Ideological founts that sustain and inspire Indian Mujahideen, SIMI

The jihadi outfits have 'purist link'

By Rajeev Deshpande,TNN

22 Sep 2008

NEW DELHI: The references in Indian Mujahideen's Delhi blasts email, and by its operatives held in connection with Friday's Batla House shootout, to two "original" 18th century martyrs opens a revealing window into the ideological founts that sustain and inspire the jihadi outfit.

The name Indian Mujahideen is apparently drawn from a book on a "jihad" waged by two Islamic warriors in north-west India around 1831 in Balakot, now Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and which suited the terror mission devised by the banned Students Islamic Movement of India.

In its new garb, a SIMI faction found IM perfectly conveyed "home grown" militancy. The harkening to the two shaheeds — Sayeed Ahmad and Shah Ismail — marks a connection of a Delhi-based madrassa that attracted notice in the late 17th century under Shah Abdur Rahim as Madrassa Rahimiya. The school came up as part of a protest against the anti-orthodox views and policies of Akbar and was a centre of Hanafi learning.

The madrassa really came into its own under Rahim's son Shah Waliullah who is variously regarded as "reformer" or "hardliner". This apparent contradiction stems from his bid to rid Islam of "impurities" and "false beliefs" that had crept in. His views reflected the Muslim clergy's disquiet and anger but he gave it a sharper purpose, advocating "reform" of Islamic practices in line with those of early Muslims in Arabia.

Waliullah took a stringent view of Sharia and was pessimistic about the faith of converts. He advocated the need for persuasion to explain religion's superiority and scholars such as Sayyid Athar Rizvi and K S Durrany point to his injunctions against "polytheists and hypocrites" and opposition to influences of pre-Islamic Arabia and Greek philosophy in Islam.

He wrote in his 'Hujjat Allah al-Baligha' that religious rules were to be obeyed unquestioningly and emphasised aspects of Quran that stress "establishing the religion". He also saw Haridwar as a centre of evil that promoted polytheism and agreed with the tradition that held religious texts were not open to any reinterpretation.

It is this "purist" and two of his followers — Sayeed Ahmed and Shah Ismail — who are IM-SIMI's role models. The early "mujahids" were so upset by what they saw as un-Islamic accretions like local customs and sufic deviations that they left for what is today Pakistan's north-west frontier region and Kashmir to wage a "jihad" against the Sikh kingdom. The project was ill-conceived and both died.

Shah Ismail was a grandson of Waliullah and despite his lack of success, Waliullah's followers were active in 1857 and two of them, Maulana Qasim Nanatawi and Rashid Gangohi, are seen to be founders of the Dar-ul-uloom at Deoband. The objectives behind the Deoband school were underlined by Maulana Mahmood Hasan (1850-1920) who studied there and he wrote, "Was it founded just for education? Its main function was to avenge the defeat of 1857."

The task was to give a "mujahid enterprise" a cover of religious learning, fearing British retribution. But the goals of Waliullah remained Deoband's guiding principles. At all times, it strove to defend its tenets against what a leading light described as ploys by critics "to invent new arguments based on modern philosophy". It is this theological "inheritance" that led the IM-SIMI to believe its "war" against India and "non-believers" is just and fair. It allowed its leaders to recruit members by presenting them with a "divine" mission and using all manner of grievances — real and imagined, ranging from riots to conspiracies to keep minorities oppressed — to present their task as setting right a wrong.

While communal clashes swell extremist recruits, belief in an exclusivist philosophy helps preclude doubts and allows jihadi groups to identify with the global movement of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden as was apparently the case with IM operative Bashir aka Atiq, seen as the brain behind the Delhi bombings. It also drives a deep hatred of innocent victims who are seen as undeserving of compassion.

The harder position on religious issues, seen to cover both the temporal and spiritual, saw belief as not merely a metaphysical concept. It is in the nature of a contract by which man barters his life in exchange for certainty of rewards in the hereafter.

Deoband has seen some churn recently with the seminary issuing a "declaration" against terrorism — not a fatwa — and some clerics arguing against the "Pakistan example". Waliullah's teachings, as the IM-SIMI have shown, are still spawning violence more than two hundred years after his passing. Until the theological repudiation of violence does not get louder, it remains a beacon for those who use the jihad doctrine as a vehicle for violence.

Source: The Times of India, New Delhi

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