God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Again the elders of the Pathan tribes who had first rallied to his standard met in grand council, this time joined by others who had previously held back. Amir Syed Ahmad was now formally chosen as the movement’s imam. In Arabia, the title signified religious leadership and little else, but in Hindustan it carried significantly more weight, due to the influence of Shia teaching which acknowledged the imam as a supreme religious authority whose judgements were considered infallible. But there were also other reasons for assuming the title: under the rules of Hanafi jurisprudence jihad could only proceed by order of an imam; and it was a further qualification required of the Imam-Mahdi. As Syed Ahmad himself acknowledged in a letter to a friend written at this time: ‘It was accordingly decided by all those present – faithful followers, Sayyids, learned doctors of law, nobles and generality of Muslims – that the successful establishment of jihad and the dispelling of belief and disorder could not be achieved without the election of an Imam.’

  Syed Ahmad was also proclaimed Amir ul-Momineen, Commander of the Faithful. This echoed the titles of the early caliphs and amounted to a public declaration of his ambition to take the war of religious liberation a lot further than the Vale of Peshawar. Amir ul-Momineen Imam Syed Ahmad was now presented to the entire Muslim community on the Indian frontier as their long-awaited saviour.

  The holy war began in earnest in the spring of 1827 with a massed attack on a Sikh column sent out from Peshawar. It was a disaster for the jihadis. According to Dr Henry Bellew’s informants, the Sikhs held their ground and counter-attacked: ‘In the first onset the Sayad’s undisciplined rabble were panic struck and were easily dispersed with great loss. The Sayad himself escaped with only a few attendants.’ All but their most loyal tribal allies deserted them and the Hindustanis were forced to flee to the safety of the Mahabun Mountain. Despite this near-annihilation, Syed Ahmad held to the hard line that characterised his vision of Islam, as demonstrated by his response when one of his most influential local allies, Khadi Khan of Hund, switched sides after suffering heavy losses among his tribesmen. To the Amir ul-Momineen Imam this was an act of apostasy. He immediately rallied his remaining friends and marched against Hund. After an untidy mêlée which neither side could claim as a victory, a much-loved Sufi hermit, revered on all sides as a saint, stepped in to act as an intermediary. This was a young man of humble origins named ABDUL GHAFFUR, known then as ‘Saidu Baba’ but later to achieve great eminence among the Pathans as the Akhund of Swat. Abdul Ghaffur duly interceded and persuaded Khadi Khan of Hund to come into the Hindustani camp under flag of truce, whereupon he was separated from his companions and had his throat cut – an act of treachery justified by Syed Ahmad on the grounds that under sharia the crime of apostasy was only punishable by death.

  Because of his role in the affair, Abdul Ghaffur was driven from his hermitage into exile. Already alienated by the Amir’s attempts to impose the Wahhabi version of the law upon them, a number of villages in the plains now publicly expressed their disquiet. This, too, was interpreted as apostasy – the worst of all sins in the Wahhabi book – and orders went out for the twin villages of Hoti and Mardan to be looted and fired as an example to other waverers. A decade later, when Hoti Mardan was chosen as the base for the new border force to be known as the Guides, this outrage was still remembered. It helps to explain why the irregulars who joined the Guides Cavalry and Infantry in later years regarded the Hindustanis in the hills to the north as their inveterate enemies.

  Fortunately for the Hindustanis, a botched attempt by the Governor of Peshawar in December 1828 to poison the Amir ul-Momineen Imam sheltering among the Yusufzai brought an end to the dissent. The attempt on the life of their guest impugned their honour, and the Yusufzai tribes in the mountains reacted by setting aside their differences and again rallying to Syed Ahmad. They swept down from the hills and overwhelmed a Sikh army many times their superior in numbers and fire-power. The Governor of Peshawar was killed and his forces scattered.

  This surprise victory was followed by a third loya jirga, held in February 1829, at which many of the khans agreed not only to levy special tithes on their people to pay for the holy war but also to implement the Wahhabi version of sharia among their people. Over this same period many new adherents to the cause began arriving from every corner of the frontier, until eventually the Hindustani camp in the mountains contained more than six thousand fighting men – who from this point onwards began to refer to themselves by a word hitherto unused on the Punjab frontier: mujahedeen, ‘those who undertake jihad kabeer’, a word popularly translated as ‘holy warriors’.

