God's Terrorists

There is a widely held view in the West that the violence perpetrated by Muslim jihadists is a response to Western imperialism: a defence of Islam that will cease as soon as the US and its allies pull out of the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan (taking the Israelis with them). As a student of South Asian history I am bound to take a more sanguine view: that this violence has its roots in the perceived failure of Islam to achieve its destiny as a global religion, resulting in attempts to renew Sunni Islam and set it back on course to become the new world political order. The failure of our respective state departments to recognise the true nature of this revivalism has, I believe, contributed significantly to the West’s failure to get to grips with the phenomenon of Islamist extremism.

Sunni Muslim revivalism has a known history – and a hidden one. The known history begins with the rise to power of the Arab cleric Muhamad ibn Abd al-Wahhab of Nejd in the 1740s. Al-Wahhab was greatly influenced by the teachings of the controversial fourteenth century jurist of Damascus, Ibn Taymiyya, the ideologue whose reinterpretation of jihad (the Muslim’s duty to ‘strive’ for his Faith) is today cited by every extremist. Ibn Taymiyya developed his uncompromising views on jihad at a time when Islam was threatened by Mongol invaders. Al-Wahhab had no such excuse but he also believed that Islam was under threat: Islam’s conquest of the world was faltering and this could only be because Muslims had turned away from the true path. He called upon his parishioners to return to the pristine Islam of the days of the Prophet and to combat innovation with violence. His words fell on deaf ears – until he found a secular champion in a local Bedouin chieftan named Muhammed Ibn Saud. The imam and the emir formed an alliance cemented by the marriage of their children and then set about converting Arabia to Wahhabism by the sword with the simple philosophy of ‘convert to Wahhabi Islam or die’. In the process they brought death and destruction to a large corner of the Ottoman empire.  Six generations later the interlinked houses of Ibn Said and Al-Wahhab became joint rulers of the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Wahhabism would have remained a merely regional blot on the face of Islam but for the combination of three events in the late 1970s: the coming to power in Pakistan of the dictator General Zia-ul-Haq, determined to turn his country into an Islamic state; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan next door in December 1979; and  the dramatic hike in oil prices, which allowed the Saudis to devote huge sums to promoting the Wahhabi creed overseas – particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So much for the known history of Wahhabi Islam. What is much less well known is that Al-Wahhab’s creed was exported abroad by pilgrims returning from Mecca and took root in Muslim countries as far apart as Morocco, Chechnya and Sumatra. But nowhere did Wahhabism have a greater impact than in India, where it was first propagated in the 1820s by a charismatic preacher named Syed Ahmad. Determined to restore India to Islam Syed Ahmad led a small army of mujahedeen fighters to the Afghan border where he established a base in the mountains known as the kilamujahedeen or ‘fortress of the holy warriors’. He did this in imitation of the Prophet, who led his followers to Medina to establish a dar ul-Islam or ‘land of Faith’ from which he launched his campaign to capture Mecca from the infidels. From his own dar ul-Islam in the mountains Syed Ahmad rallied the local Pathan tribes and then set out to liberate the Punjab from its Sikh rulers. He failed and in 1831 died bravely in battle along with most of his followers.

That should have been the end of it, but the survivors regrouped: some returned to their mountain redoubt while the rest went underground to form a secret organisation dedicated to restoring India to Islam. Reinforced by volunteers and guns supplied by their supporters in India, the Wahhabis in the mountains tried time and time again to bring the Pathan tribes out in armed jihad against the British, one such uprising in 1897-98 requiring an army of 80,000 troops to suppress it. Although the British chased these Wahhabi mujahedeen from one hideout after another they kept the banner of jihad flying, and when Pakistan was created in 1947 their descendents were still to be found preaching jihad in a remote village called Bajour - the scene of the Pakistan Army’s recent gunship assault on a Taliban madrassa and previously the hideout of Osama bin Laden’s lieutenant Dr Ayman Al-Zawahari. The influence of these Wahhabi mujahadeen on the Pathans can hardly be exaggerated: they introduced the hardline Wahhabi interpretation of Islam to the Pathans, they provided a shining example of militant jihad, and they established the concept of a dar ul-Islam on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border – a belief that Osama bin Laden exploited when he set up his camp for Arab volunteers and named it Bait al-Ansar or ‘the House of Ansar’ (Ansar being the man who gave the Prophet refuge when he retreated to Medina). Later the same concept inspired Al-Qaeda, the ‘Military Base’.

