At a public gathering a year before his assassination Lord Mayo had posed the rhetorical question: ‘Are the Indian Mussalmans bound by their Religion to rebel against the Queen?’ It was fiercely debated in the newspapers and a number of leading figures went into print on the subject, most notably the eminent civil servant, statistician and historian Sir William Hunter, who followed Lord Mayo with a polemic entitled The Indian Musulmans in which he inveighed against the Wahhabis, but also argued that by doing away with Muslim laws and imposing their own the British Government in India had turned India into the very domain of enmity that the Wahhabis had declared it to be, thus making it incumbent on every Muslim in India to fight against the British as a religious duty.
Where the authorities led, public opinion followed. British India’s first unofficial poet laureate was Alfred Lyall, Commissioner of Berar in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and later Foreign Secretary. A number of Lyall’s published verses take as their subject Muslims who hark back nostalgically to the years of Muslim glory and who conceal their hatred of the British. One of the earliest is ‘A Sermon in Lower Bengal’, written in 1864 in the wake of the first Wahhabi trial. It tells of a mullah from Swat named ‘Hajee Mahomed Ghazee oorf Moojahid-ood-deen Wahabee’ who addresses a secret assembly in the Bengal countryside and calls for volunteers to reclaim the empire they have lost. His audience is moved, but no one steps forward to answer his call and he leaves in disgust:
Two decades later Lyall yielded his laurels to a younger poet whose collection of Departmental Ditties, published in 1887, gave notice that a new laureate had appeared on the Indian scene. Rudyard Kipling’s three years as assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore taught him to regard Muslims as strong men worthy of respect but never to be trusted. In his early short story On the City Wall the narrator is tricked into aiding the escape of a political prisoner held in Lahore Fort. When he asks who this elderly prisoner might be he is told: ‘“He fought you in 1836, when he was a warrior youth, refought you in ’57, and he tried to fight you in ’71 but you had learned the trick of blowing men from guns too well. Now he is old; but he would fight you if he could.” “Is he a Wahhabi, then?”’ asks the narrator. More intriguingly, Kipling also wrote a strangely ambivalent scrap of verse, entitled ‘From the Masjid-Al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed (Wahhabi)’, published many years after he left India in his collection of short stories Traffics and Discoveries. The narrator of the poem observes a Wahhabi convict in a chain-gang and is so impressed by his demeanour that he questions him about his ‘red Yesterday’. But as he listens to the convict’s tale the narrator finds himself transfixed by his ‘miraculous weaving’. The poem closes with the lines:
Much heart-searching about loyalties also took place in the Muslim community. The question of where a Muslim’s first duty lay was hotly debated in the vernacular newspapers and in the mosques. Convocations of Sunni muftis and other jurists met in Calcutta and Delhi, and after much agonising produced fatwas pronouncing on whether India under the British was a dar ul-harb or a dar ul-Islam. In Calcutta they declared British India to be a domain of Faith, wherein religious rebellion was unlawful, whereas in Delhi they found the country to be a domain of enmity – but went on to state that rebellion against the British Government was nevertheless uncalled-for. At the same time there remained many ordinary Sunni and Shia Muslims who, for all their misgivings about Wahhabi dogma, saw the Wahhabi trials as victimisation of fellow-Muslims and part of a general pattern of increasing discrimination against Muslims. A number of historians from the Indian sub-continent have subsequently taken this line, citing as evidence the decline in the numbers of Muslims in government employment from this time onwards. The sad reality is that this decline was part of a pattern of withdrawal from public life, as the greater part of India’s Sunni Muslim community began a slow retreat into the past.
Prior to British rule the Muslim community in India had always looked for political leadership to a Muslim aristocracy, headed by the Mughal emperor in Delhi who had ruled India through a number of regional viceroys. As Mughal power waned these governors had established themselves as local rulers, as either Muslim nawabs or Hindu or Sikh maharajas, each supported by a landowning nobility. By degrees the British Government in India replaced or weakened these several tiers of political leadership with a modern administration which had little room for feudal or religious loyalties. The events of 1857 speeded up this transfer of power. The old emperor of Delhi was sent into exile in Burma, the Nawab of Tonk was similarly exiled to Benares, while many of the landowning nobles of Oude and Bihar had their great estates confiscated. At the same time the British set up a number of schools, such as Edwardes College in Peshawar and Aitchison College in Lahore, where sons of the former governing aristocracy could be educated along British lines, effectively isolating them from those whom they traditionally represented.
This restructuring further divided the Muslim community in India. A significant minority took the view that Muslims should embrace modern learning on the Western template and work for the advancement of their religion and community within the power structure of the British Raj until such time as they were ready to stand alone. Remarkably, their standard-bearer was one of the Naqshbandi radicals who had studied in Delhi under Shah Muhammad Ishaq in the 1840s and Sayyid Nazir Husain in the 1850s: the Mughal aristocrat SYAD AHMAD KHAN, founder of the Alighar movement and of the university of that name. Although he was at the same time a fierce critic of many aspects of British rule, he and his supporters found themselves increasingly isolated and abused as the greater part of their co-religionists turned their backs on progress.
Heading this great leap backward – and directing the attack on Syad Ahmad Khan and his progressives – were two groups of mullahs who shared exactly the same background as Syad Ahmad Khan: they too were Naqshbandis educated in the tradition of Shah Waliullah by Shah Muhammad Ishaq and Sayyid Nazir Husain in Delhi in the years leading up to the 1857 Mutiny.
The more overtly extreme of these two groups of mullahs was led by Sayyid Nazir Husain himself, the same man who had led the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’ in 1857 and who in 1868 had been arrested by the British authorities on suspicion of being the Wahhabis’ chief in Delhi. Together with two influential fellow alumni of the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya – Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan of Bhopal and Maulvi Muhammad Husain Batalvi – he founded within a year or two of his release a politico-religious organisation known as Jamaat Ahl-i-Hadith, The Party of the People of the Hadith. Its leaders made no secret of their ambition to ‘convert India into an abode of Islam through jihad’. Yet they also made it plain to their followers that this was not the time for jihad. ‘Bretheren,’ wrote Muhammad Husain Batalvi, ‘the age of the sword is no more. Now instead of the sword it is necessary to wield the pen. How can the sword come into the hands of the Muslims when they have no hands? They have no national identity.’