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8-2013

A Subcontinent's Sunni Schism: The Deobandi-Barelvi Rivalry and

the Creation of Modern South Asia
William Kesler Jackson

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Abstract

A Subcontinent’s Sunni Schism presents the first-ever history of the 150-year religio-

political rivalry between the Deobandis and the Barelvis—arguably the most important

schism in the “Muslim world,” and certainly the most significant within Sunni Islam.

More recently, that rivalry has often been expressed by means of bullets and bombs,

especially in Pakistan. But beyond the headline-grabbing violence of the Deobandi-

Barelvi schism lies the story of a century-and-a-half-long religious antagonism: at first

over converts, later for competing visions of the political future, then for a place within

a new “Islamic” polity—for dominance within its political structure. For Deobandis,

the rivalry was defined by their struggle to propagate a “pure” Islam, as opposed to the

Barelvi deviation (plus an unmitigated hatred of the British presence in India); for

Barelvis, their right to speak for the “Sunni majority” was what defined the battle—a

privilege that the Deobandis had long sought to usurp. Running constant throughout

the rivalry’s history, too, were the two schools’ separate visions of a glorious future

Islamic epoch, of a truly Islamic state—or, perhaps more precisely, their differences on

the subject of how to get there. Of course, the rivalry did not develop in a vacuum; its

participants were shaped, inspired, and manipulated by a host of outside influences, the

strongest of which, perhaps, was the modern, “total” state.

 
 A SUBCONTINENT’S SUNNI SCHISM:
THE DEOBANDI-BARELVI DYNAMIC AND
THE CREATION OF MODERN SOUTH ASIA

by

W. Kesler Jackson

B.S., Brigham Young University, 2004

M.A., Pennsylvania State University, 2010
M.S., Syracuse University, 2011

Dissertation
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in History.

Syracuse University
August 2013
 Copyright © William Kesler Jackson 2013
All Rights Reserved

 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A list of all who have assisted me in the preparation of this work would be near-

impossible to construct. To all I express my sincere gratitude. The staff at the dar

ul’alwm Deoband’s library were most helpful, as were the teachers and students whom I

interviewed. The staff at the dar ul’alwm Karachi were likewise very generous in their

assistance, as were the personnel at the Jamia Naeemia in Lahore, the Syracuse

University library in Syracuse and the Syracuse University London Center, the Al-

Jamiatul Ashrafia in Mubarakpur, the Jamiah Islamiah Talimuddin in Dabhel, the

mәsjyd-e-ilyas in London, and the jam’y mәsjyd and connected mәdrәsәħ in Ludhiana. A

quick shout-out, too, goes to the Urdu booksellers of Urdu Bazaar Road near Old

Delhi’s jam’y mәsjyd. I would also like to thank Muhammad Junaid Swati of Baffa, Faiz

Raza Khan of Bareilly, Akhtar Bodla of Islamabad’s NIHCR, Beth Coyle of AES in New

Delhi, Ali Zaidi of London, Syed Badar Saeed of Lahore, Jamil Ashraf of Karachi, Abul

Qasim Nomani of Deoband, Saghir Aslam of Lahore, the indomitable Welches of Tokyo,

Muhammad Hasan Misbahi of Mubarakpur, Christopher Patch of Kathmandu, Abdul

Waheed of Lahore, Adnan Hussain and Mansab Nathoka of Sargodha, the DeWaals of

Nairobi, Dr. Rasheed H. Jawed of Rawalpindi, Saeed Abdullah of Mansehra, J. Anthon

Jackson of Aarhus, Muhammad Usman Rehman of Ludhiana, Shayne and Weston

“Dougie” (and their progenitors) of Dalkey, Praveen Beesa of Delhi, Sajid Khan of

Mansehra, Sahibzada Qutabuddin of Sial Sharif, and Raghib Hussain Naeemi of Lahore.

My appreciation goes out too, of course, to my doctoral advisor and mentor Dr. Subho

Basu, as well as to Dr. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, both of Syracuse University’s

Department of History. Thanks to Bill and Ann Jackson for their seemingly unending

  iv 
support. And an especially big thank-you to my ever-patient wife, Sarah, and my three

incredible children—William, Kasia, and Thomas—who let me truck them all over the

world in search of Urdu books, mәdarys, and ‘alәma.

  v 
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ix

Note on Dates, Names, and Transcription x

Introduction 1

I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: The ‘alym, the Sufi shix, and

the “Muslim” State in South Asia 12

Medina: the First Islamic State 16

Muslim Footholds in South Asia 25

Delhi Sultanate 37

The Mughal State 48

The Waliullahi School 57

The Farangi Mahalis & the Khairabadi-Badayuni

Group 68

Shi’a Inroads in South Asia 71

The ‘alәma, the mәshayx, and 1857/1273 72

II. GENESIS OF A RIVALRY: The Deobandi and Barelvi

Schools, 1866-1921/1283-1340 88

A School is Founded: the Birth of “Deobandism” 90

Counter-Reformation: the Birth of “Barelvism” 109

The Early Disputes I: the fәtwa War of 1902/1320 112

The Early Disputes II: the Battle for History 117

The Early Disputes III: “Rationalist” vs.

  vi 
 “Transmitted” traditions 124

The Early Disputes IV: Other Points of Doctrine 125

Muslims, Hindus, and Politics: 1875-1916/1292-1334 130

Spreading the Rivalry: the Proliferation of mәdarys

Networks 147

Khilafat: Ephemeral High Point of Hindu-Muslim

Unity 158

III. A MUSLIM HOMELAND: The Rivalry in Pre-Partition

Politics, 1921-1947/1339-1366 180

Naimuddin Moradabadi: Father of Political Barelvism 187

Husain Ahmad Madani: Taking Up the Mantle of

Mahmud Hasan 212

Amjad ‘Ali A’azmi: Chief of Islamic Law 245

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani: Jinnah’s Gamechanger 262

IV. DEFINING A NEW ISLAMIC STATE: The Rivalry in Pakistani

Politics, 1947-1977 291

Constitution-making: A Cold Alliance 393

Distractions from Constitution-Making 332

“Secularist” Patron of pirs: the Ayub Khan Years 352

Yahya Khan, the 1970 Elections, and the Birth of

Bangladesh 375

Prelude to “Islamization,” 1970-1977 495

March 1977: “Zenith” of Islam’s “Politicization” 404

V. “ISLAMIZATION” AND WAR: Militarization of the

  vii 
 Rivalry, 1977-2001 408

Consolidating Power: Zia, Democracy, and the ‘alәma 410

Zia’s “Islamization” Push 421

“Islamic Revolution”: Deobandi-Barelvi Response 418

Soviet Invasion, U.S.-Saudi Response, Deobandi-Barelvi

Fallout 435

Proselytizing Deobandism: the Rise and Spread of the

Tablighi Jama’at 447

ISID Patronage: Growth of mәdarys Networks, Militant

Outfits 454

Barelvi Response: Sunni Tehrik, Dawat-e-Islami, et alia 460

After Zia: Deobandi-Barelvi Politics, 1988-2001 466

Post-Soviet Afghanistan and the Establishment of

Taliban Rule 473

VI. EPILOGUE 486

The Suicide of Muhammad Siddiq: 11 April 2006 490

The Rivalry Continues 507

Glossary 519

Bibliography 527

Endnotes 548

  viii 
PREFACE

The words of Nehru, in reference to relations between “Englishmen and Indians,” might

just as well be applied today to those between “the West” and “the Muslim world”:

“What a great gulf divided the two…and how they distrusted and disliked each other!