  Under the direction of their Commander of the Faithful and Imam these mujahedeen received both military training and religious instruction. Syed Ahmad had always been a keen sportsman, and by instituting fitness training he saw to it that the new recruits followed his example. He organised wrestling, archery and shooting competitions, and held ‘field days’ in which his troops fought each other in mock battles across the hillsides. In between their religious studies and their military training the mujahedeen learned marching songs that extolled the virtues of their leader and his cause; a number of them survived to be presented as evidence in court cases in later years. The most popular was the Risala Jihad, the Army of Holy War, written by Syed Ahmad’s first disciple, Shah Muhammad Ismail. Part of it went as follows:

  War against the Infidel is incumbent on all Musalmans; make provision for all things.

  He who from his heart gives one farthing to the cause, shall hereafter receive seven hundred fold from God.

  He who shall equip a warrior in this cause of God shall obtain a martyr’s reward;

  His children dread not the trouble of the grave, nor the last trump, nor the Day of Judgement.

  Cease to be cowards; join the divine leader, and smite the Infidel.

  I give thanks to God that a great leader has been born in the thirteenth century of the Hijra [1786–1886, the ‘great leader’ being Syed Ahmad, born 1786].

  In response to this new spirit of revolt the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, ordered his generals to take sterner measures against the insurgents. A brutal war now began in which neither side gave any quarter, sowing the seeds of a hatred between the Sikhs and the frontier tribes that continues to this day. As the Victorian historian Sir William Hunter later put it, ‘the Muhammadens burst down from time to time upon the plains, burning and murdering wherever they went. On the other hand, the bold Sikh villagers armed en masse beat back the hill fanatics into their mountains, and hunted them down like beasts.’

  In spite of setbacks Syed Ahmad’s army of mujahedeen continued to grow. Wherever possible direct confrontation with the Sikhs in open battle was avoided in favour of guerrilla tactics, using ambushes and night attacks. In the course of a year and a half the rebels came to control the entire countryside as far east as the Indus, leaving the Sikhs as masters of Peshawar city but little else. Finally, in October 1830 the new Governor of Peshawar concluded a private treaty with the rebels that allowed him to withdraw from the city unharmed, leaving Peshawar and the surrounding Vale in the hands of the Wahhabis and their allies.

  To mark this great victory Syed Ahmad declared himself Padshah, or Great King, and had coins struck bearing the inscription ‘Ahmad the Just, Defender of the Faith; the glitter of whose scimitar scatters destruction among the Infidels.’ It was another step in the process of assuming the mantle of the King of the West, the longed-for Imam-Mahdi.

  After appointing Mullah Muzhir Ali as his local caliph and chief judge in the city of Peshawar, the newly proclaimed Padshah returned to his mountain stronghold with his closest companions, leaving it to Muzhir Ali and his fellow Hindustanis to impose Wahhabi sharia on the inhabitants of the Vale of Peshawar. This lasted no more than two months before the Pathans had had enough. The tribesmen had been happy to pay the religious war tithes, but the strict imposition of sharia as meted out by a Hindustani judge soon came into conflict with their own tri
bal laws of Pakhtunwali. The two final straws appear to have been a ruling that the Pathans must abandon their un-Islamic custom of selling their daughters in marriage – followed by an equally ill-advised edict announcing that any single girls of marriageable age who were not married within twelve days should be made over to the Hindustani mujahedeen to become their wives.

  This last edict struck at the very heart of the Pathan honour-code, nang-i-Pukhatna, a code as inflexible as anything devised by the Wahhabi jurists, and one which required that any personal injury or insult, however slight, be answered with blood. Again a loya jirga was held, but this time in secret, and a plan of retaliation was hatched with the objective of killing the Padshah and every other Hindustani along with him. In a Pathan version of the St Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre, it was agreed that this strike should take place at the hour of evening prayer, the signal being the lighting of a beacon on the top of Karmar hill, a peak in the Malakand range overlooking the Vale of Peshawar. The beacon was duly lit, and within an hour Mullah Muzhir Ali, his fellow judges and all the Hindustanis in the Vale had been dragged from their prayer mats and put to the sword.

