God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  The impact of Dar ul-Ulum Deoband and its missionaries on central and south Asian Islam was immense. They gave new authority to the ulema and undermined the traditional authority of secular leaders. They gave new impetus to the old ideals: that a true Muslim’s first duty was to his religion; that his only country was the world community of Islam; and that he had an obligation to defend Islam wherever it was under attack. The end result was a seismic shift in the Sunni Islam of South Asia, which became increasingly conservative and introverted, less tolerant, and far more inclined to look for political leadership to the madrassah and the madrassah-trained political leader committed to the cause of leading the umma back to the true path. The consequences were profound.

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  * Founded and produced by my great-grandfather, George Allen: C.A.

  9

  The Frontier Ablaze

  One is inclined to sum up the causes of the outbreak under three heads, the first of which is fanaticism, the second, fanaticism, and the third, fanaticism . . . Wherever Islam is the creed there will be found disciples prepared to preach its cause and to fire the undercurrent of feeling which forms part of this weird belief. All that such preachers ask is that a crisis may arrive which shall stir the popular feeling out of the narrow channels of trade, commerce and homeside agriculture. And in 1897, this crisis came . . . the whole business may be claimed to be the successful attempt of the Mullahs to seize a moment of unrest and work upon the fanaticism of the tribesmen.

  Lionel James of Reuters, The Indian Frontier War, 1898

  ‘Who or why, or which or what, is the Akond of Swat?’ wrote the poet Edward Lear in his Nonsense Songs in 1871, reflecting the Western world’s general ignorance of Indian affairs at this time. To Madame Blavatsky, founding mistress of the Theosophical Society, the Akhund was nothing less than an evil genius. In 1878 she declared Abdul Ghaffur to be ‘the founder and chief of nearly every secret society worth speaking of among the Mussulmans, and the dominant spirit in all the rest. His apparent antagonism to the Wahabees was but a mask, and the murderous hand that struck Lord Mayo was certainly guided by the old Abdul.’ But Madame Blavatsky was, as usual, wide of the mark.

  Despite the Akhund’s decisive intervention against them at Ambeyla in 1863, the British authorities in Peshawar recognised him as a positive influence. ‘His life’, wrote a British official of the Akhund,

  seems to have been one of devotion, humility, abstinence and chastity; the doctrines he taught were as tolerant and liberal as those of his Wahhabi opponents were intolerant and puritanical. Judged by the standard applied to other religious leaders, he used his influence, according to his lights, for good, supporting peace and morality, discouraging feuds, restraining the people from raiding and offences against their neighbours.

  But with Abdul Ghaffur’s death in 1877 the cohesion he had brought to Swat, Buner and beyond began to unravel. His death coincided with what a distinguished historian of Anglo-Afghan relations, Sir Kerr Fraser-Tytler, has called ‘the high water mark of British forward policy’ – the theory that India was best served by extending British influence deep into Afghanistan in order to prevent the Russians from doing the same. After two decades of ‘masterly inactivity’ on the part of Lawrence, Mayo and other viceroys, the pendulum swung the other way with the arrival in India of the new Viceroy, the mercurial Lord Lytton.

  In September 1878, in response to the reception of Russian envoys in Kabul by Sher Ali, the Amir of Kabul, Lytton despatched a mission up the Khyber to bring the Amir to his political senses. It was led by that old frontier war-horse Neville Chamberlain, now a major-general and a KCB, and included in his party as interpreter was another frontier veteran, Surgeon-Major Henry Bellew. Half-way up the pass, beneath the hill fort of Ali Masjid, the party was met by the Afghans and told that if they proceeded any further their lives would be forfeit. This snub was all Lord Lytton required to order the invasion of Afghanistan, an action that received the reluctant backing of the British Prime Minister.

  Three armies duly entered Afghanistan by three different routes (one fighting its way through the same mountain region, the Tora Bora, where in December 2001 slipshod planning allowed Osama bin Laden and many of his ‘Arabs’ to slip through the US Special Forces net into Pakistan). The Amir was forced to flee into exile and a rival, Yakub Khan, was set on the throne of Kabul in his place. The usual pattern of catastrophe, retreat and retribution followed: the killing of the British Resident along with his Guides escort at Kabul; a military disaster at Maiwand, followed by a triumphant march and victory at Kandahar; the collapse of Lytton’s forward policy and the installation of a much less pliable amir in Kabul. The hero of the hour was the commander of the Kabul Field Force, Fred ‘Bobs’ Roberts, now a major-general, who nevertheless left Afghanistan declaring that ‘the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us’.

