God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  At first the local district magistrate, a Mr Alexander, failed to grasp the nature of the outrages. Escorted by twenty-two sepoys and about twice that number of local policemen, he advanced on the rebel village believing that his appearance on the scene would be enough to cause the troublemakers to disperse. Indeed, so convinced of this was Mr Alexander that he ordered his men to load their weapons with the blank cartridges used for ceremonials. To his consternation he found himself faced by a small army between four and six hundred strong drawn up in ranks behind their military commander, one Ghulam Masum, mounted on a horse.

  The unhappy Mr Alexander now attempted to parley, but before he could say a word Ghulam Masum gave the order to charge and himself bore down on him brandishing a tulwar. Mr Alexander fled, leaving his sepoys to fire a volley of blanks before being overwhelmed by Titu Mir’s peasant army. Only after a long chase through the countryside did Mr Alexander, bedraggled and frightened, reach safety. Fifteen men were killed and many others either wounded or taken prisoner, but still the Calcutta authorities assumed they were dealing with a minor local dispute. Three days after the massacre a second British magistrate, a Mr Smith, repeated Mr Alexander’s error, this time approaching the rebel village in the company of a number of local British indigo planters, all of them mounted on elephants – the armoured vehicles of their day and as effective in counter-insurgency as Russian tanks in Afghanistan or US humvees in Iraq. They had brought with them a large body of armed watchmen, but the closer they drew to the village of Narkulbaria the less enthusiastic these became. ‘One by one,’ notes the official report, ‘the Bengalis dropped behind, and when the party arrived in the large plain in front of the village they found that, with the exception of twenty or thirty up-country burkundazes [watchmen], every native had disappeared. Here they found the insurgents about a thousand strong, drawn up in regular order.’

  The magistrate and his party at once turned their elephants about and lumbered off, pursued by a howling mob that soon caught up with them and began to cut down the stragglers. A second humiliating chase across the Bengal countryside followed, leaving the insurgents utterly convinced of their leader’s claims that they were under the special protection of God, and safe from the bullets of infidels.

  Now at last the Governor-General of Bengal became involved, and no fewer than twelve infantry regiments together with the Governor-General’s own cavalry bodyguard and some horse artillery took to the field. On the evening of 17 November this substantial force marched out from Calcutta with colours flying and drums and fifes playing and, on the following morning, disposed itself for battle before the stockaded village of Narkulbaria. More than ten thousand professional troops found themselves opposed by a peasant army scarcely a tenth of their number, largely armed with farm implements and staves, but paraded as before in well-ordered ranks. By way of a banner, they flew the body of a dead Englishman suspended from a pole.

  A text-book frontal assault followed, with the infantry advancing in extended columns and halting to fire volley upon volley into the massed insurgents. Even so, Titu Mir’s men held their ground for almost an hour before the survivors retired into their stockade. The two guns of the horse artillery were then brought into play before the village was stormed at the point of the bayonet. Titu Mir was among the fifty dead. Almost two hundred of his followers were subsequently tried in court. Eleven received life sentences for treason, and 136 earned themselves sentences of imprisonment ranging from two years to seven. Ghulam Masum, Titu Mir’s second-in-command, was hanged. ‘These people’, recorded the presiding magistrate, ‘pretend to a new religion, calling out “Deen Mohummad”, declaring that the Company’s government is gone. They are headed by fakirs, two or three, and the men who led the attack on us were fine able-bodied fanatics apparently influenced by the decision that they were charmed.’ An enquiry followed and duly reported to the Governor-General that ‘the insurrection was strictly local, arising from causes which had operation in a small extent of country’.

  Without the forceful leadership of Syed Ahmad the Wahhabi movement in India began to splinter as sectarian differences resurfaced. Since their leader had himself decreed that a jihad could only proceed by authority of an imam, and since that imam was now dead, the holy war had to be abandoned.

