God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  In 1804 a Wahhabi army again crossed the great desert into the Hijaz and destroyed tombs in the ancient cemetery at Medina, despoiling the grave of the Prophet Muhammad. In the following year the Wahhabis entered Mecca for the second time and, having massacred those who refused to accept their creed, now claimed it for themselves.

  The shock waves of the fall of Mecca to the Wahhabis were felt in the farthest corners of the Ottoman Empire. To most Muslims it was sacrilege of the grossest kind, made all the worse by the Wahhabis’ violation of the tomb of the Prophet. By shutting down the pilgrimage route, the Wahhabis also closed off the path to salvation for all Muslims except those of their own sect. There were those who could place only one interpretation on these events: they marked the descent to earth of the false prophet Ad-Dajjal, as foretold by the Prophet Muhammad, and the beginning of the end of the world. Others were more sanguine, but concerned that they might lead to an Islamic revival. ‘The Wahabis are now united under the banner of a single leader where their power was formerly scattered among a thousand small tribes,’ wrote de Corancez in 1810:

  This union has moulded vagrant hordes weakened by internecine wars into a people; and through this union the might of this people will soon spread beyond the desert itself . . . These Arabs lament their past glory, and impatiently await the time to regain it. Everything therefore points to the Wahabis becoming in our time – at least in the East – what the Arabs once were, and such a revolution can surely no longer be remote.

  The British Government in India and the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire now became involved, though from very different motives. Today one need only tap in ‘Wahhabi+British’ on the search engine of a PC to bring up any number of websites claiming a British hand behind the rise of Al-Wahhab and the Wahhabis as part of the Crusader war against Islam. Many take as their source the purported memoirs of a British spymaster named Mr Humphrey, who in the mid-eighteenth century supposedly infiltrated the Ottoman caliphate in the guise of a Muslim and thereafter guided Al-Wahhab’s every move. One such site declares of the Wahhabis that ‘their false love of religion traces back to a dajjal [devil] who went by the name of Muhammad bin Abdul-Wahhab, who was a man sponsored, educated, paid, and helped by the British to eradicate the Uthmani [Ottoman] empire, as well as the rest of the Ummah from within.’ Mr Humphrey is in fact a fiction, part of a German-inspired effort to destabilise the Indian war effort in the Second World War. The author was most probably the anti-British ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad al-Husseini, also known as ‘Hitler’s Mufti’.

  In the real world the British played no part in these affairs until two Wahhabi dhows attacked and boarded the sloop HMS Sylph in the Persian Gulf in November 1818, cutting the throats of all the non-Muslims on board. This threatened the East India Company’s profitable sea trade with Persia and Iraq: the Governor of Bombay reacted by forming an alliance with the rulers of Oman and Muscat and despatching a squadron of armed frigates to sweep the shipping lanes. After a few Wahhabi dhows had been blown out of the water and a seaport shelled the Wahhabis turned their attentions elsewhere, and the EICo’s political agents stationed at Bushire in the Persian Gulf reverted to the role of interested observers.

  For the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, however, the Wahhabis posed a far more direct challenge. Under Emir and Imam Abd al-Aziz ibn-Saud Wahhabism was now questioning the ancient suzerainty of the Caliphate over all Muslims.

  ‘If there was one point of the Wahauby faith which was more prominently odious to the Ottoman government than another,’ wrote the British diplomat Sir Harford Brydges, ‘it was that which divested the grand signor of the sacred character of visible Imamm, or spiritual head of the followers of Islam.’ Furthermore, the closing down of the Hajj by the Wahhabis had removed an important source of revenue for the Sultan of Turkey in the form of pilgrim tax, besides denting his claim to be the protector of the holy places of Islam.

  After the failure of a succession of half-hearted military campaigns directed from Baghdad, Egypt’s Muhammad Ali Pasha was given the responsibility of reclaiming the Hijaz for the Caliph and reopening the pilgrimage routes to all Muslims. Ali Pasha too began by underestimating the strength and mobility of his opponents, entrusting his army to his eighteen-year-old son. In 1811 an eight-thousand-strong Egyptian force was defeated by a united force of Bedouin tribes led by a hard core of Wahhabi fighters from Nejd. A year later the Egyptians returned with a larger force and recaptured Medina, forcing the Wahhabis back to Mecca. The Egyptians then made the mistake of looting Jedda, alienating the local Arab chieftains and causing them to pledge allegiance to the Wahhabis once more.

