Most unwisely, Abdul Haq went out of his way to call on the father of two students who had skipped college in Lahore to join Obaidullah’s army of volunteers. This man – named in reports simply as ‘the Khan Bahadur’ – happened to be a highly respected figure in Multan and a great supporter of the British. When he learned from Abdul Haq what his two sons were doing in Kabul he had him beaten until he revealed the full story, including the fact that he was the bearer of an important letter sewn inside a coat. The coat was produced and cut open to reveal the three silk letters. Being unable to read Persian, the Khan Bahadur took the letters to the Commissioner of Peshawar – who after one look immediately passed them on to the Government of India’s Criminal Intelligence Department.
The inevitable outcome was the arrest in August 1915 of no fewer than 222 clerics from all over northern India, in what came to be known as the Silk Letter Conspiracy Case. A large proportion of these arrestees were Deobandi alumni. To further compound the disaster, Sheykh Huseyn of the Hijaz was then leaned on by the British Government to detain Mahmood ul-Hasan and five senior members of his entourage. They were duly brought to trial in Cairo in 1917, found guilty of sedition, and each sentenced to several years’ imprisonment in Malta. Although Obaidullah and other members of his organisation in Kabul remained free, they now found themselves high on the Indian Police Special Branch’s ‘most wanted’ list and unable to return to their homeland.
The traitorous activities of Mahmood ul-Hasan and his associates were publicly repudiated by the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband authorities, who were able to show the British Government in India that they had severed all links with his organisation long before the war. From this time onwards the Deoband movement’s political ambitions were concentrated on a new politico-religious party known as Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Hind (JUH), the Party of Clerics of Hindustan, formed in October 1920. Mahmood ul-Hasan was freed in time to attend the JUH’s inauguration. ‘I gave a lot of thought to the causes of the sorry state of this ummah [the world community of Islam] while in prison in Malta,’ he declared. ‘Our problems are caused by two factors: abandoning the Quran and our in-fighting.’ He died a year later, aged seventy, his health broken by his three and a half years’ imprisonment.
India’s contribution to the British war effort between 1914 and 1918 was unstinting. More than eight hundred thousand Indian troops fought as volunteers, and expectations were high that India would be rewarded with dominion status. Instead, the British Government in India responded by bringing in the repressive Rowlatt Acts, introduced to deal with subversion of the sort exemplified by the Silk Letter Conspiracy. For many loyal subjects of the British Raj this was a turning point. Large numbers of middle-class Indians now gave their support to the Congress Party, as did the JUH. Calls for civil disobedience led to violent disturbances in the Punjab, to which the authorities reacted with greater violence, culminating in the Amritsar Massacre. Meanwhile, in Europe the Paris Conference of January 1919 had begun the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, embodiment of all the past achievements of Islam. A month later Afghanistan’s cautious neutrality ended with the murder of Amir Habibullah while out hunting. Misreading the mood in India, his more combative son AMIR AMANULLAH launched a half-hearted invasion down the Khyber. The outcome was the short, sharp Third Afghan War, lasting no more than twenty-nine days and leaving the new Amir badly bruised.
But there were some Sunni Muslims in India who saw Amir Amanullah as the new champion of Islam. What became known as the Hijrat Movement swept like a summer whirlwind through the Punjab, leading thousands of Muslims to abandon jobs and homes and decamp with little more than what they stood up in to the dar ul-Islam of Afghanistan. Among them was an earnest young man in his twenties named Sayyid Abulala MAWDUDI, whose ancestors had entered India as Sufi scholars and had thereafter served first the Mughals and then the Nizams of Hyderabad. Forced to abandon his education by the death of his father, as an adolescent Mawdudi had moved to Delhi where he became an activist for the Khalifat Movement, which sought to restore the Turkish sultanate. Caught up in the fervour of the moment, he joined the Hijratis and travelled with them up the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. Here they very quickly discovered they were not wanted. The Amir of Afghanistan had lost his enthusiasm for armed conflict, and was not prepared to support them. After some months the civil authorities in Peshawar found themselves in the curious position of having to repatriate several thousand destitute and disillusioned ex-mujahedeen.
With the collapse of the Khalifat Movement in the early 1920s many Muslim intellectuals began to look for new Muslim identities through the development of their own Islamic nation states, among them the young Mawdudi, who returned to Delhi and there became a student at the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband’s Fatihpuri Madrassah, something he never acknowledged in later years. For a time he was closely involved with the Deobandi JUH political movement, now led by Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, Mahmood ul-Hasan’s successor as rector of Dar-ul-Ulum Deoband. Under Madani’s leadership the JUH continued to support Congress and resisted the calls of the Muslim League for a separate Muslim state in the Indian sub-continent. The JUH also established links with Wahhabi Arabia. In 1921 it sent a delegation of mullahs to Nejd and thereafter continued to maintain ties with Ibn Saud and the aal as-Sheikh.
The JUH’s alliance with Congress led to two splinter groups breaking away to form new politico-religious parties. The first to do so was led by the Naqshbandi Sufi Maulana Muhammad Ilyar, whose party, Tablighi Jamiat (Preaching Party), followed the teachings of Shah Waliullah but sought to apply them in largely apolitical terms. The second was led by Mawdudi, who began to promote a new political agenda based on his belief that, to survive in the modern world, Islam had to present itself as a viable political and social alternative to both Western capitalism and socialism. Islam, he believed, had to confront non-Islam head on, and out of that ‘Islamic revolution’ would emerge the modern Islamic state purged of all accretions, a ‘democratic caliphate’ whose citizens would embrace sharia willingly, even those aspects of sharia that were undemocratic. He put together an entirely new political platform based on Islamic revival and separatism, taking on board Deoband’s interpretative reading of Islam but setting aside its sectarian theology in favour of salvation through political action and jihad. These views became hugely influential among Muslim intellectuals in setting a new agenda for Islamic revival. In 1939 Mawdudi moved to Lahore, where two years later he and a number of like-minded individuals founded the Jamiat-i-Islami (JI), the Party of Islamists, in direct opposition to the then pro-Congress JUH.
Throughout the period leading up to Independence in 1947, as India became increasingly secularised and while Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the modernising leader of the Muslim League, urged Muslims to resist what he termed the ‘reactionary’ calls of ‘the undesirable element of Moulvis and Maulanas’, the JI, JUH, Tablighi Jamiat and other political parties led by clerics kept the banner of Islamic revival flying in the Sunni community. As demands grew for a separate Muslim nation-state, a number of younger Deobandis in the JUH broke with their leader to reconstitute themselves as the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI), Party of Scholars of Islam, formed in 1945 under the leadership of two Deobandi mullahs, Maulana Shabbar Ahmad Othmani and Maulana MUFTI MAHMUD. The JUI’s declared aim was shape the new nation of Pakistan into a truly Muslim state, with an Islamic constitution in conformity with the Quran and sharia – a vision it shared with the JI, Tablighi Jamiat, and a number of smaller ulema-led political parties.