In Muslim India these distinctions and qualifications had become blurred over the centuries, like so much else in Islam. In the last decades of the Delhi Sultans in the mid-sixteenth century a Sunni mullah named Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur, near Benares, had proclaimed himself the Mahdi and had attracted a large following. His early death failed to discourage his adherents, who had proclaimed themselves the Mahdawis and set up a cult characterised by extreme asceticism, and violence towards other Muslims. ‘They always carried swords and shields, and all kinds of weapons,’ wrote the chronicler Nizamuddin Ahmad in his history Tabaqat-i-Akbari, ‘and going into cities and bazaars, wherever they saw anything that was contrary to the law of the Prophet, at first they forbade these things, with gentleness and courtesy. If this did not succeed, they made people give up the forbidden practices, using force or violence.’ The Mahdawi cult gained many converts among the Afghan leadership in India, so many in fact that it eventually provoked an orthodox backlash and was declared a heresy. Nevertheless, the belief in a messiah figure who would appear from the mountains to the west as the King of the West took hold among all sections of the Muslim community in India, becoming increasingly popular as Muslim power there waned.
A second and less successful eruption of Mahdism had occurred in Syed Ahmad’s own lifetime, in western India in January 1810, when a Muslim named Abdul Rahman proclaimed himself the Imam-Mahdi, collected a band of followers of the Bohra sect of Sunnis and seized the fort of Mandvi in Eastern Surat. The insurgents had then marched on the nearest town, calling on all Hindus to embrace the faith or be killed. The British political agent at Surat had been sent a written demand calling on him to convert, and had responded by summoning troops from Bombay. Four companies of infantry and two troops of cavalry were landed on 19 January and a one-sided encounter followed in which the aspiring Imam-Mahdi and some two hundred insurgents were killed, after which the uprising fizzled out.
There was thus a well-established predisposition among all sections of the Muslim community in India to respond to the call of the true Imam-Mahdi in a time of religious crisis, and this now became an established part of Amir Syed Ahmad’s Wahhabi platform in India: the belief that the end of days was drawing nigh and with it the imminent return of the Hidden Imam-Mahdi, the King of the West.
From Bombay Syed Ahmad and the other hajjis sailed on round the coast to Calcutta, where they finally disembarked.
The Hindustan to which Syed Ahmad returned was fast being reshaped on British terms. The last of the Pindari freebooters had been destroyed, the wings of the Maratha warlords clipped, and the Jat ruler of Bharatpore, holed up in his great mud fortress near Agra with eighty thousand men, was in the process of being brought to heel. Except for the Punjab, where the Sikhs still held sway, all Hindustan was now under direct or indirect East India Company control. So it was not surprising that Syed Ahmad and his twin messages of Islamic revival and armed struggle against the infidel were received with an enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. And nowhere was this enthusiasm more marked than at Patna, the seat of his most loyal supporters, headed by the three families of Fatah Ali, Elahi Bux, and Syed Muhammad Hussain.
Syed Ahmad’s second stay in Patna marked a turning point in the progress of his movement. Word had spread through all sections of the Muslim community that the Hajji had returned to restore India, if not the world, to a domain of Faith under Islamic sharia. His first two disciples were now likened to the Prophet’s two closest Companions, and Syed Ahmad himself was seen by his followers as travelling in the footsteps of the Prophet as His messenger. He was proclaimed amir of his movement, and each day hundreds came forward to be blessed by him and to swear allegiance to him by taking the oath of baiat. He ordained Syed Muhammad Husain, head of one of the three families, as his first vice-regent, set up a five-man council in Patna also drawn from the three families, and appointed a number of his leading supporters to be regional caliphs and collectors of religious taxes. Once this machinery was in place a highly sophisticated campaign was launched to promote Syed Ahmad’s theology, which he himself named the Path of Muhammad (Tariqa-i-Muhammadia). From an account of his mission left by Shah Muhammad Ismail we know that Syed Ahmad’s first disciple was only one of many preachers who were now sent out to spread Syed Ahmad’s gospel. Shah Muhammad Ismail writes of journeying ‘from town to town preaching the sermon of jihad. Emissaries were likewise sent into the interior to prepare the minds of the Muhammadens for a religious war. Such was the powerful force of the orations of Maulvie Ismail [Shah Muhammad Ismail] that in less than two years the majority of respectable Muhammadans were in his favour.’
