This was, in essence, a retread of the Shia version of the Imam-Mahdi story, in which the Hidden Imam absented himself from the sight of man in a cave in the mountains, awaiting the summons of the faithful to make himself known as King of the West.
Absurd as this story now appears, it gave great heart to the disconsolate faithful in the plains and, just as importantly, it overcame the technicality of the imam required to authorise jihad. If Syed Ahmad was still alive, the jihad he had proclaimed could be continued. The immediate outcome was a second hijra (retreat) made under the command of Nasiruddin, the caliph who had earlier abandoned the Fanatic Camp. He was authorised to form a new group of volunteers and in 1835 marched them off towards Afghanistan with the declared intention of resuming the holy war against the Sikhs. Their arrival in Sind aroused the suspicion of the British Political Agent in nearby Kutch. Political pressure was applied and Nasiruddin’s jihadis found themselves stranded in Sind, where they kicked their heels for months that became years as they waited for reinforcements to join them.
Syed Ahmad in his lifetime had exploited the concept of the Imam-Mahdi to his movement’s advantage, but had never openly declared himself to be the ‘expected one’. Nor did his successors speak directly of him in these terms. Nevertheless, a cult was now formed around his person. Those who had been closest to him set down their recollections of ‘Imam Saheb’, as they referred to him, and collected his sayings, very much as the followers of the Prophet had gathered the material for the Hadith. Syed Ahmad was now credited with all manner of saintly virtues, and, in a further deviation from the dictates of Wahhabism, miraculous powers were attributed to him – one of which, seemingly, was the ability to rise from the dead.
At the same time old Sunni and Sufi prophecies were dusted down, re-examined and, where necessary, revised: ‘I see’, read part of one such prophecy, originally devised by the Madhawi followers of Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur some centuries earlier, ‘that after 1200 years [750 years in the original text] have passed wonderful events will occur; I see all the kings of the earth arrayed one against the other; I see the Hindus in an evil state; I see the Turks oppressed; then the Imam will appear and rule over the earth; I see and read AHMD [‘MHMD’ in the original, thus ‘Ahmad’ replaced ‘Muhammad’] as the letters showing forth the name of this ruler.’ Shia texts were similarly employed, particularly a prophecy which gave the date of the forthcoming advent of the Imam-Mahdi as the year 1260 AH, corresponding to 1843–4 in the Christian calendar. When 1843–4 came and went without any divine manifestations a fresh text, entitled Asar Mahshar or Signs of the Last Day, was circulated. This foretold that after an initial defeat by the English on the Punjab Frontier the Faithful would begin a search for the Imam-Mahdi, culminating in an apocalyptic four-day battle, the complete overthrow of the Nazarenes and the triumphal appearance of the Imam-Mahdi to preside over the triumph of Islam in India. No exact date was given; but these events were to be heralded by an eclipse of both the sun and the moon.
A cult can be defined as a form of worship with specific rites and ceremonies in which excessive devotion is paid to a particular person or belief system, creating a closed group environment everything within which is deemed good and everything outside bad. In the case of Indian Wahhabism, as it now became under the aegis of Wilayat Ali, these cult-like characteristics can be summed up as follows:
1. belief in one man’s reading of the Quran and the Hadith, and a determination to bring about a theocracy based exclusively on those beliefs accompanied by a rejection of all other interpretations;
2. absolute devotion, formalised by the swearing of an oath, to a single authority figure who is both religious leader and military commander, Imam and Amir, often accompanied by the belief that this leader has quasi-divine abilities;
3. a perception of that figure as the natural heir to the caliphs of early Islam, if not an Imam-Mahdi figure heralding the final great battle against Islam’s enemies;
4. a belief in millenarianism – the notion that the end of the world is fast approaching, and with it the triumph of Islam;
5. an us-and-them mentality, whereby all who hold other religious views are seen as heretics and thus fair game for violent suppression;
6. a recognition of jihad as one’s prime duty, but ignoring jihad akbar (the great jihad) in favour of jihad kabeer (the lesser jihad), interpreted as nothing less than holy war;
7. the making of a symbolic retreat before beginning the jihad, so replicating the Prophet’s hijra from Mecca to Medina;
8. the wish to return to a past golden age of Islam, together with a rejection of modern learning and technology (except where this can be used to further jihad);
9. the recruiting of young male followers from among the poor and ignorant (preferably prepubescent orphans), subjecting them to long periods of intensive and exclusive religious indoctrination while keeping them isolated from other sources of ideas; and lastly,
10. the promotion of a death-wish mentality in which the status of shahid (martyr) is exhalted as the ultimate goal of every jihadi.
The leading promoter of the cult of Syed Ahmad, if not its originator, was Maulvi Wilayat Ali. Though he himself was short, fat and dark, and entirely without the good looks and charismatic qualities which had distinguished his predecessor, Wilayat Ali soon emerged as the movement’s new ideologue. What he lacked in appearance and character he more than made up for with his tireless promotion of Syed Ahmad and his teaching. He became the movement’s leading strategist and, over time, its most successful propagandist, travelling far and wide to preach his version of Syed Ahmad’s Wahhabism.
But as the tenets and agenda of his revivalism became more widely known, so opposition began to grow. Some months after Titu Mir’s abortive uprising in Bengal, Wilayat Ali appeared in Bombay to preach in the mosques. According to one of his critics, ‘he prohibited the people from reading “Mowlood Shareef” [a text not contained in the Hadith], and paying reverence to our Prophet. Upon this the Moulvees of Bombay took him for an infidel, and turned him out.’ A year later fourteen leading Sunni mullahs of Delhi put their names to a fatwa denouncing the Indian Wahhabis as ‘a faithless, wicked, treacherous, and seditious people’, declaring that they had been banished from Mecca and Medina; and that, ‘with a view to gaining worldly riches, they had founded a new creed to cheat and impose upon the ignorant Mussulmans.’ From this time onward repeated denunciations of the Indian Wahhabis were made by mainstream Sunni Muslim leaders in India, accompanied by the pronouncement of fatwas declaring them to be infidels and faithless.
The ‘Delhi-ites’ among Syed Ahmad’s original followers now began to distance themselves from the ‘Patna-ites’, realigning themselves with the more acceptable teachings of the school of Shah Waliullah. After the death in 1823 of Syed Ahmad’s teacher Shah Abdul Aziz the leadership of the Madrassah-i-Ramiyah had passed to Shah Abdul Aziz’s son, SHAH MUHAMMAD ISHAQ. Following the martyrdom of Syed Ahmad and his cousin Shah Muhammad Ismail at the battle of Balakot in 1831, Shah Muhammad Ishaq and a number of his disciples migrated to Arabia, where they remained for some years. Little is known about the circumstances of this self-imposed exile, but Shah Muhammad Ishaq’s departure seems to have been followed by a marked falling-off of support for Wahhabi teaching in the Delhi madrassahs. However, at some point in the late 1830s or early 1840s Shah Muhammad Ishaq returned to Delhi and began to gather about him a wide circle of outstanding young teachers and scholars from the East India Company’s Delhi College who in later years became hugely influential as radical leaders, ranging from the Mughal aristocrat SYED AHMAD KHAN of Alipore at one end of the spectrum to SAYYID NAZIR HUSAIN Muhaddith of Delhi at the other.