  The real victor of the Second Afghan War was the new Amir of Afghanistan, ABDUR RAHMAN, whose claim to rule with the proverbial rod of iron was no boast. Within the space of twenty years he forged a nation out of a land of semi-autonomous provinces and warring fiefdoms, crushing local rebellions with ruthless cruelty, indulging in mass executions and deportations. To strengthen his authority over the Afghans still further Amir Abdur Rahman declared himself imam, just as Emir Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud had in Nejd a century earlier. Indeed, so confident was Abdur Rahman of his own religious authority that he further claimed for himself the right to interpret sharia as a mujtahid. Taking the view that the existence of kaffirs on his territory was an affront to Islam, he went on to declare jihad on the Shia Hazaras in the provinces of Wardak and Bamian, and on the genuinely heathen Kalash of Kafiristan. To reduce the power of the troublesome Ghilzai Pathans, who occupied a swathe of territory between Kabul and Kandahar, he transported large numbers into Hazara country as part of his campaign to reduce the Shias there. At the same time, Amir Abdur Rahman brooked no nonsense from the ulema: when an influential mullah of Kandahar dared to accuse the Amir of infidelity, he had him dragged from the mosque where he had sought sanctuary under the famous cloak of the Prophet, and killed him with his own hands.

  Yet having secured absolute power within his borders the Amir found himself constantly humiliated by the British, particularly in the case of their partition of the Pathan tribal lands as formalised in November 1893 in the creation of the Durand Line. In that same year the Amir complained to the Viceroy that ‘in your cutting away from me these frontier tribes, who are people of my nationality and my religion, you are injuring my prestige in the eyes of my subjects, and will make me weak, and my weakness is injurious to your government.’ Fearful that the British were planning a new round of forward policy-making, Abdur Rahman then embarked on a propaganda campaign aimed at securing the loyalties of the trans-border Pathans. He declared himself Zia-ul-Millat wa-ud-Deen (Light of Union and Faith), and sent out to every mullah on the frontier a document entitled Taqwim-ud- Deen (The Rightness of Faith). This purported to be a book of religious doctrine, but was devoted almost entirely to the promotion of jihad as a religious duty.

  Abdur Rahman’s actions were bound up with his desire to be seen by the wider Muslim world as a religious leader, taking as his model the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid. The first stirrings of pan-Islamic revivalism were now beginning to be felt in several quarters of the Muslim world, accompanied by a growing awareness among Muslim intellectuals that Islam required a new model if it was to survive the advance of Western imperialism. Among the first to articulate this new thinking was that mystery man of Islamic modernism, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, popularly known as ‘the Afghan’. Al-Afghani had first appeared on the Indian scene just before the Sepoy Mutiny, as a teenage talib. Whether he took up arms against the British is debatable, but what he saw in India convinced him that Britain was Islam’s greatest enemy and had to be opposed. In 1866 he was to be found in Afghanistan working as the chief counsellor of a warlord of Kandahar. Expelled by Abdur Rahman, he re
appeared in India to become a vociferous opponent of the moderniser Syad Ahmad Khan of Alighar and his philosophy of revival through co-operation. However, ‘the Afghan’ also rejected the Deoband philosophy, arguing that true Islamic revival could only be accomplished by Muslims uniting and modernising. Although his last years were spent under house arrest in Turkey, his promotion of pan-Islamism in the last decades of the nineteenth century inspired radicals throughout the Muslim world, leading in the 1920s to the formation of two anti-imperialist political movements: in Egypt the Ikhwan-ul- Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood; and in India Jamaat-i-Islami, the Party of Islam.

