God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Over the previous two weeks every post had brought news of further mutinies in Upper Hindustan. Bengal Army regiments had turned on their officers in Benares, Allahabad and Azimgargh, and in Oude the troops in half a dozen outlying districts had followed suit, isolating Sir Henry Lawrence and a small garrison in the British Residency at Lucknow. In the Punjab, sepoys were said to be deserting in droves to join the mutineers in Delhi; a score of Bengal Army regiments were in the process of being disarmed and disbanded before they too followed suit. Meanwhile, in Patna itself it had been reported to Tayler that ‘an intimacy’ had developed between the ‘saintly gentlemen’ who led the Wahhabis and a rich banker named Lootf Ali Khan. The latter was a Shia and thus a natural enemy of the Wahhabis, which made him, in Tayler’s eyes, ‘an unnatural subject for such a connex-ion’. Fearing that the Wahhabis had finally put aside their religious scruples to join forces with the Lucknow rebels, Tayler decided to make a pre-emptive strike. As he himself put it, ‘I came to the determination in my own mind, to take the initiative against the town, and deprive the disaffected, as far as I might, of all power of mischief.’

  Among those now living in the Commissioner’s bungalow were two junior assistants, the youngest of whom was twenty-year-old Edward Lockwood. He had only recently arrived in Patna on his first posting, and he now slept on Tayler’s front veranda with a revolver under his pillow and a gun beside his bed. In later years Lockwood remembered his Mutiny days in Patna as the most exciting and ‘joyous’ period of his life. To begin with, however, their prospects appeared very bleak: ‘Truly there was no lack, most days, of news which was qualified to make one’s hair come out of curl . . . but we soon got used to it. The calm confidence felt by the Commissioner communicated itself to all the others, and with Tayler and Rattray at the head of affairs, I felt comfortable enough.’ On 19 June Lockwood was told by the commissioner that he had issued an invitation to ‘all the respectable natives’ in the city to meet in his house on the following day, and that he would need his help. Among those asked to attend were three Wahhabi leaders, described by Tayler as ‘three Puritan Moulvees, Shah Mahomed Hossein [Syed Muhammad Hussain], Moulvee Ahmad Oollah [Ahmadullah], and Moulvee Waiz-ool-Huq’.

  ‘Next day,’ wrote Lockwood, ‘when the Wahabee Chiefs arrived by invitation, I received them, and bowed them, with all due ceremony, into the large room in which we all used to dine.’ When all the local dignitaries were present, Tayler entered flanked by Captain Rattray and Subedar Hedayut Ali. After some perfunctory discussions the meeting was declared over, but then, as all got up to leave, the three Wahhabis were asked to stay behind. They were then informed by Tayler that he had decided to hold them ‘in safe keeping until matters had settled down’. They were to be conveyed in their palanquins to the Patna circuit house where a guard of Rattray’s Sikhs would be placed over them. To all intents, they were under arrest – but without any charges being laid against them.

  The three took the news remarkably calmly, Ahmadullah responding ‘with a politeness of manner worthy of all admiration’ that whatever the commissioner ordered was best for ‘your slaves’. Young Lockwood was less impressed: ‘An old fellow [probably Muhammad Hussain] who sat next to me was the only one who appeared uneasy, for he looked at me slyly through the corners of his eyes as though he could not understand our little game; but I calmed his fears, and said: “Your Reverend, in your new abode . . . you will enjoy peace with honour whilst these troubled times remain; and you can tell your beads and study your Koran at leisure.”’

  Tayler’s action was inspired by what he called ‘the most striking characteristic of the Wahabee sect . . . the entire subservience which they yield to the Peer, or spiritual guide’. He had taken the trouble to study the Wahhabis’ beliefs, and had been struck by the fact that once a follower had committed himself by taking the oath of allegiance to the leader of the movement he ‘henceforward abandons himself mind and body to a state of utter and unreflecting slavery to his saintly superior’. By removing the head, Tayler hoped to render the rest of the body incapable of independent thought or action. He believed he had now placed under house arrest two of the three most important leaders of the movement: Muhammad Hussain – ‘the Peer, or spiritual chief, to whom the entire body of converts of the last generation owe their admission to the fraternity’ – and Ahmadullah, considered by Tayler to be ‘the principal “Mureed”, or disciple, and . . . said to possess greater influence than his superior’. In this supposition he was entirely correct.

