Yet having secured absolute power within his borders the Amir found himself constantly humiliated by the British, particularly in the case of their partition of the Pathan tribal lands as formalised in November 1893 in the creation of the Durand Line. In that same year the Amir complained to the Viceroy that ‘in your cutting away from me these frontier tribes, who are people of my nationality and my religion, you are injuring my prestige in the eyes of my subjects, and will make me weak, and my weakness is injurious to your government.’ Fearful that the British were planning a new round of forward policy-making, Abdur Rahman then embarked on a propaganda campaign aimed at securing the loyalties of the trans-border Pathans. He declared himself Zia-ul-Millat wa-ud-Deen (Light of Union and Faith), and sent out to every mullah on the frontier a document entitled Taqwim-ud-Deen (The Rightness of Faith). This purported to be a book of religious doctrine, but was devoted almost entirely to the promotion of jihad as a religious duty.
Abdur Rahman’s actions were bound up with his desire to be seen by the wider Muslim world as a religious leader, taking as his model the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid. The first stirrings of pan-Islamic revivalism were now beginning to be felt in several quarters of the Muslim world, accompanied by a growing awareness among Muslim intellectuals that Islam required a new model if it was to survive the advance of Western imperialism. Among the first to articulate this new thinking was that mystery man of Islamic modernism, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, popularly known as ‘the Afghan’. Al-Afghani had first appeared on the Indian scene just before the Sepoy Mutiny, as a teenage talib. Whether he took up arms against the British is debatable, but what he saw in India convinced him that Britain was Islam’s greatest enemy and had to be opposed. In 1866 he was to be found in Afghanistan working as the chief counsellor of a warlord of Kandahar. Expelled by Abdur Rahman, he reappeared in India to become a vociferous opponent of the moderniser Syad Ahmad Khan of Alighar and his philosophy of revival through co-operation. However, ‘the Afghan’ also rejected the Deoband philosophy, arguing that true Islamic revival could only be accomplished by Muslims uniting and modernising. Although his last years were spent under house arrest in Turkey, his promotion of pan-Islamism in the last decades of the nineteenth century inspired radicals throughout the Muslim world, leading in the 1920s to the formation of two anti-imperialist political movements: in Egypt the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood; and in India Jamaat-i-Islami, the Party of Islam.
This burgeoning pan-Islamic revivalism went hand in hand with a growing belief among Muslims worldwide that momentous times were fast approaching as the Christian millennium drew near: that centuries of Christian advances were at an end and that Islam was now in the ascendant. In North Africa this millenarianism found expression in the Mahdiyyah movement, led by the Sudanese mystic Muhammad Ahmad, who in 1881 proclaimed himself the Mahdi. Like Al-Wahhab and Syed Ahmad before him, Muhammad Ahmad set out to revive the golden age of Islam by raising an army of the faithful and declaring jihad on an infidel regime – in this instance, the Egyptian Government. The death of General Gordon in Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi’s followers in 1885 provided an enormous fillip to the Mahdi’s cause, while the subsequent failure of the British to overthrow the dervish armies of the Mahdi’s appointed caliph, Abdullah, was widely interpreted as a sign that Christian power was on the wane. In India traditional allegiances were further weakened as the increasingly eager faithful turned away from their secular leaders to listen to the mullahs who preached that the appointed time was nigh. And nowhere was this mood of expectation more charged than among the Afghan–Pathan tribes of the North-West Frontier. In the summer of 1895 an engineer named Frank Martin entered Afghanistan to take up a position as chief engineer to Amir Abdur Rahman. Like Herbert Edwardes and others before him, Martin was struck by the influence of the mullahs over the ordinary people – but what was much more disconcerting was their hatred of non-Muslims:
The sight of a kafar, and all who are not Mussulman are infidels, is so obnoxious that they spit in the street, and to kill one of them is quite a meritorious action in their eyes… They argue that the enemy of their religion is the enemy of God and therefore a loathsome thing, and that the Koran commands them to kill all such, and promises that if they themselves are killed in doing so, they shall go straight to Paradise, and that a man who fails to kill a Kafar, but suffers death himself in the attempt, has only a little less rank in heaven than the one who succeeds.
This hostility he blamed on the mullahs and the new licence given them by their amir and imam, Abdur Rahman: ‘Very few, with the exception of the moullahs, can read the Koran, and the latter apparently give very free translations when it suits their purpose; such, for instance, as that of killing unbelievers, on which is built up the principle of Jihad, holy war, and which the Amir has had printed in pamphlet form and distributed throughout the country of late.’
In the mid-1890s every Pathan tribe on the North-West Frontier seemed quite suddenly to acquire its own charismatic religious leader, a human talisman who had it in his power to sway his flock to his purpose. These charismatics included the Hadda Mullah of the Mohmands, Mullah Powindah of the Mahsuds, Said Akbar of the Akakhel Afridis, Indrej of Bazar, the Manki Mullah, the Palam Mullah – and, above all, the Sadullah Mullah of Swat.
In the spring of 1897 an envoy of Sultan Abdul Hamid arrived in Kabul to encourage the Amir to join his pan-Islamic revival. This led Amir Abdur Rahman to summon all the leading ulema of the Pathans to a theological conference in Kabul. Whatever the Amir may have intended, these delegates left Kabul believing that the British Empire was on the point of collapse and that the time had come to strike a mighty blow for Islam. They returned to their constituencies convinced that the sultan had just won a great victory against the Christians in Greece, that the Turks had captured the Suez Canal and Aden, and that Germany and Russia had joined them in a war against Britain. The mood among the frontier tribes at this time was described by Winston Churchill as ‘a vast but silent agitation… Messengers passed to and fro among the tribes. Whispers of war, a holy war, were breathed to a race intensely passionate and fanatical. The tribes were taught to expect prodigious events. A great day for their race and faith was at hand.’
The British authorities in Peshawar and Lahore saw this sudden agitation as Kabul-inspired, and assumed it would blow over. They entirely underestimated the potency of the banner of jihad first planted on the Frontier by Syed Ahmad seventy years earlier.
It is a remarkable testimony to the legacy of Ambeyla that despite all the information brought to light in the Wahhabi trials, the Hindustani Fanatics had been suffered to remain on the Frontier. And it is all the more remarkable when one considers that their leader and amir was Maulvi Abdullah Ali, the same man who had taken over command of the Hindustani Fanatics almost forty years earlier and had subsequently led them through the Ambeyla campaign.