God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  To make matters worse, Nasiruddin and his army of Hindustani mujahedeen, having spent almost six years in limbo in Sind, now got caught up in the British invasion of Afghanistan. Answering a call to come to the aid of the Afghan defenders of the great citadel of Ghazni, they arrived in time to play a heroic but futile role in its defence. Fifty of their number survived, only to be taken in chains before Shah Shuja, where, in the words of a historian of the period, they were ‘hacked to death with wanton barbarity by the knives of his executioners’. For a second time, Wahhabism in India appeared to have run its course.

  The storming of Ghazni by the Army of the Indus was followed by the occupation of Kabul and the installation of Shah Shuja as Amir of Afghanistan. But then a fatal decision was taken to withdraw the bulk of the army, leading to the killing of the British Resident and a number of his colleagues and the destruction of the remaining British and Indian troops as they tried to make their way out of the country. Six months later a self-proclaimed Army of Retribution marched back up the Khyber to visit token punishment on the Afghans before once more withdrawing to the safety of Hindustan.

  Whatever gloss they cared to put on it, the British received a drubbing in Afghanistan, and the withdrawal of their troops acted as a fresh spur to the Wahhabis. No sooner had the Army of Retribution been disbanded than the Wahhabi faithful in the Indian plains learned that their Hidden Imam in the mountains had at last ended his self-imposed exile and was preparing to resume personal command of the jihad from Sittana. It was announced that letters had been received in Patna, written by Syed Ahmad’s first disciple Shah Muhammad Ismail but dictated by his master. They summoned the faithful to join him in the mountains of Buner so that the holy war might be resumed. Those who were unable to come themselves were to participate in the jihad by providing funds and food.

  Whatever their origins – and the suspicion must be that they were the work of Wilayat Ali – these letters had the desired effect. The mystique of Syed Ahmad, both as martyr and as lost leader in waiting, had grown over the years and to many young men of faith he now came to be seen as a unique symbol of Islamic resistance and resurgence – very much as Osama bin Laden became in later years. Large numbers of mujahedeen volunteers responded to the call, among them a devout but unusually independent-minded mullah from Hyderabad named Maulvi Zain ul-Abdin, who had been converted to Wahhabism by Wilayat Ali during one of his visits to the city. Travelling across India in small parties to escape detection, Zain ul-Abdin and almost a thousand recruits from the Deccan made their way to Sittana to begin their military training. However, Zain ul-Abdin was determined to meet the Hidden Imam whose call he and his fellow Hyderabadis had answered. He demanded to see the Amir ul-Momineem and, after being repeatedly fobbed off with excuses, was finally led up into the mountains above the Hindustani camp to a point from where he and a number of other curious mujahedeen could make out a distant cave, at the entrance of which stood three figures dressed in white robes. These, he was told, were the Amir-ul-Momineen and the two disciples who attended to his daily needs. The spectators were then made to promise not to go any closer, because if they or anyone else did so the Hidden Imam would again disappear, and remain hidden from the sight of man for fourteen years.

  Thrilled as he and the others were by this distant glimpse of their leader, Zain ul-Abdin found himself unable to contain his curiosity. Finally, he and a number of comrades bolder than the rest went back up into the mountains to take a closer look. They clambered right up to the cave and found, to their horror, that the three figures were nothing more than effigies. As Zain ul-Abdin later reported it, he examined the figure of the supposed imam ‘and found that it was a goatskin stuffed with grass, which with the help of some pieces of wood, hair, etc. was made to resemble a man. The suppliant enquired from Qasin Kazzab [Maulvi Qasim Panipati, the Wahhabi’s caliph at Sittana] about this. He answered that it was true, but that the Imam Humam had performed a miracle, and appeared as a stuffed figure.’

