The Ascent of Taliban in Afghanistan Is a Culmination of Deobandism
Father
of Deobandism in India Shah Waliullah Studied Islam with Muhammad Bin Abdul
Wahhab in Hijaz
Main
Points:
1. Founders of Deoband
Movement were influenced by the Wahhabism originated in Najd, Saudi Arabia.
2. Taliban of Afghanistan are
the products of Deoband school of Islamic though
----
New Age Islam Staff Writer
24 November 2021
Kamran Bokhari’s article “The
Long Shadow of Deobandism in South Asia”
gives a detailed historical account of the birth and development of Deobandism
in the Indian subcontinent. The author traces the birth of Deobandism in the
ideology of Muhammad Bin Abdul Wahhab of Najd with whom the founder of the
Deobandi ideology Shah Waliullah Muhaddith Dehlawi studied the Quran, Hadith
and Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) in Hijaz. The founders of Darul Uloom Deoband,
Qasim Nanautavi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi were groomed by the Wahhabi school of
Islamic thought promoted by Shah Waliullah. The Deoband School of Islamic
thought believed from the beginning in armed revolution to establish an Islamic
state and therefore it declared jihad against the British government. After
being defeated by the British, the Deoband School adopted the strategy of
expanding its ideological base across the undivided India. Deobandism is
greatly influenced by the extremist ideas of Ibn Taymiyyah.The Darul Uloom
became the ideological centres of similar schools in the subcontinent. During
the freedom movement, they supported Gandhi’s Khilafat Movement and outdid the
rival Bareilvis. During the same time, Jamaat Islami emerged on the lines of
Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. This movement spread its influence among
the majority of Muslims as a puritanical Islamic movement that sought to purify
Islam of local un-Islamic impurities that had entered Islam. The leaders of
Deoband tried to create a Pan-Islamic presence and tried to topple the British
government of India with the help of the Muslim governments of the Islamic
world including of Afghanistan. However, the plan failed and the leaders of
Deoband were put in prison. During this
course, Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, Deoband’s political wing came into existence.
However, after the Partition, the movement was divided and its Pakistani
offshoot, Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam came into existence. This JUI later established
Darul Uloom Haqqania which promoted militant Deobandism. General Zia promoted
Deobandism in the country and during his tenure Deobandism expanded its
foothold.
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This
movement later gave birth to Taliban. Taliban was a militant outfit that did
not believe in the democratic process. In 2007, 13 Taliban factions of Pakistan
formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. It unleased attacks against government
installations and on non-Muslim minorities of Pakistan. Extremist religious
outfits affiliated to Deobandism had so great an influence on the governments
that the Imran Khan government had to compromise with them. The rise and the
growing power of Deobandism caused the contamination of the Bareilvi sect that
hitherto remained affiliated to the ideology of Sufism and had become violent.
Therefore, Deobandism has caused the rise of militant Islamism in the
sub-continent and thrust the Taliban on the pedestal of power in Afghanistan as
Wahhabism had thrust ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood to power in the Middle East.
The author Kamran Bokhari has very minutely studied the birth and emergence of
violent Deobandism in the sub-continent.
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The Long Shadow of Deobandism in South Asia
By Kamran Bokhari
November 23, 2021
I might have been 11 when I first heard the
word “Deobandi.” My family had just returned to Islamabad after eight years in
New York, where my father served as a mid-ranking official at Pakistan’s
mission to the United Nations. A year had passed since military ruler, Gen.
Zia-ul-Haq, began subjecting Pakistan to his despotic Islamisation agenda, and
I was being exposed to a lot more than my brain could process. My dad despised
Zia for two separate reasons. The first was obviously political. My father was
a democrat and a staunch supporter of ousted Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, who had been executed after Zia’s 1977 coup. The second was religious.
Our ancestors were from the Barelvi sect, which constituted the vast majority
of Pakistanis at the time and has been the historical rival of the Deobandis,
whom Zia had begun to capacitate to gain legitimacy for his regime. For the
most part a secular individual, my father had always been passionate about our
supposed ancestral lineage to medieval Sufi saints.
Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines
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Deobandis are Hanafi Sunni Muslims like
Barelvis, but for him they represented local variants of the extremist brand
known as Wahhabism, which originated in the Arabian Peninsula. And with Zia
empowering their mullahs, mosques and madrassas, he thought it was his duty to
protect his heritage, and I was given a crash course on the sectarian
landscape.
While most Islamists in the Arab/Muslim world
are more activists than religious scholars, in South Asia the largest Islamist
groups are led by traditional clerics and their students. And the Deobandi sect
has been in the forefront of South Asian Islamism, with the Taliban as its most
recent manifestation. The Deobandis’ influence, reach and relevance in a vast
and volatile region like South Asia is immense, yet they are little understood
in the West. Western scholarship and commentary tend to be more focused on the
movement’s counterparts in the Arab world, namely the Muslim Brotherhood and
Wahhabi Salafism.
Deobandism was propelled by ulema lamenting at
the loss of Muslim sovereignty in India. Different dynastic Muslim regimes had
ruled over various regions in the subcontinent since the late 10th and early
11th century. The ulema had been part of the South Asian Muslim political elite,
but their public role was always subject to a tug of war with the rulers and
evolved over time.
