God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Having completed his official duties in the kutcherry, Mackeson had walked across the road to his bungalow to work on his papers. It was his habit to see petitioners only in the morning, so when a tribesman advanced towards him holding out a roll of paper, Mackeson told him to come back the next day. He was unknown to Mackeson’s staff but had earlier been seen praying outside the office. As recounted to a young officer named Sydney Cotton, newly arrived on the frontier, the stranger then fell down at the feet of the Commissioner and, clasping his hands, implored him to read his petition: ‘Colonel Mackeson then took the paper and commenced to read, and being intent on its contents, the native suddenly sprung upon the Colonel, and plunged a dagger into his breast.’ The Commissioner died four days later.

  The assailant was seized and interrogated. He had come from a village outside British territory, in Swat, declared himself to be a talib, and claimed to have acted to stop the British invading his land. Further questioning revealed him to be a ‘religious fanatic’ who saw himself as a mujahedeen set on a course of martyrdom. He was duly tried and hanged. He died, according to Cotton, ‘glorying in his deed of blood’. To prevent his grave becoming a martyr’s shrine his remains were burned and the ashes thrown in the river.

  As for the unfortunate Mackeson, fears that his body might be further violated led to his being interred not in the Christian cemetery, which lay outside the perimeter on the cantonment, but in a garden known as the Company Bagh. A black marble obelisk was erected over the grave, inscribed with a fulsome tribute penned by the Governor-General of India himself, Lord Dalhousie.

  Because of the name Mackeson had made for himself among the frontier tribes, his friends found his murder incomprehensible. There were rumours, angrily dismissed, that the Commissioner had violated Pathan taboos by making advances to one of their women. There was also talk of a fatwa or religious edict having been proclaimed, and of a reward being offered for his head. The reality was that the murder was both an act of revenge and the first successful blow against the British Government in India by a secret organisation intent on revolution.

  This organisation was, in fact, already known to the authorities. Back in 1848 Lieutenant Harry Lumsden had reported the presence of Hindustani outsiders among the Sayyed tribesmen of Hazara. He had captured their two leaders – two brothers named Ali – who after questioning had been returned under custody to their homes in Patna. Then in August 1852 the Assistant Magistrate of Patna, Charles Carnac, had sent details to the Governor-General of a plot involving a sect of Muslims in his city who were ‘mixed up with a band of Moslem fanatics in the distant hills of Sittana and Swat’. A bundle of letters had been intercepted which revealed that a ‘treasonable correspondence’ was taking place between these fanatics in the mountains and members of a prominent Muslim family living in the Sadiqpore district of Patna. The latter were apparently despatching kafilas or caravans of men, arms and funds to the frontier along a secret trail that went from Patna to Peshawar by way of Meerut, Amballa and Rawalpindi, for the express purpose of waging war against the Government of India.

  Acting on this information, Mr Carnac had raided the Sadiqpore mansion-cum-caravanserai in Patna, only to find that the occupants had been forewarned and had destroyed all their letters. However, the head of the family, one Maulvi Ahmadullah, had subsequently assembled several hundred armed men in his premises and had declared that ‘he was prepared to resist any further prosecution of the Magistrate’s enquiries and, if attacked, would raise the standard of revolt’.

  After taking advice from his home minister and members of his council, Lord Dalhousie had then set out a formal Minute in Council in which he expressed himself satisfied that there was no cause for concern. For years these fanatics had been doing their best to ‘induce the Mussulmans [Muslims] in India to join in a holy war’ and nothing had come of it: ‘The letters now detected seem to me to show that their efforts have met with very little success. They ask for money, they ask for arms and recruits, and the terms in which they write seem to me conclusive of the fact that they have obtained very little of the one and very few of the other.’ The Governor-General had himself seen ‘a sort of ballad’, picked up in the back streets of Calcutta, which enjoined ‘all true Mussulmans to join the standard of the faith and rise against the infidel’. But that sort of thing was only to be expected. His Lordship could see ‘no reason to suppose that there is any more movement or intrigue at present going on than must at all times be expected among the Mussulmans in India’.