  Thoroughly outraged by this deception, Zain ul-Abdin promptly decamped from Sittana together with most of the thousand volunteers from Hyderabad. Thereafter he became a vociferous critic of the Wahhabis. ‘This deception’, he wrote, ‘is only a small portion of the acts, idolatry and heresy of these people . . . Now the errors and falsity of these people are as clear as noon-day, and [by abandoning them] I have saved my soul from sin.’ Other disillusioned volunteers also decamped from Sittana, claiming that they too had been deceived. They included a number of unemployed weavers from Bengal, priced out of the market by cheap imported cotton goods manufactured in the Lancashire mills. They had volunteered in the expectation that they would take up arms against the British, but on arrival at Sittana had been put to work as tailors, water-carriers, wood-cutters and mule-drivers. The camp’s leaders had decreed that only the peasant farmers who made up the bulk of the recruits were fighting material, leaving the weavers and other artisans to fill the less congenial supporting roles.

  From these and other accounts gathered as judicial evidence in later years, it is clear that the great majority of recruits who went to Sittana in order to fight were poor, illiterate and unskilled young men, while those who trained and indoctrinated them were almost invariably mullahs or maulvis, older and better-educated. The same pattern continues to this day.

  In March 1849, following two fierce-fought wars against the Sikhs, the Punjab became a province of British India, administered for the British Government by the East India Company acting on the orders of a Governor-General in Calcutta and a Court of Directors in London. This was a time of innovation and change in British India during which a great many reforms were introduced, including the promotion of education on English lines. In Britain Evangelical Christianity was on the rise and many of the civil and military officers who went out to India to make a career for themselves began increasingly to see it as their Christian duty to spread the good word. This increased religiosity went hand in hand with a growing sense of racial superiority, characterised by the absolute conviction of Herbert Edwardes, who stepped into Frederick Mackeson’s boots as Commissioner of Peshawar in 1853 after his murder, that God had awarded India to Britain because ‘England has made the greatest effort to preserve the Christian religion in its purest form’.

  These reforms and changing attitudes led to increasing disaffection in many sections of Indian society. Muslims and Hindus began to feel that their religious customs were under threat, none more so than the infantry sepoys and cavalry sowars of the Bengal Army. A majority of the former were orthodox high-caste Hindu Brahmins and Rajputs, while a significant proportion of the latter were Muslim cavalrymen of Pathan–Afghan origin whose forebears had settled in Delhi and in Rohilkund, the fertile plains east of the Jumna. One such Muslim was a soldier named Sheikh HEDAYUT ALI, whose grandfather had joined the ranks of the Bengal Army in 1763 and had been followed in his turn by his son and grandsons. Hedayut Ali was later to prove his loyalty to the salt he had eaten, but in 1842, as an adolescent boy in barracks, he had watched the regiments return from the Afghan War to the military cantonment of Ferozepore, and had observed how discontented the soldiers had become:

  The Hindoo Sepoys who had returned from Cabul were not allowed by the Hindoostanees to touch the cooking utensils, being looked upon by them as outcastes . . . The Sepoys spoke that they [had] lost caste by going to Cabul, because, they said, they were obliged to wear skins of animals, and because they could do there none of the acts prescribed by their religion in consequence of [the] intensity of the cold weather. The Moosulmen Sepoys also did not perform their work with loyalty, because, they said, the British Government forced them to fight with people professing the Islam creed, which is forbidden in the Koran. They also boasted among themselves, that they had always fired upwards and never took aim.

  As well as the usual grumbles over pay, accommodation and promotion, the sepoys also felt themselves becoming increasingly distanced from their British officers. According to
Shaik Hedayut Ali, the sense of comradeship that had once existed between the British officers and the Indians they commanded had all but disappeared.

