God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Eight months earlier a very different gathering had taken place, a deliberate riposte to the costly propaganda exercise then being prepared outside Delhi. It was staged eighty miles to the north, on the by then extensive campus grounds of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband Madrassah. Billed as a reunion, it was more in the nature of a conference, attended by some thirty thousand teachers and former students, and presided over by the madrassah’s rector, sixty-year-old Maulana MAHMOOD UL-HASAN, widely regarded as the most influential Muslim cleric in India and on whom the title of Shaikh-ul-Hind had been bestowed by his admirers.

  Mahmood ul-Hasan’s rise to religious authority mirrored that of the religious institution to which he had dedicated his life since joining Deoband Madrassah as its first student in 1866. After graduating in 1877 Mahmood ul-Hasan had gone on, with the full support of Deoband’s founder Muhammad Qasim, to set up his own organisation which he called Samaratut Tarbiyat (Results of the Training). This was a quasi-military body in which volunteers known as fedayeen, or ‘men of sacrifice’, were taught to prepare themselves for armed jihad against the British – although in practice this preparation was limited to marching and drilling in khaki uniforms, for weapons carrying nothing more lethal than staves. To the British authorities this body was about as menacing as a cadet corps, and Mahmood ul-Hasan’s fedayeen were allowed to parade about freely. With the death of Muhammad Qasim in 1880 the leadership of the Deoband organisation passed first to its co-founder Rashid Ahmad and then, after his death in 1905, to Deoband’s first graduate.

  As rector of Dar ul-Ulum Deoband, Mahmood ul-Hasan presided over its continuing expansion as the leading Muslim university in Asia, ensuring that it and the scores of branch Deobandi seminaries now in existence adhered to the original curriculum and continued to propagate the strict pro-tawhid, pro-ulema, anti-innovation, anti-polytheist, fundamentalist revivalism first initiated in Syria by Ibn Taymiyya, in Arabia by Al-Wahhab and in India by Shah Waliullah. Yet even as Deobandi theology reshaped mainstream Sunni thinking in India along more conservative lines, so its political philosophy of jihad through withdrawal and separatism lost ground. The formation of the Indian National Congress, attracting support from both Hindu and Muslim intellectuals, led to growing fears among many Muslims that representative government on the British model would lead to Hindu majority rule. One response was the formation in 1906 of the All-India Muslim League, dedicated to the protection of Muslim interests. But Mahmood ul-Hasan and other radicals saw even the Muslim League as playing into the hands of the British authorities by helping them ‘divide and rule’.

  It was against this background that Mahmood ul-Hasan stood up before the assembled delegates at the April 1911 Dar ul-Ulum Deoband reunion to announce that the time had come to resume the armed struggle against the British colonial government in India. ‘Did Maulana Nanautawi [Deoband’s founder, Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi] found this madrassah only for teaching and learning?’ he is said to have demanded. ‘It was founded in 1866 to teach and prepare Muslims to make up for the losses of 1857.’

  This announcement appears to have been received by the assembled alumni with considerable disquiet, and led eventually to a split in the Deobandi movement and the appointment of a new rector at Dar ul-Ulum Deoband. However, Mahmood ul-Hasan pressed on. The quasi-military organisation that he had nurtured with little success for so many years was reconstituted as Jamiat-ul-Ansaar, the Party of Volunteers. Its exact purpose was kept from the British authorities: it was to be the nucleus of an army of resistance. Deobandi graduates would provide the Party of Volunteers with its officers and religious commissars, while its rank-and-file would be drawn from the Pathan tribes of what was now the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

  Under Mahmood ul-Hasan’s direction the Party of Volunteers held a number of anti-British rallies, provoking the authorities into banning it as an organisation. Mahmood ul-Hasan’s response was to set up a new body, Nazzaarat ul-Maarif (Offering of Good Actions), with its headquarters and recruiting base in Delhi. Then in the spring of 1914 he put into execution plans for hijra and jihad remarkably similar to those first drawn up by Syed Ahmad almost a century earlier, even to the extent of seeking to replicate his model of a supply base in the plains and a fighting base in the mountains. A group of fifteen volunteers, made up of Deoband old boys under the joint command of two of Mahmood ul-Hasan’s lieutenants, Maulana OBAIDULLAH Sindhi and Maulvi Fazal Ilahi, set out for the NWFP with the intention of linking up with other students from Peshawar and Kohat and then proceeding through Mohmand country to join the remnants of Syed Ahmad’s Hindustani Fanatics in the mountains.

