God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Thus the adolescent Syed Ahmad became a student of probably the most radical and reactionary school in India at a time when the umma, the world community of Islam, felt itself threatened to a degree not experienced since the days of the Great Khans. The Ottoman sultanate, after centuries as the pre-eminent power in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, was suffering one reverse after another at the hands of the Austrians, Russians and French, while at the same time its authority was being undermined from within by a series of revolts by regional viceroys. In India it was the same story. As Mughal power at the centre waned, local Muslim governors were breaking away to set up their own regional principalities. These, in their turn, were being taken over one after another by the British East India Company, beginning in Bengal and the Carnatic and then pushing into the interior: in 1799 Tipu Sultan was defeated and killed at Seringapatam; in 1803 the Mughal emperor Badshah Shah Alam, great-great-grandson of Emperor Aurangzeb, suffered the last in a series of humiliations at the hands of foreign invaders when he signed over what little authority remained to him to become a pensioner of the British in Delhi.

  Unable to match the growing military and economic power of Europe, Islam responded through religious revival in a variety of forms. Disgusted at his emperor’s craven response to the takeover of his city by the British, Syed Ahmad’s teacher Shah Abdul Aziz issued a fatwa that Delhi had been enslaved. ‘In this city the Imam ul-Muslimin [religious leader of the Muslims; thus, the Mughal Emperor] wields no authority,’ he declared. ‘The real power rests with the British officers. There is no check on them, and the promulgation of the commands of kufr [heathenism] means that in administration and justice, in matters of law and order, in the domain of trade, finance and collection of revenues – everywhere the kuffar [heathen infidels] are in power.’ He therefore declared Hindustan to be a domain of enmity (dar ul-harb), and that henceforward it was incumbent on all Muslims to strive to restore India to that blessed state which had prevailed in earlier times.

  This fatwa was little more than a symbolic act of defiance, but there can be no doubt that young Syed Ahmad left the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya thoroughly radicalised and with the conviction that un-Islamic forces were threatening his faith. As an expression of this radicalisation he abandoned the name ‘Muhammad’ as blasphemous, and became Syed Ahmad.

  Biographies of Syed Ahmad such as that already quoted from state that after eight years of study in Delhi he married and moved back to his home town of Rae Bareli as a mullah. But there are other versions, including a biography written by a nephew, which give widely differing accounts and dates – suggesting that the writers were following very different agendas. They demonstrate that Syed Ahmad gathered under the umbrella of his leadership a number of factions that were only willing to sink their religious differences while he remained alive. One has to pick one’s path through these competing histories with caution, but it seems highly probable that Syed Ahmad abandoned his studies in Delhi in his late teens to join his elder brother, an irregular horseman in the forces of a Pathan freebooter named AMIR KHAN.

  Even the most hagiographical accounts accept that Syed Ahmad did indeed spend time with Amir Khan, although the claim is that he did so as pesh-imam or chaplain to the troops, during which time he exercised moral influence over Amir Khan’s band of Pathan soldiery, besides performing several miracles. What is glossed over is that Amir Khan was no jihadi fighting for Islamic values but a deeply unpleasant mercenary, a Yusufzai originally from the mountains of Buner who fought for whoever paid the most or offered the best prospect of booty. At this period Amir Khan commanded the cavalry of the half-mad Maratha warlord Jaswant Rao Holkar; in effect, he was helping a Hindu to plunder central India. In British eyes Amir Khan and his Pathans were nothing less than pindaris or marauders, notorious for their acts of cruelty and rapine. Colonel James Tod, who witnessed Amir Khan’s depredations at first hand, describes him in his Annals of Rajasthan as ‘one of the most notorious villains India has ever produced’. Nevertheless, as a means of bringing order to central India the British authorities in Bengal entered into negotiations with Amir Khan, and in 1817 recognised him as the ruler of a new principality named Tonk.

