During this period of expansion the house and attached caravanserai of Shah Muhammad Husain’s family in Sadiqpore Lane in Patna was greatly enlarged and fortified. A mosque was built in its inner courtyard, with a madrassah attached. It was given the code name of chota godown or small warehouse, while the moun-tain camp up at Sittana was henceforward referred to as the burra godown or big warehouse.
Within a decade the Wahhabi movement in India was transformed from a minority preaching sect into a highly effective organisation for Islamic revival and revolution, with branches throughout northern India and the support of a large popular constituency drawn mainly from the labouring classes. It was an extraordinary achievement, one that even its most trenchant critic was forced to acknowledge. ‘Indefatigable as missionaries,’ wrote William Hunter in his polemic Our Indian Mussulmans, ‘careless of themselves, blameless in their lives, supremely skilful in organising a permanent system for supplying money and recruits, the Patna Caliphs stand forth as the types and exemplars of the Sect. Much of their teaching was faultless, and it had been given to them to stir up thousands of their countrymen to a purer life and truer conception of the Almighty.’
In February 1850 Inayat Ali was again arrested for preaching sedition in Bengal. He absconded and fled to Patna, where he was re-arrested, the British magistrate noting that this was the second time he had broken the terms of the original order requiring him to keep the peace. Released on a bond of a thousand rupees, he concluded nevertheless that the authorities were on to him. He left secretly for Sittana to assume military leadership of the burra godown as its amir. Towards the end of that same year his elder brother Wilayat Ali decided that the time had come when he too should make his retreat. In December he appointed Farhat Husain to be caliph in his absence, and left him in charge of the chota godown at Patna. He then set out to join his brother in the mountains, accompanied by his family and an entourage that included Yahya Ali and his two younger brothers. Yahya Ali’s responsibilities were taken over by his brother Ahmadullah, oldest of the four sons of Elahi Bux.
The party wintered in Delhi, where Maulvi Wilayat Ali was invited by the Emperor, Bahadur Shah, to deliver a sermon before him in the Red Fort’s famous Hall of Public Audience. According to court protocol, preachers avoided controversial subjects in the presence of the last of the Mughals, but Wilayat Ali, in line with Wahhabi teaching, regarded the Emperor as an apostate for having submitted to the authority of the British. Accordingly, he launched into a fiery speech on the pains of hell awaiting those who failed to heed the commands of God. Midway through his sermon the Emperor interrupted him to declaim some verses he had composed on the transitory nature of life. The maulvi’s response was to recite a verse from the Quran criticising those who interrupted sermons. Despite this rebuke and the maulvi’s breach of protocol, the Emperor entertained his guest to a magnificent banquet and invited him to stay at the Red Fort. However, the British Resident at Delhi was also present at the Emperor’s audience, and he now began to question Wilayat Ali so closely about his background and his intended movements that the maulvi grew alarmed. Making his excuses, he led his entourage out of the fort and left the city as soon as he could.
Shortly afterwards the two Ali brothers met by arrangement in Ludhiana and continued their withdrawal from the domain of enmity together, reaching Sittana early in 1851. Only once on their journey through the Punjab did the local authorities attempt to stop their progress, and even then they were soon allowed to continue – after receiving a personal apology from the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar.
The two brothers had not been long established in Sittana when it became clear that they differed on how the jihad was now to be prosecuted. Officially the dead Syed Ahmad was the movement’s imam and amir but as long as he remained hidden the two brothers shared these two roles between them, Wilayat Ali as imam and Inayat Ali as amir. The problem was that the former believed they should wait until the movement had gained more support, while the latter saw it as their religious duty to resume Syed Ahmad’s jihad without further delay. Inayat Ali was very different from his brother, in both appearance and personality. He was physically taller and stronger, he possessed a violent temper, and he was a man of action rather than a thinker. It is said of him that he bore a great hatred of the British. Having assumed leadership of the camp a year before the arrival of his elder brother, he may well have been reluctant to relinquish any authority – but he also needed Wilayat Ali’s permission as imam to commence jihad. So strained did relations between the two become that Inayat Ali finally left Sittana to set up his own camp at Mangalthana, deeper and higher in the Mahabun Mountain massif. Here he built a stone fort on land donated to him by Sayyed Akbar Shah, leader of the Saiyyed clan at Sittana and the late Syed Ahmad’s old patron and admirer.
Since Syed Ahmad’s demise a new political phenomenon had appeared in the mountains of Swat and Buner in the person of the Akhund of Swat, who was none other than Abdul Ghaffur, the saintly hermit who had been expelled from the mountains after his unwise intervention in Syed Ahmad’s vendetta against a local chieftain. In 1834, at the age of forty, Abdul Ghaffur had returned to Swat in triumph as an acknowledged man of God and had been accorded the local title of Akhund or saint. Since then he had become increasingly influential as the religious leader of the mountain Yusufzai, and as a peacemaker. In 1850, in an attempt to bring an end to the inveterate feuding among the tribes, he had anointed Sayyed Akbar Shah as padshah and leader of the law (amir-e-sharia), effectively making him king of the Swatis and Bunerwals.
Although a Naqshbandi Sufi, the Akhund was resolutely opposed to the violent and exclusive creed of the Hindustani Wahhabis, which makes it hard to understand why he should have chosen the patron of the Hindustani Fanatics to be pad-shah. According to Abdul Ghaffur’s grandson, Miangul Abdul Wadud Badshah Sahib, the Akhund acted in response to a call from the tribes for a leader who would prevent the British from taking them over. To have selected a Pathan would have led to inter-tribal jealousy, whereas Sayyed Akbar Shah was both a Saiyyid and greatly respected for his leadership in the first insurrection against the Sikhs back in 1823 – to say nothing of his subsequent support for Syed Ahmad in his fatal campaign against the same enemy in 1830–1. So Sayyed Akbar Shah had been made king of Swat in the hope that he would command respect from all sides.
However, the effect of the Akhund’s appointment of a king from the Saiyyed clan had one consequence that he may not have anticipated, for it gave further credence to the Wahhabi claim that here in the mountains of Swat was the dar ul-Islam from which the great jihad should be launched. Yet at the same time the Akhund’s moderating influence over Sayyed Akbar Shah acted as a brake on the Hindustanis’ warlike ambitions – until the death from natural causes of Wilayat Ali at Sittana in the late autumn of 1852. This event coincided with Lord Dalhousie’s writing of his Second Minute on the Wahabees, in which he declared the Hindustani Camp at Sittana to be insignificant and best left alone.