Early in 1821 Syed Ahmad announced that he was to make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca which constitutes one of the five pillars of Islam. He invited his followers to join him, and some four hundred assembled in his home town of Rae Bareli before accompanying their master on a grand progress down the Ganges by boat, with stops at all the major cities.
Nowhere was Syed Ahmad received with more enthusiasm than at the ancient city of Patna, on the Ganges approximately half-way between Delhi and Calcutta. This was the home of his new disciple Wilayat Ali, and it is probable that he and his brother INAYAT ALI – three years younger, so then aged eighteen to Wilayat Ali’s twenty-one years – marshalled their family and friends to organise this welcome. Patna’s large Muslim community turned out en masse to receive Syed Ahmad like a major prophet, the most important Muslims in the city taking off their shoes and running beside his palanquin as it was carried through the streets. So warm was his reception that the preacher stayed on for some weeks as a guest of the wealthiest men in Patna, among them the heads of three houses that were to combine together to become the bastions of Wahhabism in India: FATAH ALI, descended from a long line of religious leaders and saints, and father of the two men who became notorious in later years as the ‘Ali brothers’; Fatah Ali’s close friend and contemporary ELAHI BUX, doctor, bibliophile and philanthropist, four of whose sons became Syed Ahmad’s lieutenants; and Syed MUHAMMAD HUSSAIN of Sadiqpore, brother-in-law of Elahi Bux, whose daughters married the sons of Elahi Bux and whose house and serai in Sadiqpore Lane in Patna became the movement’s headquarters and central seminary (see Appendix 2, the ‘Wahhabi’ family tree in India).
For three generations the male members of these three houses combined to run the movement initiated by Syed Ahmad, initially as his counsellors and lieutenants and subsequently as devotees of his cult. They have been portrayed as saints and martyrs in the cause of Indian freedom, but it would be more accurate to compare them to the Mafia families of Sicily and America. Both organisations conspired to impose their exclusive views of society through violence and by working to eliminate the opposition – which in this instance meant not only the governing Nazrani (Christians) but also Hindus, Sikhs, Shias, and even most schools of Sunni Islam. Both organisations worked in secret, swore oaths of loyalty to their leaders, followed their own exclusive code of morality, and believed themselves to be God-fearing, the only striking difference being that one party put its faith in the family godfather, the other in its spiritual leader.
From Patna, Syed Ahmad continued his triumphal progress downriver to Calcutta, where so many of the faithful flocked to his banners that he was unable to initiate them individually by his hand and they had to make do with touching the folds of his unrolled turban. So great was the stir created by his arrival in the city that some professedly ‘loyal’ Muslims presented a petition to the police declaring Syed Ahmad to be planning an uprising against the British. Enough donations had now been received to allow Syed Ahmad’s organisation to book passages to Arabia for some eight hundred and fifty pilgrims. In the spring of 1821 (or possibly the following year) they set sail in ten vessels for the Red Sea port of Jedda.
Syed Ahmad was away from India for at least one and possibly two years. He returned with a vision of militant Islam that was to divide the Muslim community.
2
The Puritan of the Desert
This Puritan of the desert, who was no doubt a reformer, believing in the early teachings of Mahomet, determined to bring back El Islam to its ancient simplicity. With a great following, after denouncing the superstitions and corruptions of those who professed his religion, he commenced by destroying the tombs of saints, even those of Mahomet and Husein, inculcating at the same time a higher state of morals.
The man who gave his name to this new vision of Islam was an Arab, Muhammad ibn Abd AL-WAHHAB, born in 1702 or 1703 in the town of Uyainah in the desert country of Nejd, a rocky plateau in the hinterland of the Arabian peninsula. However, the true roots of Wahhabism go back a lot further – to the late thirteenth century, and a time when Islam faced its first great challenge in the form of the eruption of the Mongols into the heartlands of the faith. In 1258 the Mongols overthrew the historic caliphate of Baghdad and went on to make the lands of the Middle East tributary to the Great Khans. One of the many caught up in this conquest was a Sunni jurist named Sheikh IBN TAYMIYYA, born in what is now Syria in 1263. His father was a refugee from the destruction of Damascus in 1259, and he grew up believing the Mongols to be enemies of Islam.
Out of the ruins of the caliphate a brilliant, inclusive Islamic civilisation flowered under the Mongols, centred on Persia, rooted in Sufism, and predominantly Shia. But to Ibn Taymiyya and others who followed the Hanbali code of jurisprudence – the last, strictest and least popular of the four main schools of law in the Sunni tradition – this civilisation was anathema and an offence to God. In the centuries following the first dramatic expansion of Islam under the aegis of the Prophet and his first caliphs, these four schools had developed to interpret and pronounce on all matters of sharia, the divinely ordained laws of Islam governing human behaviour. By about AD 900 a consensus had been arrived at in the Sunni community that every outstanding issue concerning right belief had been resolved by learned and righteous men from one or other of the four schools of jurisprudence; this came to be known as taqlid (community consensus). It followed that there was no further scope for ijtihad (independent reasoning), the traditional phrase being that ‘the gates of ijtihad were now closed’.
In the wake of the Mongol invasion Ibn Taymiyya set out to ‘break the shackles of taqlid’. He declared himself qualified to be a mujtahid, one who makes his own interpretations by virtue of informed reasoning, and began to redefine the laws of Islam. He first came to prominence with his literalist interpretations of the Quran and his strictures against innovation (bidat). He attacked the great Sufi mystic of the age, Ibn al-Arabi, and condemned as polytheistic and heretical many folk practices that had entered the Sunni mainstream. As if this direct challenge to religious custom were not enough, Ibn Taymiyya went on to challenge the central authority of the caliphate, arguing that a true caliphate had ceased to exist after the death of the last of the four caliphs who followed the Prophet as religious and political leaders of the early Islamic world. The true Muslim state, he argued, was one where the amir (temporal leader) governed only in partnership with the imam (religious leader), who had the authority not only to interpret sharia but also to guide the amir’s administration with the support of other members of the Muslim clergy (ulema): the mullahs, magistrates (qadis), and judges (hakims and muftis). In keeping with this view of the ulema as the senior partner in government, Ibn Taymiyya made it clear that only with the authority of the imam could the amir go to war – and only the imam could proclaim jihad.