  The Wahhabis were able to turn such discontent to their advantage. Throughout the 1840s and early 1850s they continued to send their missionaries out into the towns, villages and military cantonments, preaching jihad and the imminent return of the Hidden Imam. To encourage jihadis to proceed to their mountain hideout, they printed and circulated notices declaring that it was incumbent on all true Muslims to do as the Prophet had done: ‘At the present time in this country, hijrat is a stern duty,’ reads part of a Wahhabi pamphlet from this time. ‘Truly learned men have written this. Now he who forbids this, hear faithful, let him declare himself a slave to sensuality. He who, having gone away, returns leaving his conscience in the land of Islam and does not again depart hence, let him know that all his past services are in vain. Should he die without departing hence, he will in the end lose the way of salvation.’ Other pamphlets spoke of the duty to wage holy war against the English, and on the traditions of the Prophet regarding jihad. The movement’s debt to the founder of Wahhabism was explicitly acknowledged by its publication of a work variously entitled Tawarikh Kaisar Rum and Misbah-us-Sari, described as ‘a history of Abdul Wahhab, his persecutions and wars against the Turkish apostates’.

  The two Ali brothers, Maulvis Wilayat Ali and Inayat Ali, spearheaded the proselytising programme, both undertaking extended tours across the country. In April 1843 the Superintendent of Police of Murshidabad in Bengal reported that one Inayat Ali had been found acting in ways ‘inimical to our government’. He was said to have used ‘the topic of a religious war and the resurrection of Syed Ahmed as a pretext for calling for aid’, and it was recommended that his movement should be watched. The Secretary to the Government of Bengal responded with a note that Government was ‘disinclined to attach much importance to this preaching’. In 1847, as recorded earlier, the two Ali brothers were arrested in Hazara by Harry Lumsden, sent under custody to Patna and bound over to remain in the city for five years. Ignoring these restrictions, they continued to travel freely throughout northern India.

  Meanwhile, another Ali on the Wahhabi Council in Patna, Yahya Ali, youngest son of Elahi Bux, was focusing his efforts on restructuring the organisation. Under his aegis, which lasted right through into the mid-1860s, the Path of Muhammad movement became increasingly sophisticated and increasingly covert. As evidenced in testimony presented in trials two decades later, it continued to expand its organisation until a network of interlinked provincial, regional and district groups had been established across much of Bengal, Bihar, the North-West Provinces and Punjab – all unknown to the authorities.

  A district network was usually initiated by a Wahhabi missionary seeking out a suitable base where he could establish himself, often marrying into the local Muslim community. He then set himself up as a schoolmaster or religious teacher and, having gained a following in the district, appointed three lay figures to act as tax-gatherer, postmaster and general manager. Once established, these four local representatives acted independently of each other: the mullah taught and proselytised, the tax collector gathered funds, the postmaster arranged the transmission of messages and the movement of recruits, and the general manager co-ordinated. By this compartmentalising of duties the Wahhabis avoided the attentions of the British authorities. A mullah might be called before the district magistrate to account for his seditious preaching, but was almost always allowed to carry on because he appeared to be working in isolation. As Sir William Hunter put it, ‘An English Magistrate in India had all the reluctance of a Prefect of the Augustan Empire to intermeddle with the various beliefs and superstitions of the races over whom he rules. Treason can thus safely walk under a religious habit.’

  Every local group was linked to Patna through a number of regional centres, while Patna itself was linked to the frontier by the movement’s own dak or posting system of safe houses, which enabled messengers, supplies and recruits to be moved up and down the line in secrecy and safety. To maintain confidentiality the movement adopted a number of security measures. Its leading members all used aliases, its communications were so written as to appear to be innocuous business letters, and a code was devised for key words. God was always spoken of as the mukhtar or ‘agent’, jihad was termed a ‘lawsuit’, recruits for jihad were called variously beoparis (merchants), musafirs (travellers) or khitmutgars (servants), bands of recruits being sent up the line were called kafilas (caravans), money orders were referred to as ‘white stones’, money as ‘books’ or ‘merchandise’, gold coinage as ‘rosaries of red beads’, and the coins themselves as ‘large Delhi gold-embroidered shoes’ or ‘large red birds’.

  During this period of expansion the house and attached caravanserai of Shah Muhammad Husain’s family in Sadiqpore Lane in Patna was greatly enlarged and fortified. A mosque was built in its inner courtyard, with a madrassah attached. It was given the code name of chota godown or small warehouse, while the moun-tain camp up at Sittana was henceforward referred to as the burra godown or big warehouse.