They
had a strong presence in the royal court from the time of the first Muslim
sultanistic dynasty in the subcontinent: the Turkic Ghaznavids (977-1170), who
broke off from the Persian Samanids (who themselves had declared their
independence from the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad). It was during this era
that the role of ulema began to change in that a great many of them from
Central Asia invested in proselytization and spiritual self-discipline. This
spiritual approach gained ground and distinguished itself from the legalistic
approach of the ulema. The former took on a social and grassroots role while
the latter continued to focus on directly influencing the sultan and, through
his sultanate, the realm at large. Behind both movements were ulema who, to
varying degrees, subscribed to Sufism. The difference was between those who
swung heavily toward scriptural scholarship and those who were open to
unorthodox ideas and practices in keeping with what they perceived as the need
to accommodate local customs and exigencies. This divide would remain contained
and the ulema would enjoy an elite status, which continued through the era of
the Ghaurids (1170-1215) — an Afghan dynasty.
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Essentially the ulema provided legitimacy for
the rulers and in exchange received largesse and influence in matters of
religion. It was under the Sultanate of Delhi (1206-1525) that the ulema were
appointed to several official state positions, largely within the judiciary. In
addition, a state law enforcement organ called Hisbah was created for ensuring
that society conformed to Shariah, which is the origin for the modern-day agencies
in some Muslim governments assigned the task of “promoting virtue and
preventing vice.” It was an arrangement that allowed the ruler to keep the
ulema in check and incapable of intruding into matters of statecraft.
After the Delhi Sultanate collapsed in 1526,
it was replaced by another Turkic dynasty, the Mughals, under whom the ulema
were marginalized. In his award-winning 2012 book, “The Millennial Sovereign:
Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam,” Azfar Moin, who heads the University
of Texas at Austin’s Religious Studies Department, explains that during the
reigns of Akbar (r. 1542-1605), his son Jehangir (r. 1605-27) and his grandson
Shah Jehan (r. 1628-58), the ulema would remain in political wilderness.
It was Akbar’s great-grandson, Aurangzeb
(r. 1658-1707), who not only restored the ulema to their pre-Akbar status but
also radically altered the empire’s structure by theocratising it. His
Islamisation agenda was a watershed moment, for it created the conditions in
which the ulema would eventually gain unprecedented ground. What enabled the
advance would be the fact that Aurangzeb was the last effective emperor,
leading to not just the collapse of the Mughal empire but also the ascendance
of British colonial rule. These two sequential developments would essentially
shape the conditions in which Deobandism, and later on, radical Islamism, would
emerge, as argued by Princeton scholar Muhammad Qasim Zaman explains in in his
seminal 2007 book “The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change.”
Over
the course of the next two centuries, an ulema tendency that stressed the study
of original Islamic sources and deemphasized the role of the rational sciences
gained strength. Started by Shah Abdur Rahim, a prominent religious scholar in
Aurangzeb’s royal court, this multigenerational movement was carried forward by
his progeny, which included Shah Waliullah Delhawi, Shah Abdul Aziz and
Muhammad Ishaq. This line of scholars represented the late Mughal era
puritanical movement.
Delhawi, who was its most influential
theoretician, was a contemporary of the founder of Wahhabism in the Arabian
Peninsula, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The two even studied at the same time in
Medina under some of the same teachers who exposed them to the ideas of the
early 14th century iconoclastic Levantine scholar Ibn Taymiyyah. Salafism and
Deobandism, the two most fundamentalist Muslim movements of the modern era,
simultaneously emerged in the Middle East and South Asia, respectively.
According to the conventional wisdom, the extremist views of Wahhabism spread
from the Middle East to South Asia. In reality, however, Delhawi and
Wahhabism’s founder drank from the same fountain in Medina — under an Indian
teacher by the name of Muhammad Hayyat al-Sindhi and his student Abu Tahir
Muhammad Ibn Ibrahim al-Kurani. A major legacy of Delhawi is Deobandism, which
arose as Wahhabism’s equivalent in South Asia in the late 19th century. Similar
circumstances led to the near simultaneous rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in
the Middle East and Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia in the early 20th century.
These connections go to show how the two regions often influence each other in
more significant ways than usually acknowledged.
For this clerical movement shaped by
Delhawi, Muslim political decay in India was a function of religious decline,
the result of the contamination of thought and practice with local polytheism
and alien philosophies. Insisting that the ulema be the vanguard of a Muslim
political restoration, these scholars established a tradition of issuing fatwas
to provide common people with sharia guidance for everyday issues. Until then,
such religious rulings had been largely the purview of the official ulema who
held positions in the state. This group was responsible for turning the
practice into a nongovernmental undertaking at a time when the state had become
almost nonexistent. By the time Ishaq died in the mid-19th century, he had
cultivated a group of followers including Mamluk Ali and Imdadullah Mujhajir
Makki, who were mentors of the two founders of Deobandism, Muhammad Qasim
Nanutavi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi.