  This first Minute had then been followed by a second, written by Dalhousie in October 1852 in response to further discoveries of treasonable activities, now involving attempts to subvert sepoys of the Bengal Native Infantry on service in the Punjab. Again, the evidence pointed to a group of Muslim mullahs in Patna being deeply involved in treasonable conspiracy against the state. But Government, according to Dalhousie, was on top of the situation, and the law as it existed was fully capable of dealing with it. Instructions were subsequently sent to all the provinces under British rule reminding the local authorities how they were to deal with such cases. Where it could be proved that treason was being plotted, the ringleaders of plots were to be shown no leniency – but magistrates were to avoid taking any action that might be seen as oppressive by the native population. As for the fanatics up in the Mahabun Mountain at Sittana, they were best left untouched: ‘Since they are insignificant, they may be let alone as long as they are quiet. At any rate, this is not a propitious time for such a movement. We have already irons enough in the fire on the north-west frontier without heating another unnecessarily.’

  Barely eight weeks after the Governor-General recorded this second Minute, Commissioner Mackeson had himself led a small punitive force across the Indus River from British territory in Hazara. This was in response to an appeal from a local tribal chief, the Khan of Amb: some Hindustani foreigners had occupied one of his forts on the banks of the Indus and he needed help to expel them. These Hindustanis were the same Moslem fanatics of Sittana of whom the Magistrate of Patna had complained eighteen months earlier. Among the officers who accompanied Mackeson on this raid was a young lieutenant of the 41st Bengal Native Infantry, George Rowcroft, for whom it was his first taste of frontier warfare. ‘Sittana’, he wrote in a private memoir, ‘was a place built and inhabited by Mahomedan Hindustanis and Bengalis; refugees and outlaws, men who had left the British territories either as criminals fleeing from justice, or as fanatics renouncing the “Feringee” [the British] and all his works. They were a thorn in the side of the civil and political authorities on the Frontier, and made frequent raids across the Indus into British territory, often succeeding in carrying off, for ransom, some of our subjects; generally a Hindu trader.’ Having kidnapped a victim they would send a ransom demand to his relatives and, if this wasn’t answered, follow up with a second message accompanied by the victim’s ear: ‘A further neglect to pay up resulted in the head of the victim being sent, and a sarcastic message that they were now relieved of the expense of feeding him.’

  Ordered by Mackeson to give up the Khan of Amb’s fort, its Hindustani occupants responded with a defiant letter declaring that they would die first. Accordingly, on 6 January 1853 two regiments of Sikh infantry were ferried across the Indus and advanced on the fort from below, while at the same time a party of matchlock-men supplied by the Khan of Amb took up a position on the heights above. The sight of columns of troops advancing in good order was enough to send the occupants scurrying up the mountainside. ‘In spite of the boasts of the Hindustanis,’ wrote Colonel Mackeson in his official despatch, ‘they were all, to the number of from 200 to 300, in full flight from the fort of Kotla.’ In the meantime, the Khan of Amb’s matchlock-men had seized the Hindustanis’ main base at Sittana, higher up in the mountains. But here, too, the Hindustanis dispersed into the surrounding crags and ravines, leaving behind a small rearguard party to hold off the attackers. According to George Rowcroft’s account, by the t
ime the Sikhs arrived the fighting was over: ‘The latter, on arriving at Sittana – a partially fortified village surrounded by a dense belt of dried thorns – found that the able bodied portion of the occupants had fled, and the few (some dozen or fifteen of sick and wounded) left behind, had been promptly disposed of by the gallant Tunawallis.’

  The camp at Sittana was levelled, the belt of thorns fired, and the expedition withdrew, taking with it a number of wounded prisoners. In Peshawar the Guides’ Assistant Surgeon, Dr Robert Lyell, treated these wounded men and was impressed by their fortitude and their refusal to talk. Only after one of his nursing assistants had gained their confidence did they begin to give information about themselves and their organisation, whereupon it became clear that this was no rabble of outlaws but a disciplined army, well organised and with a clear agenda. It had an established chain of command, and was currently led by the younger of two brothers named Ali following the recent death of the elder brother. Although they lived frugally on stewed pulses and unleavened bread, they were armed with carbines and were kept well supplied by their supporters in the plains. The prisoners boasted that many pious Muslims contributed to their cause, including the rulers of a number of leading Muslim princely states in India.