But more than the distrust and the dislike was the ignorance of each other, and, because of this,

each side was a little afraid of the other and was constantly on its guard in the other’s

presence. To each, the other appeared as a sour-looking, unamiable creature, and

neither realized that there was decency and kindliness behind the mask.” On another

occasion, the Pandit remarked, “An average Englishman, if he were frank, would

probably confess that he knows some quite decent Indians but they are exceptions and

as a whole Indians are a detestable crowd. The average Indian would admit that some

Englishmen whom he knows are admirable, but, apart from these few, the English are

an overbearing, brutal, and thoroughly bad lot. Curious how each person judges of the

other race, not from the individual with whom he has come in contact, but from others

about whom he knows very little or nothing at all.” Apart from any academic

aspiration, then, it is my hope that the telling of the story of the Deobandi-Barelvi

rivalry, its long transformation, and its ripples within the politics of pre-Partition India,

independent Pakistan, and beyond might in some small measure peel away another layer

of that “ignorance”—Nehru’s “great gulf”—yet separating hundreds of millions of

Muslims in the East from hundreds of millions of non-Muslims in the West.

W. KESLER JACKSON
New Delhi,
28 April 2012/6 Jumada II 1433

  ix 
Note on Dates, Names, and Transcription

Dates are generally presented through Chapter 3 of this work according to both the

Gregorian and the Hijri calendars, respectively, separated by a forward slash symbol (/).

Thus, 1857/1273 refers to the Gregorian year 1857 AD, or the Hijri year 1273 AH.

The “old” AD signification has been retained (instead of the “new” CE) to add emphasis

to both calendars’ religious underpinnings. Where only the Gregorian year is

employed, the acronym “AD” is used to so signify. Hijri dates are meant as a reference

and are only approximations. From Chapter 4 onwards—chronologically, with the

establishment of the Pakistani state—the Hijri references are dropped and only the

Gregorian system is used.

When introducing proper nouns, where possible I have chosen to use spellings

either already in common use or preferred by the person, institution, or organization in

question (as shown, for example, on their official websites or in their own

correspondence, etc.). The name “Muhammad,” however, has been spelled consistently

throughout to avoid confusion. Titles and descriptives, often lumped with names (as if

they are part of the name) in Western and Islamic literature have been written, with a

few exceptions, in transliterated format to distinguish them from the actual name. Thus

“Sayyid Ahmad Khan of Raebareli” has been rendered “sәyyid Ahmad Khan of Raebareli,”

sәyyid being a title denoting descent from the Prophet.

The system of transcription in this dissertation is, generally speaking, purely

phonetic. However, since more than one Urdu letter may correspond to a single Roman

one, a number of modifications have been made, essentially along the lines of the system

devised by Mumtaz Ahmad in his Urdu Newspaper Reader (Kensington, MD: Dunwoody

  x 
Press, 1985), who himself more or less followed the system created by Muhammad Abd-

Al-Rahman Barker in the 1960s/1380s. All Urdu words are transcribed into Roman

letters and/or symbols, except for proper nouns, and written in italics.

The reader may refer to the following chart for the Urdu equivalent of all Roman

letters or symbols.

‫ا‬ ә ‫ڈ‬ D ‫ع‬ ‘a

‫آ‬ a ‫ذ‬ ź ‫غ‬ G

‫ب‬ b ‫ر‬ r ‫ف‬ f

‫پ‬ p ‫ڑ‬ R ‫ق‬ q

‫ت‬ t ‫ز‬ z ‫ک‬ k

‫ٹ‬ T ‫ژ‬ ʑ
‫گ‬ g

‫ث‬ ș ‫س‬ s ‫ل‬ l

‫ج‬ j ‫ش‬ sh ‫م‬ m

‫چ‬ ch ‫ص‬ S ‫ن‬ n

‫ح‬ ħ ‫ض‬ ż ‫و‬ w/v

‫خ‬ x ‫ط‬ ț ‫ہ‬ h

‫د‬ d ‫ظ‬ ž ‫ی‬ i

/
y

ْ u

  xi 
  

INTRODUCTION

When twenty-one-year-old Muhammad Siddiq, a village-born Deobandi from what

is now called Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and a recent Lashkar-e-Jhangvi recruit, waded

through the crowd of Barelvis celebrating the Prophet’s birthday (mwlyd) at Nishtar

Park on 6 April 2006/7 Rabi I 1427, attendees could not have known that the young

man was concealing a jacket packed with two pounds of explosives and three thousand

ball bearings underneath his coat. Just as the gathering’s leaders closed the mәGryb

prayer, human bomb Muhammad Siddiq detonated in an act of destructive suicide,

jointly claiming the lives of scores of celebrants (including the entire leadership of a

Barelvi militant organization called the Sunni Tehrik) and injuring hundreds more.

The attack signaled the opening of a new chapter of violence in the long-standing

rivalry between the Deobandi and Barelvi schools of Sunni thought. How it had come

to this—how a theological debate that had once been carried out via books, public

debates, and juridical rulings now routinely made use of bullets and bombs—is one of

the chief subjects of this study. But beyond the headline-grabbing violence of the

Deobandi-Barelvi schism also lies the story of a century-and-a-half-long religious

antagonism: at first over converts, later for competing visions of the political future,

then for a place within a new “Islamic” polity—for dominance within its political

structure. For Deobandis, the rivalry was defined by their struggle to propagate a

“pure” Islam, as opposed to the Barelvi deviation; for Barelvis, their right to speak for

the “Sunni majority” was what defined the battle—a privilege that the Deobandis had

long sought to usurp. Running constant throughout the rivalry’s history, too, were the

two schools’ separate visions of a glorious future Islamic epoch, of a truly Islamic

  1 
  

state—or, perhaps more precisely, their differences on the subject of how to get there

(and who should lead the charge). Of course, the rivalry did not develop in a vacuum; its

participants were shaped, inspired, and manipulated by a host of outside influences, the

strongest of which, perhaps, was the modern, “total” state.

Though the Nishtar Park bombing of April 2006/Rabi I 1427 is only one of

hundreds of similar attacks—most far smaller, some of comparable scale—to stain the

now bullet- and bomb-ridden history of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry, the enmity

between these two schools of Sunni Islam was, as aforementioned, not always

characterized in such a blood-stained manner. In fact, Nishtar-esque murderous

outbursts are a rather recent animal, wreaking havoc on the unity of Muslims (and

especially their religious leadership) within Pakistan in particular, with similarly

divisive results in India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and within South Asian Muslim

communities across North America, the British Isles and continental Europe, East

Africa, South Africa, and beyond—indeed, wherever the rivalry has spread in recent

decades.

Despite the Deobandi-Barelvi schism’s pivotal role in the politics of South Asia

(indeed, as this work argues, the central part it played in pre-Partition independence

politics in India and the literal shaping of the political structure of Pakistan), both

schools are relatively unknown in the West (even among academics) and their rivalry

one with another remains mostly unexamined. Barbara Metcalf’s Islamic Revival in

British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (1982/1402) is the only full-length, scholarly,

published work dealing specifically and primarily with the Deoband school, drawing

heavily from sources in Urdu and Persian. (The 2010/1431 doctoral dissertation of one

of her students, Najeeb A. Jan—“The Metacolonial State: Pakistan, The Deoband

  2 
  

‘Ulama and the Biopolitics of Islam” [University of Michigan]—might be included

here, too.) The Deobandis are given serious consideration in Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi’s

short The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (1963/1383), too. In Devotional

Islam and Politics in British India (1996/1417), Usha Sanyal devotes half a chapter to the

Deoband school of Islam. M. Reza Pirbhai’s Reconsidering Islam in a South Asian Context

(2009/1430) devotes a small but detailed section on the Deobandis, and Stephen Cohen

devotes approximately four pages in The Idea of Pakistan (2004/1425) to the group.