Renowned American scholar of South Asian
Islam Barbara Metcalf in her 1982 book “Islamic Revival in British India:
Deoband, 1860-1900” explains how the emergence of Deobandism was rooted in both
ideological and practical concerns. It began when Nanutavi and Gangohi
established the Dar-ul-Uloom seminary in the town of Deoband, some 117 miles
north of Delhi, in 1866 — eight years after participating in a failed rebellion
against the British conquest of India.
These two founders of the movement had
already tried forming an Islamic statelet in a village called Thana Bhawan,
north of Delhi, from where they sought to wage jihad against the British, only
to be swiftly defeated. William Jackson explains in great detail, in his 2013
Syracuse University dissertation, the story of how the two formed a local
emirate — a micro-version of the one achieved by the Taliban. Their mentor
Makki became emir-ul-momineen, the Leader of the Faithful, and the two served
as his senior aides — Nanutavi as his military leader, and Gangohi served as
his judge. The tiny emirate was crushed by the British within a few months.
Imdadullah fled to Mecca, Gangohi was arrested and Nanautavi fled to Deoband, where
he sought refuge with relatives.
Realizing there was no way to beat the
British militarily, Nanautavi sought to adopt the empire’s educational model
and established a school attached to a mosque. His decision would be
instrumental in shaping the course of history, ultimately helping to lay the
groundwork for Indian independence, the creation of Pakistan and the rise of
modern jihadist groups including the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.
In Nanautavi’s point of view, European
Christians were now masters of the land long ruled by Indian Muslims. He thus
envisioned the seminary as an institution that would produce a Muslim vanguard
capable of restoring the role of the ulema in South Asian politics and even
raising it to unprecedented levels. His priority was religious revival and,
after Gangohi was released from prison, the madrassa at Deoband became the
nucleus for a large network of similar schools around the country.
After Nanautavi died in 1880, Mahmud
Hassan, the first student to enroll in Dar-ul-Uloom, led the Deobandi movement.
Hassan transformed the movement from focusing on a local concern to one with
national and international ambitions. Students from Russia, China, Central
Asia, Persia, Turkey, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula came to study at the
seminary under his leadership. By the end of the First World War, more than a
thousand graduates had fanned out across India. Their main task was to expunge
ideas and practices that had crept into Indian Muslim communities through
centuries of interactions with the Hindu majority.
This quickly antagonized the pre-dominant
Muslim tendency that was rooted in Sufi mysticism and South Asian Islamic
traditions. This movement started to organize in response to the Deobandis, in
another Indian town called Bareilly, and was led by Ahmed Raza Khan
(1856-1921). The Barelvis, as the rival movement came to be known, viewed the
Deobandis as a greater threat to their religion and country than British
colonial rule. This rivalry continues to define religious and political
dynamics till this day, across South Asia.
Although the Deobandis viewed India as
Dar-ul-Harb (Dominion of War), they initially did not try to mount another
armed insurrection. Instead, they opted for a mainstream approach to politics
that called for Hindu-Muslim unity. The Barelvis, meanwhile, took up
controversial positions that unintentionally helped the Deobandis gain support.
In particular, a fatwa by the Barelvi leader, Ahmed Raza Khan, in which he
ruled that the Ottoman Empire was not the true caliphate, angered many Indian
Muslims and drove them closer to the pan-Islamic, anti-British vision of the
Deobandis. In fact, given the success of the Deobandi movement on a sectarian
level, it never really viewed the Barelvis as a serious challenge.
While Deobandis and Barelvis were in the
making, so was a modernist Muslim movement led by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan
(1817-98). A religious scholar turned modern intellectual, Sir Syed hailed from
a privileged family during the late Mughal era and worked as a civil servant
during British rule. From his point of view, Muslim decline was a direct result
of a fossilized view of religion and a lack of modern scientific knowledge. Sir
Syed would go on to be the leader of Islamic modernism in South Asia through
the founding of the Aligarh University. The university produced the Muslim
elite, which would, almost half a century after Sir Syed’s death, found
Pakistan.
Sir Syed’s prognosis of the malaise
affecting the Muslims of India was unique and clearly different from that of the
long line of religious scholars who saw the problem as a function of the
faithful having drifted away from Islam’s original teachings. The loss of
sovereignty to the British combined with the rise of men like him who advocated
a cooperative approach toward the British and an embracing of European
modernity would lead the founders of Deoband to adopt their own pragmatic
approach but one that laid heavy emphasis on religious education. The Deobandis
viewed Sir Syed’s Islamic modernism as their principal competitor. In other
words, the Aligarh movement also developed around a university — but one that
emphasized Western secular education — represented a major challenge, and not
just politically but also religiously in that it offered an alternative paradigm.
Barely half a century after its founding, the
Deobandi movement had established seminaries across India, from present-day
Bangladesh in the east to Afghanistan in the west. Such was its influence that
in 1914, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the leader of the secular Pashtun Khudai
Khidmatgars movement, visited the Dar-ul-Uloom. Ghaffar Khan, who would later
earn the moniker “The Frontier Gandhi,” met the Deobandi leader Mahmud Hassan
to discuss the idea of establishing a base in the Pashtun areas of northwest India,
from which they could launch an independence rebellion against the British.
