Fortunately for the Hindustanis, a botched attempt by the Governor of Peshawar in December 1828 to poison the Amir ul-Momineen Imam sheltering among the Yusufzai brought an end to the dissent. The attempt on the life of their guest impugned their honour, and the Yusufzai tribes in the mountains reacted by setting aside their differences and again rallying to Syed Ahmad. They swept down from the hills and overwhelmed a Sikh army many times their superior in numbers and fire-power. The Governor of Peshawar was killed and his forces scattered.
This surprise victory was followed by a third loya jirga, held in February 1829, at which many of the khans agreed not only to levy special tithes on their people to pay for the holy war but also to implement the Wahhabi version of sharia among their people. Over this same period many new adherents to the cause began arriving from every corner of the frontier, until eventually the Hindustani camp in the mountains contained more than six thousand fighting men – who from this point onwards began to refer to themselves by a word hitherto unused on the Punjab frontier: mujahedeen, ‘those who undertake jihad kabeer’, a word popularly translated as ‘holy warriors’.
Under the direction of their Commander of the Faithful and Imam these mujahedeen received both military training and religious instruction. Syed Ahmad had always been a keen sportsman, and by instituting fitness training he saw to it that the new recruits followed his example. He organised wrestling, archery and shooting competitions, and held ‘field days’ in which his troops fought each other in mock battles across the hillsides. In between their religious studies and their military training the mujahedeen learned marching songs that extolled the virtues of their leader and his cause; a number of them survived to be presented as evidence in court cases in later years. The most popular was the Risala Jihad, the Army of Holy War, written by Syed Ahmad’s first disciple, Shah Muhammad Ismail. Part of it went as follows:
In response to this new spirit of revolt the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, ordered his generals to take sterner measures against the insurgents. A brutal war now began in which neither side gave any quarter, sowing the seeds of a hatred between the Sikhs and the frontier tribes that continues to this day. As the Victorian historian Sir William Hunter later put it, ‘the Muhammadens burst down from time to time upon the plains, burning and murdering wherever they went. On the other hand, the bold Sikh villagers armed en masse beat back the hill fanatics into their mountains, and hunted them down like beasts.’
In spite of setbacks Syed Ahmad’s army of mujahedeen continued to grow. Wherever possible direct confrontation with the Sikhs in open battle was avoided in favour of guerrilla tactics, using ambushes and night attacks. In the course of a year and a half the rebels came to control the entire countryside as far east as the Indus, leaving the Sikhs as masters of Peshawar city but little else. Finally, in October 1830 the new Governor of Peshawar concluded a private treaty with the rebels that allowed him to withdraw from the city unharmed, leaving Peshawar and the surrounding Vale in the hands of the Wahhabis and their allies.
To mark this great victory Syed Ahmad declared himself Padshah, or Great King, and had coins struck bearing the inscription ‘Ahmad the Just, Defender of the Faith; the glitter of whose scimitar scatters destruction among the Infidels.’ It was another step in the process of assuming the mantle of the King of the West, the longed-for Imam-Mahdi.
After appointing Mullah Muzhir Ali as his local caliph and chief judge in the city of Peshawar, the newly proclaimed Padshah returned to his mountain stronghold with his closest companions, leaving it to Muzhir Ali and his fellow Hindustanis to impose Wahhabi sharia on the inhabitants of the Vale of Peshawar. This lasted no more than two months before the Pathans had had enough. The tribesmen had been happy to pay the religious war tithes, but the strict imposition of sharia as meted out by a Hindustani judge soon came into conflict with their own tribal laws of Pakhtunwali. The two final straws appear to have been a ruling that the Pathans must abandon their un-Islamic custom of selling their daughters in marriage – followed by an equally ill-advised edict announcing that any single girls of marriageable age who were not married within twelve days should be made over to the Hindustani mujahedeen to become their wives.
This last edict struck at the very heart of the Pathan honour-code, nang-i-Pukhatna, a code as inflexible as anything devised by the Wahhabi jurists, and one which required that any personal injury or insult, however slight, be answered with blood. Again a loya jirga was held, but this time in secret, and a plan of retaliation was hatched with the objective of killing the Padshah and every other Hindustani along with him. In a Pathan version of the St Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre, it was agreed that this strike should take place at the hour of evening prayer, the signal being the lighting of a beacon on the top of Karmar hill, a peak in the Malakand range overlooking the Vale of Peshawar. The beacon was duly lit, and within an hour Mullah Muzhir Ali, his fellow judges and all the Hindustanis in the Vale had been dragged from their prayer mats and put to the sword.
Either by chance or because of a loss of nerve on the part of his hosts in the Buner mountains, Syed Ahmad and his closest companions survived the massacre and fled eastwards across the Indus River into Hazara. They then made their way north to the Khagan valley and sought refuge among the Khagan Sayyeds, who now found themselves bound by the Pathan law of nanawati to give the Hindustanis shelter and to protect them with their lives. As so often in Pathan history, this absolute interpretation of sanctuary cost the hosts dear, for the news of the massacre and the retreat of the survivors galvanised the Sikhs into action. Peshawar was quickly restored to Sikh rule, and once all opposition in the Vale had been silenced the Sikhs advanced on the Khagan valley in force.
On 8 May 1831 the remaining Hindustanis, together with the more committed Sayyeds of Sittana and Khagan, made a last stand at the little village of Balakot which guards the entrance to the Khagan valley. Expecting the Sikhs to advance up the valley from the south, they dug trenches and flooded the open ground below the village, only to be thrown into disarray when their enemy came down on them from the hills above. Ringed in on almost every side, they chose death rather than surrender. Led by their Amir Al-Mumineem, Imam and Padshah, the Hindustanis charged as best they could up the slopes to meet the advancing lines of Sikh infantry.
Quite remarkably, considering this was a battle fought hundreds of miles from the nearest British territory, the closing stages of the battle of Balakot were witnessed by an American: a vagabond and soldier of fortune named Colonel Alexander Gardner, born on the shores of Lake Superior in 1785. Mystery surrounds Alexander Gardner’s exact origins and movements; he may not after all have been born in America, and half the extraordinary tales of his wanderings through Turkestan, Badakshan, Kafiristan and Afghanistan in the 1820s and 1830s may not be true, but there is no doubt that he was among the many foreign mercenaries who served in the ranks of the Sikh army under Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Prior to joining the Sikhs, Gardner had led a squadron of horse in the service of a contender for the throne of Kabul. He found himself on the losing side and fled northwards into the Pamirs, after which he journeyed southwards through Kashmir, Gilgit, Chitral and Kafiristan until he came to the frontier region of Bajour, ruled over by a chieftain named Mir Alam Khan.