  However, at the time of the last stand of the Hindustanis at Balakot three local caliphs appointed by the dead leader had been away on a diplomatic mission in Kashmir. They and a few other others succeeded in recrossing the Indus to the Mahabun Mountain, where they petitioned the Sayyids of Sittana to again give them refuge. A jirga was duly held and some new land was found for them outside the village. But so hostile were the surrounding Pathan tribes to their presence that at least one of the caliphs, Maulvi NASIRUDDIN, decided it was time to move on. He abandoned the mountains for the plains, leaving a mere handful of Hindustani diehards at Sittana under the charge of Maulvi Qasim PANIPATI. There they hung on, and over the months that followed they came increasingly to see themselves as guardians of the shrine of their lost imam and amir. Visitors arrived anxious to know more about the fate of Syed Ahmad the Martyr and how exactly he had met his death. Then it was discovered that no one had actually seen the Imam-cum-Amir die, although several eyewitnesses were prepared to swear that they had seen him and his two dearest disciples fighting fiercely in the very midst of the battle. A cloud of dust had then descended on all three figures, and they had disappeared from mortal sight. So inspired was Panipati by this revisionist testimony that he wrote letters to Patna giving a quite different account of the battle of Balakot. He urged his coreligionists to take heart – and, while they were about it, to send up funds and fresh supplies.

  Panipati’s revelations were eagerly seized upon by the new leadership of the Wahhabi movement in Patna. Four members of the original six-man council appointed by Syed Ahmad had died with him on the frontier. Of the remaining two, Fatah Ali had died of natural causes, leaving Shah Muhammad Husain of Sadiqpur as the senior caliph in Patna. The five vacant places on the council were now filled by a younger generation, all accorded the title of Maulvi (preacher). They included Fatah Ali’s two eldest sons, Wilayat Ali and Inayat Ali; the two eldest sons of Elahi Bux, AHMADULLAH and YAHYA ALI; and an outsider, FARHAT HUSAIN, who had married into the three interlinked Patna families by taking as wife yet another of the daughters of Shah Muhammad Husain. These five younger men together became the guiding force behind the Wahhabi movement’s restructuring in the late 1830s and 1840s and its re-emergence as a fighting force in the 1850s.

  For some years Wilayat Ali served as Shah Muhammad Husain’s wazir (chief counsellor) before succeeding him as the movement’s leading imam. His brother Inayat Ali then became the movement’s minister for war, Ahmadullah the new counsellor in succession to Wilayat Ali, Yahya Ali treasurer and bursar, and Farhat Husain the movement’s recruiter and chief religious ideologue, running the movement’s madrassah and acting as caliph during Wilayat Ali’s frequent absences from Patna.

  Wilayat Ali, it will be remembered, was almost certainly a convert to Wahhabism even before his first meeting with Syed Ahmad. His youngest brother Talib Ali had accompanied Syed Ahmad on his long march and had died as a martyr fighting the Sikhs, so perhaps it was no surprise that Wilayat Ali and the middle brother Inayat Ali should emerge as the most determined members of the Wahhabi council. It appears to have been Wilayat Ali who first grasped the significance of the doubts emerging about their leader’s death, and who made the first public announcements of his survival. He then let it be known that he himself had heard Syed Ahmad foretell his disappearance some years earlier in a sermon. Now he could report the glad tidings that their beloved master was indeed alive and well, but that God, displeased by the faint-hearted response of the Muslims of India to His prophet’s call to arms, had withdrawn him from the eyes of men. Their Imam and Amir ul-Momineen was even now hidden in a cave in the Buner mountains, waited on by his two faithful disciples. Only when his followers had pr
oved their faith by uniting once more to renew the jihad would their lost leader reappear. He would then manifest himself as padshah and lead them to victory against the unbelievers.

  This was, in essence, a retread of the Shia version of the Imam-Mahdi story, in which the Hidden Imam absented himself from the sight of man in a cave in the mountains, awaiting the summons of the faithful to make himself known as King of the West.

  Absurd as this story now appears, it gave great heart to the disconsolate faithful in the plains and, just as importantly, it overcame the technicality of the imam required to authorise jihad. If Syed Ahmad was still alive, the jihad he had proclaimed could be continued. The immediate outcome was a second hijra (retreat) made under the command of Nasiruddin, the caliph who had earlier abandoned the Fanatic Camp. He was authorised to form a new group of volunteers and in 1835 marched them off towards Afghanistan with the declared intention of resuming the holy war against the Sikhs. Their arrival in Sind aroused the suspicion of the British Political Agent in nearby Kutch. Political pressure was applied and Nasiruddin’s jihadis found themselves stranded in Sind, where they kicked their heels for months that became years as they waited for reinforcements to join them.