  Old Abdullah Ali, having commanded the Hindustanis for over four decades, had finally expired in 1901. A year later his son Amanullah and the remaining faithful had been expelled from Swat and Buner for the last time. They had then migrated northwestwards to the village of Chamarkand in Dir, close to the Afghan border and far beyond the reach of the British authorities. Government intelligence reports suggested that they no longer represented a military threat, even though they were putting out ‘intensive propaganda’ through a news sheet called the Al- Mujaheed (the Holy Warrior). According to the Peshawar Gazetteer, they were reduced to a mere handful, but still preaching jihad. ‘Politically,’ noted the writer of the Gazetteer, ‘their most dangerous doctrine is that it is a religious duty for all Muslims to wage the holy war against infidels.’

  Obaidullah and his volunteers succeeded in reaching the Fanatic Camp only to find the Hindustani Fanatics reluctant to practise what they so fervently preached. At this point the Great War of 1914–1918 intervened, and with it came the Sultan of Turkey’s call for Muslims to unite in jihad against Britain.

  In plains India the call went largely unheeded, despite the serious efforts made to persuade Muslims serving with the Indian Army to desert. ‘Raise your fellow caste-man against the English and join the army of Islam,’ reads a letter sent anonymously to the Risaldar-Major of the 6th Bengal Cavalry. ‘All the Muslims who have died in this war fighting for the British will spend an eternity in hell. Kill the English whenever you get the chance and join the enemy . . . Be watchful, join the enemy, and you will expel the Kaffir from your native land. The flag of Islam is ready and will shortly be seen waving.’

  However, the Sultan’s call for jihad now led Mahmood ul-Hasan to change his plans. Obaidullah was ordered to proceed with his student volunteers to Kabul, while he himself sailed to Jedda. What followed has never been satisfactorily explained, for the very good reason that Mahmood ul-Hasan’s bid to replicate Syed Ahmad’s holy war was such a fiasco that he and his supporters preferred to keep silent about it. But enough details survive to give the lie to those who claim that the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband was never in the business of promoting armed jihad.

  Early in 1915 Mahmood ul-Hasan, now calling himself Al- Qayed, The Leader, turned up in Mecca. There he presented himself to Ghalib Bey, the Turkish Governor of the Hijaz, to solicit the Ottoman Caliphate’s support for his cause in the form of funds and guns. To his dismay, he and his party were given the cold shoulder, although one of their number, Muhammad Mian, was permitted to return to his home in Peshawar with a letter from Ghalib Bey inviting the tribesmen of the Frontier to invade the Punjab. Muhammad Mian took this letter into Mohmand country, where it was acted upon by two mullahs, the Hajji of Turangzai and the Babrhai Mullah, with predictable consequences for those who followed their banner. An account of this swiftly suppressed minor uprising of 1915, set down by one of those who took part, Qasoori Sahib, perfectly illustrates the degree to which the Frontier tribes had been ‘jihadised’ by the example of Syed Ahmad the Martyr. ‘As soon as the fighting was over,’ wrote Qasoori Sahib in a memoir,

  local women came out singing Pashto battle songs with their daf and dhols [pipes and drums] . . . A mother would kiss the forehead of her shaheed [martyr] son. A sister would cry out of happiness for her shaheed brother and the wives would hug their shaheed husbands. They would sing to the
ir beloved, ‘Go, we have handed you over to Allah. Because you are a shaheed, go and enjoy Jannah [Paradise]. But do not forget us for Allah’s sake. Ask Allah that he give the ability to your brothers as well, that they might follow in your footsteps.’

