God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Finally, there was the overlooked detail in the seditious letters intercepted by the authorities at Peshawar at the time of the outbreak of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the so-called Indian Mutiny. As described in the Punjab Gazetteer of the Peshawar Division, these letters had been sent by ‘Muhammadan bigots in Patna and Thanesar to soldiers of the 64th Native Infantry, revelling in the atrocities that had been committed in Hindustan on the men, women and children of the “Nazareenes” [Christians] and sending them messages from their own mothers that they should emulate these deeds, and if they fell in the attempt they would at least go to heaven, and their deaths in such a case would be pleasant news at home. These letters alluded to a long series of correspondences that had been going on, through the 64th Native Infantry, with the fanatics in Swat and Sitana.’

  The fruit of my travels and researches was Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier, published in 2000. It told the story of a pioneering band of political officers, known collectively as ‘Henry Lawrence’s Young Men’, young military officers who served under Lawrence on what was then the north-west frontier of the Punjab but which became the North-West Frontier Province of British India. Besides Harry Lumsden and James Abbott, these frontiersmen included Herbert Edwardes, John Nicholson, Reynell Taylor and Neville Chamberlain, all of whom carved out extraordinary reputations for themselves in their dealings with the frontier tribes – and who between themselves and the Pathans helped to create the lasting mystique of ‘the Frontier’. From then on India’s North-West Frontier became increasingly romanticised, as much by the political officers on the spot as by anyone else. I particularly recall the words of perhaps the last of these British frontiersmen, Sir Olaf Caroe, Governor of the North-West Frontier Province from 1946 to 1947, who described his feelings to me in the following terms:

  The stage on which the Pathan lived out his life was at the same time magnificent and harsh – and the Pathan was like his background. Such a contrast was sometimes hard to bear, but perhaps it was this that put us in love with it.

  There was among the Pathans something that called to the Englishman or the Scotsman – partly that the people looked you straight in the eye, that there was no equivocation and that you couldn’t browbeat them even if you wanted to. When we crossed the bridge at Attock we felt we’d come home.

  Exactly the same attitude came into being in Britain’s dealings with the desert tribes of Arabia. Early adventurers such as Doughty, Burton and Palgrave and later politicals such as St John Philby and T. E. Lawrence unwittingly conspired to create a romance of a stark landscape sparsely populated by manly Badawin, better known today as Bedouin, whose harsh moral code mirrored that of the Pathans in almost every respect. It may be going too far to say that the tendency to view these two regions and their two peoples through rose-tinted preconceptions had fatal consequences, but it most certainly blurred the realities.

  The first British officer to attach this aura of romance to the Pathans was Herbert Edwardes, in A Year on the Punjab Frontier, published in 1851. Yet Edwardes recognised that many of the qualities he admired in the Pathans were double-edged: their individualism and manliness was accompanied by intense egoism and vengefulness; strong clan identity meant intense inter-clan enmity; codes of friendship and hospitality were matched by deceit and betrayal. But perhaps the most striking paradox was that the Pathans’ much-vaunted independent nature was accompanied by an extraordinary degree of religious dependence. Edwardes was a devout Christian evangelical, brought up to regard his own values as the benchmark of modern civilisation, as demonstrated by the conspicuous success of the British Empire. He had no time for what he saw as the Pathans’ religious credulity, which in his opinion made them prey to exploitation by the many categories of persons known collectively as ulema, or ‘those learned in the ways of Islam’, the Muslim clergy. ‘The Moolah and the Kazee, the Peer and the Syud descended on the smiling vale,’ wrote Herbert Edwardes of the Waziri tribes south of Peshawar,

  armed with a panoply of spectacles and owl-like looks, miraculous rosaries, infallible amulets, and tables of descent from the Prophet Muhommud. Each newcomer, like St Peter, held the keys of heaven; and the whole, like Irish beggars, were equally prepared to bless or curse to all eternity him who gave or him who withheld . . . To be cursed in Arabic, or anything that sounded like it; to be told that the blessed Prophet had put a black mark against his soul, for not giving his best field to one of the Prophet’s own posterity; to have the saliva of a disappointed saint left in anger on his doorpost; or behold a Hajee, who had gone three times to Mecca, deliberately sit down and enchant his camels with the itch, and his sheep with the rot: these were things which made the dagger drop out of the hand of the awe-stricken savage, his knees knock together, his liver turn to water, and his parched tongue to be scarce able to articulate a full and complete concession of the blasphemous demand.