  Following the death of Wilayat Ali at Sittana, Muhammad Hussain and Ahmadullah had assumed what was essentially joint command of the Wahhabi organisation in the plains. Both were men of influence. As well as senior imam, Muhammad Hussain was the head of one of the three founding families of the Wahhabi movement in Patna, while Ahmadullah, besides filling the role of deputy and chief counsellor to Muhammad Hussain, was also one of Patna’s leading public figures. He too was effectively the head of his family, for his father Elahi Bux was now a frail seventy-one-year-old and no longer played any significant role in the movement’s affairs. Tayler had in fact hoped to apprehend Elahi Bux in this same coup, but the old man had failed to attend the meeting in the commissioner’s bungalow. Balked, Tayler went out of his way to threaten Ahmadullah that his father’s freedom depended on his own good behaviour, using the phrase ‘His life is in your hands, yours in his.’

  Tayler’s enemies subsequently chose to interpret these words as a threat to kill the old man, just as they chose to portray his tricking of the three mullahs as an act of treachery on a par with the seizing and murder of the British envoy Macnaghten during the Afghan War. Edward Lockwood and others present saw Tayler’s action in a very different light: ‘There appears to me’, argued Lockwood, ‘a vast difference between inviting a man to my house, in order to kill him when he gets there; and inviting him, in order that his followers shall not kill me, so long as I keep him handy.’ Tayler himself had no doubts as to the rights and wrongs of the case: ‘To this day I look at the detention of these men as one of the most successful strokes of policy which I was able to carry into execution.’ It was, however, a detention lacking the approval of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, for Frederick Halliday was notified by Tayler only after the event.

  Having safely secured the three Wahhabi mullahs, the Commissioner next issued a proclamation calling on all Patna’s citizens to surrender their arms within twenty-four hours. This was backed up by a curfew, under which no one was allowed to leave his home during the hours of darkness. Shortly afterwards a Muslim magistrate suspected by Tayler’s right-hand man Dewan Mowla Baksh of being in league with conspirators in the city was also arrested. These measures had the desired effect: Patna and the surrounding districts remained relatively calm, and Farquharson and others who had taken refuge in the opium store were persuaded to return to their posts.

  Tayler’s pre-emptive strike in Patna also had other effects that he could never have anticipated. Deprived of the direction from the top that was such a marked feature of their organisation, almost the entire Wahhabi network across the plains of northern India entered a state of paralysis. And with the chota godown at Patna effectively closed, the movement of caravans of much-needed supplies of men, arms and money to the burra godown in Sittana came to a halt.

  By mid-June the city of Delhi had become the focal point of anti-British resistance as increasing numbers of Muslims, soldiers and civilians alike, answered what they believed to be a call from their emperor, and rallied to his cause.

  It will be remembered that after the martyrdom of Syed Ahmad at Balakot divisions had opened up between the Wahhabi ‘Patna-ites’ led by Wilayat Ali and the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’. For many years the latter were led by Shah Waliullah’s grandson, SHAH MUHAMMAD ISHAQ, whose cousin and brother-in-law were Syed Ahmad’s first two disciples. Following the death of his cousin with Syed Ahmad in 1831, Shah Muhammad Ishaq and a group of his disciples had migrated to Arabia. After an abs
ence of many years he and his followers returned to Delhi, where Shah Muhammad Ishaq placed himself at the head of a radical circle of scholars working within the traditions established by his grandfather. After Shah Muhammad Ishaq’s death in 1846 the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya broke up into a number of interlinked schools, of which the most obviously Wahhabi was that led by Maulana SAYYID NAZIR HUSAIN of Delhi.

  Born in 1805, Sayyid Nazir Husain had begun his religious studies in Patna at the Sadiqpore house of one of the heads of the three Patna families, Muhammad Hussain, and it was there that he first heard Syed Ahmad speak in the 1820s. He later moved up to Delhi to sit at the feet first of Shah Abdul Aziz and then of his son and successor, Shah Muhammad Ishaq, becoming in time a highly respected teacher of Hadith. The degree to which Sayyid Nazir Husain participated in the 1857 Mutiny can only be guessed at. He afterwards denied that he was one of the thirty-seven ulema of the city who in July 1857 put their seals to a declaration calling for jihad against the Nazrani – but there are grounds for believing that he did just that.