Pirbhai’s and Cohen’s treatment—devoting a few lines to a few pages—seems to be the

norm, if the Deobandis happen to be mentioned at all. But Metcalf’s survey, already

almost thirty years old, ends with the turn of the twentieth century/late thirteenth

century (and concentrates mostly on doctrinal developments and the establishment of

the actual dar ul’alwm at Deoband), while Faruqi’s, almost fifty years old, is somewhat

brief (148 pages) and fails to cover any period after Partition. Sanyal’s work likewise

deals only with early Deobandi thought and organization, scarcely reaching beyond

1900/1318, while Pirbhai and most others, too, examine only the group’s founding

years. Of the aforementioned, only Cohen focuses on more recent times, but the

mention is brief (and almost entirely within the context of fundamentalist violence and

terrorism, like most other works that mention modern-day Deobandism); the same

might be said about most any other serious academic work in which the Deobandis are

momentarily featured. In other words, no serious scholarly study (of significant length)

on the Deobandis beyond 1947/1366 (or, more accurately, beyond the 1920s/1340s

with the death of Mahmud Hasan) has been published. Apart from the obvious sixty- to

ninety-year omission in the research, such a gap is especially yawning since

Deobandism has continued to grow and to spread far beyond its qәSbәħ beginnings in

  3 
  

the rural upper Doab. Besides, the period after 1920/1338 would witness a surge of

Indian and later Pakistani nationalism—a critical phase in the formation of the current

political framework on the subcontinent, and one in which the Deobandis played a

highly significant role (generally in opposition to Partition, then within the Pakistani

state as a champion of an Islamic order as interpreted by the Deobandi scholars).

Considering the school’s relevance to current world events, too, particularly in Pakistan

and Afghanistan (including its entrenchment among the Pathan people of the north-

west frontier), the need for scholarship on the Deobandis, post-1920/1338, seems

greater than ever.

If the subject of the Deoband school of Sunni Islam suffers from a lack of scholarly

attention, then its rival out of Bareilly has fared far worse in this regard, despite the

latter’s significant numerical superiority. The only academic study of note on the

movement is Sanyal’s Devotional Islam, which, like Metcalf’s, draws heavily on Urdu-

and Persian-language sources. But even this work is more of a biographical one,

focused on the movement’s guiding light, Ahmad Riza Khan, rather than on the Barelvis

as a whole. In any case, the book stops around 1921/1339, the year of Ahmad Riza’s

death, leaving the next ninety years nebulous (Sanyal would follow up, in 2006/1427,

with another completely biographical book: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi: In the Path of the

Prophet, in essence a condensed version of Devotional Islam). True, other works have

devoted a few pages specifically to Riza’s movement out of Bareilly (including Metcalf’s

Islamic Revival), but, like its Deobandi counterpart, the school suffers from a distinct lack

of scholarly notice from around 1920/1338 to the present. Such a void in South Asian

history is unfortunate, especially since the Barelvi school claims a large majority of

South Asian Muslims—making it likely the largest Muslim sect in the world. (It should be

  4 
  

pointed out that Barelvis don’t consider themselves as belonging to a sect at all; they

are, simply, “Sunni,” like “most Muslims” around the world; it is the Deobandis, in their

view, who form a breakaway sect). In addition, the Barelvi school, which has been

known as a primarily rural movement as opposed to the allegedly urban Deobandis has,

over the past half-century, “extended to towns and cities,” according to Hamza Alavi,1 a

highly significant development (especially within the context of Pakistani politics) that

has never, to the author’s knowledge, been studied by scholars. On yet another note,

the Barelvi school has always been viewed as just another Muslim revivalist movement

of the late nineteenth/late thirteenth century, of which there were several. But the very

term “revivalist” may not be accurate at all in describing the Barelvis, since, unlike the

Deobandis and other Muslim reform movements of the period, Ahmad Riza Khan and

the ‘alәma associated with him were not organizing anything new—not initiating any

“revival” per se. On the contrary, their actions were a defense of the conventional in the

face of what they viewed as a radical challenge. Tradition-wise, they upheld the status

quo and viewed only religious innovation (byd’at) as abhorrent—and to them, the

Deobandis were in the business of byd’at. (This is ironic, since the Deobandis view much

Barelvi practice in the same light.) While Deobandi leaders like Muhammad Qasim and

Mahmud Hasan were introducing what might arguably have been deemed “new”

concepts into Islamic practice (Qasim and Hasan, of course, would have characterized

such “new” concepts as those originally upheld and practiced by the Prophet and his

companions but subsequently forgotten, ignored, abandoned, or erroneously replaced by

the majority of South Asian Muslims), Ahmad Riza Khan crusaded to protect the old.

The Barelvis, then, held that their version of Islam—the “true,” “Sunni” version—had

existed all along; it did not take the career of Ahmad Riza Khan to resurrect it (though

  5 
  

it may very well have required the man’s life’s work to preserve it, a sentiment echoed

by some of his supporters); this was the Barelvi line of thought. It may be argued, then,

that Ahmad Riza Khan was neither a reformer nor the founder of any movement, but

rather a defender of what was, a protector of existing Sufi and pir tradition, an anti-

reformer (or, as he would have seen it, simply anti-byd’at) who happened to be a

charismatic teacher. (Barelvis admire him most for his intense love and respect for the

Prophet; most of the Barelvis’ grievances against the Deobandis stem from the latters’

perceived disrespect towards Muhammad.) In a sense, then, the great majority of South

Asian Muslims were “Barelvi” long before the designation existed. In any case, after

1920/1338 (and with the rise of Indian, then Pakistani, nationalism), it seems the

Barelvis by and large favored Partition and an independent South Asian Muslim

homeland.

But it is the dynamic between the Barelvi and Deobandi sects of Sunni Islam in South

Asia, so the thesis of this project goes, that played a critical role in the debate over the

partition of India, the creation of a separate Muslim state (Pakistan), and the (continued)

shaping of the political order in Pakistan (and even surrounding states, particularly

Afghanistan). From the early days (during the lifetimes of their founding figures), the

two schools forced South Asian Muslims to examine their own religious practice, to

scrutinize their own theologies, and to identify with one or the other (there were other

schools of thought, too, of course, but the vast majority of South Asian Muslims

gravitated toward one or the other category, either formally or informally). During the

run-up to Partition, the schools often could be differentiated purely by political position,

as the Pakistan debate added fuel to the rivalry and acted as a venue for various scholars

to descredit and otherwise defame their religious nemeses. It is unlikely Jinnah would

  6 
  

have gained the support he needed in the final years before the birth of Pakistan without

the Deobandi-Barelvi schism’s divisive power, preventing as it did any sort of joint

Deobandi-Barelvi action (despite Deobandi attempts to win Barelvis over to their

“side”). Barelvi pirs and scholars (and a few Deobandi rebels, too) were instrumental in

the Muslim League’s meagre “victory” in the Northwest Frontier, where loss might

have spelled an abrupt end to the Pakistan dream. In Pakistan, it was the Deobandi and

Barelvi parties (along with, at times, the Deobandi-inspired Jama’at-e-Islami, as well as

some other Deobandi or Barelvi groups) who led the charge for an Islamic constitution,

often spearheading the Opposition. Here again, though, it was the divisiveness that the

rivalry engendered—and the subsequent inability of either party to combine in any sort

of sustained joint political action—that prevented the “religious parties” from ever

dominating Pakistani politics. With the militarization that followed the breakaway of

Bangladesh, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the rush of

millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan, the flood of Saudi and American cash along

Pakistan’s western border, the continued struggle for Kashmir (and the ISID’s covert

machinations in the region), Zia’s “Islamization,” the emergence of the Taliban, and the

U.S. Government’s own invasion of Afghanistan—all combined with the politicization

of Deobandi and Barelvi parties like the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam and the Jamiat Ulema-e-

Pakistan, among others—the rivalry took on an entirely new character. Eventually this

led to seemingly constant violence, with attacks increasing in regularity and scale. All

the while, the rivalry spread across the globe through the sizable South Asian diaspora,

transforming, almost, into a microcosmal battleground for the soul of Islam between

“fundamentalist” revivalists and “fundamentalist” preservers. Despite this, and despite

the fact that the combined population of these sects numbers in the hundreds of

  7 
  

millions, an academic study of any significant length dealing with the Deobandi-Barelvi

rivalry has never been published by a Western academician as far as this writer is aware.