  In the meantime, Obaidullah and his Deobandi volunteers had made their way over the mountains into Afghanistan and, after a period in detention, were given permission by Amir Habibullah to join with a number of Indian nationalists in establishing a government-in-exile in Kabul. In the late summer of 1915 Obaidullah and his colleague Maulvi Fazal Ilahi formed the Junood ul- Rabbaniyah, or Army of God. Under the leadership of the still absent Mahmood ul-Hasan it would spearhead an invasion of India on the Syed Ahmad model. Obaidullah then wrote a self-congratulatory letter, in Persian on yellow silk cloth, giving his leader a full account of his activities. Enclosed with this first letter were two further letters on silk from another member of the group, the grandson of Dar ul-Ulum Deoband’s founder, containing details of the Army of God’s organisation and battle plans and listing the names of its leading players and supporters in India. These three silk letters were entrusted to a senior student, Abdul Haq, with instructions to deliver them by hand to a sheikh of Hyderabad in Sind, who would then send them on to Mahmood ul-Hasan in Mecca.

  Most unwisely, Abdul Haq went out of his way to call on the father of two students who had skipped college in Lahore to join Obaidullah’s army of volunteers. This man – named in reports simply as ‘the Khan Bahadur’ – happened to be a highly respected figure in Multan and a great supporter of the British. When he learned from Abdul Haq what his two sons were doing in Kabul he had him beaten until he revealed the full story, including the fact that he was the bearer of an important letter sewn inside a coat. The coat was produced and cut open to reveal the three silk letters. Being unable to read Persian, the Khan Bahadur took the letters to the Commissioner of Peshawar – who after one look immediately passed them on to the Government of India’s Criminal Intelligence Department.

  The inevitable outcome was the arrest in August 1915 of no fewer than 222 clerics from all over northern India, in what came to be known as the Silk Letter Conspiracy Case. A large proportion of these arrestees were Deobandi alumni. To further compound the disaster, Sheykh Huseyn of the Hijaz was then leaned on by the British Government to detain Mahmood ul-Hasan and five senior members of his entourage. They were duly brought to trial in Cairo in 1917, found guilty of sedition, and each sentenced to several years’ imprisonment in Malta. Although Obaidullah and other members of his organisation in Kabul remained free, they now found themselves high on the Indian Police Special Branch’s ‘most wanted’ list and unable to return to their homeland.

  The traitorous activities of Mahmood ul-Hasan and his associates were publicly repudiated by the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband authorities, who were able to show the British Government in India that they had severed all links with his organisation long before the war. From this time onwards the Deoband movement’s political ambitions were concentrated on a new politico-religious party known as Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Hind (JUH), the Party of Clerics of Hindustan, formed in October 1920. Mahmood ul-Hasan was freed in time to attend the JUH’s inauguration. ‘I gave a lot of thought to the causes of the sorry state of this ummah [the world community of Islam] while in prison in Malta,’ he declared. ‘Our problems are caused by two factors: abandoning the Quran and our in-fighting.’ He died a year later, aged seventy, his health broken by his three and a half years’ imprisonment.

  India’s contribution to the British war effort between 1914 and 1918 was unstinting. More than eight hundred thousand Indian troops fought as volunteers, and expectations were high that India would be rewarded with dominion status. Instead, the British Government in India responded by bringing in the repressive Rowlatt Acts, introduced to deal with subversion of the sort exemplified by the Silk Letter Conspiracy. For many loyal subjects of the British Raj this was a turning point. Large numbers of middle-class Indians now gave their support to the Congress Party, as did the JUH. Calls for civil disobedience led to violent disturbances in the Punjab, to which the authorities reacted with greater violence, culminating in the Amritsar Massacre. Meanwhile, in Europe the Paris Conference of January 1919 had begun the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, embodiment of all the past achievements of Islam. A month later Afghanistan’s cautious neutrality ended with the murder of Amir Habibullah while out hunting. Misreading the mood in India, his more combative son AMIR AMANULLAH launched a half-hearted invasion down the Khyber. The outcome was the short, sharp Third Afghan War, lasting no more than twenty-nine days and leaving the new Amir badly bruised.

  But there were some Sunni Muslims in India who saw Amir Amanullah as the new champion of Islam. What became known as the Hijrat Movement swept like a summer whirlwind through the Punjab, leading thousands of Muslims to abandon jobs and homes and decamp with little more than what they stood up in to the dar ul-Islam of Afghanistan. Among them was an earnest young man in his twenties named Sayyid Abulala MAWDUDI, whose ancestors had entered India as Sufi scholars and had thereafter served first the Mughals and then the Nizams of Hyderabad. Forced to abandon his education by the death of his father, as an adolescent Mawdudi had moved to Delhi where he became an activist for the Khalifat Movement, which sought to restore the Turkish sultanate. Caught up in the fervour of the moment, he joined the Hijratis and travelled with them up the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. Here they very quickly discovered they were not wanted. The Amir of Afghanistan had lost his enthusiasm for armed conflict, and was not prepared to support them. After some months the civil authorities in Peshawar found themselves in the curious position of having to repatriate several thousand destitute and disillusioned ex-mujahedeen.