  The circumstances of the signing of the Delhi fatwa are surrounded in obfuscation and claims of forgery; understandably so, since to have admitted any support for the mutineers in the dark days that followed the suppression of the uprising would have been tantamount to signing one’s own death warrant. The undisputed facts are that on 19 May 1857, eight days after the arrival of the mutineers from Meerut, a group of mullahs erected a green banner on the roof of the city’s greatest mosque, the Jama Masjid, and published a fatwa proclaiming jihad. As soon as he heard of it, the Emperor ordered the banner to be removed and denounced the jihad fatwa as a great folly because it would alienate his Hindu supporters. His actions were supported by the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’, but for very different reasons. Sayyid Nazir Husain is said to have considered this declaration of jihad to be ‘faithlessness, breach of covenant and mischief’, and to have pronounced that it was a sin to take part in it. But his reasons for doing so were essentially doctrinal: he and other Sunni fundamentalists viewed the emperor as ‘little better than a heretic’ on account of his insistence on working with Shias and Hindus; and he did not consider Delhi to be a dar ul-Islam, making it unlawful to proclaim jihad from there. All the evidence suggests that the ‘Delhi-ites’ and other Sunni hard-liners in the city initially remained aloof from the mutineers and kept their own counsel.

  However, everything changed with the arrival in Delhi on 2 July of a large contingent of sepoys accompanied by ‘three or four thousand ghazis [warriors of the Faith but, in British eyes, fanatics]’. A significant number of these ghazis, led by one Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali, were Wahhabis. They had come from the town of Bareilly (not to be confused with Syed Ahmad’s birthplace in Oude, Rae Bareli), capital of Rohilkhand, which in earlier days had been an Afghan–Pathan stronghold in the plains. Ever since Syed Ahmad’s day Bareilly had been an outpost of Wahhabism on a par with that other Pathan bastion, Tonk. The Bareilly brigade was led by a senior officer of artillery, Subedar Muhammad Bakht Khan, whose first act on arriving in Delhi was to go straight to the Emperor and offer to take command of the mutineers – an offer gratefully accepted by the bewildered old man. Bakht Khan and two senior cavalry officers at his side were afterwards named as Wahhabis and the charge may well have some truth in it, because from this point onward the dominant group among the mutineers in Delhi became increasingly insistent that Emperor Bahadur Shah should lead them in a religious war, to the great disquiet of the many high-caste Hindus in their ranks. Bakht Khan assembled all the mullahs in the city and called on them draw up and put their seals to a second fatwa, ‘enjoining upon Mahomedans the duty of making religious war upon the British’. Initially, many refused to do so, but in mid-July a further six hundred ghazis arrived in the city, this time from Tonk. Again the presumption must be that many of them were Wahhabis – and that they came with the blessing of Syed Ahmad’s former devotee, Mohammad Wazir Khan, now the Nawab of Tonk. It was then put to the mullahs that the presence of all these warriors of the Faith – now said to number seven thousand in total – had, together with that of their Muslim brothers-in-arms in the Bengal Army, transformed Delhi into a land of Faith. This time thirty-seven divines put their seals to the jihad fatwa, and it was duly published.

  6

  The Late Summer of 1857

  Mutiny is like smallpox. It spreads quickly and must be crushed as soon as possible.

  John Nicholson in a letter, Peshawar, June 1857

  The ruthless crushing of the Sepoy Mutiny on the Punjab frontier by Nicholson and others has been recounted in Soldier Sahibs, but it should be remembered that it was prompted by the discovery of a number of damning letters, some from mullahs, others from Muslim conspirators in the ranks, but all calling for an uprising against the Nazarenes. One of these letters specified the fourth day of the Muslim festival of Eid, 22 May, another directly implicated the Hindustani Fanatics gathered under Maulvi Inayat Ali on the eastern slopes of the Mahabun Mountain.