  Mackeson could have put an end to the Hindustani Fanatics at Sittana in January 1853. But the Commissioner had just received the Governor-General’s Minute, telling him to leave things as they were. So he did not order a pursuit, later justifying his inaction on the grounds that he had done all that was required of him: ‘He considered their flight, without offering resistance, would generally increase the contempt in which they were held by the surrounding tribes, and would be more useful to us than any persecution of them could be.’

  Mackeson’s failure to follow up his raid probably cost him his life. Had he done so, the history of the North-West Frontier might well have been very different. But Frederick Mackeson, like Lord Dalhousie before him and many others who came after, underestimated the Hindustani Fanatics. Intelligence existed to show the movement’s true nature, but this information was disregarded. It was not the first time the Hindustani Fanatics were let off the hook, and it was certainly not the last.

  What the British came to know as the Fanatic Camp at Sittana had been established almost a quarter of a century earlier on the eastern slopes of Mahabun Mountain overlooking the Indus Valley. It was on land granted in perpetuity as a religious gift by the local Yusufzai back in the sixteenth century to a renowned saint named Pir Baba, who was a Saiyyed descended from the Prophet. After the Sikhs annexed neighbouring Hazara and the Vale of Peshawar, Sittana became a refuge and a rallying point for resisters – or, as a British intelligence officer put it, ‘the refuge for outlaws and offenders from Yusufzai and Hazara, and the rendezvous of all the discontented Khans and their followers’. Then in the winter months of 1827–8 a very different kind of resister appeared on the Frontier: SYED AHMAD of Rae Bareli, founder and first of the Hindustani Fanatics.

  Syed Ahmad was born Syed Ghullam Muhammad in 1786 in the town of Rae Bareli, on the Gangetic plains between Lucknow and Allahabad in the kingdom of Oude. As his first name implies, his family claimed descent from the Prophet, which marked him out as someone to be respected by virtue of his inherent sanctity and to be accorded the honorific title of shah (king). According to his several biographers, he grew up into a model of perfection: tall, strong and fair, with close-knit eyebrows and a long and bushy beard. He was said to have had a great appetite for physical sports, including wrestling, swimming, archery and shooting. This gave him an imposing physique that set him apart from most clerics, yet he was apparently taciturn and gentle in demeanour, with a quiet voice that could be heard by all who wished to hear him. As one biography put it, ‘All the perfections . . . were implanted from his birth in this holy man, as evidenced from the delight which he took in the exercise of piety and practice of virtue from his childhood.’ Like the Prophet, he fell from time to time into deep ecstatic trances, indicating that he was in direct communication with God.

  After his father’s death in 1800 the fourteen-year-old moved to Delhi to become a talib of the leading scholar of the age, SHAH ABDUL AZIZ, principal of a small but greatly respected religious school known as Madrassah-i-Rahimiya, tucked away in the back streets of the old city. According to the author of Sirat-ul- Mustaqim, the best known of the biographies, ‘When he was admitted into the society of the venerated Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who received him as a disciple of the Nakshbandia school, by the propitious effects and influence of the enlightened spirit of his instructor, the concealed excellencies of his nature developed themselves in a natural succession of wonders.’ Among these wonders were three dreams: in the first the Prophet fed the boy with three dates; in the second the Prophet’s daughter Fatima bathed him, washed him and dressed him in garments ‘of exceeding richness’; in the third God placed him on his right hand, showed him his treasures and said to him ‘This I have given to you, and I shall give you yet more.’ Clearly Syed Ahmad was destined for great things – although it should always be borne in mind that the hagiographers who wrote about him did so as leading practitioners of the cult of Syed Ahmad that developed after his untimely demise.

  Syed Ahmad was extremely fortunate in having Shah Abdul Aziz for his teacher, for he was the eldest son and religious successor of the renowned Sufi scholar and reformer SHAH WALIULLAH of Delhi, who has been described by a leading modern historian as ‘the bridge between medieval and modern Islam in India’. Half a century earlier Shah Waliullah had set out to make Islam more accessible by translating the Quran, the word of God divinely revealed to his Prophet Muhammad, from Arabic into Persian. He had also called for moral reform and a return to the pristine Islam of the days of the Prophet as set down in the Quran and the Hadith, a corpus of accounts of the deeds and sayings of the Prophet as remembered by his companions. As part of this process of reform Shah Waliullah had broken with religious convention by setting himself up as a mujtahid, one who makes his own interpretations of established religious law by virtue of informed reasoning.