  This alliance with the British was seen as a betrayal by Syed Ahmad, who quit Amir Khan’s service to return to the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya in Delhi, where he became one of several radical teachers, all disciples of Shah Abdul Aziz in the school of Shah Waliullah. Very soon, however, Syed Ahmad was marking out his own territory, making a name for himself through the intensity of his preaching and the forcefulness of his personality. Leaving his now elderly master, he took up residence in Delhi’s Akbar-abadi mosque beside the city’s famous Red Fort, to which crowds flocked to hear him preach and deliver religious judgements. Among the many who came to hear him was a man seven years his senior named SHAH MUHAMMAD ISMAIL, a nephew of Shah Abdul Aziz. After hearing Syed Ahmad preach one evening, Shah Muhammad Ismail was invited to join him in his room, where the two of them spent the night in a state of silent rapture contemplating God. Shah Muhammad Ismail then took the oath of religious allegiance known as baiat to become Syed Ahmad’s first disciple. He was soon joined by SHAH ABDUL HAI, a son-in-law of Shah Abdul Aziz, as Syed Ahmad’s second disciple. It is said that these two were Syed Ahmad’s ‘lovers’, although the word should probably be seen in the Sufi context of intense ecstatic devotion to one’s spiritual master. In the case of Shah Muhammad Ismail, this devotion extended to ghosting at least some of Syed Ahmad’s published writings and to writing the first biography. Indeed, there is a good case for concluding that the disciple had a major hand in smoothing out and filling in his master’s thinking: that Syed Ahmad was a man of action who spoke from the heart rather than the head, leaving his disciples to sort out the theological details.

  From 1818 onwards Syed Ahmad’s name and his message of Islamic reform and revival began to be heard in Sunni mosques and meeting-places right across northern India, greatly assisted by the efforts of his more learned disciples. As he toured through the plains country north and west of the Jumna River, hundreds pledged themselves to his work by taking the oath of baiat. Yet it seems that Syed Ahmad was still at this time seeking to come to terms with Sufism, since he is on record as having himself taken oaths of allegiance not only to the order of Naqshbandi Sufism followed by his mentors but also to three other Sufi schools. The outcome of this search seems to have been a rejection of many aspects of Sufism as idolatrous, and a hardening of attitude.

  At some point on Syed Ahmad’s preaching tour he arrived at the great city of Lucknow, then in chaotic decline but still the most important seat of Muslim learning on the sub-continent outside Delhi. Here his sermons were heard by a talib from Patna named WILAYAT ALI, then aged about eighteen or nineteen, who was won over to his cause and duly took the oath of allegiance. That, at least, is the received account of the conversion to Syed Ahmad’s cause of the man who was to follow him as the most influential leader of his movement – but there is an alternative version, of which more latter.

  In about 1819 Syed Ahmad’s first disciple Shah Muhammad Ismail set down his master’s theology in a work entitled Sirat-ul- Mustaqim (the Straight Path). It laid great stress on the doctrine of the oneness of God (tawhid), and on the importance of struggling against all heretical practices associated with innovation (bidat). ‘The law of the Prophet is founded on two things,’ it declares:

  First, the not attributing to any creature the attribute of God [tawhid]; and second, not inventing forms and practices which were not invented in the days of the Prophet, and his successors of Caliphs [bidat]. The first consists in disbelieving that angels, spirits, spiritual guides, disciples, teachers, students, prophets or saints, remove one’s difficulties; in abstaining from having recourse to any of the above creations for the attainment of any wish or desire; in denying that any of them has the power of granting favour or removing evils; in considering them as helpless and ignorant as one’s self in respect to the power of God
. . . True and undefiled religion consists in strongly adhering to all the devotions and practices in the affairs of life which were observed at the time of the Prophet. In avoiding all such innovations as marriage ceremonies, mourning ceremonies, adorning of tombs, erection of large edifices over graves, lavish expenditure on the anniversaries of the dead, street processions and the like, and in endeavouring as far as may be practicable to put a stop to these practices.

  This was exactly the theology to be expected of a student of the school of Shah Waliullah. Indeed, the only real difference between Syed Ahmad and his predecessors at this stage lay in his boldness in taking his message beyond the confines of the mosque and the madrassah and into the streets. He and his disciples were the first Muslim proselytisers to exploit the new medium of printing, taking their lead from the Christian missionaries in Bengal. These printed texts were mostly set down in Urdu, the language of the masses, rather than in Persian or Arabic.