Harking back to the armed struggle of their forerunners, the Deobandis, once
again, tried their hand at jihad — this time on a transnational scale.
With the help of Afghanistan, Ottoman
Turkey, Germany and Russia, Hassan sought to foment this insurrection,
believing that Britain would be too focused on fighting the First World War on
the battlefields of Europe to be able to deal with an uprising in India. The
plan was ambitious but foolhardy. Hassan wanted to headquarter the insurgent
force in Hejaz, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, with regional commands in Istanbul,
Tehran and Kabul. He traveled to Hejaz, where he met with the Ottoman war
minister, Anwar Pasha, and the Hejaz governor, Ghalib Pasha. The Ottomans
strongly supported an Indian rebellion as a response to the British-backed Arab
revolt against them. The plan failed in great part because the Afghan monarch,
Emir Habibullah Khan, would not allow an all-out war against the British be
waged from his country’s soil. Hassan, the Deoband leader, was ensconced in
Mecca when he was arrested by the Hashemite ruler of the Hejaz, Sharif Hussein
bin Ali, and handed over to the British. He was imprisoned on the island of
Malta.
During the four years that Hassan was jailed,
several key developments took place back home in India. The most important was
the launch of the 1919 Khilafat (Caliphate) Movement by a number of Muslim
notables influenced by Deobandism. As prominent historian of South Asian Islam,
Gail Minault, argues in her 1982 book “Religious Symbolism and Political
Mobilization in India,” the Khilafat Movement, which lobbied Turkey’s new
republican regime to preserve the caliphate, was actually a means of mobilizing
India’s Muslims in a nationalist struggle against the British. This would
explain why the movement received the support of Mahatma Gandhi in exchange for
backing his Non-Cooperation Movement against the British. At around the same
time, several Deobandi ulema created Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind (JUH), which would
become the formal political wing of the movement – engaging in a secular
nationalist struggle.
When
Hassan was released from prison and returned to India, Gandhi traveled to
Bombay to receive him. Hassan went on to issue a fatwa in support of the
Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements, which was endorsed by hundreds of
ulema. Under his leadership, the Deobandis also supported Gandhi’s candidacy
for the presidency of the Indian National Congress. The move was in keeping
with their point of view that the Hindu majority was not a threat to Islam and
the real enemies were the British.
As the Deobandi movement pushed for
Hindu-Muslim unity, it underwent another leadership change. Ill from
tuberculosis, Hassan died in November 1920, six months after his release from
prison. He was succeeded by his longtime deputy Hussain Ahmed Madani, who
engaged in a major campaign calling for joint Hindu-Muslim action against the
British. With Madani at the helm, the Deobandis argued that movements organized
along communal lines played into the hands of the colonial rulers and advanced
the idea of “composite nationalism.” A united front was needed to end the
British Empire’s dominance. This view ran counter to the atmosphere of the
times and, following the collapse of the Deobandis’ transnational efforts, the
movement’s nationalist program also floundered.
The
All-India Muslim League (AIML), headed by the future founder of Pakistan,
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was growing in strength and steering Indian Muslims toward
separatism. At the same time, the Deobandis’ JUH and Gandhi’s Indian National
Congress intensified their demand for Indian self-government. The situation
came to a head with massive nationwide unrest in 1928. To defuse the situation,
the British asked Indian leaders to put forth a constitutional framework of
their own. In response, the Indian National Congress produced the Nehru Report,
a major turning point for the Deobandis. The report by their erstwhile allies
ignored the JUH demand for a political structure that would insulate Muslim
social and religious life from central government interference. This led
dissenting members of the JUH and among the wider Deobandi community to join
AIML’s call for Muslim separatism.
While prominent Deobandi scholar Ashraf Ali
Thanvi would initiate the break, it was his student, Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, who
led the split. Usmani would spearhead a reshaping of the Deobandi religious
sect and play a critical role in charting the geopolitical divide that still
defines South Asia today. In 1939, Thanvi issued a fatwa decreeing that Muslims
were obligated to support Jinnah’s separatist AIML. He then resigned from the
Deoband seminary and spent the four remaining years of his life supporting the
creation of Pakistan.
Thanvi and Usmani realized that if the
Deobandis did not act, the Barelvis — already allied with the AIML — could
outmanoeuvre them. Better organized and one step ahead of their arch-rivals,
the Deobandis were able to position themselves as the major religious allies of
the AIML. It is important to note, however, that many Deobandis remained loyal
to Madani’s more inclusive approach. They viewed his stance as in keeping with
the Prophet Muhammad’s Compact of Medina, which had ensured the cooperation of
various non-Muslim tribes. In contrast, Usmani and the renegade Deobandis had
long been deeply uncomfortable with the idea of Hindu-Muslim unity, which
conflicted with their religious puritanism. When Usmani established Jamiat
Ulema Islam (JUI) in 1945 as a competitor to Madani’s JUH, the deep schism
within the Deoband movement had reached a point of no return. Usmani’s
insurrection came at the perfect time for Jinnah, a secular Muslim politician
with an Ismaili Shia background. Jinnah had long sought to weaken JUH’s
opposition to his Muslim separatist project; the support of Usmani lent
religious credibility to his cause: creating the state of Pakistan.