  The Corps of Guides surgeon Dr Henry Bellew also noted this same propensity for religious subservience among the Yusufzai. ‘They are’, he declared, ‘entirely controlled by their priests, and are at all times ready for a jahad [jihad], be the infidels black or white . . . An inordinate reverence for saints and the religious classes generally is universal, and their absurdly impossible and contradictory dicta are received and acted upon with eager credulity.’ Half a century later Winston Churchill, then a junior officer with the 4th Hussars, came to exactly the same conclusion. ‘Their superstition’, he wrote of the Pathans, ‘exposes them to the rapacity and tyranny of a numerous priesthood – Mullahs, Sahibzadas, Akhundzadas, Fakirs – and a host of wandering Talib-ul- ulms, who correspond with the theological students in Turkey, and live free at the expense of the people.’

  When Dr Bellew came to set down his General Report on the Yusufzais in 1864, he singled out two groups of clergy as having particular influence over the Pathans. The first were the Saiyyeds, of Arab extraction and believed to be the direct descendants of Caliph Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet: ‘Their origin being from so holy a source, they are, of course, esteemed as uncommonly holy persons. Their bold, obtrusive, and continual publication of their sacred character and descent draws from the ignorant a reverential and awful respect, and at the same time gives them great influence over the mass of the population they dwell among. They use this to their own advantage and manage to get from the Afghans [i.e., Pathans] considerable tracts of land in gift as a perpetual and hereditary possession.’

  Bellew’s second group provided the most active portion of the clergy. Every mosque had its imam, who led the congregation in prayers, supported in the larger mosques by a number of religious teachers, known variously as mullahs, maulvis or maulanas: ‘They call the azan [summons to prayer], and perform the prayers and other duties of the Imam in his absence. They are mostly occupied in teaching the Talib-ul-ulm the Kuran [Quran], the forms of prayer, and the doctrines of Islam, and the village children how to repeat their “belief” and say their prayers.’ Dr Bellew’s ‘Talib-ul-ulm’ were more correctly taliban-ul-ulm, literally ‘seekers of knowledge’, or religious students. He categorised them as ‘a mixed class of vagrants and idlers, who, under the pretence of devoting themselves to religion, wander from country to country; and, on the whole, lead an agreeable and easy life. Wherever they go they find shelter in the mosques, and can always get a sufficiency of food for the mere asking. As a rule, they are very ignorant and remarkably bigoted.’

  Edwardes, Bellew and the British officers who came after them loathed these saiyyeds, imams, mullahs, maulvis, maulanas and taliban in equal measure. They saw the ulema, because of their influence over their flocks, as a threat to British authority and their influence on the tribespeople as wholly negative. That loathing was returned in equal if not greater measure by the sayyeds, mullahs, maulvis, maulanas and taliban, who considered the British not merely a threat to their authority but also a threat to their religion. In 1847 a would-be assassin caught and disarmed by Herbert Edwardes’ guards was found to
have been acting on the instructions of a mullah. In 1853 John Nicholson shot a man advancing on him with a sword, an assailant whom he later described as ‘religiously mad’. This man, too, had been put up to it by what Nicholson described as a ‘religious instructor’. As the gravestones in the Christian cemeteries of Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu and elsewhere on the Frontier testify, scores of acts of violence against individual Britons were perpetrated over the next century.

