A Muslim Brought to Christ

A Muslim Brought to Christ — published in 1884 as A Mohammedan Brought to Christ, the wording of its day — is the autobiography of Maulvi Imad-ud-din Lahiz (1830–1900), a learned Sunni scholar from a family of maulvis in Panipat, North India. Translated by Robert Clark and published by the Church Missionary House in 1884, it recounts how a man steeped in Islamic learning — who had translated the Quran into Urdu and assisted the Muslim side at the famous 1854 Agra debate against Karl Pfander — came, through long restlessness and doubt, to faith in Christ.

He records his search through Islamic devotion and Sufi practice for a peace he could not find, his mounting doubts, and his baptism at Amritsar on 29 April 1866, together with his father and brother. He wrote the account partly to answer accusers who claimed he had converted for worldly gain, which gives it the pointed candor of a sincerity document.

He went on to serve with the Church Missionary Society, was honored with a Doctor of Divinity, and became honorary chaplain to the Bishop of Lahore. It is widely regarded as the strongest first-person Muslim-convert autobiography of the nineteenth century.

Our edition presents Robert Clark’s public-domain English translation in a clean, readable modern format, and we link a free source so you can read the original scan online as well.

This is a clean, modern reading edition of the autobiography of the Rev. Imad-ud-din Lahiz (c. 1830–1900), translated from the Hindustani by the Rev. Robert Clark of the Church Missionary Society and first published in English in 1884. Imad-ud-din wrote it in 1866, the year of his baptism, expressly to answer those who doubted that a Muslim scholar of his standing could have converted sincerely. The text is in the public domain.

A note on language. The nineteenth-century translation used the words that were standard in English at the time — "Mohammedan" for a Muslim, and "Mohammedanism" for the religion of Islam. These terms are now dated, and are not the words Muslims use of themselves. In this edition we have updated them to "Muslim" and "Islam" throughout the body of the text, so that a modern reader meets the account in respectful, current language. Three of Clark's other renderings have been brought forward the same way: "Koran" is given as "Quran," "Soofie" as "Sufi," and "the Traditions" — his term for the reports of Muhammad's words and deeds — as "the Hadith." The last is an imperfect fit, since the Traditions are the reports and hadith the body of them, but it is the word a reader is likely to know.

What we have not changed is as important as what we have. We have left the author's argument, his voice, and his meaning entirely intact — he was a Muslim scholar setting out, in the plainest terms, why he left the faith of his fathers, and none of that is softened. We have kept personal names exactly as written (including names such as Ghulam Mohammed). The book's title carried the same dated word, and we have brought it into line with the text: this edition is A Muslim Brought to Christ. The historical title, A Mohammedan Brought to Christ, is the one under which the work has been known and cited since 1884, so it is printed on the title page and on the book's page on our site, and any catalogue or footnote pointing to it will still find this book.

A note on the scan. This edition was set from the Internet Archive scan of the 1884 printing, and that scan was read page by page, so the printed furniture landed in the middle of the prose: fifteen running heads, one of them inside a word, and nine footnotes set at the feet of pages, each sitting between the two halves of a sentence that ran across the page break. The furniture has been removed and those sentences rejoined. Clark's footnotes are kept, printed together after the narrative, because only four of his printed markers survive in the scan and we would rather not guess where the others belonged. Where the scan was destroyed outright, the missing words were recovered from a second scan of the same translation — the 1885 New Edition held by Columbia — and every repair is recorded in this edition's correction file.