  In 1806 Emir and Imam Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud died at the hand of a vengeful Shia from Karbala while saying his prayers. His capable son Saud ibn Saud assumed his father’s twin titles and continued to apply his aggressive policies until his own death from fever in 1814, when he was succeeded by his son Abdullah ibn Saud. But Abdullah lacked the fighting qualities of his paternal line, and in February 1815 the combined forces of the Wahhabis and their allies were crushed by the Egyptians in a decisive battle fought seven days’ march west of Riyadh. Among those present on the battlefield was an Italian adventurer named Giovanni Finati, who had joined Mahomet Ali Pasha’s army as an officer by claiming to be a convert to Islam and taking the name of Mahomet. At this engagement Fanati noted what increasingly became a characteristic feature of the Wahhabi phenomenon: that the majority of the Arabs fighting alongside them were at best lukewarm supporters of the Wahhabi creed but had joined because they saw the Egyptians and Ottomans as invaders of their land. Initially the battle went their way, but a well-executed withdrawal of their own centre by the more disciplined Egyptians drew their opponents down from their strong position and exposed them to the Egyptian cavalry. Many of their allies turned and ran, leaving the Wahhabis to fight on alone. ‘Courage’, noted Finati, ‘was all that the Wahabees had to oppose us; but it did not forsake them to the last, the fight being protracted, even in that desperate condition . . . The slaughter made of the enemy was prodigious, the whole field remaining strewed over with their headless bodies.’

  The Egyptian Pasha had offered six silver coins for every head brought to him, with the result that the ground before his headquarters was soon covered in pyramids of human heads. The lives of three hundred prisoners were deliberately spared, but only so that they could be impaled in batches before the gates of Mecca and Jedda and at the ten staging-posts in between.

  In 1818 the Egyptians laid siege to the surviving Wahhabis under Emir-cum-Imam Abdullah ibn Saud at Dariyah. The defenders held out for several months before starvation forced them to surrender. Ibrahim Pasha rounded up all the Wahhabi ulema he could find, some five hundred in all, and herded them into the main mosque, where for three days he presided over a theological debate in which he sought to convince them of their errors. By the end of the fourth day his patience had worn out and he ordered his guards to fall on them and kill them, so that the mosque at Dariyah became, in the words of the traveller William Palgrave, ‘the bloody tomb of Wahhabee theology’. Abdullah ibn Saud and five male members of the family were sent as prisoners first to Cairo and then on to Constantinople where, ‘after having been paraded through the streets for three days, they were beheaded and their bodies were exposed to the outrages of the mob’. Other members of the family were sent to Medina and placed under house arrest. A year later the Wahhabi stronghold at Riyadh was taken and the fortress built there by the great Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud razed to the ground.

  The destruction of the Wahhabi empire was greeted with satisfaction and relief by their Muslim contemporaries. The celebrated early nineteenth-century Hanafi scholar Muhammad Amin ibn Abidin had only harsh words for the founder of Wahhabism and his theology: ‘He claimed to be a Hanbali, but his thinking was such that only he alone was a Muslim, and everyone else was a mushriq [polytheist]. Under this guise, he said that killing the Ahl as-Sunnah [those who follow Sunni tradition] was per
missible, until Allah destroyed his [people] in the year 1233 AH [AD 1818] through the Muslim army.’

  Lieutenant Burden and other members of the British mission at Bushire took a more practical line. With the destruction of the Wahhabi empire the main threat to stability in the Gulf had been removed. ‘Thus’, concluded Burden in the closing paragraph of his Report, ‘rose and fell – it is to be hoped never to rise again – the extraordinary sect of the Wahabees.’

  3

  The False Dawn of the Imam-Mahdi

  From 1820 some Moulvees of India declaring themselves to be disciples of Syud Ahmed of Bareilly, whom they styled Ameerul Momeneen and Iman Homan (chief and leader of the faithful), began to preach the Wahabee creed in this country . . . They preached to the common people that Hindustan is now a Darool Harab (or country of the infidels): therefore it behoved all the good Mehomedans to wage war against the infidels.