The theology preached by Syed Ahmad and his missionaries was based on five articles of faith. As summarised by T. E. Ravenshaw, these were:
1. reliance on one Supreme Being [the doctrine of tawhid];
2. repudiation of all forms, ceremonies, and observances of the modern Mahomedan religion, retaining only such as are considered the pure doctrines of the Koran [bidat];
3. the duty of Jehad or holy war for the faith against infidels generally;
4. blind and implicit obedience to their spiritual guides or Peers [pirs];
5. expectation of an Imam who will lead all true believers to victory over infidels.
The first four of these articles fell comfortably within the tenets of revivalist Sunni Islam as promoted by Al-Wahhab in Nejd and Shah Abdal Aziz in Delhi, but the last was a quintessential Shia belief, albeit deeply entrenched in Sunni tradition in India. There can be no doubt that both Al-Wahhab and Shah Abdal Aziz would have considered it heretical. Its inclusion as a basic article of faith appears to have been a deliberate bid by Syed Ahmad to raise the stakes by taking advantage of a belief widespread in all sections of the Muslim community in India. It has also enabled later commentators to argue, with some cause, that Syed Ahmad’s ‘Path of Muhammad’ had little in common with Al-Wahhab’s Wahhabism.
The fact is that Syed Ahmad and his first disciple Shah Muhammad Ismail arrived in Mecca predisposed to accept Al-Wahhab’s vision of tawhid through their spiritual apprenticeship at Delhi’s Madrassah-i-Rahimiya – which reflected in large part the teaching acquired by Shah Waliullah in Mecca almost a century earlier. When Syed Ahmad returned to India he took with him a distinctly more hard-line, less tolerant and more aggressive Islam, directly inspired by the Wahhabi model, than he had imbibed at the feet of his first master Shah Abdul Aziz of Delhi. But because he was backed by several widely respected members of Shah Abdul Aziz’s family, and because he carried out all religious ceremonies and observances according to the rules of the Hanafis, Syed Ahmad could present himself as the natural heir to this distinguished line of Hanafi reformers.
Due account must also be taken of the nature of the bonds that developed between Naqshbandi Sufi teachers in India and their students, bonds that demanded absolute devotion and loyalty. It will be remembered that Syed Ahmad’s two closest disciples were respectively the nephew and son-in-law of his first master. With Shah Abdul Aziz’s death in 1823 leadership had passed to his eldest son, SHAH MUHAMMAD ISHAQ, and he too appears to have been personally devoted to Syed Ahmad, if not to his cause. In consequence, Amir Syed Ahmad’s teaching seems initially to have been embraced with enthusiasm by all the followers of the school of Shah Waliullah. Very soon, however, differences began to surface, probably disputes over matters of interpretation and emphasis, in which petty rivalries and jealousies must also have played a part. The outcome of these differences was the dividing of Syed Ahmad’s Way of Muhammad movement into two factions held together only by the strength of personality of their leader. These two parties could well be termed the ‘Delhi-ites’ and the ‘Patnaites’: the former made up of those such as the two first disciples who conformed to Sunni custom as already pushed to the limits by Shah Waliullah and Shah Abdul Aziz; the latter led by younger men such as Wilayat Ali of Patna who saw themselves as Wahhabis in all but name – and as committed jihadis. Syed Ahmad’s first disciple Shah Muhammad Ismail appears to have started out as a ‘Delhi-ite’ before his more extreme position forced him into the Patna camp. By his own account, he preached in Delhi’s great Jamma Masjid every Friday and Tuesday, as a consequence of which thousands were reclaimed from ‘the darkness of blasphemy in which they were plunged’. But his success attracted the jealousy of his contemporary divines, and a public debate was held to determine whether his preaching was in accordance with sharia. It broke up in disorder and Shah Muhammad Ismail was subsequently prohibited by the city authorities from public speaking. From that time Amir Syed Ahmad and his followers were proclaimed ‘Wahabees’. According to an observer, ‘The followers of the reformers are nicknamed “Wahabees” by their opponents, while the latter are called [by their opponents] “Mushriks”, or associates of others with God.’