With the ending of the British Raj in August 1947, the Pathans in the tribal areas lost their traditional enemy. Some supported the chimera of Pakhtunistan, a separate Pathan nation, others committed themselves to integration with the emerging state of Pakistan. Only a seemingly insignificant minority turned to the new Islamist religious parties.
Everything changed for Pakistan with the coming to power of the military dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in July 1977. His military calling notwithstanding, General Zia came from a traditionalist clerical background and was determined to Islamicise his country. He turned to Mawdudi’s JI party, and for the eleven years of his rule the JI and the other Islamist parties enjoyed unprecedented influence, providing the ideological driving force that enabled the General to create an authoritarian Islamic state which had little support from the people of Pakistan. By now there were more than nine thousand Deobandi madras-sahs in the sub-continent, the majority in Pakistan. Many Deoband-trained idealists joined the Pakistan Army and the civil service, where General Zia’s patronage ensured their rapid promotion. A significant number were subsequently recruited into Pakistan’s greatly expanded Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI.
In 1979, two years after General Zia’s coming to power, the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan to support a Marxist regime that had seized power in a bloody coup four years earlier. This provoked the ulema of Afghanistan into declaring an antigovernment jihad. Despite the overwhelming support of the tribal chiefs, this jihad would have had little chance of success but for the intervention of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States of America. For quite different reasons these three nations (along with Iran, China, Egypt, and even Britain, in a more limited capacity) stepped in to support the Afghan mujahedeen with military and financial aid. As a direct result of this support so many rival anti-Soviet groupings came into being that General Zia eventually put his foot down and announced that he would recognise only seven. Six of the seven were Pathan-dominated and four avowedly Islamist. These four were:
the Ittihad-i-Islami, formed by a Kabuli theologian named Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf with strong links to Saudi Arabia, describing itself as Salafi and to all intents a Wahhabi war-party;
the far bigger Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami, headed by Maulana Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi, which had a strong following among village ulema and the Ahmadzai Pathans of Northern Waziristan;
Hizb-i-Islami (Hekmatyar), led by the Pathan Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, with a strong base among the Mohmand, Shinwari and other Pathan tribes in Nangahar province, stretching east of Kabul to the Khyber; and
Hizb-i-Islami (Khalis), led by Younis Khalis, a Deobandi graduate with a following in the Kandahar and Pakhtia provinces close to the Pakistan border, in whose ranks marched the mujaheed mullah Muhammad Omar.
The last two parties had their origins in a branch of the JI set up in Kabul in the 1960s. The two rival leaders split in 1979 to form their own parties, but subsequently Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i- Islami (Hekmatyar) gained the backing of the main JI party in Pakistan and of the ISI to become the most effective mujahedeen fighting force in south-east Afghanistan.
For more than a decade the governments of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States worked through their respective intelligence agencies to direct the mujahedeen in their war against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. Over this same period thousands of Muslim idealists from outside the region volunteered to join the jihad, and did so with the active support of the three main supporting nations. Agents of the United States and Saudi Arabia worked together to set up a bureau in Peshawar, the Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Offices), which became the single most important cell in the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.
Over this same period – or, at least, until his death in an air-crash in 1988 – General Zia sought to bring the Pathans on-side by encouraging the establishment of madrassahs in the tribal border areas, subsequently extended throughout the NWFP, Baluchistan, the Punjab and Sindh. This was part and parcel of his programme of Islamicisation. However, it was only made possible by the support of Pakistan’s Islamist parties, who provided the teachers and the teachings, and of Saudi Arabia, which provided the greater part of the funding for the building and maintenance of the madrassahs.
There was now a coming-together of two ideologies; or, more precisely, a reuniting of two strands of a common ideology, long separated.
At the time of Partition in 1947 there had been approximately two hundred madrassahs on Pakistan’s soil. Many were still of the old model: ramshackle institutions with ill-educated mullahs of the sort that Edwardes, Bellew and other British observers had mocked. All that changed with the proliferation of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband madrassahs and those of their rivals. With the arrival in Peshawar, Nowshera and elsewhere along the NWFP of these modern madrassahs and their better-educated and more motivated teachers, increasing numbers of young Pathans and Afghans became radicalised and politicised. The support given to the JI, JUI and other Islamist parties by President Zia greatly enlarged the process, which then received a further boost with the stepping-up of funding from Saudi Arabia. Understandably enough, the Saudis channelled their financial support through and to those religious organisations with which they felt most comfortable, and who shared their vision of jihad: those that were overtly Wahhabi or had Wahhabi associations.
