God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Muhammad Jafar’s remarkable autobiography ends with a passionate defence of religious conservatism:

  This [English] language is so closely connected with materialistic life that it is not only harmful but dangerous for the spiritual life. If a young man, before learning Quran and traditions of the holy Prophet in detail, learns English and reads English books of various types and different disciplines as I used to do, he will become an unreligious, uncultured person with excessively free ideas to such an extent that it would not only be difficult but impossible to reform him . . . Such knowledge will certainly make a person unreligious and atheist if he is not well acquainted with Islam. It will create doubts in his mind which will remain there throughout his life.

  It was better therefore to remain in blessed ignorance. His own life history, Muhammad Jafar finally advises the reader, should be read as a moral tale, for ‘about a similar story, God in his book Holy Quran says, “In these stories there is a lesson to be drawn.”’

  The Wahhabi trials and the two assassinations caused great disquiet among both the small British community and India’s much larger Muslim population. Since the traumatic events of the Indian Mutiny a view had developed among the British that Muslims were not to be trusted – a view that hardened when a report produced in 1875 found that, for all the round-ups and arrests, Wahhabi mullahs were still actively preaching as far afield as Madras and Rangoon, and that sedition was still being plotted.

  At a public gathering a year before his assassination Lord Mayo had posed the rhetorical question: ‘Are the Indian Mussalmans bound by their Religion to rebel against the Queen?’ It was fiercely debated in the newspapers and a number of leading figures went into print on the subject, most notably the eminent civil servant, statistician and historian Sir William Hunter, who followed Lord Mayo with a polemic entitled The Indian Musulmans in which he inveighed against the Wahhabis, but also argued that by doing away with Muslim laws and imposing their own the British Government in India had turned India into the very domain of enmity that the Wahhabis had declared it to be, thus making it incumbent on every Muslim in India to fight against the British as a religious duty.

  Where the authorities led, public opinion followed. British India’s first unofficial poet laureate was Alfred Lyall, Commissioner of Berar in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and later Foreign Secretary. A number of Lyall’s published verses take as their subject Muslims who hark back nostalgically to the years of Muslim glory and who conceal their hatred of the British. One of the earliest is ‘A Sermon in Lower Bengal’, written in 1864 in the wake of the first Wahhabi trial. It tells of a mullah from Swat named ‘Hajee Mahomed Ghazee oorf Moojahid-ood-deen Wahabee’ who addresses a secret assembly in the Bengal countryside and calls for volunteers to reclaim the empire they have lost. His audience is moved, but no one steps forward to answer his call and he leaves in disgust:

  Nay, though your spirits be willing, your flesh is but weak for crusading,

  When I face Englishmen’s cannon I want better stuff at my back.

  Two decades later Lyall yielded his laurels to a younger poet whose collection of Departmental Ditties, published in 1887, gave notice that a new laureate had appeared on the Indian scene. Rudyard Kipling’s three years as assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore taught him to regard Muslims as strong men worthy of respect but never to be trusted. In his early short story On the City Wall the narrator is tricked into aiding the escape of a political prisoner held in Lahore Fort. When he asks who this elderly prisoner might be he is told: ‘“He fought you in 1836, when he was a warrior youth, refought you in ’57, and he tried to fight you in ’71 but you had learned the trick of blowing men from guns too well. Now he is old; but he would fight you if he could.” “Is he a Wahhabi, then?”’ asks the narrator. More intriguingly, Kipling also wrote a strangely ambivalent scrap of verse, entitled ‘From the Masjid-Al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed (Wahhabi)’, published many years after he left India in his collection of short stories Traffics and Discoveries. The narrator of the poem observes a Wahhabi convict in a chain-gang and is so impressed by his demeanour that he questions him about his ‘red Yesterday’. But as he listens to the convict’s tale the narrator finds himself transfixed by his ‘miraculous weaving’. The poem closes with the lines:

  So I submitted myself to the limits of rapture – Bound by this man we had bound, amid captives his capture –

  Till he returned me to earth and the visions departed; But on him be the Peace and the Blessing: for he was great-hearted.