The author submits this work as the first, hoping that its premises might be examined,

built upon, corrected, and expanded in order to increase understanding of this highly

important phenomenon in the Muslim world and beyond.

Chapter 1, “Historical Background: Islam in South Asia to the Mid-Nineteenth

Century,” looks backwards—to the early days of Islam, tracking developments

especially pertinent to the rise of Deobandism and Barelvism all the way to

1860s/1270s-1280s India. Some of these developments include the precursor rivalries

and power contestations through which the Deobandi and Barelvi schools can trace

their ideological genealogy (like the tug-of-war between the court scholars and the Sufi

mystics, or the schism that developed between court scholars and “other-worldly”

scholars, to borrow a term from Robinson). In other words, the chapter attempts to

ground the Deobandi and Barelvi positions (especially those of the political variety)

within a historical context. Along the way, questions like, “What does the ideal Islamic

state (and ruler) look like?” and, “What is the role of the ‘alәma and the Sufi shix within

the state apparatus?” are posited and, hopefully, answered, if briefly. Most of the

information presented here is not new, but it has never, to the author’s knowledge, been

arranged within the context of the Deoband-Barelvi rivalry in so comprehensive a

fashion. The focus of Chapter 2, “Genesis of a Rivalry: The Deobandi and Barelvi

Schools, 1866-1921/1283-1340,” is the founding epoch of the two schools of thought—

first the Deobandi school (1866/1283) and then the Barelvi response, running into the

mid-1920s/late 1330s. The ground for most of this information has been broken by

previous scholars, though its presentation as specifically focused on the Deobandi-

  8 
  

Barelvi rivalry (not simply on one or the other) may be a first, as, too, might be the

chapter’s more overtly political concentration.

Chapter 3, “A Muslim Homeland: The Rivalry in Pre-Partition Politics, 1921-

1947/1339-1366,” attempts to shed light on the rivalry between the two schools within

the pre-Partition politics of British India, from the 1920s/1340s right up to Partition in

1947/1366. Here, perhaps, some new ground has been broken, as most every Western

or scholarly work on either school tends to peter out by the early twenties AD. The

chapter documents the rise and fall of the Khilafat Movement, the role of the Jami’at

Ulema-e-Hind, the political divisions that developed within the Deoband school, the

organization of the All-India Sunni Conference, the relationship between the Deobandi

religious leadership and the Indian National Congress, the rise of the All-India Muslim

League and its co-opting of the Barelvis (plus an influential Deobandi faction), and the

jockeying for position of various Barelvi and Deobandi leaders as the prospect of

Pakistan loomed. Then, in “A New Islamic State: The Rivalry in Pakistani Politics,

1947-1977/1366-1397,” the focus shifts almost entirely to the political rivalry as it

pertains to the first several decades of Pakistan's existence (for most of this period, this

included present-day Bangladesh). Both schools formed political parties during this era

that operated within the structure of the Pakistani state (and even, especially in the

beginning, within other, more overtly political parties). These organizations (most

prominentaly the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan) at times

worked “together” toward a common cause (though typically employing a form of

cooperation this writer terms “separate unity”)—like the institution of an “Islamic”

constitution, the struggle against the Ahmadis, or wars with India over Kashmir—but

typically stood at odds with one another, competing for constituents, their votes, and

  9 
  

the patronage and power that came with them. Perhaps the most important aspect of

the rivalry during this period was the way in which it prevented the two major Sunni

sects in the country from ever mounting a truly united assault against the forces of

secularism and socialism.

The great transformation of the rivalry (initiated partly via its politicization within

the context of pre-Partition independence politics and post-Partition Pakistani party

politics, and partly thanks to its confrontation with the modern, total state) took its

most significant turn during the period that followed, covered in Chapter 5:

“Islamization and War: Militarization of the Rivalry, 1977-2001/1397-1422.” The

chapter focuses on the political rivalry during the years of “Islamization” under Zia ul-

Haq and afterwards. This period, this work argues, is vital to understanding the

Deobandi-Barelvi schism’s metamorphosis from juridical rulings and religious tracts to

suicide bombers and assassinations. With an “Islamic Revolution” in Iran (and the anti-

Shi’a militancy it fostered in Pakistan), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the

intervention of the American and Saudi (and Pakistani) governments (among others) in

the conflict, the participation of mostly Deobandi jyhәdis in the “war against

communism,” the US- and petro-dollar-funded (via relatively new fiat currency systems)

mushrooming of mәdarys in South Asia, the institution of a new “Islamic” order in

Pakistan, the rise of the Deobandism-inspired “Taliban,” the rapid spread of both

schools’ ideology to other centers across the world, and the coming of the so-called

“War on Terror”—all of this taken together had a profound effect upon the dynamic in

question. Finally, chapter 6 (“Epilogue”)—truly an epilogue in both scope and

brevity—attempts to bring the historical narrative, as far as is possible in a few short

pages, up to the present day.

  10 
  

And so we return to the Nishtar Park bombing of April 2006/Rabi I 1427, and the

mega-attacks that have followed. Such is the situation as of the time of this writing,

even as Western governments’ armies occupy Afghanistan and drop bombs from drones

in Baluchistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa,

and as intelligence agencies from around the world (and from Pakistan itself) meddle in

Pakistan’s (and Afghanistan’s) internal affairs for information and covert action

purposes. U.S. Government troops, together with a smattering of others, occupy

Muslim lands where the rivalry is well known among locals and highly influential both

today and historically—yet scarcely understood by the relatively small group of

American policymakers in Washington deciding the fate of billions of dollars in military

expeditures and foreign aid, not to mention military and strategic policy in the region.

And far from South and Central Asia—in Durban and London, in Chicago and Kuala

Lumpur, in Singapore and Dar es Salaam, in Houston and Cairo and Johannesburg—the

rivalry increasingly divides Muslims, continually forcing a reevaluation of belief and

practice, and, in essence, drawing battle lines for a near-inevitable, future Islamic

struggle for the very spirit of the faith.

  11 
  

1 - HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: The ‘alym, the Sufi shix, and the

“Muslim” State in South Asia

The ‘alәma are the successors of the Prophet.

ABU DAWUD SULAYMAN, 9TH CENTURY A.D.2

Just after noon on 24 January 2010/8 Safar 1431, a three-day conference—dubbed

the “Biswa Ijtema,” or “Global Meeting”—came to an end outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The banks of the Turag river had provided the backdrop to the event, attended by

anywhere from two to five million devotees (under the watchful eye of almost twenty

thousand security personnel), including Bangladesh President Muhammad Zillur

Rahman, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and leader of the political opposition Khaleda

Zia, among many other high-profile participants. The pilgrims that made up the

massive crowd had come from all over the world (from France and Palestine, from the

United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia, from Algeria and Iraq, and more), descending upon

the town of Tongi to offer prayers, hear sermons and the recitation of the Qur’an and

hәdis (translated into Chinese, Tamil, Arabic, English, Bangla, and other languages),

and to partake of the edification of brotherhood, at night sleeping in the cold fog of

  12 
  

winter under makeshift tents or the bare sky. There was even a mass, dowry-free

wedding, featuring one hundred forty couples. Due to space constraints, thousands took

part in the proceedings upon nearby rooftops or along surrounding roads. The

gathering was organized annually by a proselytizing Deobandi group called the

Tablighi Jama’at (tәbliGi jәma’at, “Assembly of Proselytization”)—and the only Muslim

gathering on the planet bigger was the hәj to Mecca itself.3 Meanwhile, Barelvis

branded the Tablighi Jama’at, with its missionary efforts and mega-conferences, “an

effective instrument” used by “the enemies of Islam” to “prevent the emergence of a true

Islamic movement in Europe and elsewhere in the world.”4

Two-and-a-half-weeks earlier, in the north-central Indian city (and traditional

Barelvi stronghold) of Moradabad, some one hundred miles east of Delhi on the banks

of the Ramganga, a sizable conference of “Sunni” religious leaders—under the ageis of

the All-India Ulema Mashaikh Board, or AIUMB—issued a formal demand to the

Indian government. Deobandi usurpers, they claimed, had stealthily taken control of

