Despite the hostility of the Sunni ulema, the message of militant jihad as now promoted by Wilayat Ali and the Patna-ites still found appreciative audiences, particularly among the Muslim nawabs who ruled over their states under the suzerainty of the British crown. Foremost among these was the Nizam of Hyderabad, whose enormous wealth and extensive titles could not disguise the fact that he was no longer an independent power. In 1839 Wilayat Ali arrived in Hyderabad to preach accompanied by his wife, the daughter of a Hyderabadi nobleman. News of his missionary activities soon reached the court of the Nizam’s younger brother Mubariz-ud-Daula, who went to hear him and was converted to his cause. It was said of his preaching that the women of the court, as they listened from behind their latticed screens of marble, were so overcome that they threw off their jewels and gold bangles and contributed them to his cause.
The East India Company was now preparing to launch its ultimately disastrous intervention in Afghanistan, with the intention of ousting the current ruler in Kabul and putting their man, Amir Shah Shuja, back on the throne he had lost many years earlier. For this purpose a vast contingent of troops drawn from the EICo’s Bombay and Bengal Armies was assembled and given the grandiose title of the Army of the Indus. With so many of the Company’s troops about to be committed in Afghanistan, Wilayat Ali and his allies in Hyderabad saw an opportunity too good to be missed. Plans were laid for a pan-Hindustan rising and carefully worded letters were sent out from Hyderabad to a number of rulers expected to offer support. In the event, the nawabs had too much to lose, and their responses were noncommittal. But whispers of Prince Mubariz-ud-Daula’s plotting reached the ear of the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and he confronted the Nizam with clear evidence of his brother’s treasonable activities. A secret trial was held and the prince was sentenced to spend the rest of his days confined in the melancholy grandeur of the ancient fortress of Golconda. Every suspected Wahhabi follower in Hyderabad was rounded up and either imprisoned or expelled.
To make matters worse, Nasiruddin and his army of Hindustani mujahedeen, having spent almost six years in limbo in Sind, now got caught up in the British invasion of Afghanistan. Answering a call to come to the aid of the Afghan defenders of the great citadel of Ghazni, they arrived in time to play a heroic but futile role in its defence. Fifty of their number survived, only to be taken in chains before Shah Shuja, where, in the words of a historian of the period, they were ‘hacked to death with wanton barbarity by the knives of his executioners’. For a second time, Wahhabism in India appeared to have run its course.
The storming of Ghazni by the Army of the Indus was followed by the occupation of Kabul and the installation of Shah Shuja as Amir of Afghanistan. But then a fatal decision was taken to withdraw the bulk of the army, leading to the killing of the British Resident and a number of his colleagues and the destruction of the remaining British and Indian troops as they tried to make their way out of the country. Six months later a self-proclaimed Army of Retribution marched back up the Khyber to visit token punishment on the Afghans before once more withdrawing to the safety of Hindustan.
Whatever gloss they cared to put on it, the British received a drubbing in Afghanistan, and the withdrawal of their troops acted as a fresh spur to the Wahhabis. No sooner had the Army of Retribution been disbanded than the Wahhabi faithful in the Indian plains learned that their Hidden Imam in the mountains had at last ended his self-imposed exile and was preparing to resume personal command of the jihad from Sittana. It was announced that letters had been received in Patna, written by Syed Ahmad’s first disciple Shah Muhammad Ismail but dictated by his master. They summoned the faithful to join him in the mountains of Buner so that the holy war might be resumed. Those who were unable to come themselves were to participate in the jihad by providing funds and food.
Whatever their origins – and the suspicion must be that they were the work of Wilayat Ali – these letters had the desired effect. The mystique of Syed Ahmad, both as martyr and as lost leader in waiting, had grown over the years and to many young men of faith he now came to be seen as a unique symbol of Islamic resistance and resurgence – very much as Osama bin Laden became in later years. Large numbers of mujahedeen volunteers responded to the call, among them a devout but unusually independent-minded mullah from Hyderabad named Maulvi Zain ul-Abdin, who had been converted to Wahhabism by Wilayat Ali during one of his visits to the city. Travelling across India in small parties to escape detection, Zain ul-Abdin and almost a thousand recruits from the Deccan made their way to Sittana to begin their military training. However, Zain ul-Abdin was determined to meet the Hidden Imam whose call he and his fellow Hyderabadis had answered. He demanded to see the Amir ul-Momineem and, after being repeatedly fobbed off with excuses, was finally led up into the mountains above the Hindustani camp to a point from where he and a number of other curious mujahedeen could make out a distant cave, at the entrance of which stood three figures dressed in white robes. These, he was told, were the Amir-ul-Momineen and the two disciples who attended to his daily needs. The spectators were then made to promise not to go any closer, because if they or anyone else did so the Hidden Imam would again disappear, and remain hidden from the sight of man for fourteen years.
Thrilled as he and the others were by this distant glimpse of their leader, Zain ul-Abdin found himself unable to contain his curiosity. Finally, he and a number of comrades bolder than the rest went back up into the mountains to take a closer look. They clambered right up to the cave and found, to their horror, that the three figures were nothing more than effigies. As Zain ul-Abdin later reported it, he examined the figure of the supposed imam ‘and found that it was a goatskin stuffed with grass, which with the help of some pieces of wood, hair, etc. was made to resemble a man. The suppliant enquired from Qasin Kazzab [Maulvi Qasim Panipati, the Wahhabi’s caliph at Sittana] about this. He answered that it was true, but that the Imam Humam had performed a miracle, and appeared as a stuffed figure.’
Thoroughly outraged by this deception, Zain ul-Abdin promptly decamped from Sittana together with most of the thousand volunteers from Hyderabad. Thereafter he became a vociferous critic of the Wahhabis. ‘This deception’, he wrote, ‘is only a small portion of the acts, idolatry and heresy of these people… Now the errors and falsity of these people are as clear as noon-day, and [by abandoning them] I have saved my soul from sin.’ Other disillusioned volunteers also decamped from Sittana, claiming that they too had been deceived. They included a number of unemployed weavers from Bengal, priced out of the market by cheap imported cotton goods manufactured in the Lancashire mills. They had volunteered in the expectation that they would take up arms against the British, but on arrival at Sittana had been put to work as tailors, water-carriers, wood-cutters and mule-drivers. The camp’s leaders had decreed that only the peasant farmers who made up the bulk of the recruits were fighting material, leaving the weavers and other artisans to fill the less congenial supporting roles.