated_by": "Muse (Muse Spark 1.3)"
  }
 },
 "prose": {},
 "degree": 0,
 "contemporaries": [],
 "updated": "2026-10-25",
 "connections": [],
 "related": [],
 "license": {
  "prose": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
  "data": "CC0 1.0"
 }
}