  Much heart-searching about loyalties also took place in the Muslim community. The question of where a Muslim’s first duty lay was hotly debated in the vernacular newspapers and in the mosques. Convocations of Sunni muftis and other jurists met in Calcutta and Delhi, and after much agonising produced fatwas pronouncing on whether India under the British was a dar ul-harb or a dar ul-Islam. In Calcutta they declared British India to be a domain of Faith, wherein religious rebellion was unlawful, whereas in Delhi they found the country to be a domain of enmity – but went on to state that rebellion against the British Government was nevertheless uncalled-for. At the same time there remained many ordinary Sunni and Shia Muslims who, for all their misgivings about Wahhabi dogma, saw the Wahhabi trials as victimisation of fellow-Muslims and part of a general pattern of increasing discrimination against Muslims. A number of historians from the Indian sub-continent have subsequently taken this line, citing as evidence the decline in the numbers of Muslims in government employment from this time onwards. The sad reality is that this decline was part of a pattern of withdrawal from public life, as the greater part of India’s Sunni Muslim community began a slow retreat into the past.

  Prior to British rule the Muslim community in India had always looked for political leadership to a Muslim aristocracy, headed by the Mughal emperor in Delhi who had ruled India through a number of regional viceroys. As Mughal power waned these governors had established themselves as local rulers, as either Muslim nawabs or Hindu or Sikh maharajas, each supported by a landowning nobility. By degrees the British Government in India replaced or weakened these several tiers of political leadership with a modern administration which had little room for feudal or religious loyalties. The events of 1857 speeded up this transfer of power. The old emperor of Delhi was sent into exile in Burma, the Nawab of Tonk was similarly exiled to Benares, while many of the landowning nobles of Oude and Bihar had their great estates confiscated. At the same time the British set up a number of schools, such as Edwardes College in Peshawar and Aitchison College in Lahore, where sons of the former governing aristocracy could be educated along British lines, effectively isolating them from those whom they traditionally represented.

  This restructuring further divided the Muslim community in India. A significant minority took the view that Muslims should embrace modern learning on the Western template and work for the advancement of their religion and community within the power structure of the British Raj until such time as they were ready to stand alone. Remarkably, their standard-bearer was one of the Naqshbandi radicals who had studied in Delhi under Shah Muhammad Ishaq in the 1840s and Sayyid Nazir Husain in the 1850s: the Mughal aristocrat SYAD AHMAD KHAN, founder of the Alighar movement and of the university of that name. Although he was at the same time a fierce critic of many aspects of British rule, he and his supporters found themselves increasingly isolated and abused as the greater part of their co-religionists turned their backs on progress.

  Heading this great leap backward – and directing the attack on Syad Ahmad Khan and his progressives – were two groups of mullahs who shared exactly the same background as Syad Ahmad Khan: they too were Naqshbandis educated in the tradition of Shah Waliullah by Shah Muhammad Ishaq and Sayyid Nazir Husain in Delhi in the years leading up to the 1857 Mutiny.

  The more overtly extreme of these two groups of mullahs was led by Sayyid Nazir Husain himself, the same man who had led the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’ in 1857 and
who in 1868 had been arrested by the British authorities on suspicion of being the Wahhabis’ chief in Delhi. Together with two influential fellow alumni of the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya – Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan of Bhopal and Maulvi Muhammad Husain Batalvi – he founded within a year or two of his release a politico-religious organisation known as Jamaat Ahl-i-Hadith, The Party of the People of the Hadith. Its leaders made no secret of their ambition to ‘convert India into an abode of Islam through jihad’. Yet they also made it plain to their followers that this was not the time for jihad. ‘Bretheren,’ wrote Muhammad Husain Batalvi, ‘the age of the sword is no more. Now instead of the sword it is necessary to wield the pen. How can the sword come into the hands of the Muslims when they have no hands? They have no national identity.’