After partition in 1947, the spiritual home of
the Deobandi movement remained in India, but Pakistan was now its political
centre. When they founded JUI, Usmani and his followers already knew that it
was way too late in the game for their group to be the vanguard leading the
struggle for Pakistan. The AIML had long assumed that mantle, but it was not too
late for the JUI to lead the way to Islamizing the new secular Muslim state. In
fact, Jinnah’s move to leverage the Islamic faith to mobilize mass demand for a
secular Muslim homeland had left the character of this new state deeply
ambiguous. Such uncertainty provided the ideal circumstances for JUI to
position itself at the center of efforts to craft a constitution for Pakistan.
In the new country’s first Parliament, the Constituent Assembly, JUI
spearheaded the push for an “Islamic political system.”
The
death of secularist Jinnah in September 1948 created a leadership vacuum, which
helped JUI’s cause. As a member of the assembly, the JUI leader Usmani played a
lead role in drafting the Objectives Resolution that placed Islam at the center
of the constitutional process. The resolution stated that “sovereignty over the
entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has
delegated to the State of Pakistan.” It went on to say that “the principles of
democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and social justice” must be followed
“as enunciated by Islam.” Adopted in 1949, the Objectives Resolution marked a
huge victory for JUI and other Islamists.
By mid-1952, JUI appeared to be on its way
to achieving its objectives. Within months, however, the situation soured.
Along with other Islamist groups, it launched a violent nationwide protest
movement against the minority Ahmadiyya sect, believing that the move would
enhance its political position. In response, the government imposed martial law.
A subsequent government inquiry held JUI and the other religious forces
responsible for the violence and even questioned the entire premise of the
party’s demand for Pakistan to be turned into an Islamic state. Nevertheless,
in March 1956, the country’s first constitution came into effect, formally
enshrining Pakistan as an Islamic republic. Two and a half years later,
however, the military seized power under Gen. Ayub Khan, who was determined to
reverse the influence of the Deobandis and the growing broader religious
sector. Khan would go on to decree a new constitution that laid the foundations
of a secular modern state — one in which the Deobandis did not even achieve
their minimalist goal of an advisory role.
The
Deobandi movement went through another period of decline and transition during
President Khan’s reign. It was in the late 1960s under Mufti Mahmud, a
religious scholar-turned-politician from the Pashtun region of Dera Ismail
Khan, near the Afghan border that JUI experienced a revival. After Khan allowed
political parties to operate again in 1962, Mahmud became JUI’s deputy leader.
In truth, though, he was now the real mover and shaker of the Deobandi party
steering it towards alliances of convenience with secular parties. Pakistani
historian Sayyid A.S. Pirzada, in his 2000 book “The Politics of the Jamiat
Ulema-i-Islam Pakistan 1971-1977,” goes into detail on how Mahmud transformed
JUI from a religious movement seeking to influence politics into a full-fledged
political party participating in electoral politics.
By the time Khan was forced out of office
by popular unrest in 1969, socio-economic issues had replaced religion as the
driving force shaping Pakistani politics.
Another general, Yahya Khan, took over as president and again imposed
martial law, abrogating the entire political system his predecessor had put
together over an 11-year period. Yahya held general elections in 1970, marking
the country’s first free and fair vote. Both secular and left-leaning, the
country’s two major parties, the Awami League and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP),
came in first and second place in the vote for Parliament with 167 and 86 seats
respectively, while JUI won only seven seats.
By now the west-east crisis that had been
brewing since the earliest days of Pakistan’s independence was reaching a
critical point.
The
Awami League won all of its seats in East Pakistan while the PPP won all of its
seats in the west of the country. The military establishment, meanwhile,
refused to transfer power to the Awami League. This caused full-scale public
agitation in the east, which quickly turned into a brutal civil war that led to
the creation of Bangladesh from what had been East Pakistan.
The
war, which killed hundreds of thousands, resulted in two major implications
that would help the Deobandis regain much of the political space they had lost
since the early 1950s. First, it seriously weakened the military’s role in
politics and allowed for the return of civilian rule. Second, it helped JUI and
other religious parties to argue that only Islam could bind together different
ethnic groups into a singular national fabric.
Within days of the defeat in the December 1971
war, Gen Yahya’s military government came to an end and PPP chief Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto became president. In March 1972, JUI chief Mahmud became chief minister
of North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP), leading a provincial coalition
government with the left-wing Pashtun ethno-nationalist National Awami Party (NAP).
The JUI also was a junior partner with NAP in Baluchistan’s provincial
government. JUI’s stint in provincial power, however, was cut short when
President Bhutto in 1973 dismissed the NAP-JUI cabinet in Baluchistan, accusing
it of failing to control an ethno-nationalist insurgency in the province. In
protest, the Mahmud-led government in NWFP resigned as well. The Deobandi party
then turned its focus to ensuring that the constitution Bhutto’s PPP was
crafting would be as much in keeping with its Islamist ideology as was
possible.