  Syed Ahmad in his lifetime had exploited the concept of the Imam-Mahdi to his movement’s advantage, but had never openly declared himself to be the ‘expected one’. Nor did his successors speak directly of him in these terms. Nevertheless, a cult was now formed around his person. Those who had been closest to him set down their recollections of ‘Imam Saheb’, as they referred to him, and collected his sayings, very much as the followers of the Prophet had gathered the material for the Hadith. Syed Ahmad was now credited with all manner of saintly virtues, and, in a further deviation from the dictates of Wahhabism, miraculous powers were attributed to him – one of which, seemingly, was the ability to rise from the dead.

  At the same time old Sunni and Sufi prophecies were dusted down, re-examined and, where necessary, revised: ‘I see’, read part of one such prophecy, originally devised by the Madhawi followers of Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur some centuries earlier, ‘that after 1200 years [750 years in the original text] have passed wonderful events will occur; I see all the kings of the earth arrayed one against the other; I see the Hindus in an evil state; I see the Turks oppressed; then the Imam will appear and rule over the earth; I see and read AHMD [‘MHMD’ in the original, thus ‘Ahmad’ replaced ‘Muhammad’] as the letters showing forth the name of this ruler.’ Shia texts were similarly employed, particularly a prophecy which gave the date of the forthcoming advent of the Imam-Mahdi as the year 1260 AH, corresponding to 1843–4 in the Christian calendar. When 1843–4 came and went without any divine manifestations a fresh text, entitled Asar Mahshar or Signs of the Last Day, was circulated. This foretold that after an initial defeat by the English on the Punjab Frontier the Faithful would begin a search for the Imam-Mahdi, culminating in an apocalyptic four-day battle, the complete overthrow of the Nazarenes and the triumphal appearance of the Imam-Mahdi to preside over the triumph of Islam in India. No exact date was given; but these events were to be heralded by an eclipse of both the sun and the moon.

  A cult can be defined as a form of worship with specific rites and ceremonies in which excessive devotion is paid to a particular person or belief system, creating a closed group environment everything within which is deemed good and everything outside bad. In the case of Indian Wahhabism, as it now became under the aegis of Wilayat Ali, these cult-like characteristics can be summed up as follows:

  belief in one man’s reading of the Quran and the Hadith, and a determination to bring about a theocracy based exclusively on those beliefs accompanied by a rejection of all other interpretations;

  absolute devotion, formalised by the swearing of an oath, to a single authority figure who is both religious leader and military commander, Imam and Amir, often accompanied by the belief that this leader has quasi-divine abilities;

  a perception of that figure as the natural heir to the caliphs of early Islam, if not an Imam-Mahdi figure heralding the final great battle against Islam’s enemies;

  a belief in millenarianism – the notion that the end of the world is fast approaching, and with it the triumph of Islam;

  an us-and-them mentality, whereby all who hold other religious views are seen as heretics and thus fair game for violent suppression;

  a recognition of jihad as one’s prime duty, but ignoring jihad akbar (the great jihad) in favour of jihad kabeer (the lesser jihad), interpreted as nothing less than holy war;

  the making of a symbolic retreat before beginning the jihad, so replicating the Prophet’s hijra from Mecca to Medina;

  the wish to return to a past golden age of Islam, together with a rejection of modern learning and technology (except where this can be used to further jihad);

  the recruiting of young male followers from among the poor and ignorant (preferably prepubescent orphans), subjecting them to long periods of intensive and exclusive religious indoctrination while keeping them isolated from other sources of ideas; and lastly,

  the promotion of a death-wish mentality in which the status of shahid (martyr) is exhalted as the ultimate goal of every jihadi.

  The leading promoter of the cult of Syed Ahmad, if not its originator, was Maulvi Wilayat Ali. Though he himself was short, fat and dark, and entirely without the good looks and charismatic qualities which had distinguished his predecessor, Wilayat Ali soon emerged as the movement’s new ideologue. What he lacked in appearance and character he more than made up for with his tireless promotion of Syed Ahmad and his teaching. He became the movement’s leading strategist and, over time, its most successful propagandist, travelling far and wide to preach his version of Syed Ahmad’s Wahhabism.