  In the public mind, however, Shah Waliullah had been best known for his unavailing efforts to restore Muslim rule to Hindustan, culminating in a famous appeal to the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali to invade India, destroy the Hindu Marathas in battle and bring back the golden years of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. In the event, Ahmad Shah had been forced to retreat to Afghanistan and the Marathas had once again become the dominant power in northern India. But the dream of an Islamic revival and of Hindustan under sharia had been kept alive by Shah Waliullah’s four sons, with the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya acknowledged as the most influential seminary in all Hindustan.

  Islam east of the Indus River had developed along different lines from that followed in the faith’s heartlands. It had reached almost every corner of the sub-continent, but was a minority religion everywhere other than in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and in perhaps half a dozen regional centres such as Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad. Contrary to what some Hindu nationalist historians would have us believe, most conversions to Islam had been voluntary, inspired as much by the challenge to the Hindu caste system represented by Islamic egalitarianism as by the examples of Sufi saints, who in many areas preceded the Muslim invasions. Islam represented a rare opportunity for social betterment, so it followed that most of these converts came from the bottom of the pile, as exemplified by the weavers and artisans of East Bengal. Most of them became willing if ignorant followers of the Hanafi school of law, the oldest, most inclusive and least hierarchical of the four schools of jurisprudence of the Sunnis, the Islamic mainstream which followed the precedents established by the Prophet and his immediate successors and acknowledged the authority of the line of caliphs who came after them.

  The many waves of Turko-Afghan invaders who settled in northern India were also Sunnis, again mostly Hanafis, whereas the Persians who came with the Mughals were predominantly Shia, the largest minority sect in Islam, wh
ich regarded Imam Ali and his line as the legitimate descendants of the Prophet and thus the only true source of religious authority – a view considered heretical by orthodox Sunnis. However, centuries of contact with Hinduism also led to a measure of synthesis between it and both Sunni and Shia interpretations of Islam – an intermingling of views and practices that reformers such as Shah Waliullah and his sons found highly objectionable.

  Elements of racism also came into play. Even though Islam stood for the equality of all men before God, the Muslim community in India developed a hierarchy that in many respects mirrored the Hindu caste system, a pecking order in which Hindustani Muslims descended from Hindu converts were at the bottom and those of Arab descent at the top, closely followed by Mughal, Persian and Afghan settlers. At the very pinnacle, naturally enough, were the Saiyyeds, whose descent from the Prophet accorded them respect bordering on veneration, enabling them to exercise what was generally a moderating influence on society by acting as mediators in disputes and as religious patrons. A significant number among this Muslim aristocracy resented their loss of power and equated it with the watering-down of Islam’s core values since the days of Emperor Aurangzeb. Many also embraced Sufi mysticism. The reformer Shah Waliullah was himself a follower of the Naqshbandi Sufi school, based on a movement originating in Bokhara in the fourteenth century which eschewed music and dance in favour of silent contemplation, and sought to recapture the simple intensity of early Islam through personal devotion. However, there are Sufis and Sufis. Prior to Shah Waliullah, the best-known Naqshbandi Sufi in India was Sheikh AHMAD SIRHINDI, who had been so appalled by the religious tolerance promoted by Emperor Akbar that when Jehangir succeeded him he began a political campaign to restore what he regarded as true Muslim values. These were centred on the overarching importance of tawhid, the oneness of God or absolute monotheism, as the basis of true religion, and on the need to combat all innovations and deviations from tawhid, as represented not only by Shia beliefs but also by many of the popular customs that had been adopted by Sunnis over the centuries. Ahmad Sirhindi’s application of Naqshbandi Sufism expressed itself in violent intolerance of Sunni backsliders and in the persecution of Shias and Hindus. Despite being proscribed in later years, the Sirhindi movement continued to inspire Sunni fundamentalists – among them Shah Waliullah, his four sons and those who studied under them at Delhi’s Madrassah-i-Rahimiya.