Well
aware that the masses overwhelmingly voted on the basis of bread-and-butter
issues as opposed to religion, JUI sought to prevent the ruling and other
socialist parties from producing a charter that would seriously limit its share
of power. JUI and the country’s broader religious right were able to capitalize
on the fact that Bhutto was seeking national consensus for a constitution,
which would strengthen a civilian political order led by his ruling PPP. He was
thus ready for a quid pro quo with the JUI and other Islamists — conceding on a
number of their demands to Islamize the charter in order to establish a
parliamentary form of government.
Consequently, Pakistan’s current constitution,
which went into effect in August 1973, declared Islam the state religion, made
the Objectives Resolution the charter’s preamble, established a Council of
Islamic Ideology to ensure all laws were in keeping with the Quran and the
Sunnah, and established the criteria of who is a Muslim, among a host of other
provisions. The following year the Deobandis and the broader religious right
won another major victory in the form of the second amendment, which declared
Ahmadis as non-Muslims.
By
1974, the government of PPP founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began to appropriate
religion into its own politics. Over the next three years, nine parties with
JUI in a lead role formed a coalition of Islamist, centrist and leftist
factions in the form of the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) to jointly contest
the 1977 elections. The PNA campaign was trying to leverage the demand of the
religious right to implement Nizam-i-Mustafa (System of Muhammad).
In
an election marred by irregularities, the PPP won 155 seats while the
opposition alliance took only 36. After three months of unrest in the wake of
the results, Bhutto invited his opponents to negotiate; JUI chief Mahmud led
the opposition in the talks. In an effort not to compromise politically, Bhutto
sought to appease the Islamists culturally and moved to ban the sale and
consumption of liquor, shut all bars, prohibit betting and replace Sunday with
the Muslim holy day of Friday as the weekly sabbath. The negotiations were cut
short when army chief Gen. Zia mounted a coup, ousting Bhutto and appropriated
the Deobandi agenda of Islamisation — all designed to roll back the
civilianization of the state and restore the military’s role in politics.
Zia’s moves to Islamize society top-down
naturally resonated significantly with the religious right. From their point of
view, Zia was the very opposite of the country’s first military dictator, Ayub
Khan, who had been an existential threat to the entire ulema sector. The
Deobandis, however, were caught between their opposition to a military
dictatorship and the need to somehow benefit from Zia’s religious agenda.
Although he was known for being a religious conservative, Zia was first and
foremost a military officer. While the entire raison d’être of the Deobandi JUI
was to establish an “Islamic” state, the Zia regime weaponized both the
religion of Islam and the ideology of Islamism to gain support for what was
essentially a military-dominated political order.
The JUI saw itself as heir to a
thousand-year tradition of ulema trying to ensure that Muslim sovereigns in
South Asia were ruling in accordance with their faith. Albeit late in the game,
it was also a key player in creating Pakistan, and more importantly, worked to
ensure that the country’s constitution was Islamic. But now Zia, who had
assumed the presidency, had engaged in a hostile takeover of not just the state
but the entire Deobandi business model. This explains why Mahmud opposed Zia’s
putsch and kept demanding that he stick to his initial pledge of holding
elections, which the general kept postponing. Zia’s primary objective was to
reverse Bhutto’s efforts to establish civilian supremacy over the military.
By
the time Zia banned political parties in October 1979, JUI was struggling to
deal with a new autocratic political order that was stealing its thunder. It
was also in a state of unprecedented decline. An internal rift had emerged
within the party between those opposing Zia’s military regime and those seduced
by his Islamization moves. A year later, Mahmud died of a heart attack.
Mahmud’s son, a cleric-politician named Fazlur Rehman, was accepted as the new
JUI chief by many of the leaders and members of the Deobandi party. But others
opposed the hereditary transition. This led to a formal split in the party
between Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam — Fazlur Rehman (JUI-F) and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam
Sami-ul-Haq (JUI-S), named after Sami-ul-Haq, a cleric whose madrassah
Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania would soon play a lead role in the rise of militant
Deobandism. JUI-F continued to oppose Zia’s martial law regime while the
splinter Deobandi faction, JUI-S, became a major supporter of the military
government.
The same year that Zia was Islamizing his
military regime, three major events shook the Muslim world: the Islamist-led
revolution in Iran, the siege of Mecca by a group of messianic Salafists and
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These three developments would prove to be
a watershed for the Deobandi movement. Deobandis formed a major component of
the Afghan Islamist insurgent alliance fighting the Soviet-backed communist
government. Many of the leaders of the Afghan insurgent factions like Mawlawi
Yunus Khalis, Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi and Jalaluddin Haqqani were Deobandis.
From the early 1980s onward, the two JUI factions were involved in dual
projects: supporting the creation of an Islamic state in Afghanistan through
armed insurrection and the Islamization of Pakistan (though divided over how on
the latter).
At the same time, Saudi Arabia supported
the Afghan insurgency and began to step up its promotion of Wahhabism in
Pakistan, partly as a response to the Mecca siege. The Deobandis benefited
financially and ideologically from Riyadh’s support, leading to the emergence
of new groups.