  My youngest daughter has a beautiful gold-threaded scarf that once belonged to an English doctor named Flora Butcher. Miss Butcher wanted to be a doctor at a time in Britain when women were not allowed to enter the profession, so she went to Belgium to study. After qualifying, she had hoped to practise in India but was refused permission to do so by the British authorities. Undaunted, she proceeded up the Khyber Pass, to set up a medical mission in tribal territory, where she and a small band of devoted Indians ministered with great success to the local tribes-people. Towards the end of 1927 her friends became concerned by the non-appearance of the pack ponies that kept her supplied, enquiries were made, and it was discovered that Miss Butcher and most of her staff had been murdered. She was only one of a number of doctors targeted and assassinated on the Frontier at that time by what the British termed ‘fanatics’.

  In Soldier Sahibs I interpreted these killings by tribesmen as part and parcel of the Pathans’ traditional propensity for violence and their antipathy to outside interference. I was quite wrong. What I had missed was something infinitely more serious: a series of insurgencies and assassinations increasingly directed by a movement whose adherents saw themselves as engaging in a great religious struggle in defence of Islam but who were (as they still are) profoundly at odds with that same religion; a movement dedicated not simply to protecting Islam, as its adherents protested (and still protest), but to the destruction of all interpretations of religion other than its own; a movement that worked time and time again to bring the people of the Frontier out in armed revolt, and which in 1857 played an unacknowledged part in the struggle to overthrow British rule in India; a movement brought to the verge of extinction many times over but whose ideology was always kept alive – and which today is not only back in business but whose appeal and authority is greater than it has ever been.

  The founder of this movement saw himself as a reformer and described those who followed his teachings as Al-Muwahhidun, or the Unitarians. But to their many enemies they became known, after their movement’s founder, as Al-Wahhabi – the Wahhabi. One of the many curious features of their subsequent history is that the Wahhabis were very well known to people of my great-grandparents’ generation. Indeed, one of my great-grandfathers was standing beside Lord Mayo, the then Viceroy of India, when he was knifed by what was almost certainly a Wahhabi-directed assassin in 1871. To the British authorities in India in the nineteenth century these Wahhabis were best known as the Hindustani Fanatics, and their fighting base in the mountains was always spoken of as the ‘Fanatic Camp’. A generation later, in my grandparents’ time, the same movement reappeared in Arabia, revitalised and now calling itself Al-Ikhwan – the Brotherhood. Meanwhile, on the Indian sub-continent Wahhabism had mutated into a more respectable form, now rebranding its religious ideology Salafi, or ‘following the forefathers’. Then in our own times these two streams, re-energised by new political ideologies associated with nationalism, separatism and pan-Islamism, converged and cross-infected on the Afghanistan–Pakistan fault line. Out of this coming-together emerged two very different bodies, one tight-knit and localised, the other loose-knit and with global aspirations: the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

  Wahhabism is declared by its defenders to be no more than Islam in its purest, original form, and without links to either the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. A number of serious academics and political observers have taken the same view, representing Wahhabism as little more than a puritanical reformist teaching within Islam which still has political clout in Saudi Arabia but little relevance to modern-day events elsewhere, particularly when it comes to the driving ideologies of men like the Yemeni Osama bin Laden, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, the Afghan Mullah Omar and the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and others who use terror in the name of Islam as a political weapon.

  The founder of Wahhabism saw himself as a reformer and revivalist reacting against corruptions inside Islam. He declared holy war on those corruptions and took that war to his fellow Muslims. But his Wahhabism very quickly developed its own militant politico-religious ideology built around an authority figure who was both a temporal and spiritual leader. It became, in essence, a cult.

  Wahhabism of itself never enjoyed mass support. Its ideology always was and remains rooted in violent intolerance, which has few charms for most people. It would have gone the way of all extremist cults but for the fact that it appeared as a champion of faith at a time when the world community of Islam, the umma, began to question why it was that the triumph of Islam was not proceeding as ordained.