  Although determined to avoid direct conflict with the Government of India, the leaders of the Party of the People of the Hadith lost no opportunity to vent their religious spleen on co-religionists and infidels alike in as close an approximation to the ways of Al-Wahhab and his followers as they could manage within the law, even to the extent of employing physical violence against mosques and shrines. As a result, Ahl-i-Hadith preachers were banned from most mosques and denounced as Wahhabis. Fatwas were issued condemning all who followed them as ‘disbelievers and apostates’. Eventually, in 1885, the Ahl-i-Hadith leadership published a book denying any links with Wahhabism and calling for the Government of India to cease employing that term in relation to themselves. Not wishing to give religious offence, the Government complied and ordered the terms ‘Wahhabi’ and ‘Wahhabism’ to be avoided henceforward in all its official correspondence. However, the Islamic community in India knew no such qualms, and to this day Ahl-i-Hadith continues to be described – with good reason – as Wahhabi in its origins and teachings. Its unremitting anti-polytheist, anti-innovation, anti-Shia and anti-Christian message continues to attract a hard core of fundamentalist Sunnis.

  The second group of Delhi alumni adopted a less confrontational approach and benefited accordingly. Their leaders were Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmed, two of the four-man group of jihadis that had left Delhi in the summer of 1857 to create their own dar ul-Islam at Thana Bhawan: Muhammad Qasim had acted as the group’s military commander and may well have had a hand in the massacre in Shamlee mosque; Rashid Ahmed had presided over the imposition of sharia as the group’s judge.

  In May 1866, one year after the ending of the Patna Trial, these two mullahs set up their own madrassah at Deoband, a small town seventy-five miles north of Delhi and within a day’s march of their earlier stamping-ground at Thana Bhawan. Initially the school had one teacher, Mullah Mahmood Deobandi, and one student, fifteen-year-old MAHMOOD UL-HASAN, and its premises consisted of nothing more than the courtyard beside an ancient mosque.

  The main guiding force behind what became the Deobandi movement was Muhammad Qasim, who made no bones about his reason for setting up Deoband Madrassah – to preserve Islam in the face of British oppression. ‘The English’, he wrote, ‘have perpetrated boundless acts of tyranny against the Muslims for their fault, if at all it was a fault, of the uprising of 1857 and their relentless endeavour for the independence of this country thereafter. They have left no stone unturned to plunder and obliterate the Islamic arts and science, Muslim culture and civilization.’

  Initially known as the ‘Arab Madrassah’, Deoband Madrassah was organised on very different lines from the usual madrassahs in India, which up to this time were run fairly informally, depending very much on the authority of the school’s senior mullah. Muhammad Qasim had learned at first hand how the British-backed Delhi College had been set up and he organised Deoband on a British model, with a rector, a vice-chancellor, a dean of studies and instructors, a set curriculum and a time-table. Yet the ethos was entirely that of the seminary: a strict discipline was maintained, the students lived simply and frugally, English was prohibited, Urdu provided the lingua franca, and all students began their studies by learning the Quran by heart in the original Arabic. All classes thereafter were focused on Quranic studies, taught by mullahs who were specialists in the Hadith and who placed great emphasis on the doctrine of oneness, in accordance with the teachings of Shah Waliullah of Delhi as passed down through his descendants Shah Abdul Aziz and Shah Muhammad Ishaq. Elements of Naqshbandi Sufism were maintained, especially those which elevated the authority of the teacher and allowed favoured students to be initiated into the intense master–disciple relationship felt to be in imitation of the close bonds that had existed between the Prophet and his Companions.

  At the same time, the school promoted an uncompromising, puritanical and exclusive fundamentalism no less restrictive than Wahhabism. Deobandism denounced the worship of saints, the adorning of tombs, and such activities as music and dancing; it waged a ceaseless war of words against Shias, Hindus and Christian missionaries; it distanced itself from much that was progressive in Indian society, shunning the British law-courts as far as possible without breaking the law; it retained militant jihad as a central pillar of faith, but focused this jihad on the promotion of Islamic revival and identity through the principle of the immutability of sharia, the oneness of God and the overarching, guiding authority of the ulema.