  But as the tenets and agenda of his revivalism became more widely known, so opposition began to grow. Some months after Titu Mir’s abortive uprising in Bengal, Wilayat Ali appeared in Bombay to preach in the mosques. According to one of his critics, ‘he prohibited the people from reading “Mowlood Shareef” [a text not contained in the Hadith], and paying reverence to our Prophet. Upon this the Moulvees of Bombay took him for an infidel, and turned him out.’ A year later fourteen leading Sunni mullahs of Delhi put their names to a fatwa denouncing the Indian Wahhabis as ‘a faithless, wicked, treacherous, and seditious people’, declaring that they had been banished from Mecca and Medina; and that, ‘with a view to gaining worldly riches, they had founded a new creed to cheat and impose upon the ignorant Mussulmans.’ From this time onward repeated denunciations of the Indian Wahhabis were made by mainstream Sunni Muslim leaders in India, accompanied by the pronouncement of fatwas declaring them to be infidels and faithless.

  The ‘Delhi-ites’ among Syed Ahmad’s original followers now began to distance themselves from the ‘Patna-ites’, realigning themselves with the more acceptable teachings of the school of Shah Waliullah. After the death in 1823 of Syed Ahmad’s teacher Shah Abdul Aziz the leadership of the Madrassah-i-Ramiyah had passed to Shah Abdul Aziz’s son, SHAH MUHAMMAD ISHAQ. Following the martyrdom of Syed Ahmad and his cousin Shah Muhammad Ismail at the battle of Balakot in 1831, Shah Muhammad Ishaq and a number of his disciples migrated to Arabia, where they remained for some years. Little is known about the circumstances of this self-imposed exile, but Shah Muhammad Ishaq’s departure seems to have been followed by a marked falling-off of support for Wahhabi teaching in the Delhi madrassahs. However, at some point in the late 1830s or early 1840s Shah Muhammad Ishaq returned to Delhi and began to gather about him a wide circle of outstanding young teachers and scholars from the East India Company’s Delhi College who in later years became hugely influential as radical leaders, ranging from the Mughal aristocrat SYED AHMAD KHAN of Alipore at one end of the spectrum to SAYYID NAZIR HUSAIN Muhaddith of Delhi at the other.

  Despite the hostility of the Sunni ulema, the message of militant jihad as now promoted by Wilayat Ali and the Patna-ites still found appreciative audien
ces, particularly among the Muslim nawabs who ruled over their states under the suzerainty of the British crown. Foremost among these was the Nizam of Hyderabad, whose enormous wealth and extensive titles could not disguise the fact that he was no longer an independent power. In 1839 Wilayat Ali arrived in Hyderabad to preach accompanied by his wife, the daughter of a Hyderabadi nobleman. News of his missionary activities soon reached the court of the Nizam’s younger brother Mubariz-ud-Daula, who went to hear him and was converted to his cause. It was said of his preaching that the women of the court, as they listened from behind their latticed screens of marble, were so overcome that they threw off their jewels and gold bangles and contributed them to his cause.

  The East India Company was now preparing to launch its ultimately disastrous intervention in Afghanistan, with the intention of ousting the current ruler in Kabul and putting their man, Amir Shah Shuja, back on the throne he had lost many years earlier. For this purpose a vast contingent of troops drawn from the EICo’s Bombay and Bengal Armies was assembled and given the grandiose title of the Army of the Indus. With so many of the Company’s troops about to be committed in Afghanistan, Wilayat Ali and his allies in Hyderabad saw an opportunity too good to be missed. Plans were laid for a pan-Hindustan rising and carefully worded letters were sent out from Hyderabad to a number of rulers expected to offer support. In the event, the nawabs had too much to lose, and their responses were noncommittal. But whispers of Prince Mubariz-ud-Daula’s plotting reached the ear of the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and he confronted the Nizam with clear evidence of his brother’s treasonable activities. A secret trial was held and the prince was sentenced to spend the rest of his days confined in the melancholy grandeur of the ancient fortress of Golconda. Every suspected Wahhabi follower in Hyderabad was rounded up and either imprisoned or expelled.