“more than one lakh [100,000] madrassas, dargahs, graveyards and other historical

monuments.” sәyyid Muhammad Ashraf Kichowchhwi, a mwlana and the general

secretary of the AIUMB, described the Deobandis as a “13% miniscule, manipulative

minority,” that had “hijacked” the state’s minority bodies (like the Central Haj

Committee and the Urdu Academy, to name just two) both in Uttar Pradesh and within

the central government of India. “Since [the Deobandis] do not have faith in patron

saints of ‘dargah’ or ‘mazar’ and have condemned the practice, logically they must not

be considered for management of Ajmer Sharif or Deva Sharif [two of the most

important Muslim shrine centers in India],” he argued, pointing out that the Barelvi

religious leadership, on the other hand, spoke for “80%” of India’s Muslims. AIUMB

  13 
  

secretary Babar Ashraf explained the power of the Deobandis and their ilk as emanating

from the financial support of Wahhabi states like Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, an unnamed

Deobandi cleric interviewed by the Times of India responded by speculating that the

Barelvi conference “could [have] been just a pressure tactic to influence

the…government.”5

A few days after the Moradabad conference, a West Point military academy report

published by one Imtiaz ‘Ali argued that Karachi, Pakistan might be transforming into a

“Taliban safe haven,” and linked a number of Deobandi seminaries, by name, not only to

the Taliban but to several anti-Shi’a, anti-Barelvi militant outfits as well.6

The next month armed Deobandis attacked (mostly Barelvi) mwlyd processions in

Faisalabad and Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan, “causing death, injuries and mayhem”; a

Deobandi preacher at a Faisalabad mosque was subsequently arrested for “inciting

people to violence,” prompting observers to wonder if a “cure” to the country’s sectarian

ills might best be focused on the “steady diet of dogmatic preaching” that “is to be found

wherever such violence occurs.”7

Two months before the attacks, the UK-based Guardian published an article

entitled, “Here, everyone is a minority,” highlighting (among other things) South Asian

immigration to Britain and concentrating on the so-called “Muslim city” of Leicester.

One of the dominant images painted in the article presented a ten-year-old Deobandi

mәsjyd, packed every Friday with over five hundred people, facing a one-hundred-year-

old Edwardian church with a congregation numbering only thirty. The Guardian piece

also underscored, however, the divided nature of the immigrant population, separated

by ethnic, linguistic, as well as religious barriers. The author, Andrew Brown, asked his

  14 
  

readers, “[Is] this…city a model for our future? Or is it proof that mass immigration

brings unmanageable strains?”8

A few weeks after the Guardian piece, a joint American and Pakistani raid

(conducted by the states’ respective intelligence agencies) captured top Taliban leader

mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi, though the elusive, Deobandi-trained mullah

Muhammad Omar remained yet out of reach—while Barelvis vacillated between

animosity for the mostly Deobandi Taliban movement and hatred for the Pakistani

Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) and the American Central Intelligence

Agency and military.9

The above exercise merely provides a snapshot, of course—restricted to a couple

months’ time, randomly selected—of the Deobandi-Barelvi dynamic as it plays out

across the world within religious, social, and political spheres. What is this apparent

Deobandi-Barelvi schism, and how has it become so centrally connected to such broadly

unrelated phenomena as the world’s second-largest Muslim gathering (in Bangladesh),

the largest missionary organization of any faith on the planet in the Tablighi Jama’at (a

position disputed by the Barelvis’ own Dawat-e-Islami), minority disputes over

government influence in north-central India, reports issued by West Point researchers

in the United States, “Muslim” immigration to Britain, outbreaks of sectarian violence in

Pakistan, and the machinations of intelligence agencies vis-à-vis the Afghan Taliban

movement? To answer this interrogative, it may be necessary to go back to the

beginning, to the days of the Prophet Muhammad, and trace the development of the

ideologies and belief systems and political philosophies, as far as is possible, that would

eventually coalesce and emerge into the separate schools now classified as

“Deobandism” and “Barelvism.” Along the way, perhaps, the reader might gain an

  15 
  

improved understanding not only of the tangled roots of the past from which these

schools’ draw inspiration and sustenance, but also of their separate visions for a future,

glorious Islamic order.

Medina: the First Islamic State.

The beginnings of an overtly political Islam can be traced all the way back to the

days of the Prophet Muhammad and the Emigration (hyjrәt; 622 AD/1 AH) to

Medina.10 Before this watershed, Muhammad had been, simply, a “messenger”

(piGәmbәr) of God; each revelation (later to become a chapter [swrәt] of the Qur’an)

that he received was memorized and recited both by him and his followers as part of

their religious ritual. The Meccan revelations, too—usually significantly shorter than

their subsequent Medinan counterparts—tended to possess a more “spiritual” (as

opposed to temporal) nature, communicating ideas about the greatness of God, warning

of God’s judgments, expressing the significance of showing gratitude, conveying the

importance of charity, and underscoring Muhammad’s calling as a messenger of Allah.

These early revelations seemed to avoid, for the most part, the mundane or the worldly

(though there is a subtle undercurrent of hostility against the wealthy merchants of

Mecca, many of whom belonged to clans opposed to Muhammad’s own Hashimite clan

and its allies).11

But after Meccan opposition drove the Muslims from the holy city and into the

desert, Muhammad and his followers became, for the first time, a community set apart.

From this point forward, Islam denoted not just a religious philosophy but also an

identifiable, explicitly political phenomenon. Indeed, the Prophet assumed the role not

only of spiritual leader but political ruler as well (not to mention political arbiter

  16 
  

between the various Medinan tribes)—and the change was reflected in the swrәts

received in the Muslims’ new oasis center. Here, the Prophet’s revelations became

longer and dealt with a much wider range of everyday community issues. Within six

months of his arrival, Muhammad was sending out “expeditions” to plunder Meccan

caravans (though their first successful raid didn’t come for another year) and make

alliances with nearby nomadic tribes—both overtly political moves. And within the

first five years (though probably around the time of his arrival in the oasis), Muhammad

had drawn up a “Constitution of Medina,” outlining a political alliance between the eight

Arab clans of the town (each of whom had pledged to embrace Islam) plus the

muhajyrwn, or “emigrants,” that Muhammad had led out of Mecca; the Jews and pagans

(i.e. all of the non-Muslims) were allotted allied status vis-à-vis the “main” community.

Meanwhile, as a political leader, Muhammad continued to govern his own clan of

émigrés, order raids (taking his one-fifth when they returned successful), make alliances,

and position himself politically within Medina, all the while acting as a judge of sorts

between the various Medinan groups when necessary. The political structure of Arab

society in Muhammad’s time did not befit a single despot, thus the Prophet’s use of such

indirect means of control, at least during the initial Medina years, is hardly surprising.

Indeed, one mid-nineteenth/mid-thirteenth century commentator described the political

system of the Arabs during this period thus:

The representative of the common ancestor of each tribe possessed a

natural authority over it; but, having no support from any external power

he could only carry his measures by means of the heads of subordinate

divisions, who depended, in their turn, on their influence with the

  17 
  

members of the family of which they represented the progenitor. The

whole government was therefore conducted by persuasion and there was no

interference with personal independence unless it directly affected the general

interest. [Italics added.]12

As time passed and Muhammad, based in Medina, consolidated power, this “persuasive”

form of government evolved into something more coercive, setting the stage for the

even more top-down system established by his successors and, eventually, the “Islamic”

states that would emerge later. Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina plus his

early years in the oasis might therefore justifiably be described as a transitional

period—from the almost wholly “persuasive Islam” of the Meccan era to the more

coercive version of the faith (including coercion via the threat of violent reprisal against

members of the community and military action against enemies) that later developed in

Medina. It was to this later, more compulsion-based (at least as it compared to the early

Meccan period) epoch that future Muslim scholars would look for the ultimate example

of righteous Islamic government. Both the Deobandis and the Barelvis would draw

inspiration from Muhammad’s example as a political leader, and from the ideal Islamic

state that he instituted in what had once been the minor desert town of Yathrib.