  When denounced as Wahhabis, as happened frequently, the Deobandis declared themselves to be pillars of Hanafi orthodoxy. Their official line on Wahhabism was probably best represented by a statement contained in a fatwa put out by Rashid Ahmed which stated that Al-Wahhab ‘held excellent beliefs but his creed was Hanbali. Although he was of rather harsh temperament he and his followers are good people.’ This did not prevent three hundred mainstream ulema putting out a fatwa forbidding Sunnis to have any dealings with Deoband Madrassah. ‘The Deobandis,’ read part of this fatwa, ‘because of their contempt and insult in their acts of worship towards the saints, prophets and even the Holy Prophet Muhammad and the very Person of God himself, are very definitely apostates and infidels. Their apostasy and heresy is of the worst kind, so that anyone who doubts their apostasy and heresy even slightly is an apostate and infidel. Muslims should be very cautious of them and stay away from them, let alone pray behind them.’

  Fundamentalist to the core in its theology, Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi’s Deoband was also boldly innovative, particularly in making Islamic studies accessible to the masses. The school very deliberately set out to draw its students from the peasantry, the dispossessed and the uneducated, and refused to accept funding from Government or from wealthy benefactors, insisting that it would accept only religious donations. Students as young as five were accepted and often remained there until adulthood, so that many came to identify with the madrassah as their main home and with their teacher as a surrogate parent. This was in striking contrast to earlier models, where taliban often moved from one mullah to another picking up learning wherever they could, often on a haphazard basis. The consequence was a closed, introverted, tight-knit society of young males approaching or in the throes of puberty, taught to regard their sexuality as innately sinful and women as weak creatures incapable of self-control and easily tempted, therefore best kept in subjection. Homosexuality was recognised to be as great a sin as adultery, yet at the same time intense friendships were accepted as the norm, with all that pent-up sexuality and feeling being channelled into mystical experience and fervid devotion towards God – and towards his regents on earth.

  While always proclaiming itself a bastion of conservatism, Deoband nevertheless exploited modern technology, making good use of the print medium to put out its message, especially in the dissemination of fatwas on every issue brought before its muftis. Officially the Deoband muftis rejected ijtihad, the use of independent reasoning in interpreting a matter of sharia. But they also took the line that on every issue there was an outer injunction to be taken literally and an inner meaning open to informed interpretation: this was nothing less than ijtihad by the back door. So proficient did Deoband become in its provision of religious judgements on request that it m
ore or less cornered the market, issuing so many thousands of highly conservative fatwas every year that it came to be seen in India as the last word on all matters pertaining to sharia and how a good Muslim should behave. One of the earliest of these fatwas declared the activities of the moderniser Syad Ahmad Khan of Alighar to be un-Islamic, and banned all Muslims from joining his Patriotic Association.

  By such populist means Deoband Madrassah gained the support of the masses, leading the way among the several revivalist schools that came into being at this time in providing young Muslims with a new sense of identity and an alternative to the British model. Deoband became known throughout India as the place where boys could safely be initiated into the old religion of their forefathers. In 1879 the institution assumed the additional name of Dar ul-Ulum, the Abode of Islamic Learning. By then it was already well on the way to becoming renowned throughout the Islamic world as a centre of religious study second only to the university attached to the great mosque of Al-Aqsa in Cairo.

  By the end of the nineteenth century Dar ul-Ulum Deoband had founded more than two dozen allied madrassahs in northern India. At the same time the school produced an ever-expanding cadre of graduates who formed a new class of reformist ulema not unlike the Jesuits of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in their impact: a distinctive, politicised leadership of religious teachers with professional qualifications in the form of degrees who could compete to advantage against all others, outshine critics in public debates, take the lead in public prayers and, above all, disseminate the teachings of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband school in their own madrassahs.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century these teachings were dignified with the term salafi, or ‘following the forefathers’, based on the ideal of emulating the early fathers as a basis for Islamic renewal first developed by the medieval Hanbali jurist of Damascus, Ibn Taymiyya, and those who followed them became known as salafiyya – ‘followers of the forefathers’. Both words were associated with the Prophet’s Companions and the early scholars of Islam.