  Moulvee Syud Emdad Ali Khan,

  An Epitome of the History of the Wahabees, 1871

  The desecration of the tomb of the Prophet in Medina in 1804 by Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud’s jihadis and the subsequent occupation of Mecca shocked the entire Muslim umma, Sunnis and Shias alike. But there were those among the orthodox Sunnis who saw the iconoclasm of the Wahhabis as acts of cleansing and restoration, among them a group of pilgrims from Sumatra present in Mecca at the time of the first Wahhabi raid in 1803. On their return home two years later their leader, a fakir named Miskin bin Rahmatullah, set out to apply the Wahhabi programme to the uplands of central Java, where islanders of Hindu and Buddhist faith who had resisted early attempts at conversion were concentrated. According to a Muslim scholar of that period, ‘They looted and robbed the wealth of the people and insulted the orang kaya [important peoples]. They killed the ulama and all the orang yang cerdik [Brahmin Pandits]. They captured married women, wedded them to their men, and made their women captives their concubines. Still they called their actions “actions made to perfect religion”.’ What became known as the Padri Movement briefly involved Stamford Raffles during that confusing period between 1811 and 1815 when the British and Dutch East India Companies were swapping islands like playing-cards. Thereafter it became both a revivalist and an anti-colonialist struggle in the interior, only finally suppressed in 1842.

  Other pilgrims were equally inspired, including a number of individuals from India who subsequently returned to apply Al-Wahhab’s theology in their homeland, each in his own style. Besides Syed Ahmad, three deserve more than a mention: GHULAM RASUL of Benares, and the two Bengalis Hajji SHARIATULLAH (the word Hajji being a term of respect given to one who has made the Hajj to Mecca) and TITU MIR.

  Of the three, Ghulam Rasul is the least well-known. He is said to have spent many years studying Hadith in Arabia soon after the start of the nineteenth century, not in Mecca or Medina but in the Wahhabi heartland of Nejd. When Ghulam Rasul eventually returned to Benares he took the name of Hajji Abdul Haq and became known as the Nejdi Sheikh. He also brought with him a radical version of Islam that caused great offence in local religious circles. However, the real significance of Ghulam Rasul/Hajji Abdul Haq to this narrative is that one of his disciples in Benares was Wilayat Ali, the young man who as an adolescent became an ardent follower of Syed Ahmad after his visit to Lucknow in 1818. By this account, Wahhabism was already being taught in India well before the return of Syed Ahmad from his pilgrimage to Mecca.

  The Bengali Shariatullah was almost certainly in Arabia at the same time as Ghulam Rasul. He was living in the Hijaz in 1805, when Mecca fell to the Wahhabis, and chose to stay on, only quitting Arabia after the destruction of the Wahhabi stronghold of Riyadh in 1818. On his return to Bengal he began to preach what is probably best described as a diluted form of Wahhabi theology, very similar to that being promoted at this same time by Shah Waliullah’s son Shah Abdul Aziz of Delhi. He declared the country to be a domain of enmity because it was now ruled by the East India Company; and because he laid great stress on faraiz, the Muslim’s duty to obey sharia, his movement became known as Faraizi. Despite his opposition to British rule, both Hajji Shariatullah and the son who followed him as leader of the Faraizis believed they had a duty to work with rather than against the British in bringing about dar ul-Islam, a view that had considerable support until it was challenged by his fellow Bengali Mir Nasir Ali, better known as Titu Mir.

  Born in 1782, Titu Mir began life as a small cultivator with an appetite for violence. Forced off the land, he turned to crime and then drifted to Calcutta, where he spent some time as a professional wrestler before taking service with a powerful landowner as a lathial, a ‘big-stick man’ or enforcer. At some point he was found guilty of affray by a British magistrate and sent to prison. He was, in the words of a British judge, ‘a man of a bad and desperate character’. After his release he went to work as a bodyguard for a minor member of the Mughal royal family in Delhi, and in that capacity accompanied him to Mecca on pilgrimage. There in 1821 or 1822 Titu Mir met a fellow Hindustani who already had a great following: the charismatic Syed Ahmad of Rae Bareli.