After a Muslim victory over far superior Meccan forces at Badr (624/2)—during yet

another raid—the political prestige of Muhammad skyrocketed. Several assassinations

(in which he may or may not have had personal involvement) quickly ridded him of

critics and political opponents, to boot. He oversaw a siege against one of the Jewish

tribes (mostly goldsmiths and armor-makers) of the oasis before expelling them

completely from the area. The concept of jyhad (or holy “struggle,” strictly against non-

  18 
  

Muslims) developed, too, perhaps as a way for the various tribes to continue their

traditional raids while simultaneously preserving the peace of the Muslim community at

large (ummәt). The Muslims survived a close call against the Meccans at Uhud (625/3)

before driving a second Medinan Jewish tribe (keepers of palm orchards) away. A third

major engagement against Meccan forces—the Battle of the Trench (627/5)—saw the

Muslims victorious, and was followed by the murder of all of the men of the remaining

Jewish tribe in the oasis (and the sale of the tribe’s women and children into slavery) for

alleged conspiracy with the enemy. Each of these overtly political actions eventually led

to the Prophet’s emergence as unchallenged leader in Medina. He was, in effect, both

spiritual and political head of an oasis state. Meanwhile, the task of building alliances

with nomadic tribes continued.

By 628/6, Mecca was no longer in a position to destroy Muhammad or his

followers; indeed, the city’s leaders signed a treaty with the Prophet allowing for

Muslims to make pilgrimage there the following year. Truly, Muhammad’s political

power had grown tremendously in the mere six years since the great merchants of his

hometown had more or less driven him out of their midst. Meanwhile, the Muslims had

captured a Jewish oasis (named Khaybar), significant in that its inhabitants were

allowed to remain as long as they paid tribute to the Muslim state; the seeds of an

Islamic empire had been planted.13 By 629/8, Muhammad’s forces had taken Mecca

with minimal bloodshed. Subsequently, Muhammad’s gentle treatment of his erstwhile

enemies quickly won many of them over. Following a victory over a group of tribes

east of Mecca soon afterwards, Muhammad’s polity and its martial forces were

recognized as more than a match for any other tribe or group of tribes in all of Arabia;

deputations from many of these tribes now traveled to Medina to formally ally with the

  19 
  

Muslims. One condition underlying each alliance: the acceptance of Islam. For the first

time that anyone could remember, the feuding Arabian tribes of the vast desert

peninsula were more or less united under a single banner (indeed, one scholar described

the political situation of Arabia at this time as “pax Islamica”).14 Toward the end of his

life, Muhammad led a major expedition (comprising tens of thousands of men) outside of

Arabia into Syria, where he contracted treaties with Jewish and Christian communities,

laying the groundwork for the later Islamic empire’s “dhimmi” (źymi) system. The

expedition opened the door, too, to external conquest, taken up with a vengeance by the

Prophet’s successors, and made additionally possible by the recent collapse of the

Persian Empire and the sheer “exhaustion” of Byzantium.15

Even examining these earliest early years of Islam, it is possible to identify the roots

of both the scholarly ‘alәma (“jurist-theologians,” to use the descriptive of M. Ahmad;

singular: ‘alym) and the Sufi mәshayx (“elders,” “leaders,” or “great men”; singular: shix),

both of which, in different forms, would play a central role within the development of

the Deobandi and Barelvi schools and within the progression of their mutual rivalry. As

mentioned previously, though the Prophet recited the Qur’an as revealed to him by

God, the Prophet’s Companions became known as qurra, “reciters of the Qur’an”

(singular: qari), too (as revealed to them by the Prophet). Some modern-day scholars

trace the beginnings of the ‘alәma to the qurra of Medina, though a distinct class of

Muslim scholars appears not to have been identifiable until the period of hәdis-collection

and Qur’anic law codification (c. eighth-tenth centuries/second-fourth centuries).16

More certainty about historicity is expressed by the various Sufi orders, each of which

traces its spiritual genealogy—their “initiatic chains,” or sylsәla—all the way back to the

Prophet himself. Of course, no one in Muhammad’s day was likely thinking about

  20 
  

documentation for the benefit of establishing historical legitimacy in the eyes of future

scholars, and as a result such “hard proof” is lacking. Still, for Sufis, their particular

brand of religious practice “begins…in a real and important sense with the origins of

Islam itself.”17 Each of the major orders in South Asia, whose ranks include both

leading Deobandis and prominent Barelvis, can name each and every link in the chain,

stretching back one-and-a-half millennia to Muhammad’s Arabia. The Prophet,

according to Sufi doctrine, is the founder of the Sufi orders—not any other individual.

(For example, the Naqshbandis identify their sylsәla as having been introduced during

the hyjrәt, when Muhammad evidently initiated Abu Bakr while they were hiding in a

cave from Meccan enemies). In a sense, then, all Sufism is revivalist, as the initiatory

pledge necessary to gain admittance to a Sufi order becomes a key to “gain access,” to

quote Algar, to the “’auspicious age’ which it is the purpose of the Sufi to relive.”18

Upon the death of Muhammad in 632/11, his Companions at once selected a

successor and “deputy” (xәlifәħ, or “caliph”): Abu Bakr. What is remarkable is that,

according to tradition, this reorganization took place more or less unanimously (despite

some initial rumblings in ‘Ali’s favor) and immediately—even before the Prophet’s body

had been laid in the earth. This episode in the history of Islam has been interpreted by

many of the ‘alәma as demonstrating the religiously obligatory nature of the caliphate

(xylafәt), an institution so important that the Companions “preferred it [this obligation]

over the burial of the Holy Prophet” [italics added]. This act, strengthened as it was by

the consensus of the Companions, thus became “a permanent source of [shәri’at],” in the

words of one prominent Pakistani mufti.19 The selection of Abu Bakr as caliph is

considered a textbook example of how a board of responsible, intellectual people (әhәl

  21 
  

әlhәl w әl’aqәd)—typically ‘alәma, of course—possess the responsibility (and power) to

appoint the next viceroy of the Prophet.

Over the next three decades alone (the period of the “Rashidun” [rashydin], or the

four “rightly-guided” caliphs after Muhammad; 632-661/11-40), the new Muslim polity

spread rapidly, annexing territory from the Arabian peninsula in the south to what is

today Turkey and the Caucasus in the north, from northern Africa and southwestern

Europe in the west to Persia and much of Central Asia in the east. The ‘alәma and

Muslim historians, even of the early twenty-first/mid-fifteenth century, write of these

conquests as glorious affairs, the crowning achievement of an era of greatness since

unrivaled. As one Muslim commentator has described this phenomenon, “Muslims

[throughout the ages] could not forget the memory of their early triumphs” (italics

added).20 This period and (perhaps especially) those that followed after it illuminate

several key ideas connected to the present work—including that of the ideal Muslim

ruler, the role of the ‘alym as well as the Sufi shix vis-à-vis such a ruler, and the religio-

political vision of the ‘alәma for the future. Identifying and understanding these

historical roots is vital to comprehending the long-standing rift between the religious

schools born of Deoband and Bareilly, including their more modern-day manifestations

within the political framework of pre-Partition India and post-Partition Pakistan. Both

schools are driven in large part by visions of the distant past and, shaped by that past, of

Islamic revival and a more glorious future.