  Either by chance or because of a loss of nerve on the part of his hosts in the Buner mountains, Syed Ahmad and his closest companions survived the massacre and fled eastwards across the Indus River into Hazara. They then made their way north to the Khagan valley and sought refuge among the Khagan Sayyeds, who now found themselves bound by the Pathan law of nanawati to give the Hindustanis shelter and to protect them with their lives. As so often in Pathan history, this absolute interpretation of sanctuary cost the hosts dear, for the news of the massacre and the retreat of the survivors galvanised the Sikhs into action. Peshawar was quickly restored to Sikh rule, and once all opposition in the Vale had been silenced the Sikhs advanced on the Khagan valley in force.

  On 8 May 1831 the remaining Hindustanis, together with the more committed Sayyeds of Sittana and Khagan, made a last stand at the little village of Balakot which guards the entrance to the Khagan valley. Expecting the Sikhs to advance up the valley from the south, they dug trenches and flooded the open ground below the village, only to be thrown into disarray when their enemy came down on them from the hills above. Ringed in on almost every side, they chose death rather than surrender. Led by their Amir Al-Mumineem, Imam and Padshah, the Hindustanis charged as best they could up the slopes to meet the advancing lines of Sikh infantry.

  Quite remarkably, considering this was a battle fought hundreds of miles from the nearest British territory, the closing stages of the battle of Balakot were witnessed by an American: a vagabond and soldier of fortune named Colonel Alexander Gardner, born on the shores of Lake Superior in 1785. Mystery surrounds Alexander Gardner’s exact origins and movements; he may not after all have been born in America, and half the extraordinary tales of his wanderings through Turkestan, Badakshan, Kafiristan and Afghanistan in the 1820s and 1830s may not be true, but there is no doubt that he was among the many foreign mercenaries who served in the ranks of the Sikh army under Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Prior to joining the Sikhs, Gardner had led a squadron of horse in the service of a contender for the throne of Kabul. He found himself on the losing side and fled northwards into the Pamirs, after which he journeyed southwards through Kashmir, Gilgit, Chitral and Kafiristan until he came to the frontier region of Bajour, ruled over by a chieftain named Mir Alam Khan.

  At the beginning of May 1831 Gardner and a group of Pathan tribesmen, whom he termed his ‘trusty band of Khaibaris [people of the Khyber]’, were in the process of offering their services to Mir Alam Khan when ‘a certain Muhammad Ismail arrived from the fanatic chief Syad Ahmad with a demand for aid from the mir [chief], as from all neighbouring Muhammadan chieftains’. Gardner’s ‘Muhammad Ismail’ was none other than Syed Ahmad’s first disciple, Shah Muhammad Ismail, then engaged in making a desperate bid to win back some of the allies who had deserted his master. Gardner suggests that he and his fellow mercenaries were won over to Syed Ahmad’s cause by ‘an impassioned address which I heard Muhammad Ismail deliver to a large assembly of the wild Eusufzai mountaineers. The enthusiasms which he aroused suggested to me that I might do worse than join the Syad his master, as I saw a good opportunity of getting together such a body of followers as would make my services valuable to any ruler to whom I might subsequently offer them.’ Some money may also have been promised, for Gardner, at this time masquerading as a Muslim and carrying a copy of the Quran suspended round his neck, agreed to fight for the Hindustanis.

  Shah Muhammad Ismail then hurried on ahead to rejoin Syed Ahmad in the Khagan valley while Gardner and some two hundred and fifty Pathans, ‘all burning with religious zeal’, came on at a steadier pace. According to Gardner, they then lost their way, as a result of which they arrived at Balakot ‘just an hour too late’. The battle was already under way and it was clear that it was turning into a massacre: ‘I well remember the scene’, Gardner later wrote,

  as I and my Eusufzai and Khaibari followers came in view of the action. Syad Ahmad and the maulvi [Shah Muhammad Ismail], surrounded by his surviving Indian followers, were fighting desperately, hand-to-hand with the equally fanatical Akalis [Sikh warriors] of the Sikh army. They had been taken by surprise, and isolated from the main body of the Syad’s forces, which fought very badly without their leader. Even as I caught sight of the Syad and maulvi, they fell pierced by a hundred weapons . . . I was literally within a few hundred yards of the Syad when he fell, but I did not see the angel descend and carry him off to Paradise, although many of his followers remembered afterwards that they had seen it distinctly enough.

