Although determined to avoid direct conflict with the Government of India, the leaders of the Party of the People of the Hadith lost no opportunity to vent their religious spleen on co-religionists and infidels alike in as close an approximation to the ways of Al-Wahhab and his followers as they could manage within the law, even to the extent of employing physical violence against mosques and shrines. As a result, Ahl-i-Hadith preachers were banned from most mosques and denounced as Wahhabis. Fatwas were issued condemning all who followed them as ‘disbelievers and apostates’. Eventually, in 1885, the Ahl-i-Hadith leadership published a book denying any links with Wahhabism and calling for the Government of India to cease employing that term in relation to themselves. Not wishing to give religious offence, the Government complied and ordered the terms ‘Wahhabi’ and ‘Wahhabism’ to be avoided henceforward in all its official correspondence. However, the Islamic community in India knew no such qualms, and to this day Ahl-i-Hadith continues to be described – with good reason – as Wahhabi in its origins and teachings. Its unremitting anti-polytheist, anti-innovation, anti-Shia and anti-Christian message continues to attract a hard core of fundamentalist Sunnis.
The second group of Delhi alumni adopted a less confrontational approach and benefited accordingly. Their leaders were Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmed, two of the four-man group of jihadis that had left Delhi in the summer of 1857 to create their own dar ul-Islam at Thana Bhawan: Muhammad Qasim had acted as the group’s military commander and may well have had a hand in the massacre in Shamlee mosque; Rashid Ahmed had presided over the imposition of sharia as the group’s judge.
In May 1866, one year after the ending of the Patna Trial, these two mullahs set up their own madrassah at Deoband, a small town seventy-five miles north of Delhi and within a day’s march of their earlier stamping-ground at Thana Bhawan. Initially the school had one teacher, Mullah Mahmood Deobandi, and one student, fifteen-year-old MAHMOOD UL-HASAN, and its premises consisted of nothing more than the courtyard beside an ancient mosque.
The main guiding force behind what became the Deobandi movement was Muhammad Qasim, who made no bones about his reason for setting up Deoband Madrassah – to preserve Islam in the face of British oppression. ‘The English’, he wrote, ‘have perpetrated boundless acts of tyranny against the Muslims for their fault, if at all it was a fault, of the uprising of 1857 and their relentless endeavour for the independence of this country thereafter. They have left no stone unturned to plunder and obliterate the Islamic arts and science, Muslim culture and civilization.’
Initially known as the ‘Arab Madrassah’, Deoband Madrassah was organised on very different lines from the usual madrassahs in India, which up to this time were run fairly informally, depending very much on the authority of the school’s senior mullah. Muhammad Qasim had learned at first hand how the British-backed Delhi College had been set up and he organised Deoband on a British model, with a rector, a vice-chancellor, a dean of studies and instructors, a set curriculum and a time-table. Yet the ethos was entirely that of the seminary: a strict discipline was maintained, the students lived simply and frugally, English was prohibited, Urdu provided the lingua franca, and all students began their studies by learning the Quran by heart in the original Arabic. All classes thereafter were focused on Quranic studies, taught by mullahs who were specialists in the Hadith and who placed great emphasis on the doctrine of oneness, in accordance with the teachings of Shah Waliullah of Delhi as passed down through his descendants Shah Abdul Aziz and Shah Muhammad Ishaq. Elements of Naqshbandi Sufism were maintained, especially those which elevated the authority of the teacher and allowed favoured students to be initiated into the intense master–disciple relationship felt to be in imitation of the close bonds that had existed between the Prophet and his Companions.
At the same time, the school promoted an uncompromising, puritanical and exclusive fundamentalism no less restrictive than Wahhabism. Deobandism denounced the worship of saints, the adorning of tombs, and such activities as music and dancing; it waged a ceaseless war of words against Shias, Hindus and Christian missionaries; it distanced itself from much that was progressive in Indian society, shunning the British law-courts as far as possible without breaking the law; it retained militant jihad as a central pillar of faith, but focused this jihad on the promotion of Islamic revival and identity through the principle of the immutability of sharia, the oneness of God and the overarching, guiding authority of the ulema.
When denounced as Wahhabis, as happened frequently, the Deobandis declared themselves to be pillars of Hanafi orthodoxy. Their official line on Wahhabism was probably best represented by a statement contained in a fatwa put out by Rashid Ahmed which stated that Al-Wahhab ‘held excellent beliefs but his creed was Hanbali. Although he was of rather harsh temperament he and his followers are good people.’ This did not prevent three hundred mainstream ulema putting out a fatwa forbidding Sunnis to have any dealings with Deoband Madrassah. ‘The Deobandis,’ read part of this fatwa, ‘because of their contempt and insult in their acts of worship towards the saints, prophets and even the Holy Prophet Muhammad and the very Person of God himself, are very definitely apostates and infidels. Their apostasy and heresy is of the worst kind, so that anyone who doubts their apostasy and heresy even slightly is an apostate and infidel. Muslims should be very cautious of them and stay away from them, let alone pray behind them.’
Fundamentalist to the core in its theology, Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi’s Deoband was also boldly innovative, particularly in making Islamic studies accessible to the masses. The school very deliberately set out to draw its students from the peasantry, the dispossessed and the uneducated, and refused to accept funding from Government or from wealthy benefactors, insisting that it would accept only religious donations. Students as young as five were accepted and often remained there until adulthood, so that many came to identify with the madrassah as their main home and with their teacher as a surrogate parent. This was in striking contrast to earlier models, where taliban often moved from one mullah to another picking up learning wherever they could, often on a haphazard basis. The consequence was a closed, introverted, tight-knit society of young males approaching or in the throes of puberty, taught to regard their sexuality as innately sinful and women as weak creatures incapable of self-control and easily tempted, therefore best kept in subjection. Homosexuality was recognised to be as great a sin as adultery, yet at the same time intense friendships were accepted as the norm, with all that pent-up sexuality and feeling being channelled into mystical experience and fervid devotion towards God – and towards his regents on earth.
While always proclaiming itself a bastion of conservatism, Deoband nevertheless exploited modern technology, making good use of the print medium to put out its message, especially in the dissemination of fatwas on every issue brought before its muftis. Officially the Deoband muftis rejected ijtihad, the use of independent reasoning in interpreting a matter of sharia. But they also took the line that on every issue there was an outer injunction to be taken literally and an inner meaning open to informed interpretation: this was nothing less than ijtihad by the back door. So proficient did Deoband become in its provision of religious judgements on request that it more or less cornered the market, issuing so many thousands of highly conservative fatwas every year that it came to be seen in India as the last word on all matters pertaining to sharia and how a good Muslim should behave. One of the earliest of these fatwas declared the activities of the moderniser Syad Ahmad Khan of Alighar to be un-Islamic, and banned all Muslims from joining his Patriotic Association.