From the Rashidun period to the present, Muslim rulers (and the scholars and Sufis

inhabitating their realms—some as legitimators, others as contestors of legitimacy)

constantly harked back to the original Muslim empire established by Muhammad and

expanded by his first four “rightly-guided” deputies. Here, then, lies the key to

  22 
  

establishing righteousness upon the earth—a true Islamic state ruled by a legitimate

caliph of the Prophet. As a reputable Muslim scholar in Pakistan has pointed out,

taking his inspiration from this early period, the ideal ruler within an Islamic order

must (a) always strive to act according to God’s will, (b) respect the ‘alәma and the

mәshayx, (c) ensure the fair treatment of the people by his subordinate officers, (d) show

equal justice to both “high and low,” (e) snuff out immorality, (f) encourage commerce,

(g) show charity to the poor, and (h) handle the financial affairs of the realm such that

surplus money might be allotted to deserving charities, scholars, divines, and artists.21

Perhaps the verse of eighteenth-century/twelfth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ahmad Rafi

Sauda describes this ideal well, too. The following comes from Sauda’s ain-e-dawri

(“Rules of Good Governance”):

Once a beggar, we are told, to a king did pray:

“I would like to say something, if you heed my say.

Of good and wise governance this is the foremost rule

That a ruler should be kind to the destitutes.

When a king delivers justice from his regal seat,

Both the great and the small he should with even hand treat.

Only to such advice should he lend his ear,

Which contributes to the public welfare.

He should treat his subjects as tender blooms and buds,

And like a vernal cloud his gentle shade spread,

His kindness with even course flows for one and all,

His grace, on boss and worker, in equal measure falls.

  23 
  

How tragic that the men considered God’s vice-regents,

Should be unacquainted with the rules of governance!

[Italics added.]22

Sauda’s verse is pertinent on a number of levels, though his obvious emphasis on justice,

equity, and mercy, common themes for great rulers within Muslim historiography (even

those considered brutal, piratical, or bloodthirsty by, for example, Western standards),

is perhaps the most relevant here. The final lines of the poem indicate, of course, that

Muslim observers recognized that the ideal not infrequently remained just that—an

ideal, all-too-often unrealized in the temporal world.

Hand-in-hand with the ideal Muslim ruler is the ideal Muslim state. In the words of

leading (Deobandi) Islamic juridical scholar Muhammad Taqi Usmani, Islam is “a

complete way of life” dealing with “political, economic, and social problems,” not just

“theological issues.” The ‘alәma point both to Qur’anic injunctions concerning such

earthly matters as loans, business, mortgages, contracts, penal law, marriage, war,

peace, international relations, politics, and inheritance, as well as to interpretations

related to these and other issues gleaned from the sunnәt, as proof that the domain of

Islam extends beyond the wholly spiritual to the day-to-day mundane details of mortal

life.23 For Muhammad, as Watt reminds us, religion was a “total response” to the “total

situation” confronting him in seventh-century/first-century Arabia; it thus extended

beyond the realm of the intellectual or the strictly spiritual or the “religious.” “[I]t is

impossible,” Watt concluded, “for any occidental to distinguish within [Muhammad’s]

achievement between what is religious and what is non-religious or secular.”24

Returning to the question of an Islamic socio-political framework, then, it is not enough

  24 
  

to enjoy the freedom to carry out Islamic ritual, worship, and study within a given

geographical area—not enough to possess the autonomy to live one’s religion as one

pleases without the interference of the state. This individualist, more libertarian

outlook, both the Deobandi and Barelvi religious scholars agree, simply will not suffice.

Islam, as a “complete way of life,” must be established within the apparatus—indeed, as

the very bedrock—of the State.25 Since the days of the Messenger, one scholar has

explained, it was “the possession of power” that “was seen to be essential to upholding the

shari’a…” [italics added].26 Perhaps it is unfortunate that something akin to a more

classical liberal approach rarely, if ever, seems to have been considered, for once shәri’at

is to be established via the guns of government—and the threat of violence, whether

implicit or explicit, by which government fundamentally operates—the question of

who’s version of shәri’at is to be applied becomes especially critical. This phenomenon

was to embed itself centrally at the heart of the Deobandi-Barelvi dispute.

Muslim Footholds in South Asia.

In South Asia, contact with Islam seems to have first been initiated by Arab

merchants, plying their trade along the coasts of what are today southern Pakistan,

western India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives (though several abortive Muslim raids had

penetrated the subcontinent as far as Multan within the first half-century of the Islamic

era, too). Eventually considerable-sized Muslim settlements developed in many of the

trading ports ringing the Indian Ocean. Here Islam spread more or less non-coercively,

as local populations (and, at times, local rulers) adopted the foreign traders’ faith as their

own. Muslim merchants journeyed far beyond India, too, regularly conducting

commercial activity up and down the Southeast Asian coast, in China, and even in

  25 
  

Korea. In fact, the Muslim merchants of Korea would play what might be considered a

decisive role in the spread of Islam in South Asia. For it was here that, upon the deaths

of a number of these merchants, the Korean king commissioned a group of Persian ships

to convey the deceased trader’s wives and children to Iraq so that this husbandless and

fatherless collection might be reunited with its coreligionists. The convoy experienced

little trouble sailing south from Korea, past China, Vietnam, Cambodia, around the

Southeast Asian peninsula and into the Indian Ocean, past Ceylon and up the western

Indian coast. But as the widows and their families were sailing on the waters south of

Sindh, they were attacked—either by pirates or the naval forces of the local Brahmin

king; historians aren’t certain which. Immediately upon hearing the news, the Muslim

viceroy in Iraq requested that the Sindhi ruler intervene, but he refused. In fact,

according to Muslim sources, the women, children, and shipmen in question were even

at that moment being held prisoner—not by pirates, but by the wily ruler himself.

(Other historians point to the Brahman king’s stated reason for non-compliance with

Arab demands: namely, that the city wherein the Arab ships had been seized lay outside

of his jurisdiction).

The Iraqi viceroy’s response was to send the young Muhammad bin Qasim at the

head of a mighty army into the subcontinent, and by 712/93 the conquest of Sindh,

briefly attempted before bin Qasim (but never successfully), was complete. The move

not only opened up increased trade with the rest of India, clearing the sea lanes for Arab

merchants, but it also convinced many of west India’s rulers that friendship and

commerce with the new conquerors was prudent. The aforementioned development of

Muslim communities up and down western India’s coastline mostly occurred after the

Sindhi conquest of Muhammad bin Qasim.

  26 
  

The description of Muhammad bin Qasim handed down by history (or “through

Muslim eyes,” as contemporary descriptions of the man, his victories, and his rule are

inevitably garnered from Muslim pen) is an interesting one—and relevant to the topic

of this work. Far from being painted as a tyrannical invader who conquered town and

city only to rule and reign as plundering despot, Muhammad bin Qasim is described as

just, tolerant, and kind (even, however reluctantly, by at least one prominent

nineteenth-century/thirteenth-century British writer, who characterized him as

“prudent and conciliatory”).27 Muslim historians insist that he preserved Buddhist and

Hindu places of worship and that he went out of his way to show respect to Brahmins.

“His main mission was to punish a willful aggressor [the erstwhile ruler of Sindh],” not

forcefully convert a country. In fact, his policy vis-à-vis his vanquished foes was one of

forgiveness and “friendship for all.” He even authored a proclamation that one Pakistani

historian has dubbed “the Charter of Liberty of Brahmanabad,” in which, among other

things, he declared freedom of worship for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Perhaps

most interestingly, he raised the status of Buddhists and Hindus so that they stood on

equal footing with Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians “in the true spirit of Islam.” This

was an ideal type, a true Muslim conqueror: one whose arrival was veritably forced by

political expediency—by justice, even—and whose conquest, though swift and militarily

inspiring, was nevertheless followed by merciful rule (including a strong tendency

toward forgiveness), equity, tolerance, patronage of the arts, and strong central

administration. The ideal ruler broke the bonds of evil or inherently unjust local

tradition and custom, too; in Sindh, Muslim rule brought with it the breakdown of “the

coercive caste-ridden alien rule of the Brahman dynasty.”28 Muhammad bin Qasim

becomes for us the first example of the Muslim ideal ruler type in South Asian history.

