The desecration of the tomb of the Prophet in Medina in 1804 by Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud’s jihadis and the subsequent occupation of Mecca shocked the entire Muslim umma, Sunnis and Shias alike. But there were those among the orthodox Sunnis who saw the iconoclasm of the Wahhabis as acts of cleansing and restoration, among them a group of pilgrims from Sumatra present in Mecca at the time of the first Wahhabi raid in 1803. On their return home two years later their leader, a fakir named Miskin bin Rahmatullah, set out to apply the Wahhabi programme to the uplands of central Java, where islanders of Hindu and Buddhist faith who had resisted early attempts at conversion were concentrated. According to a Muslim scholar of that period, ‘They looted and robbed the wealth of the people and insulted the orang kaya [important peoples]. They killed the ulama and all the orang yang cerdik [Brahmin Pandits]. They captured married women, wedded them to their men, and made their women captives their concubines. Still they called their actions “actions made to perfect religion”.’ What became known as the Padri Movement briefly involved Stamford Raffles during that confusing period between 1811 and 1815 when the British and Dutch East India Companies were swapping islands like playing-cards. Thereafter it became both a revivalist and an anti-colonialist struggle in the interior, only finally suppressed in 1842.
Other pilgrims were equally inspired, including a number of individuals from India who subsequently returned to apply Al-Wahhab’s theology in their homeland, each in his own style. Besides Syed Ahmad, three deserve more than a mention: GHULAM RASUL of Benares, and the two Bengalis Hajji SHARIATULLAH (the word Hajji being a term of respect given to one who has made the Hajj to Mecca) and TITU MIR.
Of the three, Ghulam Rasul is the least well-known. He is said to have spent many years studying Hadith in Arabia soon after the start of the nineteenth century, not in Mecca or Medina but in the Wahhabi heartland of Nejd. When Ghulam Rasul eventually returned to Benares he took the name of Hajji Abdul Haq and became known as the Nejdi Sheikh. He also brought with him a radical version of Islam that caused great offence in local religious circles. However, the real significance of Ghulam Rasul/Hajji Abdul Haq to this narrative is that one of his disciples in Benares was Wilayat Ali, the young man who as an adolescent became an ardent follower of Syed Ahmad after his visit to Lucknow in 1818. By this account, Wahhabism was already being taught in India well before the return of Syed Ahmad from his pilgrimage to Mecca.
The Bengali Shariatullah was almost certainly in Arabia at the same time as Ghulam Rasul. He was living in the Hijaz in 1805, when Mecca fell to the Wahhabis, and chose to stay on, only quitting Arabia after the destruction of the Wahhabi stronghold of Riyadh in 1818. On his return to Bengal he began to preach what is probably best described as a diluted form of Wahhabi theology, very similar to that being promoted at this same time by Shah Waliullah’s son Shah Abdul Aziz of Delhi. He declared the country to be a domain of enmity because it was now ruled by the East India Company; and because he laid great stress on faraiz, the Muslim’s duty to obey sharia, his movement became known as Faraizi. Despite his opposition to British rule, both Hajji Shariatullah and the son who followed him as leader of the Faraizis believed they had a duty to work with rather than against the British in bringing about dar ul-Islam, a view that had considerable support until it was challenged by his fellow Bengali Mir Nasir Ali, better known as Titu Mir.
Born in 1782, Titu Mir began life as a small cultivator with an appetite for violence. Forced off the land, he turned to crime and then drifted to Calcutta, where he spent some time as a professional wrestler before taking service with a powerful landowner as a lathial, a ‘big-stick man’ or enforcer. At some point he was found guilty of affray by a British magistrate and sent to prison. He was, in the words of a British judge, ‘a man of a bad and desperate character’. After his release he went to work as a bodyguard for a minor member of the Mughal royal family in Delhi, and in that capacity accompanied him to Mecca on pilgrimage. There in 1821 or 1822 Titu Mir met a fellow Hindustani who already had a great following: the charismatic Syed Ahmad of Rae Bareli.
By the time Syed Ahmad and his followers landed at Jedda to begin the Hajj – the early summer of 1821 or 1822 – the holy places of Mecca and Medina were back in the hands of the Sharifs of the Hijaz under the protection of the Egyptians. However, deep in the Arabian desert the surviving Wahhabis had regrouped. TURKI IBN SAUD, an uncle of the executed emir Abdallah ibn Saud and grandson of Muhammad ibn Saud, had escaped from house arrest and was now beginning a fresh campaign to regain the lands won by his half-brother – and to restore Al-Wahhab’s teachings. After failing to recapture the old stronghold of Riyadh, Turki ibn Saud retreated into the desert and there began to rebuild the tribal alliances first forged by his grandfather.
It was at this juncture, with the Wahhabis greatly weakened but still threatening to take on the Ottoman Empire, that the ten boatloads of Hindustani pilgrims arrived in Mecca. Having completed the Hajj, most of the party then returned to the coast and sailed back to India. However, Syed Ahmad and his closest companions stayed on. He began to preach in the mosques, and word of his preaching soon came to the attention of the religious authorities, very much on the alert for the slightest whiff of sedition or heresy. What they heard was enough to merit Syed Ahmad’s expulsion, which suggests that he was preaching rather more than the revivalism of Shahs Waliullah and Abdul Aziz. None of the several biographies written by his followers goes into details about Syed Ahmad’s period in the Hijaz, and with good reason, for by the time they came to be written ‘Wahhabi’ had become a term of abuse and the movement was working hard to present itself as something other than a sectarian force promoting a creed imported from Arabia. What is remarkable about these biographies is the degree to which they differ over how long Syed Ahmad was away from India, and where he went. Shah Muhammad Ismail, the first disciple, declares that after visiting Mecca and Medina they travelled northwards together as far as Constantinople before returning to Arabia, taking six years in all. This allowed them to see the true dar ul-Islam of the Ottomans and to compare it with the dire state of affairs in British India. Not so much as a word is said about the Wahhabism that had so recently convulsed the Islamic world.
Whatever Shah Muhammad Ismail has to say on the matter, it seems most likely that Syed Ahmad returned to India early in 1824, after an absence of at least two years. He went ashore briefly in Bombay and was fêted as a saint by all sections of the Muslim community of the city. Again, there was talk of prophecies being fulfilled and of the approach of the end of days – and it seems to have been at this point that Mahdism first entered Syed Ahmad’s newly enlarged religious vocabulary.
Both Sunnis and Shias shared the belief that at the end of days a messiah-figure known as the mahdi, or the ‘expected one’, would come to the rescue of Islam. He would return to Mecca at the head of all the forces of righteousness to take on the forces of evil in one final, apocalyptic battle, after which he and the lesser prophet Jesus would proceed to Jerusalem to kill the devil. Thereafter the world would submit to his rule until the sounding of the last trumpet, and Judgement Day. There were, however, significant differences between the Sunnis and Shias over the origins of the Mahdi, in that the latter held him to be the twelfth and last of the imams of early Islam. Unlike his predecessors, this twelfth imam had not died and gone to heaven but had disappeared from the sight of man to become the ‘Hidden Imam’. He was said to be concealed in a cave in the mountains, waiting for the call from the righteous, when he would reappear as a padshah or ‘great king’ to lead the faithful to victory.