  Islam’s first great crisis of faith occurred at the time of the eruption of the Mongols in the late twelfth century, but a second and more serious crisis began with the rise of Western capitalism. At the time of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent the Ottoman Empire appeared invincible: a world of shared faith under one central authority, the khalifa, and one rule of law, sharia, governing all aspects of Muslim behaviour. This was the civilisation of dar ul- Islam, the ‘domain of Islam’, inhabited by those who had submitted to the will of God, surrounded on all sides by dar ul-harb, the ‘domain of enmity’, inhabited by unbelievers who would all finally convert to Islam and become subject to sharia. But with the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1663 the Ottomans began a long, slow retreat before the advance of Christian Europe. That advance was much more than brute imperialism: it was all-enveloping, neatly summed up in the triumphalist words of the British missionary doctor Dr Theodore Pennell when he wrote in 1909 that ‘The Old Islam, the old Hinduism, are already doomed, not by the efforts of the missionaries, but by the contact of the West, by the growth of commerce, by the spread of education, by the thirst for wealth and luxury which the West has implanted in the East.’

  The questions ‘How can this be?’ and ‘What can we do?’ came to be asked with increasing concern by ordinary Muslims. By tradition it was the local ruler, the amir and the nawab, who defended Islam in the name of the Caliphate, but these secular leaders were giving way to Christian governors. In their absence it was the ulema who increasingly came forward with the answers that people wanted to hear. One response was Islamic revivalism, which continues today under the generic term of ‘pan-Islamism’, a movement for reshaping the world along Islamic lines, to which many disparate individuals and groups turned (and continue to turn) for comfort and salvation. This remains a perfectly legitimate ideal, no different from Christians wishing to see all non-Christians saved – until it is subsumed by the employment of compulsion, violence and terror as instruments to achieve that ideal. What made this terrorising not merely acceptable but a religious duty was the ideology articulated in Wahhabism.

  Now it is the West’s turn to ask the questions. Since 9/ll immense efforts have been made to understand the phenomenon of Islamist extremism. An entire industry of think-tanks and defence centres has sprung up to satisfy the demand for explanations. Most of this attention has been focused on recent events, with correspondingly little notice being taken of origins. Wahhabism is only part of the answer, but it is an important part, and one aspect of Wahhabism in particular has been all but ignored. Here I have tried to make good that gap in our understanding.

  1

  Death of a Commissioner

  He was the beau ideal of a soldier – cool to conceive, brave to dare, and strong to do . . . The defiles of the Khyber and the peaks of the Black Mountain alike bear witness to his exploits . . . The loss of Col. Mackeson’s life would have dimmed a victory: to lose him thus, by the hand of a foul assassin, is a misfortune of the heaviest gloom for the Government, which co
unted him among its bravest and its best.

  Part of a tribute from Lord Dalhousie inscribed on the memorial to Colonel Frederick Mackeson, Commissioner of Peshawar, died 14 September 1853

  On the afternoon of 10 September 1853 Colonel Frederick Mackeson was working on the veranda of his bungalow in the Civil Lines at Peshawar. As Commissioner of Peshawar, Mackeson was the most senior British official on the North-West Frontier of the Punjab, overseeing the work of a dozen or so assistant commissioners and magistrates. He was also the most experienced political officer in the region; he had made it his business to know the Pathans and their ways, and was liked and respected, both by his junior officers and the tribal chiefs, among whom he was known affectionately as Kishin Kaka or ‘Uncle Mackeson’. One of his first acts on his appointment two years earlier had been to build a new kutcherry or office, together with a residential bungalow. These new quarters were on open ground between Peshawar city, where the native inhabitants lived, and the cantonment housing the British political and military officers and their troops. This was in keeping with the political philosophy that Mackeson and his fellow politicals had imbibed from their chief, Henry Lawrence, which was that they should always make themselves accessible.