  By the time Syed Ahmad and his followers landed at Jedda to begin the Hajj – the early summer of 1821 or 1822 – the holy places of Mecca and Medina were back in the hands of the Sharifs of the Hijaz under the protection of the Egyptians. However, deep in the Arabian desert the surviving Wahhabis had regrouped. TURKI IBN SAUD, an uncle of the executed emir Abdallah ibn Saud and grandson of Muhammad ibn Saud, had escaped from house arrest and was now beginning a fresh campaign to regain the lands won by his half-brother – and to restore Al-Wahhab’s teachings. After failing to recapture the old stronghold of Riyadh, Turki ibn Saud retreated into the desert and there began to rebuild the tribal alliances first forged by his grandfather.

  It was at this juncture, with the Wahhabis greatly weakened but still threatening to take on the Ottoman Empire, that the ten boatloads of Hindustani pilgrims arrived in Mecca. Having completed the Hajj, most of the party then returned to the coast and sailed back to India. However, Syed Ahmad and his closest companions stayed on. He began to preach in the mosques, and word of his preaching soon came to the attention of the religious authorities, very much on the alert for the slightest whiff of sedition or heresy. What they heard was enough to merit Syed Ahmad’s expulsion, which suggests that he was preaching rather more than the revivalism of Shahs Waliullah and Abdul Aziz. None of the several biographies written by his followers goes into details about Syed Ahmad’s period in the Hijaz, and with good reason, for by the time they came to be written ‘Wahhabi’ had become a term of abuse and the movement was working hard to present itself as something other than a sectarian force promoting a creed imported from Arabia. What is remarkable about these biographies is the degree to which they differ over how long Syed Ahmad was away from India, and where he went. Shah Muhammad Ismail, the first disciple, declares that after visiting Mecca and Medina they travelled northwards together as far as Constantinople before returning to Arabia, taking six years in all. This allowed them to see the true dar ul-Islam of the Ottomans and to compare it with the dire state of affairs in British India. Not so much as a word is said about the Wahhabism that had so recently convulsed the Islamic world.

  Whatever Shah Muhammad Ismail has to say on the matter, it seems most likely that Syed Ahmad returned to India early in 1824, after an absence of at least two years. He went ashore briefly in Bombay and was fêted as a saint by all sections of the Muslim community of the city. Again, there was talk of prophecies being fulfilled and of the approach of the end of days – and it seems to have been at this point that Mahdism first entered Syed Ahmad’s newly enlarged religious vocabulary.

  Both Sunnis and Shias shared the belief that at the end of days a messiah-figure known as the mahdi, or the ‘expected one’, would come to the rescue of Islam. He would return to Mecca at the head of all the forces of righteousness to take on the forces of evil in one final, apocalyptic battle, after which he and the lesser prophet Jesus would proceed to
Jerusalem to kill the devil. Thereafter the world would submit to his rule until the sounding of the last trumpet, and Judgement Day. There were, however, significant differences between the Sunnis and Shias over the origins of the Mahdi, in that the latter held him to be the twelfth and last of the imams of early Islam. Unlike his predecessors, this twelfth imam had not died and gone to heaven but had disappeared from the sight of man to become the ‘Hidden Imam’. He was said to be concealed in a cave in the mountains, waiting for the call from the righteous, when he would reappear as a padshah or ‘great king’ to lead the faithful to victory.

  In Muslim India these distinctions and qualifications had become blurred over the centuries, like so much else in Islam. In the last decades of the Delhi Sultans in the mid-sixteenth century a Sunni mullah named Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur, near Benares, had proclaimed himself the Mahdi and had attracted a large following. His early death failed to discourage his adherents, who had proclaimed themselves the Mahdawis and set up a cult characterised by extreme asceticism, and violence towards other Muslims. ‘They always carried swords and shields, and all kinds of weapons,’ wrote the chronicler Nizamuddin Ahmad in his history Tabaqat-i-Akbari, ‘and going into cities and bazaars, wherever they saw anything that was contrary to the law of the Prophet, at first they forbade these things, with gentleness and courtesy. If this did not succeed, they made people give up the forbidden practices, using force or violence.’ The Mahdawi cult gained many converts among the Afghan leadership in India, so many in fact that it eventually provoked an orthodox backlash and was declared a heresy. Nevertheless, the belief in a messiah figure who would appear from the mountains to the west as the King of the West took hold among all sections of the Muslim community in India, becoming increasingly popular as Muslim power there waned.