  With the collapse of the Khalifat Movement in the early 1920s many Muslim intellectuals began to look for new Muslim identities through the development of their own Islamic nation states, among them the young Mawdudi, who returned to Delhi and there became a student at the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband’s Fatihpuri Madrassah, something he never acknowledged in later years. For a time he was closely involved with the Deobandi JUH political movement, now led by Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, Mahmood ul-Hasan’s successor as rector of Dar-ul-Ulum Deoband. Under Madani’s leadership the JUH continued to support Congress and resisted the calls of the Muslim League for a separate Muslim state in the Indian sub-continent. The JUH also established links with Wahhabi Arabia. In 1921 it sent a delegation of mullahs to Nejd and thereafter continued to maintain ties with Ibn Saud and the aal as-Sheikh.

  The JUH’s alliance with Congress led to two splinter groups breaking away to form new politico-religious parties. The first to do so was led by the Naqshbandi Sufi Maulana Muhammad Ilyar, whose party, Tablighi Jamiat (Preaching Party), followed the teachings of Shah Waliullah but sought to apply them in largely apolitical terms. The second was led by Mawdudi, who began to promote a new political agenda based on his belief that, to survive in the modern world, Islam had to present itself as a viable political and social alternative to both Western capitalism and socialism. Islam, he believed, had to confront non-Islam head on, and out of that ‘Islamic revolution’ would emerge the modern Islamic state purged of all accretions, a ‘democratic caliphate’ whose citizens would embrace sharia willingly, even those aspects of sharia that were undemocratic. He put together an entirely new political platform based on Islamic revival and separatism, taking on board Deoband’s interpretative reading of Islam but setting aside its sectarian theology in favour of salvation through political action and jihad. These views became hugely influential among Muslim intellectuals in setting a new agenda for Islamic revival. In 1939 Mawdudi moved to Lahore, where two years later he and a number of like-minded individuals founded the Jamiat-i- Islami (JI), the Party of Islamists, in direct opposition to the then pro-Congress JUH.

  Throughout the period leading up to Independence in 1947, as India became increasingly secularised and while Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the modernisin
g leader of the Muslim League, urged Muslims to resist what he termed the ‘reactionary’ calls of ‘the undesirable element of Moulvis and Maulanas’, the JI, JUH, Tablighi Jamiat and other political parties led by clerics kept the banner of Islamic revival flying in the Sunni community. As demands grew for a separate Muslim nation-state, a number of younger Deobandis in the JUH broke with their leader to reconstitute themselves as the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI), Party of Scholars of Islam, formed in 1945 under the leadership of two Deobandi mullahs, Maulana Shabbar Ahmad Othmani and Maulana MUFTI MAHMUD. The JUI’s declared aim was shape the new nation of Pakistan into a truly Muslim state, with an Islamic constitution in conformity with the Quran and sharia – a vision it shared with the JI, Tablighi Jamiat, and a number of smaller ulema-led political parties.

  After independence and the creation of Pakistan, these overtly Islamist parties competed for a minority constituency inside Pakistan, consistently failing to win popular support at the polling booths. Although they attracted leaders of high calibre they were riven by internal rivalries and religious disputes. Only in one region did they have any success, the JUI under the leadership of Mufti Mahmud establishing such a firm foothold in the NWFP and the tribal areas that it came to be viewed as a largely Pathan politico-religious party. It is no coincidence that the only other ulema-led party to gain a following in the Pathan tribal belt was the smaller Jamiat Ahl-i-Hadith. This was the sub-continent’s only overtly Wahhabi party, with its origins in the organisation formed by Sayyid Nazir Husain, the cleric who had led the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’ in 1857 and was later arrested by the British authorities on suspicion of being the Wahhabis’ leader in Delhi. In relocating to the northern Punjab, the Ahl-i-Hadith party had, in a very real sense, returned to its jihadi roots.