ABSTRACT
Ahamd Khan and Natcheriyya found a fierce critic in a chameleon-like Shi'i Iranian reformer who passed himself off as a Sunni religious authority from Afghanistan. Janus-like, Jamal al-Din of Asadabad showed one face to Muslims, and an opposite one when facing West. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s profound ignorance of the principles of Darwin expressed in his polemic is at first glance as inexplicable as is the fame and prestige he achieved throughout the Muslim world as a great religious scholar and reformist philosopher. Writing in Persian, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani was attacking evolution and particularly Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Natcheriyya version of it. More honest critics regarded Natcheriyya as reducing the Quran to a secondhand textbook of western discovery. Ahmad Khan's Natcheriyya philosophy was as eclectic in its sources as it was unified in its purpose, which was simply to follow Karamat Ali's lead in reading modern science into the Quran.
