By such populist means Deoband Madrassah gained the support of the masses, leading the way among the several revivalist schools that came into being at this time in providing young Muslims with a new sense of identity and an alternative to the British model. Deoband became known throughout India as the place where boys could safely be initiated into the old religion of their forefathers. In 1879 the institution assumed the additional name of Dar ul-Ulum, the Abode of Islamic Learning. By then it was already well on the way to becoming renowned throughout the Islamic world as a centre of religious study second only to the university attached to the great mosque of Al-Aqsa in Cairo.
By the end of the nineteenth century Dar ul-Ulum Deoband had founded more than two dozen allied madrassahs in northern India. At the same time the school produced an ever-expanding cadre of graduates who formed a new class of reformist ulema not unlike the Jesuits of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in their impact: a distinctive, politicised leadership of religious teachers with professional qualifications in the form of degrees who could compete to advantage against all others, outshine critics in public debates, take the lead in public prayers and, above all, disseminate the teachings of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband school in their own madrassahs.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century these teachings were dignified with the term salafi, or ‘following the forefathers’, based on the ideal of emulating the early fathers as a basis for Islamic renewal first developed by the medieval Hanbali jurist of Damascus, Ibn Taymiyya, and those who followed them became known as salafiyya – ‘followers of the forefathers’. Both words were associated with the Prophet’s Companions and the early scholars of Islam.
The impact of Dar ul-Ulum Deoband and its missionaries on central and south Asian Islam was immense. They gave new authority to the ulema and undermined the traditional authority of secular leaders. They gave new impetus to the old ideals: that a true Muslim’s first duty was to his religion; that his only country was the world community of Islam; and that he had an obligation to defend Islam wherever it was under attack. The end result was a seismic shift in the Sunni Islam of South Asia, which became increasingly conservative and introverted, less tolerant, and far more inclined to look for political leadership to the madrassah and the madrassah-trained political leader committed to the cause of leading the umma back to the true path. The consequences were profound.
9
The Frontier Ablaze
One is inclined to sum up the causes of the outbreak under three heads, the first of which is fanaticism, the second, fanaticism, and the third, fanaticism… Wherever Islam is the creed there will be found disciples prepared to preach its cause and to fire the undercurrent of feeling which forms part of this weird belief. All that such preachers ask is that a crisis may arrive which shall stir the popular feeling out of the narrow channels of trade, commerce and homeside agriculture. And in 1897, this crisis came… the whole business may be claimed to be the successful attempt of the Mullahs to seize a moment of unrest and work upon the fanaticism of the tribesmen.
‘Who or why, or which or what, is the Akond of Swat?’ wrote the poet Edward Lear in his Nonsense Songs in 1871, reflecting the Western world’s general ignorance of Indian affairs at this time. To Madame Blavatsky, founding mistress of the Theosophical Society, the Akhund was nothing less than an evil genius. In 1878 she declared Abdul Ghaffur to be ‘the founder and chief of nearly every secret society worth speaking of among the Mussulmans, and the dominant spirit in all the rest. His apparent antagonism to the Wahabees was but a mask, and the murderous hand that struck Lord Mayo was certainly guided by the old Abdul.’ But Madame Blavatsky was, as usual, wide of the mark.
Despite the Akhund’s decisive intervention against them at Ambeyla in 1863, the British authorities in Peshawar recognised him as a positive influence. ‘His life’, wrote a British official of the Akhund,
seems to have been one of devotion, humility, abstinence and chastity; the doctrines he taught were as tolerant and liberal as those of his Wahhabi opponents were intolerant and puritanical. Judged by the standard applied to other religious leaders, he used his influence, according to his lights, for good, supporting peace and morality, discouraging feuds, restraining the people from raiding and offences against their neighbours.
But with Abdul Ghaffur’s death in 1877 the cohesion he had brought to Swat, Buner and beyond began to unravel. His death coincided with what a distinguished historian of Anglo-Afghan relations, Sir Kerr Fraser-Tytler, has called ‘the high water mark of British forward policy’ – the theory that India was best served by extending British influence deep into Afghanistan in order to prevent the Russians from doing the same. After two decades of ‘masterly inactivity’ on the part of Lawrence, Mayo and other viceroys, the pendulum swung the other way with the arrival in India of the new Viceroy, the mercurial Lord Lytton.
In September 1878, in response to the reception of Russian envoys in Kabul by Sher Ali, the Amir of Kabul, Lytton despatched a mission up the Khyber to bring the Amir to his political senses. It was led by that old frontier war-horse Neville Chamberlain, now a major-general and a KCB, and included in his party as interpreter was another frontier veteran, Surgeon-Major Henry Bellew. Half-way up the pass, beneath the hill fort of Ali Masjid, the party was met by the Afghans and told that if they proceeded any further their lives would be forfeit. This snub was all Lord Lytton required to order the invasion of Afghanistan, an action that received the reluctant backing of the British Prime Minister.
Three armies duly entered Afghanistan by three different routes (one fighting its way through the same mountain region, the Tora Bora, where in December 2001 slipshod planning allowed Osama bin Laden and many of his ‘Arabs’ to slip through the US Special Forces net into Pakistan). The Amir was forced to flee into exile and a rival, Yakub Khan, was set on the throne of Kabul in his place. The usual pattern of catastrophe, retreat and retribution followed: the killing of the British Resident along with his Guides escort at Kabul; a military disaster at Maiwand, followed by a triumphant march and victory at Kandahar; the collapse of Lytton’s forward policy and the installation of a much less pliable amir in Kabul. The hero of the hour was the commander of the Kabul Field Force, Fred ‘Bobs’ Roberts, now a major-general, who nevertheless left Afghanistan declaring that ‘the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us’.
The real victor of the Second Afghan War was the new Amir of Afghanistan, ABDUR RAHMAN, whose claim to rule with the proverbial rod of iron was no boast. Within the space of twenty years he forged a nation out of a land of semi-autonomous provinces and warring fiefdoms, crushing local rebellions with ruthless cruelty, indulging in mass executions and deportations. To strengthen his authority over the Afghans still further Amir Abdur Rahman declared himself imam, just as Emir Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud had in Nejd a century earlier. Indeed, so confident was Abdur Rahman of his own religious authority that he further claimed for himself the right to interpret sharia as a mujtahid. Taking the view that the existence of kaffirs on his territory was an affront to Islam, he went on to declare jihad on the Shia Hazaras in the provinces of Wardak and Bamian, and on the genuinely heathen Kalash of Kafiristan. To reduce the power of the troublesome Ghilzai Pathans, who occupied a swathe of territory between Kabul and Kandahar, he transported large numbers into Hazara country as part of his campaign to reduce the Shias there. At the same time, Amir Abdur Rahman brooked no nonsense from the ulema: when an influential mullah of Kandahar dared to accuse the Amir of infidelity, he had him dragged from the mosque where he had sought sanctuary under the famous cloak of the Prophet, and killed him with his own hands.