Already wary of how Iran’s clerical regime was
exporting its brand of revolutionary Islamism, many Deobandis were influenced
by the anti-Shia sectarianism embedded within their own discourse and now
energized by proliferating Wahhabism. The Zia regime also had an interest in
containing Iranian-inspired revolutionary ideas and supported anti-Shia Deobandi
militant factions. In 1985, a group by the name of Sipah-e-Sahabah Pakistan was
founded as a militant offshoot of JUI. It would later give way to
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, named after Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, a firebrand anti-Shia
Deobandi cleric. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi remains notorious for horrific attacks
targeting Pakistan’s Shia minority.
After a century of being a religious-political
movement, in the 1980s Deobandism was increasingly militant. The anti-communist
insurgency in Afghanistan and sectarian militancy in Pakistan were the two
primary drivers increasingly steering many Deobandis toward armed insurrection.
While the end of the Zia regime (with the dictator’s death in a plane crash in
the summer of 1988) brought back civilian rule to the country, Deobandism was hurtling
toward a violent trajectory.
By
the early 1990s the Pakistani military had retreated to influencing politics
from behind the scenes and no longer pursued a domestic Islamization program.
The die, however, had been cast. The extremist forces that Zia had unleashed
were now on autopilot, and his civilian and military successors were unable to
rein in their growth. Deobandi seminaries continued to proliferate in the
country, especially in the Pashtun-dominated areas of the northwest.
In
1993, another militant Deobandi faction demanding the imposition of sharia law
emerged in country’s northwest by the name of
Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Muhammadi (Movement to Implement the Shariah of
Muhammad) — or TNSM — led by Sufi Muhammad, a mullah who had studied at the
Panjpir seminary, which was unique in that its Deobandism was heavily
Salafized.
The
decade long war in Afghanistan against the Soviets had significantly affected
the Pakistani military and the country’s premier spy service, the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, which was managing the Afghan,
Pakistani and other Arab/Muslim foreign fighters. Many ISI officers had gone
native with the militant Deobandi and Salafist ideologies of the proxies that
they were managing. By the dawn of the 1990s two unexpected geopolitical
developments would accelerate the course of Deobandism toward militancy. First
was the December 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union, which a few months later
triggered the collapse of the Afghan communist regime. That in turn led to the
1992-96 intra-Islamist war in Afghanistan, which gave rise to the Taliban
movement and its first emirate regime. Second was a popular Muslim separatist
uprising that began in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1989. The Pakistani
military’s efforts to leverage both developments exponentially contributed to
the surge of radicalized and militarized Deobandism.
In
Afghanistan, Pakistan supported the Taliban, a movement founded by militant
Deobandi clerics and students. The military also deployed Islamist insurgent
groups in Indian-administered Kashmir, many of which were ideologically
Deobandi. They included Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Harakat-ul-Ansar and
Jaish-e-Mohammed. Toward the late 1990s, when the Taliban were in power in
Kabul and hosting al Qaeda, these groups constituted a singular transnational
ideological battle space stretched from Afghanistan through India. This was
most evident after militants hijacked an Indian Airlines flight from Nepal and
landed in Taliban-controlled Kandahar. There, the hijackers, enabled by the
Pakistani-backed Taliban regime, negotiated with the Indian government for the
release of Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Masood Azhar and two of his associates who
had been imprisoned for terrorist activities in Kashmir.
After 9/11, the Pakistani security
establishment lost control of its militant Deobandi nexus, which gravitated
heavily toward al Qaeda that had itself relocated to Pakistan. The U.S.
toppling of the Taliban regime forced Islamabad into a situation in which it
was trying to balance support for both Washington and the Afghan Taliban.
Meanwhile, just days before the U.S. began its military operations against the
Taliban in October 2001, Jaish-e-Muhammad operatives attacked the state
legislature in Indian-administered Kashmir. This was followed by an even more
brazen attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi on Dec. 13. The Pakistanis
were now under pressure from both the Americans and the Indians. As a result,
Islamabad clamped down on the Kashmiri militant outfits. The decision of
Pakistan’s then military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf to first side with the
U.S. against the Taliban and then undertake an unprecedented normalization
process with India led to Islamabad losing control over the Deobandi militant
landscape. In fact, many of these groups would turn against the Pakistani state
itself. There were several assassination attempts on Musharraf, including two
back-to-back attacks carried out by rogue military officers within two weeks in
December 2003. The radicalized Deobandis whom Pakistan cultivated as
instruments of foreign policy in the ’80s and ’90s inverted the vector of jihad
to target the very state that nurtured them.