  Featured prominently in these new publications was the call for jihad. A printed appeal issued in Syed Ahmad’s name in 1821 speaks of jihad as ‘a work of great profit; just as rain does good to mankind, beasts and plants, so all persons are partakers in the advantages of a War against the Infidel’. It asks the faithful to compare the state of affairs in Hindustan as it now is with what it was in the days of Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb, and calls on them to struggle against all un-Islamic forces that have beset the land. However, this call does not go so far as to declare jihad, for according to the rules of Islamic jurisprudence, as Syed Ahmad understood them, such an act was a formal declaration that could only be made by an imam (religious leader) – which he evidently did not consider himself to be – acting with the support of an amir or secular leader. In India only the Emperor of Delhi had the necessary authority to declare jihad, by virtue of his dual role as religious head of the Muslim community in India and khalifa or viceroy of the Ottoman caliphate. A further complication was that jihad could only be launched from a country where Islamic sharia prevailed: a dar ul-Islam (domain of Faith) – and, in Syed Ahmad’s eyes, Hindustan was no longer a domain of Faith but a domain of enmity. If a jihad was to be launched at all it would have to be from outside Hindustan, just as long ago the Prophet had launched his first jihad on the domain of enmity of Mecca from the domain of Faith of Medina.

  Syed Ahmad’s call for spiritual revival and jihad went all but unnoticed by the British authorities. As the Indian civil servant and historian Sir William Hunter was afterwards to put it, ‘He traversed one Province with a retinue of devoted disciples, converted the populace by thousands to his doctrine, and established a regular system of ecclesiastical taxation, civil government, and apostolic succession. Meanwhile, our officers collected the revenue, administered justice, and paraded our troops, altogether unsuspicious of the great religious movement which was surging around them.’

  Early in 1821 Syed Ahmad announced that he was to make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca which constitutes one of the five pillars of Islam. He invited his followers to join him, and some four hundred assembled in his home town of Rae Bareli before accompanying their master on a grand progress down the Ganges by boat, with stops at all the major cities.

  Nowhere was Syed Ahmad received with more enthusiasm than at the ancient city of Patna, on the Ganges approximately half-way between Delhi and Calcutta. This was the home of his new disciple Wilayat Ali, and it is probable that he and his brother INAYAT ALI – three years younger, so then aged eighteen to Wilayat Ali’s twenty-one years – marshalled their family and friends to organise this welcome. Patna’s large Muslim community turned out en masse to receive Syed Ahmad like a major prophet, the most important Muslims in the city taking off their shoes and running beside his palanquin as it was carried through the streets. So warm was his reception that the preacher stayed on for some weeks as a guest of the wealthiest men in Patna, among them the heads of three houses that were to combine together to become the bastions of Wahhabism in India: FATAH ALI, descended from a long line of religious leaders and saints, and father of the two men who became notorious in later years as the ‘Ali brothers’; Fatah Ali’s close friend and contemporary ELAHI BUX, doctor, bibliophile and philanthropist, four of whose sons became Syed Ahmad’s lieutenants; and Syed MUHAMMAD HUSSAIN of Sadiqpore, brother-in-law of Elahi Bux, whose daughters married the sons of Elahi Bux and whose house and serai in Sadiqpore Lane in Patna became the movement’s headquarters and central seminary (see Appendix 2, the ‘Wahhabi’ family tree in India).

  For three generations the male members of these three houses combined to run the movement initiated by Syed Ahmad, initially as his counsellors and lieutenants and subsequently as devotees of his cult. They have been portrayed as saints and martyrs in the cause of Indian freedom, but it would be more accurate to compare them to the Mafia families of Sicily and America. Both organisations conspired to impose their exclusive views of society through violence and by working to eliminate the opposition – which in this instance meant not only the governing Nazrani (Christians) but also Hindus, Sikhs, Shias, and even most schools of Sunni Islam. Both organisations worked in secret, swore oaths of loyalty to their leaders, followed their own exclusive code of morality, and believed themselves to be God-fearing, the only striking difference being that one party put its faith in the family godfather, the other in its spiritual leader.