  Seeing which way the battle was going, Gardner held back his men until the fighting was done and then moved in to claim a share of the booty: ‘The death of the Syad broke the only link that held the followers together, and in the retreat many of the parties from different regions fell upon one another for plunder. My Khaibaris and Eusufzai were equal to the best in this matter and cut down several of the Hindustani fanatics who had joined them for protection.’ It is said that thirteen hundred Hindustanis and their adherents died at Balakot, but the real figure was probably closer to half that number.

  On receiving the news of Syed Ahmad’s death the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh gave orders for gun salutes to be fired from every fort, and for the Sikh holy city of Amritsar to be lit up in celebration. Accounts differ as to what happened to the remains of the Amir, Imam and Padshah. In the final stages of the battle a group of Wahhabis tried to carry away the body but were dispersed by gunfire, whereupon a single Wahhabi hacked the head off with his tulwar and attempted to make off with it. He was then struck down, and the head and body were found separately by the Sikhs. According to one report, both parts were subsequently chopped into small pieces and thrown into the nearby river in order to prevent the grave becoming a place of pilgrimage. Another version has the Sikhs burning the body on the battlefield and carrying the head back to Peshawar to be impaled on the battlements of the city’s fort.

  4

  The Call of the Imam-Mahdi

  Those who would prevent others from hijra and jihad are in heart hypocrites. Let all know this: in a country where the predominant religion is other than Islam, the religious precepts of Muhammad cannot be enforced, [therefore] it is incumbent on Musalmans to unite and wage war with Kaffirs.

  Part of a letter written by Maulvi Inayat Ali, leader of the Hindustani Fanatics at Sittana, 1852–3

  The catastrophic end to Syed Ahmad’s campaign to bring about dar ul-Islam in a distant corner of the Punjab did not go unnoticed in the rest of India. For all that his teachings had offended Sunnis and Shias alike, Syed Ahmad had become more than just a preacher of reform. He had taken the struggle to the enemy, and every scrap of news of his jihad against the Sikhs that filtered down from the Punjab had excited interest. The reports of his martyrdom in the summer of 1831 were received with dismay by Muslims up and down the land. In Bengal it was the spur that set off Titu Mir’s
Wahhabi revolt.

  Titu Mir, it will be remembered, was the Bengali ‘enforcer’ who went to Mecca on Hajj at the same time as Syed Ahmad and his band of pilgrims. On his return to Delhi he quit the service of his royal employer and went back to Bengal to preach the message of Wahhabism through the countryside north and east of Calcutta. The name he gave his movement, Deen Muhammad or Way of Muhammad, suggests an affinity with Syed Ahmad’s Path of Muhammad. In Bengal the countryside was largely owned by wealthy landlords whose oppression of the peasantry working their fields was legendary. Titu Mir exploited this discontent by recruiting peasants and weavers to his cause. By the time the news of the death of Syed Ahmad reached Bengal in the late summer of 1831 he had gained several thousand adherents, distinguishable from their fellow Muslim and Hindu neighbours by the long beards and plain dress worn by the men, the almost complete withdrawal of their women behind the folds of the purdah and the burqa, and their contempt for all forms of religion other than their own. In October 1831 their leader called all the members of his Wahhabi sect together in the village of Narkulbaria and ordered them to prepare it for a long siege. They laid in supplies and built a strong bamboo stockade round the village, which now became their constituted dar ul-Islam.

  Two weeks later Titu Mir marched out at the head of a band some five hundred strong armed with clubs and farm implements and attacked a nearby village in the name of jihad. They killed a Brahmin priest, cut the throats of two cows and dragged them bleeding through a Hindu temple – acts deliberately intended to outrage Hindus. At the same time their leader proclaimed an end to British rule in Bengal, evidently in the expectation that Muslims throughout the countryside would rise up and join him. Over the next few days more attacks on nearby villages were carried out, deliberately intended to terrorise both Muslim and Hindu communities. As the magistrates later noted, everything was done according to a set plan: each morning the rebels marched out in ranks under a military commander to attack and plunder a particular target, and every evening they marched back with their booty.