  Within a decade the Wahhabi movement in India was transformed from a minority preaching sect into a highly effective organisation for Islamic revival and revolution, with branches throughout northern India and the support of a large popular constituency drawn mainly from the labouring classes. It was an extraordinary achievement, one that even its most trenchant critic was forced to acknowledge. ‘Indefatigable as missionaries,’ wrote William Hunter in his polemic Our Indian Mussulmans, ‘careless of themselves, blameless in their lives, supremely skilful in organising a permanent system for supplying money and recruits, the Patna Caliphs stand forth as the types and exemplars of the Sect. Much of their teaching was faultless, and it had been given to them to stir up thousands of their countrymen to a purer life and truer conception of the Almighty.’

  In February 1850 Inayat Ali was again arrested for preaching sedition in Bengal. He absconded and fled to Patna, where he was re-arrested, the British magistrate noting that this was the second time he had broken the terms of the original order requiring him to keep the peace. Released on a bond of a thousand rupees, he concluded nevertheless that the authorities were on to him. He left secretly for Sittana to assume military leadership of the burra godown as its amir. Towards the end of that same year his elder brother Wilayat Ali decided that the time had come when he too should make his retreat. In December he appointed Farhat Husain to be caliph in his absence, and left him in charge of the chota godown at Patna. He then set out to join his brother in the mountains, accompanied by his family and an entourage that included Yahya Ali and his two younger brothers. Yahya Ali’s responsibilities were taken over by his brother Ahmadullah, oldest of the four sons of Elahi Bux.

  The party wintered in Delhi, where Maulvi Wilayat Ali was invited by the Emperor, Bahadur Shah, to deliver a sermon before him in the Red Fort’s famous Hall of Public Audience. According to court protocol, preachers avoided controversial subjects in the presence of the last of the Mughals, but Wilayat Ali, in line with Wahhabi teaching, regarded the Emperor as an apostate for having submitted to the authority of the British. Accordingly, he launched into a fiery speech on the pains of hell awaiting those who failed to heed the commands of God. Midway through his sermon the Emperor interrupted him to declaim some verses he had composed on the transitory nature of life. The maulvi’s response was to recite a verse from the Quran criticising those who interrupted sermons. Despite this rebuke and the maulvi’s breach of protocol, the Emperor entertained his guest to a magnificent banquet and invited him to stay at the Red Fort. However, the British Resident at Delhi was also present at the Emperor’s audience, and he now began to question Wilayat Ali so closely about his background and his intended movements that the maulvi grew alarmed. Making his excuses, he led his entourage out of the fort and left the city as soon as he could.

  Shortly afterwards the two Ali brothers met by arrangem
ent in Ludhiana and continued their withdrawal from the domain of enmity together, reaching Sittana early in 1851. Only once on their journey through the Punjab did the local authorities attempt to stop their progress, and even then they were soon allowed to continue – after receiving a personal apology from the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar.

  The two brothers had not been long established in Sittana when it became clear that they differed on how the jihad was now to be prosecuted. Officially the dead Syed Ahmad was the movement’s imam and amir but as long as he remained hidden the two brothers shared these two roles between them, Wilayat Ali as imam and Inayat Ali as amir. The problem was that the former believed they should wait until the movement had gained more support, while the latter saw it as their religious duty to resume Syed Ahmad’s jihad without further delay. Inayat Ali was very different from his brother, in both appearance and personality. He was physically taller and stronger, he possessed a violent temper, and he was a man of action rather than a thinker. It is said of him that he bore a great hatred of the British. Having assumed leadership of the camp a year before the arrival of his elder brother, he may well have been reluctant to relinquish any authority – but he also needed Wilayat Ali’s permission as imam to commence jihad. So strained did relations between the two become that Inayat Ali finally left Sittana to set up his own camp at Mangalthana, deeper and higher in the Mahabun Mountain massif. Here he built a stone fort on land donated to him by Sayyed Akbar Shah, leader of the Saiyyed clan at Sittana and the late Syed Ahmad’s old patron and admirer.