  From Patna, Syed Ahmad continued his triumphal progress downriver to Calcutta, where so many of the faithful flocked to his banners that he was unable to initiate them individually by his hand and they had to make do with touching the folds of his unrolled turban. So great was the stir created by his arrival in the city that some professedly ‘loyal’ Muslims presented a petition to the police declaring Syed Ahmad to be planning an uprising against the British. Enough donations had now been received to allow Syed Ahmad’s organisation to book passages to Arabia for some eight hundred and fifty pilgrims. In the spring of 1821 (or possibly the following year) they set sail in ten vessels for the Red Sea port of Jedda.

  Syed Ahmad was away from India for at least one and possibly two years. He returned with a vision of militant Islam that was to divide the Muslim community.

  2

  The Puritan of the Desert

  This Puritan of the desert, who was no doubt a reformer, believing in the early teachings of Mahomet, determined to bring back El Islam to its ancient simplicity. With a great following, after denouncing the superstitions and corruptions of those who professed his religion, he commenced by destroying the tombs of saints, even those of Mahomet and Husein, inculcating at the same time a higher state of morals.

  William Wing Loring,

  A Confederate Soldier in Egypt, 1884

  The man who gave his name to this new vision of Islam was an Arab, Muhammad ibn Abd AL-WAHHAB, born in 1702 or 1703 in the town of Uyainah in the desert country of Nejd, a rocky plateau in the hinterland of the Arabian peninsula. However, the true roots of Wahhabism go back a lot further – to the late thirteenth century, and a time when Islam faced its first great challenge in the form of the eruption of the Mongols into the heartlands of the faith. In 1258 the Mongols overthrew the historic caliphate of Baghdad and went on to make the lands of the Middle East tributary to the Great Khans. One of the many caught up in this conquest was a Sunni jurist named Sheikh IBN TAYMIYYA, born in what is now Syria in 1263. His father was a refugee from the destruction of Damascus in 1259, and he grew up believing the Mongols to be enemies of Islam.

  Out of the ruins of the caliphate a brilliant, inclusive Islamic civilisation flowered under the Mongols, centred on Persia, rooted in Sufism, and predominantly Shia. But to Ibn Taymiyya and others who followed the Hanbali code of jurisprudence – the last, strictest and least popular of the four main schools of law in the Sunni tradition – this civilisation was anathema and an offence to God. In the centuries following the first dramatic expansion of Islam under the aegis of the Prophet and his first caliphs, these four schools had developed to inte
rpret and pronounce on all matters of sharia, the divinely ordained laws of Islam governing human behaviour. By about AD 900 a consensus had been arrived at in the Sunni community that every outstanding issue concerning right belief had been resolved by learned and righteous men from one or other of the four schools of jurisprudence; this came to be known as taqlid (community consensus). It followed that there was no further scope for ijtihad (independent reasoning), the traditional phrase being that ‘the gates of ijtihad were now closed’.

  In the wake of the Mongol invasion Ibn Taymiyya set out to ‘break the shackles of taqlid’. He declared himself qualified to be a mujtahid, one who makes his own interpretations by virtue of informed reasoning, and began to redefine the laws of Islam. He first came to prominence with his literalist interpretations of the Quran and his strictures against innovation (bidat). He attacked the great Sufi mystic of the age, Ibn al-Arabi, and condemned as polytheistic and heretical many folk practices that had entered the Sunni mainstream. As if this direct challenge to religious custom were not enough, Ibn Taymiyya went on to challenge the central authority of the caliphate, arguing that a true caliphate had ceased to exist after the death of the last of the four caliphs who followed the Prophet as religious and political leaders of the early Islamic world. The true Muslim state, he argued, was one where the amir (temporal leader) governed only in partnership with the imam (religious leader), who had the authority not only to interpret sharia but also to guide the amir’s administration with the support of other members of the Muslim clergy (ulema): the mullahs, magistrates (qadis), and judges (hakims and muftis). In keeping with this view of the ulema as the senior partner in government, Ibn Taymiyya made it clear that only with the authority of the imam could the amir go to war – and only the imam could proclaim jihad.