Routledge’s fears appeared to be confirmed when less than five months after Justin Norman’s assassination a second and even more sensational murder took place.
In September 1872 Lord Mayo began a tour of the Andaman Islands. Prison reform was one of the Viceroy’s special interests, and he wanted to see for himself the conditions under which transportees served out their sentences on the several islands that made up the Andaman group. It is clear from Muhammad Jafar’s account of his life in exile that he and his fellow Wahhabis were well treated by the British officials in charge of the penal colony. Because of his skills Muhammad Jafar worked as a chief clerk for the Chief Commissioner, and although he and the other leading Wahhabis were housed on different islands they were able to meet from time to time to pray and take food together. In Muhammad Jafar’s eyes, what happened to Lord Mayo was a clear example of divine justice.
On 8 February the Viceroy, having inspected various utilities on the main islands, went ashore on the small island of Mount Harriet to view the sunset from its summit. Afterwards he descended in the gathering darkness to board his steam launch, preceded by two torch-bearers and surrounded by a small crowd of dignitaries, officials and armed guards. As Lord Mayo began to walk up the pier leading to his boat a man ran right through the party, jumped on him from behind and stabbed him twice. The assailant was immediately seized, but Lord Mayo fell over the side of the pier into the water. He got to his feet and was helped back on to the pier, and then into his carriage. But within minutes he was dead. His attacker was the Afridi Shere Ali, former orderly to Reynell Taylor and other commissioners of Peshawar, sentenced to transportation for a blood-feud killing in 1867.
Shere Ali was interrogated at length, but said nothing to link him with the Wahhabi convicts on the islands or their movement. Among those who gave evidence was George Allen, proprietor of The Pioneer, who had been standing close to Lord Mayo when he was struck. He reported that, when asked why he had attacked the Viceroy, Shere Ali had answered simply that ‘God had ordered him to kill the enemy of his country, that he had no associate in his crime, but that God was the shereek [accomplice].’ Allen described the Afridi as ‘of middle height, brownish complexion, brown beard, and not at all a bad face, as far as one can judge – at least he does not convey the idea of a criminal’, adding that ‘the way in which he glories in the act with his harsh triumphant laugh is revolting to a degree. Hanging is a thousand times too good for him.’
After his sentencing Shere Ali was again interrogated by experienced police officers from the mainland. They too were unable to extract any hard information from him beyond the fact that ‘he had heard of Abdullah having killed Justice Norman – that was a great deed, but that his was much greater than anything ever done before, as he had killed the greatest sahib in India… He hoped his name would be glorified in his country for the deed.’ In his understandably triumphant rendering of the affair Muhammad Jafar has little to add, except to record that at his execution Shere Ali briefly spoke to those gathered to watch: ‘He loudly addressed the prisoners: “Brothers! I have killed your enemy and you are a witness that I am a Muslim.” And he then started Kalma [verses from the Quran] and died while doing that.’
By Muhammad Jafar’s account Shere Ali acted simply as an instrument of divine vengeance, but had Jafar been privy to any Wahhabi conspiracy to kill Lord Mayo he would certainly not have said so, for fear of incriminating himself. While the British community in India was united in believing that the Wahhabis were behind the assassination, not a shred of evidence was found to support this belief. Yet two possibly unconnected events remain unexplained: a grandson of the late Wahhabi leader Wilayat Ali was found to have visited the Andaman Islands just before Lord Mayo’s arrival, and on the night before the murder a person or persons unknown had given a great feast for Shere Ali.
The Wahhabi leaders and brothers Ahmadullah and Yahya Ali both died in exile as convicts on the Andaman Islands. Muhammad Jafar and the remaining Wahhabi convicts were eventually released in 1883 as part of an amnesty announced by the Viceroy, Lord Ripon. Muhammad Jafar returned to his home in Thanesar in December 1883, with a wife he had married during his exile and several children, to be met by his first wife and a twenty-year-old son he had not seen since he was a few months old. Through the good offices of the British magistrate of Amballa he was found a job and resettled in the local community.
By his own admission, Muhammad Jafar returned home a changed man. He had studied English while in the penal colony and it had opened up a new world: ‘The English language’, he had discovered, ‘is a treasure of knowledge and arts. A person not knowing English cannot be well aware of world affairs. Without learning English one cannot become active and business-like.’ As well as discovering modern society through his reading, Muhammad Jafar had also mixed with other communities and had learned religious tolerance, even coming to admire some of the British officers he met. Yet, in the end, he was forced to conclude that all this new learning had endangered his souclass="underline" ‘Under the influence of Western knowledge I stopped offering prayers in the early hours of morning… I was not inclined to read Quran or listen to Hadith. I was involved with English language and English books all the time… I still remember how in those days Satan used to teach me not to believe in God and I sometimes used to do that. Sometimes when I used to read the arguments given by atheists I felt like believing them.’
Muhammad Jafar’s remarkable autobiography ends with a passionate defence of religious conservatism:
This [English] language is so closely connected with materialistic life that it is not only harmful but dangerous for the spiritual life. If a young man, before learning Quran and traditions of the holy Prophet in detail, learns English and reads English books of various types and different disciplines as I used to do, he will become an unreligious, uncultured person with excessively free ideas to such an extent that it would not only be difficult but impossible to reform him… Such knowledge will certainly make a person unreligious and atheist if he is not well acquainted with Islam. It will create doubts in his mind which will remain there throughout his life.
It was better therefore to remain in blessed ignorance. His own life history, Muhammad Jafar finally advises the reader, should be read as a moral tale, for ‘about a similar story, God in his book Holy Quran says, “In these stories there is a lesson to be drawn.”’
The Wahhabi trials and the two assassinations caused great disquiet among both the small British community and India’s much larger Muslim population. Since the traumatic events of the Indian Mutiny a view had developed among the British that Muslims were not to be trusted – a view that hardened when a report produced in 1875 found that, for all the round-ups and arrests, Wahhabi mullahs were still actively preaching as far afield as Madras and Rangoon, and that sedition was still being plotted.