  Despite the successful disarming and disbanding of the suspect units on the Peshawar parade ground on 21 May, one regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, the 55th, mutinied at Hoti Mardan and marched off towards the nearby mountains. Following a hot pursuit by John Nicholson and others in which about half the regiment perished, some five hundred men survived to reach the safety of Swat. Unfortunately for them, the Padshah of the Swatis and local patron of Syed Ahmad, Sayyed Akbar Shah, had died of natural causes on 11 May and his brother, SAYYED UMAR SHAH, had failed to win the backing of the tribal elders that his father had enjoyed. Despite this lack of support Sayyed Umar Shah offered the mutineers his protection and agreed to take them on as his standing army. But a majority of the sepoys were high-caste Hindus and they very soon found they were not welcome. The Swatis’ revered religious leader, the Akhund of Swat, then intervened and all the sepoys were ordered to remove themselves from Swat – along with their protector Sayyed Umar Shah. They made their way eastwards over the mountains to the Sayyeds’ homeland in Buner and there divided into two groups: the larger party, mostly composed of Hindus, crossed the Indus in the hope of finding refuge in Kashmir; the remainder proceeded south to join Maulvi Inayat Ali and his Hindustanis.

  At this time Inayat Ali had no fewer than four camps in the Mahabun massif: a lower camp at Sittana, two fortresses higher up in the mountains at Mangalthana and Narinji, and a village overlooking the Vale of Peshawar at Punjtar. This last had come to the Wahhabis through an alliance Inayat Ali had formed with the chief of Punjtar, Mokurrub Khan. Inayat Ali’s role in the subversion of the 55th BNI, previously based at Nowshera before they mutinied at Hoti Mardan on 23 May, remains unknown. But the arrival in his camp some five weeks later of more than a hundred armed and uniformed sepoys, nearly all Muslim, must have given him and his Hindustani mujahedeen a powerful fillip. Due to the disturbed state of Upper Hindustan at this time it is unlikely that Inayat Ali received news of the arrests of the Wahhabi leadership in Patna until after he had launched his first strike against the infidels in mid-July. This took the form of a raiding party, led by his cousin Meer Baz Khan, which swept down on to the Yusufzai plain, seized two villages, and there ‘raised the standard of the Prophet’. Perhaps the hope was that the surrounding tribespeople would rally to their banner. In the event, the jihadis failed to take the most basic military precautions, and early next morning were caught off-guard. Herbert Edwardes, Commissioner in Peshawar, afterwards set down a summary of the events of 2 July: ‘Major Vaughan (then commanding the fort at Mardan) fell upon them with about 400 horse and foot and two mountain guns, killed Meer Baz Khan, took prisoner a Rohilla leader named Jan Mahomed Khan, hanged him and Mullik Zureef, the headman of the rebels, burnt two villages which had revolted, fired others and extinguished this spark of mischief. Nothing could have been better than the promptness of this example.’

  This setback forced Inayat Ali to pull back from Punjtar to a more secure position in the hills: his fortress at Narinji, on the end o
f a long ridge overlooking the western slopes of Mahabun Mountain. ‘This mountain village’, recorded Edwardes, ‘was so strongly situated that the police scarcely dared to go near it, and it became a refuge for every evil-doer. Its inhabitants, about 400 in number, welcomed the moulvie with delight. The holy war seemed auspiciously opened with every requisite: a priest, a banner, a fastness, a howling crowd of bigots and several days’ provisions.’ But here too the Hindustanis were caught by surprise, being woken at dawn on 21 July by the crash of artillery as four mountain guns opened up on their village – the prelude to an assault by a combined force of eight hundred horse and foot. They and the rebel sepoys with them took to their heels, leaving behind a banner and sixty dead.

  By all accounts the summer of 1857 was exceptionally hot, and Major Vaughan’s men were too exhausted by the climb to continue the chase. This gave Inayat Ali the chance to regroup. He gathered his reserves from Sittana and Mangalthana and reoccupied Narinji, where he rebuilt and strengthened the defences of his eyrie. There he settled down to await the arrival of the first of many waves of mujahedeen from Patna and elsewhere in Hindustan that he and the other leaders had confidently predicted would flock to their banner in the wake of the Wahhabis’ calls for hijrat and jihad. As a result in large part of the measures taken by Commissioner Tayler in Patna, those reinforcements never came. Instead, at sunrise on 3 August a British force twice as large as the first began a fresh assault on Narinji:

  The Ghazees had thrown up some formidable entrenchments, and danced and yelled as they saw a small column advancing on their front. Their shouts were answered by British cheers from a second column under Lieutenant Hoste, which had gained the heights by a bye-path and now appeared above Nowrunjee. A general fight took place, 30 of the Ghazees died fighting stoutly, and three were taken prisoners, amongst whom was a moulvie from Bareilly who was summarily hanged. The village was then knocked down by elephants and its towers blown up by engineers. Nowrunjee was at last destroyed.