This alliance with the British was seen as a betrayal by Syed Ahmad, who quit Amir Khan’s service to return to the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya in Delhi, where he became one of several radical teachers, all disciples of Shah Abdul Aziz in the school of Shah Waliullah. Very soon, however, Syed Ahmad was marking out his own territory, making a name for himself through the intensity of his preaching and the forcefulness of his personality. Leaving his now elderly master, he took up residence in Delhi’s Akbar-abadi mosque beside the city’s famous Red Fort, to which crowds flocked to hear him preach and deliver religious judgements. Among the many who came to hear him was a man seven years his senior named SHAH MUHAMMAD ISMAIL, a nephew of Shah Abdul Aziz. After hearing Syed Ahmad preach one evening, Shah Muhammad Ismail was invited to join him in his room, where the two of them spent the night in a state of silent rapture contemplating God. Shah Muhammad Ismail then took the oath of religious allegiance known as baiat to become Syed Ahmad’s first disciple. He was soon joined by SHAH ABDUL HAI, a son-in-law of Shah Abdul Aziz, as Syed Ahmad’s second disciple. It is said that these two were Syed Ahmad’s ‘lovers’, although the word should probably be seen in the Sufi context of intense ecstatic devotion to one’s spiritual master. In the case of Shah Muhammad Ismail, this devotion extended to ghosting at least some of Syed Ahmad’s published writings and to writing the first biography. Indeed, there is a good case for concluding that the disciple had a major hand in smoothing out and filling in his master’s thinking: that Syed Ahmad was a man of action who spoke from the heart rather than the head, leaving his disciples to sort out the theological details.
From 1818 onwards Syed Ahmad’s name and his message of Islamic reform and revival began to be heard in Sunni mosques and meeting-places right across northern India, greatly assisted by the efforts of his more learned disciples. As he toured through the plains country north and west of the Jumna River, hundreds pledged themselves to his work by taking the oath of baiat. Yet it seems that Syed Ahmad was still at this time seeking to come to terms with Sufism, since he is on record as having himself taken oaths of allegiance not only to the order of Naqshbandi Sufism followed by his mentors but also to three other Sufi schools. The outcome of this search seems to have been a rejection of many aspects of Sufism as idolatrous, and a hardening of attitude.
At some point on Syed Ahmad’s preaching tour he arrived at the great city of Lucknow, then in chaotic decline but still the most important seat of Muslim learning on the sub-continent outside Delhi. Here his sermons were heard by a talib from Patna named WILAYAT ALI, then aged about eighteen or nineteen, who was won over to his cause and duly took the oath of allegiance. That, at least, is the received account of the conversion to Syed Ahmad’s cause of the man who was to follow him as the most influential leader of his movement – but there is an alternative version, of which more latter.
In about 1819 Syed Ahmad’s first disciple Shah Muhammad Ismail set down his master’s theology in a work entitled Sirat-ul-Mustaqim (the Straight Path). It laid great stress on the doctrine of the oneness of God (tawhid), and on the importance of struggling against all heretical practices associated with innovation (bidat). ‘The law of the Prophet is founded on two things,’ it declares:
First, the not attributing to any creature the attribute of God [tawhid]; and second, not inventing forms and practices which were not invented in the days of the Prophet, and his successors of Caliphs [bidat]. The first consists in disbelieving that angels, spirits, spiritual guides, disciples, teachers, students, prophets or saints, remove one’s difficulties; in abstaining from having recourse to any of the above creations for the attainment of any wish or desire; in denying that any of them has the power of granting favour or removing evils; in considering them as helpless and ignorant as one’s self in respect to the power of God… True and undefiled religion consists in strongly adhering to all the devotions and practices in the affairs of life which were observed at the time of the Prophet. In avoiding all such innovations as marriage ceremonies, mourning ceremonies, adorning of tombs, erection of large edifices over graves, lavish expenditure on the anniversaries of the dead, street processions and the like, and in endeavouring as far as may be practicable to put a stop to these practices.
This was exactly the theology to be expected of a student of the school of Shah Waliullah. Indeed, the only real difference between Syed Ahmad and his predecessors at this stage lay in his boldness in taking his message beyond the confines of the mosque and the madrassah and into the streets. He and his disciples were the first Muslim proselytisers to exploit the new medium of printing, taking their lead from the Christian missionaries in Bengal. These printed texts were mostly set down in Urdu, the language of the masses, rather than in Persian or Arabic.
Featured prominently in these new publications was the call for jihad. A printed appeal issued in Syed Ahmad’s name in 1821 speaks of jihad as ‘a work of great profit; just as rain does good to mankind, beasts and plants, so all persons are partakers in the advantages of a War against the Infidel’. It asks the faithful to compare the state of affairs in Hindustan as it now is with what it was in the days of Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb, and calls on them to struggle against all un-Islamic forces that have beset the land. However, this call does not go so far as to declare jihad, for according to the rules of Islamic jurisprudence, as Syed Ahmad understood them, such an act was a formal declaration that could only be made by an imam (religious leader) – which he evidently did not consider himself to be – acting with the support of an amir or secular leader. In India only the Emperor of Delhi had the necessary authority to declare jihad, by virtue of his dual role as religious head of the Muslim community in India and khalifa or viceroy of the Ottoman caliphate. A further complication was that jihad could only be launched from a country where Islamic sharia prevailed: a dar ul-Islam (domain of Faith) – and, in Syed Ahmad’s eyes, Hindustan was no longer a domain of Faith but a domain of enmity. If a jihad was to be launched at all it would have to be from outside Hindustan, just as long ago the Prophet had launched his first jihad on the domain of enmity of Mecca from the domain of Faith of Medina.
Syed Ahmad’s call for spiritual revival and jihad went all but unnoticed by the British authorities. As the Indian civil servant and historian Sir William Hunter was afterwards to put it, ‘He traversed one Province with a retinue of devoted disciples, converted the populace by thousands to his doctrine, and established a regular system of ecclesiastical taxation, civil government, and apostolic succession. Meanwhile, our officers collected the revenue, administered justice, and paraded our troops, altogether unsuspicious of the great religious movement which was surging around them.’