  This burgeoning pan-Islamic revivalism went hand in hand with a growing belief among Muslims worldwide that momentous times were fast approaching as the Christian millennium drew near: that centuries of Christian advances were at an end and that Islam was now in the ascendant. In North Africa this millenarianism found expression in the Mahdiyyah movement, led by the Sudanese mystic Muhammad Ahmad, who in 1881 proclaimed himself the Mahdi. Like Al-Wahhab and Syed Ahmad before him, Muhammad Ahmad set out to revive the golden age of Islam by raising an army of the faithful and declaring jihad on an infidel regime – in this instance, the Egyptian Government. The death of General Gordon in Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi’s followers in 1885 provided an enormous fillip to the Mahdi’s cause, while the subsequent failure of the British to overthrow the dervish armies of the Mahdi’s appointed caliph, Abdullah, was widely interpreted as a sign that Christian power was on the wane. In India traditional allegiances were further weakened as the increasingly eager faithful turned away from their secular leaders to listen to the mullahs who preached that the appointed time was nigh. And nowhere was this mood of expectation more charged than among the Afghan–Pathan tribes of the North-West Frontier. In the summer of 1895 an engineer named Frank Martin entered Afghanistan to take up a position as chief engineer to Amir Abdur Rahman. Like Herbert Edwardes and others before him, Martin was struck by the influence of the mullahs over the ordinary people – but what was much more disconcerting was their hatred of non-Muslims:

  The sight of a kafar, and all who are not Mussulman are infidels, is so obnoxious that they spit in the street, and to kill one of them is quite a meritorious action in their eyes . . . They argue that the enemy of their religion is the enemy of God and therefore a loathsome thing, and that the Koran commands them to kill all such, and promises that if they themselves are killed in doing so, they shall go straight to Paradise, and that a man who fails to kill a Kafar, but suffers death himself in the attempt, has only a little less rank in heaven than the one who succeeds.

  This hostility he blamed on the mullahs and the new licence given them by their amir and imam, Abdur Rahman: ‘Very few, with the exception of the moullahs, can read the Koran, and the latter apparently give very free translations when it suits their purpose; such, for instance, as that of killing unbelievers, on which is built up the principle of Jihad, holy war, and which the Amir has had printed in pamphlet form and distributed throughout the country of late.’

  In the mid-1890s every Pathan tribe on the North-West Frontier seemed quite suddenly to acquire its own charismatic religious leader, a human talisman who had it in his power to sway his flock to his purpose. These charismatics included the Hadda Mullah of the Mohmands, Mullah Powindah of the Mahsuds, Said Akbar of the Akakhel Afridis, Indrej of Bazar, the Manki Mullah, the Palam Mullah – and, above all, the Sadullah Mullah of Swat.

  In the spring of 1897 an envoy of Sultan Abdul Hamid arrived in Kabul to encourage the Amir to join his pan-Islamic revival. This led Amir Abdur Rahman to summon all the leading ulema of the Pathans to a theological conference in Kabul. Whatever the Amir may have intended, these delegates left Kabul believing that the British Empire was on the point of collapse and that the time had come to strike a mighty blow for Islam. They returned to their constituencies convinced that the sultan had just won a great victory against the Christians in Greece, that the Turks had captured the Suez Canal and Aden, and that Germany and Russia had joined them in a war against Britain. The mood among the frontier tribes at this time was described by Winston Churchill as ‘a vast but silent agitation . . . Messengers passed to and fro among the tribes. Whispers of war, a holy war, were breathed to a race intensely passionate and fanatical. The tribes were taught to expect prodigious events. A great day for their race and faith was at hand.’

  The British authorities in Peshawar and Lahore saw this sudden agitation as Kabul-inspired, and assumed it would blow over. They entirely underestimated the potency of the banner of jihad first planted on the Frontier by Syed Ahmad seventy years earlier.

  It is a remarkable testimony to the legacy of Ambeyla that despite all the information brought to light in the Wahhabi trials, the Hindustani Fanatics had been suffered to remain on the Frontier. And it is all the more remarkable when one considers that their leader and amir was Maulvi Abdullah Ali, the same man who had taken over command of the Hindustani Fanatics almost forty years earlier and had subsequently led them through the Ambeyla campaign.

  After Ambeyla the Hindustanis had been driven from refuge to refuge as pressure from their now implacable enemy, the Akhund of Swat, had forced one reluctant host after another to send them on their way. In 1868, as mentioned earlier, they had been reported on by that shadowy police officer J. H. Reily. That same winter Alfred Wilde, now a lieutenant-general, had led the Hazara Field Force into the Black Mountains, where the Hindustanis had found shelter, but could do little more than drive them from one mountain hideout to another.

