Karl Gottlieb Pfander

Karl Gottlieb Pfander (1803–1865), spelt also as Carl Gottlieb Pfander or C.G. Pfander, was a Lutheran Christian priest, missionary and apologist; he served as a missionary in Central Asia and Trans-Caucasus under the Basel Mission, and as a polemicist to the North-Western Provinces of India under the Church Missionary Society. He was known for converting Muslims to Christianity.

He authored Mizan al-Haqq (The Balance of Truth), an apologetic, Remarks on the nature of Muhammedanism, and more.

Biography One of nine children, the son of a village baker was born on 3 November 1803 at Württemberg, Germany—Württemberg, his birthplace was one of the few places notorious for Pietistic form of Evangelism, influenced by Pietistic Lutherans like J.A. Bengel and F.C. Oetinger. Pfander attended a local Latin school, and then grammar school in Stuttgart. At the age of sixteen, he had already decided to become a Protestant Christian missionary; accordingly, he got his missionary training in Germany between 1819 and 1821. 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. Karl Gottlieb Pfander was ordained as a Lutheran priest, with his holy orders being conferred in the state church.

After a disastrous famine in 1837, a large orphanage was opened by the authorities in Agra and several orphaned children were taken in and subsequently baptized as Christians. With the financial success of the orphanage, the East India Company launched Orphan Press, employing the orphans at Agra. The success of Serampore Baptist Press for the East India Company in lower Bengal by Serampore Trio was soon replicated at Sikandra in the 1840s for printing Urdu and Persian tracts in criticism of Islam. This further escalated with the transfer of "Sadr courts" from Allahabad to Agra.

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. On his arrival, he had an impression that Muslims in India were on the verge of turning to Christianity; accordingly, he translated some of the books on Islam and Christianity which he had already written during the previous years into Urdu. Mizan al-Haqq was one such book that was used as starting point at Agra, and it was translated into several other languages of the Muslim world as well. With consent from the Basel Mission, he joined CMS on 12 February 1840.

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. Having observed the debate by himself, he later labeled these articles as The Mohammedan Controversy in 1897.

Colonial India: Peshawar (1855–1857)

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." That same year he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from Cambridge University in recognition of his scholarship.

Istanbul (1858–1865) He was sent as CMS missionary to Istanbul in 1859. When he arrived at Istanbul, many Turks showed interest in the doctrines of Christianity for the first few years. When in Istanbul, then the Ottoman capital, while he was on Middle Eastern mission, he commented: