Tayler’s pre-emptive strike in Patna also had other effects that he could never have anticipated. Deprived of the direction from the top that was such a marked feature of their organisation, almost the entire Wahhabi network across the plains of northern India entered a state of paralysis. And with the chota godown at Patna effectively closed, the movement of caravans of much-needed supplies of men, arms and money to the burra godown in Sittana came to a halt.
By mid-June the city of Delhi had become the focal point of anti-British resistance as increasing numbers of Muslims, soldiers and civilians alike, answered what they believed to be a call from their emperor, and rallied to his cause.
It will be remembered that after the martyrdom of Syed Ahmad at Balakot divisions had opened up between the Wahhabi ‘Patna-ites’ led by Wilayat Ali and the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’. For many years the latter were led by Shah Waliullah’s grandson, SHAH MUHAMMAD ISHAQ, whose cousin and brother-in-law were Syed Ahmad’s first two disciples. Following the death of his cousin with Syed Ahmad in 1831, Shah Muhammad Ishaq and a group of his disciples had migrated to Arabia. After an absence of many years he and his followers returned to Delhi, where Shah Muhammad Ishaq placed himself at the head of a radical circle of scholars working within the traditions established by his grandfather. After Shah Muhammad Ishaq’s death in 1846 the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya broke up into a number of interlinked schools, of which the most obviously Wahhabi was that led by Maulana SAYYID NAZIR HUSAIN of Delhi.
Born in 1805, Sayyid Nazir Husain had begun his religious studies in Patna at the Sadiqpore house of one of the heads of the three Patna families, Muhammad Hussain, and it was there that he first heard Syed Ahmad speak in the 1820s. He later moved up to Delhi to sit at the feet first of Shah Abdul Aziz and then of his son and successor, Shah Muhammad Ishaq, becoming in time a highly respected teacher of Hadith. The degree to which Sayyid Nazir Husain participated in the 1857 Mutiny can only be guessed at. He afterwards denied that he was one of the thirty-seven ulema of the city who in July 1857 put their seals to a declaration calling for jihad against the Nazrani – but there are grounds for believing that he did just that.
The circumstances of the signing of the Delhi fatwa are surrounded in obfuscation and claims of forgery; understandably so, since to have admitted any support for the mutineers in the dark days that followed the suppression of the uprising would have been tantamount to signing one’s own death warrant. The undisputed facts are that on 19 May 1857, eight days after the arrival of the mutineers from Meerut, a group of mullahs erected a green banner on the roof of the city’s greatest mosque, the Jama Masjid, and published a fatwa proclaiming jihad. As soon as he heard of it, the Emperor ordered the banner to be removed and denounced the jihad fatwa as a great folly because it would alienate his Hindu supporters. His actions were supported by the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’, but for very different reasons. Sayyid Nazir Husain is said to have considered this declaration of jihad to be ‘faithlessness, breach of covenant and mischief’, and to have pronounced that it was a sin to take part in it. But his reasons for doing so were essentially doctrinaclass="underline" he and other Sunni fundamentalists viewed the emperor as ‘little better than a heretic’ on account of his insistence on working with Shias and Hindus; and he did not consider Delhi to be a dar ul-Islam, making it unlawful to proclaim jihad from there. All the evidence suggests that the ‘Delhi-ites’ and other Sunni hard-liners in the city initially remained aloof from the mutineers and kept their own counsel.
However, everything changed with the arrival in Delhi on 2 July of a large contingent of sepoys accompanied by ‘three or four thousand ghazis [warriors of the Faith but, in British eyes, fanatics]’. A significant number of these ghazis, led by one Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali, were Wahhabis. They had come from the town of Bareilly (not to be confused with Syed Ahmad’s birthplace in Oude, Rae Bareli), capital of Rohilkhand, which in earlier days had been an Afghan–Pathan stronghold in the plains. Ever since Syed Ahmad’s day Bareilly had been an outpost of Wahhabism on a par with that other Pathan bastion, Tonk. The Bareilly brigade was led by a senior officer of artillery, Subedar Muhammad Bakht Khan, whose first act on arriving in Delhi was to go straight to the Emperor and offer to take command of the mutineers – an offer gratefully accepted by the bewildered old man. Bakht Khan and two senior cavalry officers at his side were afterwards named as Wahhabis and the charge may well have some truth in it, because from this point onward the dominant group among the mutineers in Delhi became increasingly insistent that Emperor Bahadur Shah should lead them in a religious war, to the great disquiet of the many high-caste Hindus in their ranks. Bakht Khan assembled all the mullahs in the city and called on them draw up and put their seals to a second fatwa, ‘enjoining upon Mahomedans the duty of making religious war upon the British’. Initially, many refused to do so, but in mid-July a further six hundred ghazis arrived in the city, this time from Tonk. Again the presumption must be that many of them were Wahhabis – and that they came with the blessing of Syed Ahmad’s former devotee, Mohammad Wazir Khan, now the Nawab of Tonk. It was then put to the mullahs that the presence of all these warriors of the Faith – now said to number seven thousand in total – had, together with that of their Muslim brothers-in-arms in the Bengal Army, transformed Delhi into a land of Faith. This time thirty-seven divines put their seals to the jihad fatwa, and it was duly published.
6
The Late Summer of 1857
Mutiny is like smallpox. It spreads quickly and must be crushed as soon as possible.
The ruthless crushing of the Sepoy Mutiny on the Punjab frontier by Nicholson and others has been recounted in Soldier Sahibs, but it should be remembered that it was prompted by the discovery of a number of damning letters, some from mullahs, others from Muslim conspirators in the ranks, but all calling for an uprising against the Nazarenes. One of these letters specified the fourth day of the Muslim festival of Eid, 22 May, another directly implicated the Hindustani Fanatics gathered under Maulvi Inayat Ali on the eastern slopes of the Mahabun Mountain.
Despite the successful disarming and disbanding of the suspect units on the Peshawar parade ground on 21 May, one regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, the 55th, mutinied at Hoti Mardan and marched off towards the nearby mountains. Following a hot pursuit by John Nicholson and others in which about half the regiment perished, some five hundred men survived to reach the safety of Swat. Unfortunately for them, the Padshah of the Swatis and local patron of Syed Ahmad, Sayyed Akbar Shah, had died of natural causes on 11 May and his brother, SAYYED UMAR SHAH, had failed to win the backing of the tribal elders that his father had enjoyed. Despite this lack of support Sayyed Umar Shah offered the mutineers his protection and agreed to take them on as his standing army. But a majority of the sepoys were high-caste Hindus and they very soon found they were not welcome. The Swatis’ revered religious leader, the Akhund of Swat, then intervened and all the sepoys were ordered to remove themselves from Swat – along with their protector Sayyed Umar Shah. They made their way eastwards over the mountains to the Sayyeds’ homeland in Buner and there divided into two groups: the larger party, mostly composed of Hindus, crossed the Indus in the hope of finding refuge in Kashmir; the remainder proceeded south to join Maulvi Inayat Ali and his Hindustanis.