Khan was 40 years old when the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, what some Indian historians refer to as India's first war of independence, resulted in the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the onset of direct British rule. Muslims in India were demoralized. Khan, like his Middle Eastern contemporaries Afghani and Abduh, and as his countryman Muhammad Iqbal would do later, called upon Muslims to modernize and take the best of what the West had to offer while remaining true to their principles. Blind adherence to taqlid ("tradition") was to be abandoned, and ijtihad ("innovation") in thought and interpretation was to be encouraged as the means to bring Islam up to date. Khan's goal was to bypass much of the frozen taqlid of the scholars and strive to reconnect with Islam's primal origins, what he called "'the original religion of Islam which God and the messenger have disclosed, not that religion which the ulema and the preachers have fashioned.'" (quoted in John Esposito, Islam the Straight Path, Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 135).
While in theory, Khan considered the authority of the Qur'an incontrovertible, in practice when reason and text differed, Khan's rationalism dictated that reason should prevail. He argued for a critical reexamination of the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and the rejection of those sayings that could not be definitively traced back to the Prophet.
Khan's embrace of the West (which led to his being knighted by Queen Victoria) cost him the respect of many of his fellow Muslims, especially among the influential ulema, and limited the range of his influence. (Esposito, 134-136)