In 1972, of Pakistan’s 893 madrassahs, 354 or 40 percent were Deobandi, 144 Ahl-i-Hadith and 267 Barelvi, representing the more moderate school of Sunni Islam. By the end of the 1980s an estimated 65 per cent of Pakistan’s madrassahs were directly or indirectly Deobandi. In April 2002 (the first time accurate figures became available) Pakistan’s Minister of Religious affairs put the total number of madrassahs in Pakistan at ten thousand, of which approximately four hundred were Shia, four hundred Ahl-i-Hadith, five hundred JI – and no fewer than seven thousand Deobandi. Of the 1.7 million students these ten thousand madrassahs accommodated, 1.25 million were receiving a Deoband-based or Ahl-i-Hadith religious education.
As the jihad against Soviet Afghanistan wore on in the 1980s, increasing numbers of these madrassahs became indoctrination and training schools for jihad, with those in and close to the tribal areas filled almost entirely by Pathans. Many of the most hard-line of these madrassahs were linked to the JUI, and it was chiefly in their spartan classrooms and prayer halls that the boys who later filled the ranks of the Taliban received their education. The Jaamiah Dar ul-Ulum Haqqania madrassah at Akora Khattack, beside the Islamabad Highway out of Peshawar, has its origins in a religious school opened in 1937 by Dar ul-Ulum Deoband’s rector Madani and his fellow-Deobandi Maulana Abdul Haq (father of the present principal Samiul Haq). Many of the Taliban’s Pathan leaders received their schooling either here or at the JUI madrassah founded by Deobandi Maulvi Mohammad Yusaf Binnori in the suburbs of Karachi. The JUI also spawned a number of extremist organisations such as the Sipahi-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Companions), and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (Army of Jhangvi), both violently anti-Shia, anti-Hindu and anti-Christian terrorist groups.
Nor should the role of the smaller fundamentalist parties be overlooked, most notably that of the Markaz ad-Dawa wal Irshad (Centre for Invitation and Instruction), and the Tehreek-i-Nafaz-i- Shariat-i-Mohammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law), both Wahhabi organisations derived from the Ahl-i-Hadith party. As might be expected, Ahl-i-Hadith developed a particularly strong membership in Swat and Dir, where descendants of Wilayat Ali and his son Abdullah Ali are said to be living to this day.
One of the very few Wahhabi prelates whose names have become well known outside Saudi Arabia in recent times is Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah BIN BAZ, who died in Mecca in May 1999 at the age of eighty-nine. At the time of the first Gulf War Bin Baz acquired some notoriety by issuing fatwas against women drivers, Saudi and American, but he had earlier attracted notice with a fatwa denouncing as atheists those who held the earth to be round – a position he was forced to change after a minor S
audi prince went into space in a US space shuttle. Born in Riyadh in 1910, Bin Baz witnessed the rise to power of Ibn Saud, but lost his eyesight at the age of fourteen. He was then receiving his religious education from three members of the aal-as-Sheikh, an education that included ten years at the feet of Ibn Saud’s leading prelate, Sheikh Muhammad bin Ibrahim Aal-Shaikh, Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia.
Despite his blindness Sheikh Bin Baz became an outstanding scholar. He served as a judge for fifteen years before teaching jurisprudence and Hadith at the faculty of Sharia at Riyadh’s Institute of Religious Studies during the 1950s. After fifteen years as Vice-Chancellor and then Chancellor of the Islamic University of Medina he became President of the General Presidency of Islamic Research, and finally Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia. For a quarter of a century he was the most powerful religious figure in Saudi Arabia, and Wahhabism’s most active champion. Among the many committees he chaired were the Founding Committee of the Muslim World League, the Supreme Committee for Islamic Propagation and the World Supreme Council for Mosques, all bodies set up to export Wahhabi teachings in response to such secular challenges as President Nasser’s socialist government in Egypt. The Wahhabi ulema was already well funded, both from the Saudi national budget and from the zakat, the religious levy of one-fortieth of income required by the Quran of all believers. However, as stated earlier, the huge rise of oil prices in the wake of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war enabled Bin Baz to make this funding count. From 1979 onwards the main beneficiaries of this largesse were the madrassahs of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Wahhabi ulema were as much troubled by the growing influence of the Shia ayatollahs in neighbouring Iran as by the Russians in Afghanistan. It is said that since 1979 the Wahhabi Establishment has committed an estimated seventy billion dollars to Islamist missionary work, ‘ranging from the funding of some 10,000 madrassas in Pakistan to the construction of thousands of mosques and seminaries and community centers all over the Muslim and Western worlds’.
However, inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia both pro-and anti-Wahhabi elements were becoming disenchanted with the way the five-thousand-strong royal House of Saud was conducting itself. A first sign of trouble came in 1975 when King Faisal was assassinated by his nephew, who harboured a grudge against the head of his family after the death of his brother while leading a Wahhabi demonstration against the introduction of television. Then in November 1979, as crowds gathered in Mecca to celebrate Islam’s fourteen-hundredth anniversary – and just weeks before the Soviets sent their tanks and troop-carriers into Afghanistan – several hundred armed men burst into the Grand Mosque and took it over in the name of the Mahdi. Their leader was a Nejdi named Juhaiman al-Utaibi, raised in an Ikhwan settlement and a member of the Saudi National Guard originally composed of loyalist elements of the Ikhwan half a century earlier. He claimed to be the disciple of an imam, Muhammad Abdullah al-Qahtani, who was the long-awaited Mahdi come to overthrow the houses of Saud and aal-as-Sheikh. The revolt was violently suppressed, the supposed Mahdi dying in the fighting and Juhaiman among those subsequently beheaded, but the episode gave notice to the Saudi Government that idealists inside the country were joining forces with non-Wahhabi Islamists from outside.
Many of these Islamists received their religious education directly or indirectly from Sheikh Bin Baz, among them the Palestinian Sheikh ABDULLAH AZZAM.
Born in Jenin in 1941, Abdullah Azzam studied sharia at Damascus University and Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Following the catastrophe of the 1967 Six-Day War he fled to Jordan and worked in a Palestinian refugee camp funded by Saudi Arabia’s aal-as-Sheikh. Disillusioned by the secularism of the Palestinian resistance under Yasser Arafat he moved to Egypt to continue his religious studies at Al-Azhar. Here he met supporters of Sayyid Qutb, the recently executed co-founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The role of Sayyid Qutb and groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad in promoting Islamist jihad falls outside the scope of this book. What is relevant in the present context is that Sayyid Qutb had espoused the centrality of tawhid and the absolute necessity for Islam to combat un-Islamic ignorance (jahiliyya), as represented by the pagan West and Muslim countries like Egypt whose governments tried to follow the Western model. Despite the pleas of Sheikh Bin Baz and other leading Muslims, in 1966 Sayyid Qutb was executed, after ten years’ incarceration.
In 1974 or 1975 Abdulla Azzam was given sanctuary from Egyptian persecution by the government of Saudi Arabia and offered a lecturing post at the King Abdul Aziz University of Jedda, where he was joined by Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb. It is claimed that during this period Abdullah Azzam came under the direct influence of Bin Baz and became a Wahhabi. It is probably closer to the truth to describe Abdullah Azzam as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood who, during his time in Saudi Arabia, gained a greater understanding of Wahhabism and of Ibn Taymiyya’s philosophy of militant jihad.
Abdullah Azzam first came to international prominence with a fatwa entitled Defence of the Muslim Land, issued in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. In it he declared it obligatory on all Muslims to make jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan and the Israelis in Palestine. This fatwa was supported by Bin Baz and the Wahhabi ulema. Abdullah Azzam then moved with his family to Pakistan, taking as his inspiration the declaration of the Prophet that ‘a few moments spent in jihad in the path of Allah is worth more than seventy years spent praying at home’. Initially he taught at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, but then moved to Peshawar to set up an organisation he named the Bait al-Ansar, the House of Ansar, after the man who first gave the Prophet refuge when he and his Companions fled from Mecca to Medina. Its purpose was to assist Arab volunteers arriving on the Frontier to engage in jihad in Afghanistan. His political philosophy was now summed up in his terse declaration ‘Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogue.’