In India itself the Wahhabis played a leading role in instigating the uprising of 1857 known to the British as the Indian Mutiny, even though they refused to join with the other rebels because of their own prejudices against Hindus and Shias. In the event the soldiers’ mutiny at Meerut on 10 May 1857 took the Wahhabis by surprise but a number of Wahhabis did join in the struggle against the British, most notably a group under the leadership of Sayyid Nazir Husain of Delhi. After the collapse of the uprising this group broke up, some fleeing to Arabia and others going underground – including two young men named Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Rashid Ahmed Gangohi.

A decade later the Wahhabi’s secret organisation was discovered, leading to a series of high profile trials and the imprisonment of many Wahhabi leaders, and giving rise to much heart-searching among India’s Muslims as to where their first loyalties lay. For all their misgivings about Wahhabi dogma, many ordinary Muslims interpreted the Wahhabi trials as persecution of fellow-Muslims and part of a general pattern of increasing discrimination against Muslims. A number of historians 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 a large element of India’s Sunni Muslim community began a slow retreat into the past.

Spearheading this great leap backward were two groups of mullahs with Wahhabi links. The more extreme of the two set up a politico-religious organisation known as Jamaat Ahl-i-Hadith, ‘The Party of the Tradition of the Prophet’. Its co-founder was Sayyid Nazir Husain of Delhi. The second group of clerics was led by Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Rashid Ahmed Gangohi, the former students of Sayyid Nazir Husain. In May1866 these two set up their own madrassa in the village of Deoband, drawing their students from the peasantry and refused to accept funding from government. The ethos of Deoband was that of the Arab seminary: English was prohibited, all students began their studies by learning the Quran by heart in its original Arabic and were taught a narrow-minded, intolerant fundamentalism that denounced such sinful activities as music and dancing and waged a ceaseless war of words against Shias, Hindus and Christian missionaries. Deobandism retained jihad as a central pillar of faith but it now focussed this jihad on Islamic revival through the immutability of sharia and the authority of the ulema, the Muslim clergy.

By promoting itself as a Dar ul-Ulum, or ‘Abode of Islamic Learning,’ the Deoband madrassa gained the support of the masses, providing Muslims with a new sense of identity. By the end of the nineteenth century Dar ul-Ulum Deoband had become the leading religious authority in Asia and its graduates had gone on to set up hundreds of lesser Deobandi madrassas. Today there are ten thousand Deoband-associated madrassas worldwide – and eight thousand in Pakistan alone.

The impact of Deobandism on central and south Asian Islam has been immense. It has given new authority to the clergy and has led to a revival of traditional Islam, resulting in seismic shift within Sunni Islam in South Asia, which has become increasingly conservative and intolerant and more inclined to look for political leadership from the madrassa-trained mullah committed to the cause of leading Muslims back to the true path. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in Pakistan.

In the 1920s and 1930s Deobandis became increasingly involved in politics and the outcome was the formation of two politico-religious parties with strong Deobandi links. Neither found much popular support in Pakistan until the coming to power of General Zia-Ul-Haq in 1977. Determined to create an authoritarian Islamic state, Zia promoted the Deobandi and Ahl-i-Hadith politico-religious parties – a process greatly assisted by the intervention of Saudi Arabia after the Russian intervention in Afghanistan. Through representatives like Osama bin Laden the Saudis directed huge sums of money towards the four openly Wahhabi or Deobandi mujahadeen groups fighting the Russians – and towards Wahhabi and Deobandi madrassas along the border. It was here in the 1980s and 1990s that the Taliban’s leaders and many of its rank-and-file were educated and jihadised. Today a coalition of Wahhabi and Deobandi politico-religious parties dominate the tribal areas on the Pakistan side of the border and the Taliban continues to regroup, knowing that it has widespread support among the Pathans.