  In 1873 Abdullah Ali’s youngest brother in Patna, Muhammad Hasan, appealed to the Government of India for an official pardon that would allow the Hindustanis to return to their homes. His request was turned down, on the grounds that since the Fanatics’ support had withered away they would eventually be forced to give up. But the authorities, as so often before, were wrong. The Hindustanis clung on, kept alive by irregular and grudging handouts from the hill tribes, and still strong enough to play supporting roles in three further tribal uprisings into the Black Mountains in 1881, 1888 and 1891.

  After the last of these had been suppressed Abdullah Ali appealed to SAYYED FIROZE SHAH, grandson of the Hindustani Fanatics’ first patron Sayyed Akbar Shah and now leader of the Sayyeds of Sittana, to be allowed to recross the Indus, together with his brother and his three sons. After much argument the elders of the local Amazai gave permission for the remnants of the Hindustanis to return to their old haunts on the eastern slopes of the Mahabun Mountain in the village of Tilwai, scarcely a stone’s throw from their original camp at Sittana. They now found themselves caught up in the ongoing power struggles between their patron Sayyed Firoze Shah and the male heirs of Abdul Ghaffur, late Akhund of Swat.

  And yet when a British journalist from Lahore came to write about the North-West Frontier at this time, he noted that the Hindustanis were still widely admired among the tribes for their ‘fierce fanaticism’. Their colony was celebrated locally as the Kila Mujahidin (Fortress of the Holy Warriors), wherein they ‘devoted their time to drill, giving the words of command in Arabic, firing salutes with cannon made of leather, and blustering about the destruction of the infidel power of the British’. It was said that they were still awaiting the return of Syed Ahmad, their Hidden Imam.

  It is unlikely that Abdullah Ali or any of his mujahedeen attended Amir Abdur Rahman’s theological conference held in Kabul in the spring of 1897. Nor is it likely that the attendees included a sixty-year-old Bunerwal named MULLAH SADULLAH, also known as the Mastun Mullah (Ecstasy Mullah), or the Sartor Fakir (Bare-headed Saint), but who became best known to the British as the ‘Mad Fakir’ or the ‘Mad Mullah’. After many years’ absence from Buner Mullah Sadullah reappeared quite suddenly in his homeland in the midsummer of 1897, proclaiming that he had been visited by a number of saints who included both the late Akhund of Swat and Syed Ahmad, and had been ordered by them to turn the British out of Swat and the Peshawar
vale. God had granted the British an allotted term of sixty years as rulers in Peshawar, and that term was now over. Those who joined him in this jihad need have no fears, for the saints had also informed him that the bullets of the British would turn to water and the barrels of their guns would melt. Furthermore, he was reinforced by a heavenly host, massed but hidden from human sight on the summit of the nine-thousand-foot sacred peak of Ilam Ghar, which overlooks the Swat valley. As for supplies, the single pot of rice he had with him was quite sufficient to feed a multitude.

  The Mad Fakir’s message spread like a bush-fire through the mountains of Swat and Buner. ‘As July advanced,’ wrote Churchill, ‘the bazaar at Malakand became full of tales of the Mad Fakir. A great day for Islam was at hand. A mighty man had arisen to lead them. The English would be swept away.’ To cap it all, Mullah Sadullah had with him a thirteen-year-old boy by the name of Shah Sikander (Alexander) who was the rightful heir to the throne of Delhi and would rule over India once it had been restored to a dar ul-Islam. The identity of this young pretender remains a mystery, but it will be remembered that in 1868 the fugitive Mughal prince Firoze Shah, cousin of the last emperor, had joined the Hindustanis briefly in the Mahabun Mountain before moving on by stages to Kabul, Bokhara and Constantinople. This Mughal Bonnie Prince Charlie died in lonely exile in Mecca in 1897, and his widow promptly applied for and was granted a pension by the Government of India. Officially Prince Firoze Shah died without an heir, but it is just conceivable that thirteen-year-old Shah Sikander’s father or mother was the fruit of a union contracted during the Mughal prince’s sojourn in the Hindustani camp back in 1868.