Meanwhile, the country’s main Deobandi
political group, JUI-F, remained a force. In the 2002 elections, it led an
alliance of six Islamist parties called the Mutahiddah Majlis-i-Amal (United
Action Council or MMA) that won 60 seats in Parliament — in great part due to
the electoral engineering of the country’s fourth military regime. It also
secured the most seats in the provincial legislatures in the old Deobandi
stronghold of NWFP, forming a majority government there and a coalition
government with the pro-Musharraf ruling party in Baluchistan. The Deobandi-led
MMA governments in both western provinces enabled the rise of Talibanization in
the Pashtun-regions along the border with Afghanistan. By the time the MMA
government in the northwest completed its five-year term in late 2007, some 13
separate Pakistani Taliban factions had come together to form an insurgent
alliance known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The Deobandi-led
government turned a blind eye to rising Talibanization, partly because it did
not want to be seen as siding with the U.S. against fellow Islamists and partly
because it feared being targeted by the jihadists. The latter fear was not
unfounded given TTP’s several attempts to assassinate several JUI leaders
including chief Fazlur Rehman and its Baluchistan supremo Muhammad Khan
Sherani.
Militant Deobandism in the form of insurgents
controlling territory and engaging in terrorist attacks all over the country
would dominate the better part of the next decade. Taliban rebels seized
control of large swaths of territory close to the Afghan border. The biggest
example of this was the Taliban faction led by Mullah Fazlullah (the son-in-law
of the TNSM founder), which took over NWFP’s large Swat district (as well as
many parts of adjacent districts).
The Taliban had significant support even in
the country’s capital as illustrated by the 2007 siege of the Red Mosque
(Islamabad’s oldest and major house of worship). A group of militants led by
the mosque’s Deobandi imam and his brother for nearly 18 months had been
challenging the writ of the state in the country’s capital by engaging in
violent protests, attacks on government property, kidnapping, arson and armed
clashes with law enforcement agencies. An 8-day standoff came to an end when
army special forces stormed the mosque-seminary complex leading to a 96-hour
gun battle with well-armed and trained militants during which at least 150
people (including many women and children) were killed.
The TTP greatly leveraged popular anger
over the military operation against the mosque. It unleashed a barrage of
suicide bombings targeting high-security military installations including an
air weapons complex, a naval station, three regional headquarters of the ISI,
Special Forces headquarters, the army’s general headquarters, the military’s
main industrial complex and many other civilian targets, which resulted in tens
of thousands of deaths. It took nearly a decade of massive counterinsurgency
and counterterrorism operations to claw back provincial and tribal territories
that had fallen under TTP control. By the late 2010s, Pakistan’s security forces
had forced Taliban rebels to relocate across the border in Afghanistan where
the U.S., after 15 years of unsuccessfully trying to weaken the Afghan Taliban
movement, was in talks with it.
Washington had hoped that its 2020 peace
agreement with the Afghan Taliban would lead to a political process that could
limit the jihadist movement’s influence after the U.S. departure. The dramatic
collapse of the Afghan government in a little over a week in early August of
this year, however, has left the Afghan Taliban as the only group capable of
imposing its will on the country. The return of the Afghan Taliban to power in
Afghanistan has a strong potential to energize like-minded forces in Pakistan,
especially with the Islamic State having a significant cross-border presence
and trying to assume the jihadist mantle from the Taliban. Further in the
easterly direction, rising right-wing Hindu extremism in India empowered by the
current government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi risks radicalizing
Deobandism in its country of birth, in response to the targeting of the
country’s 200 million Muslim minority.
The
Deobandis began in India as a movement seeking to reestablish a Muslim
religio-political order in South Asia — one led by ulema. After 80 years of
cultivating a religious intellectual vanguard and aligning with the majority
Hindu community in secular nationalist politics to achieve independence from
British colonial rule, a major chunk of Deoband embraced Muslim separatism.
Once that goal was realized in the form of the independent nation-state of
Pakistan, the locus of Deobandism shifted to Islamizing the new Muslim polity.
For the next three decades, the Deobandis tried to turn a state that was
intended to be secular into an Islamic republic through constitutional and
electoral processes. The ascent of an Islamist-leaning military regime coupled
with regional geopolitics at the tail end of the Cold War fragmented and
militarized the Deobandi phenomenon whose locus yet again shifted westward.
After the 1980s, the movement increasingly reverted to its British-era jihadist
roots through terrorism and insurgency. That process has culminated in the
Taliban’s empowerment in Afghanistan and now threatens to destabilize the
entire South Asian region.
Today, Afghanistan represents the center of
gravity of South Asia’s most prominent form of Islamism. The movement that has
long sought to establish an “Islamic” state led by ulema subscribing to a
medieval understanding of religion has established the polity that its ideological
forefathers had set out to achieve over a century and a half ago.
As the Taliban consolidate their hold over
Kabul with dangerous implications for the entire South Asian region, my mind
wanders back 40 years to when my father — driven by his own sectarian
persuasions — first made me aware of Deobandism. I am amazed at just how
rapidly this phenomenon has grown before my eyes. Suffering from dementia for
almost a decade and a half, my father has been oblivious of this proliferation.
I actually don’t remember the last time either he or I broached this topic with
the other. Perhaps it is for the best that he is unaware of the extent to which
those whom he opposed all his life have gained ground. I know it would pain him
to learn that Deobandism has even contaminated his own Barelvi sect, as is
evident from the rise of the Tehrik-i-Labbaik Pakistan, which is now the latest
and perhaps most potent Islamist extremist specter to haunt the country of his
and my birth.
Source:
The News Line Magazine
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/taliban-afghanistan-deobandism/d/125832
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