Abdullah Azzam’s many admirers claim that he took an active part in the fighting in Afghanistan, but his real contribution was as an organiser and inspirational firebrand who preached locally and published internationally on the duty of every Muslim to make jihad, not just in Afghanistan but wherever Muslims were oppressed. ‘Jihad’, he wrote, ‘continues until Allah’s Word is raised high; jihad until all the oppressed peoples are freed; jihad to protect our dignity and restore our occupied lands. Jihad is the way of everlasting glory.’ From 1980 to 1989 he worked unceasingly but largely unavailingly to persuade the many mujahedeen commanders waging war in Afghanistan to set aside their rivalries and unite – ideally, under one leader.
Abdullah Azzam has been called the ‘Emir of Islamic jihad’, but it would be more accurate to describe him as its godfather. Which leads on, at last, to the present (2005) amir of world jihad, Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad BIN LADEN.
Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, Osama bin Laden was the seventeenth of 52 children of a Yemeni immigrant contractor, Muhammad bin Laden, his mother a Syrian whom his father subsequently divorced. Bin Laden senior accumulated prodigious wealth through his work as a construction contractor for the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden was raised in privileged circumstances, although he himself was never part of the Saudi inner circle. His father kept his children together in one household, usually the family’s main mansion in Jedda, to ensure they received a strict religious education on Wahhabi lines. However, as one of several fourth wives married and then divorced, the status of Osama’s mother was lowly and not enhanced by her being a follower of the Syrian Alawite sect, considered heretical by the Wahhabis. The death of his father in a helicopter crash when he was eleven may well have added to his sense of being an outsider. After this tragedy Prince Faisal, the pro-Wahhabi half-brother of King Saud, stepped in to protect and support the children, but Osama seems to have rejected the opportunity afforded his step-brothers and step-sisters to be educated abroad, in favour of local schooling in Jedda. In 1977 his eldest brother led a family party on the Hajj, during which the twe
nty-year-old underwent a religious experience that led him to abandon his Western links, grow a beard and commit himself seriously to Islamic studies. At this time he was enrolled as an undergraduate at King Abdul Aziz University at Jedda to study either economics or engineering, a degree course probably never completed. Here he came under the direct influence of the Palestinian and Egyptian radicals Abdullah Azzam and Muhammad Qutb, whose recorded sermons were widely circulated among students at this time. Osama bin Laden may thus be described as a Saudi-born Yemeni raised as a Wahhabi who was politicised by Abdullah Azzam and the revolutionary anti-imperialist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 1979, when he was twenty-two, three disparate but profoundly unsettling events caused Bin Laden to abandon his studies for direct action: the revolution of the ayatollahs in Iran; the violent seizure of the Great Mosque at Mecca; and the Russian intervention in Afghanistan. If the reports are correct, he was one of the first Saudis to fly to Afghanistan, almost certainly with the encouragement of Abdullah Azzam, whom he preceded. The Bin Laden family’s close links with the Saudi royal family now became extremely valuable. The Government of Saudi Arabia was most anxious to show its commitment to the Afghan cause, as were the Wahhabi aid and propaganda organisations overseen by Sheikh Bin Baz. So Bin Laden became an unofficial ambassador and bag-man for Saudi Arabia in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He also committed his own considerable private wealth to the cause, supported by family members and friends. He spent time on the front line, although gilded accounts of him as a battle-hardened jihadi fighting alongside such groups as the Hizb-i-Islami can be dismissed as wishful thinking on the part of his supporters. His real talent lay in ensuring that jihadis went where military commanders most needed them, and that the supplies kept coming. In the process Osama made direct, personal contact with many thousands of volunteers drawn from all corners of the Muslim umma. He is known to have performed many individual acts of kindness towards wounded mujahedeen and the families of martyrs who were suffering hardship – and it may well have been in this connection that he met Mullah Omar, who had recently lost an eye to an exploding rocket. This first encounter is said to have taken place in 1989 in a Deobandi mosque in the Banuri suburb of Karachi. By that time the conspicuously tall and well-dressed Arab known as ‘al-Shaykh’ had become a familiar and greatly admired figure throughout the Frontier region, an unassuming and, at this time, far from charismatic young man who was nevertheless recognised as the personification of Saudi Arabia’s commitment to the Afghanistan jihad.
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