Karl Gottlieb Pfander

In due course, he was accepted for training at the newly established Evangelical Institute at Basel in Switzerland between 1821 and 1825, and became fluent in Persian, Turkish, and Arabic languages.

In 1837, he joined the Church Missionary Society (CMS) when BM was closed by Russia in Central Asia; consequently, he was sent to India for sixteen years between 1837 and 1857.

Both Agra and Lucknow became home to missionaries who engaged in interfaith dialogue with the local Muslim ulema and published polemical books against the Islamic creed.

[3][4][10] Pfander started to India in 1837 and arrived at Calcutta (present Kolkata) on 1 October 1838, due to closure of his previous mission station in the Russian Caucasus—South Caucasus.

After he took his new job at Agra, he immediately began engaging local Muslims through written letters, sending copies of the Persian and Arabic Bibles.

The East India Company also posted administrators who were sympathetic to evangelicalism, such as James Thomason, the Lieutenant general of North-West Provinces, and William Muir.

[3][4] While in India, he engaged with Muslim religious leaders in a famous public debate at Agra on 10 and 11 April 1854 at the invitation of Islamic scholar Rahmatullah Kairanawi.

Local Shi'ites and Sunni audiences; Muhammad Wazîr Khân, a physician in British-run medical hospital; and prolific Islamic writer and scholar Imad ud-din Lahiz were in the crowd on Kairanawi's side.

[11] William Muir, Secretary to the Government of the North West Provinces, described these debates between Pfander and Kairanawi in an article published by the "Calcutta Review," along with recent history of Christian mission to Muslims.

[citation needed] In 1837 the CMS relocated Pfander to Peshawar, in the north-west frontier of India, where he continued his distribution of literature and his apologetics discussions.

At the outbreak of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, he "went on preaching in the streets right through the most anxious time, when plots to murder all the Europeans were revealed by intercepted letters.

[3][4][14][15] Pfander's wrote Mizan ul-Haqq (The Balance of Truth), modelled on the style of Islamic theological works, and attempting to present the Christian gospel in a form understandable to Muslims.

He said that the Bible is the inspired word of God, neither corrupted nor superseded, and that the Qur'an itself testifies to the reliability of the Christian scriptures and the supremacy of Christ.

Samuel Zwemer said of his dogmatic and controversial methods that Christ and his apostles engaged in similar public debate with individuals and crowds.

William Muir, having arrived in India before Pfander, devoted his leisure time during and after his forty years of service at North-West province, to the study of early Islamic history and the writings of evangelical tracts for Muslims.

[4] We pass on to the consideration of Dr. Pfander's writings, which consist of three treatises: first, Mîzân-ul-Haqq, or "Balance of Truth"; second, Miftâh-ul-Asrâr, or "Key of Mysteries"; and third, Tarîq-ul-Hyât, or " Way of Salvation."

From his residence and travels in Persia, Pfander possesses advantages which fortunately qualify him in an unusual degree for the great controversy with our Moslem population.

He was attached for ten or twelve years to the German mission at Fort Shushy on the confines of Georgia, from whence he made frequent and protracted visits to Persia, penetrating as far as Bagdad, and returning by a circuitous tour through Isfahan and Teheran.

In 1836, the Russian Government, unable to tolerate the presence of foreign ecclesiastics, put a stop to the mission, and thus proved the means of providing us with labourers who in the field of Persia had acquired so valuable a knowledge of its language and so intimate an acquaintance with the religion and tenets of the Mohammedans.

He used this work to support the statements of the Bible against the Islamic views of its textual corruption and attacked the veracity of Quran and Muhammed's prophethood.