  27 
  

Such a portrayal is certainly not universally accepted, of course, but most Muslim

historians—and thus most Deobandi and Barelvi scholars—seem to paint bin Qasim in

such strokes.29

Sizable “Muslim” forces arriving from the outside wouldn’t make an appearance in

the subcontinent again until the late tenth century AD, amidst the “age-old” Indo-

Turkic rivalry of Hindustan’s northwestern frontier.30 Muslim historians insist that the

aggressors were the Indian states, more or less confederate, to the east (or, at the very

least, that they [the Indians] fell behind on promised tribute payments); it seems,

however, that the conflict was focused, as ever, on land (eastern Afghanistan) and that

each side aggressed upon the other. After a series of attacks, the conflict between

Ghazni, ruled by the Turk Sabuktigin, and the Indian states came to a head in 988/378.

It was in that year that the Indian Jaipal, said to have been leading a host culled

from the various north Indian states and numbering one hundred thousand, marched on

Ghazni. The Ghaznavids were growing too strong, and Sabuktigin (who had “started

vigorously to expand his dominions”)31 had already conducted several raids as far as

Lamghan and Multan; in fact, these very raids had precipitated the alliance of “Hindu”

kingdoms against the Ghaznavid threat, an alliance that would only grow with time.

Now Jaipal was bent on putting the Turks in their place. Meanwhile, from the walls of

Ghazni, the teenaged son of Sabuktigin, Mahmud, likely watched the oncoming horde

with not a little trepidation. And so the battle commenced, and a furious clash it was,

but Sabuktigin prevailed, crushing the aspirations of his Indian rivals and extending the

Turkic king’s domain to Peshawar. Evidently he could have taken more, but

Sabuktigin, ever a noble Muslim ruler, was forgiving and interested in peace above all—

and thus he agreed to the terms aforementioned, trusting in Jaipal to honor them and

  28 
  

thereby assure the survival of his (Jaipal’s) kingdom. But the Hindu rajәħ, we are told,

continued his machinations against Ghazni in spite of the latter’s good faith. Young

Mahmud, a witness to this history—the battles against the invading Indians, their

perceived intrigues and scheming—almost certainly made mental preparation to

prevent a similar set of circumstances when his own time came to inherit his father’s

kingdom.32

That time came in 997/387. Upon ascending the throne of Ghazni, Mahmud vowed

to keep the Indian kingdoms in check through consistent and calculated aggression that

would keep them too busy at home to execute any sort of westward invasion. In

1001/391, he faced Jaipal in battle again; Jaipal’s loss was so humiliating that the Indian

king took his own life by fiery self-immolation. By 1008/398, Mahmud had defeated a

second confederacy of Indian states—this one led by Jaipal’s son—in a battle at

Peshawar. Much of the Punjab fell into Mahmud’s hands as a result, and a Ghaznavid

governor was installed at Lahore. By the time of his death in 1030/421, Mahmud had

conquered cities and states across northern India (typically leaving them in the hands of

Hindu vassals) as far east as Somnath (1024/415), and raided forts, towns, and Hindu

temples enough to fill his treasury. After all of these expeditions into the plains,

however, the son of Sabuktigin really only incorporated the Punjab into his empire.

Despite his reputation among many western historians as a raider and plunderer,

Mahmud of Ghazni is described by Muslim histories as not only a military genius, but a

just ruler as well. Writes Qureshi, “He was neither a mere robber nor a bloodthirsty

tyrant, as some modern writers have called him, and shed no blood except in the

exigencies of war.”33 It had been the Indian states that had aggressed first, and often—

and when they had lost and agreed to pay indemnities, they had defaulted. Mahmud

  29 
  

had thus done what was necessary to prevent further Indian incursions against his

dominions. The Hindu temples he destroyed, though many, were not those of his own

Hindu subjects (which he preserved). Mahmud is, in fact, credited with considerable

broadmindedness, evident in his apparent attempt “to reconcile the Hindus and

integrate them under his government and polity.” This last he accomplished by

recruiting Hindus into his civil administration (even in Ghazni, where a few rose to

considerable heights), incorporating Hindu divisions into his army, and even minting

coins depicting local mythical figures and Sanskrit script.34 And as a patron of the arts

and scholarship, his “reputation has remained undiminished throughout the ages”;35 it

was under his sponsorship that polymath Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni

(considered by some as the father of Indology, geodesy, and anthropology) labored, and

Hakim Abul Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi wrote the epic Shahnama under his patronage.

Mahmud of Ghazni thus joins Muhammad bin Qasim as an ideal Muslim ruler within

the South Asian context. Eighteenth-century/twelfth-century political philosopher and

revivalist Shah Waliullah (on whom more later) would describe Mahmud as the greatest

Islamic ruler after the original Muslim caliphate (and point out that his victories—all

fought for with the express aim of propagating Islam—were in part a result of his

sharing a horoscope with the Prophet).36 “[I]n Afghanistan he is regarded as a

philosopher prince, the conqueror of infidels,” writes one British historian, while “in

India he has left a bitter legacy for his violent conquests.”37

Several other Ghanzavids might also be included in this category, including Ibrahim

(r. 1059-1099/451-492), whose peace settlement with the Seljuks to the west made

possible further conquest east into Hindu India, and his son Masud (r. 1099-1115/492-

  30 
  

509). The rule of Ibrahim and Masud, Muslim historians insist, facilitated an impressive

flowering of culture in Lahore.

Throughout the Ghaznavid period, the relationship between the rulers and the

‘alәma remained close, a political feature that was more or less inherited by the

Ghaznavids as quasi-successors of the Samanids. These Muslim scholars not only

advised their political masters on matters of shәri’at, but also were active as impeders of

Shi’a (and particularly Ism’aili) influence.38 Maintaining Sunni orthodoxy through the

guns of government was the rule, thus it makes sense that the ‘alәma were concentrated

in Ghazna and, later, in Lahore—the seats of political power in the realm. M. Ahmad

singles out shix Ism’ail Bukhari (d. 1056 AD), based in Lahore, and Safiuddin Kazuruni

(d. 1007 AD), who established himself farther south, in Uchch, as particularly

noteworthy ‘alәma of the age. Bukhari pioneered the study of hәdis in South Asia—a

theme that later reformers, like Shah Waliullah and the Deobandi fathers, would

adopt—in addition to his missionary efforts; Kazaruni, a generation earlier, had likewise

proselytized for the faith in the subcontinent.

Indeed, perhaps the most important dynamic then being established in the

northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent was not military (i.e. the Ghaznavid

conquests) or scholarly (i.e. the efforts of the ‘alәma), but centered on Sufi proselytizing.

Since as early as the eighth/first century, when Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sindh,

Sufi missionaries had been penetrating the subcontinent—and by the time of the

Ghaznavids, many had been established in northwestern Hindustan (and further south,

along the western coast) for many years.39 To borrow from Robinson, “Sufis were the

prime agents in the long process of slowly drawing people [east of the Hindu Kush] of a

  31 
  

myriad local religious traditions into an Islamic milieu” (italics added).40 M. Ahmad

described the genesis of Sufism as follows:

Some of the ‘ulema’ who preferred to dedicate themselves to the

missionary work of Islam or devote themselves exclusively to rigorous

spiritual self-discipline were called by the names of sufiya, awliya,

mashaykh and pir. In order to preach Islam among the people at large,

they adopted the ‘mass contact’ technique and developed for this purpose

a separate ‘code of ethics’ and a body of ‘doctrines’ based on the esoteric

interpretations of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. In contrast with the ahl al-

Shar’iah [People of the Law], they are known as the ahl al-Tariqah

[People of the Way]. In fact what the mighty Muslim rulers could not

achieve by the sword, these sufis achieved with love and tolerance. They

were miraculously successful in pushing the frontiers of Islam to the

farthest extent through peaceful conversion.41

Thus while the approach of the ‘alәma to things political was to exert direct influence on

policy-makers as members of the political class and components of the sultan’s court,

the Sufis, generally speaking, adopted what could be considered in modern parlance a

more libertarian method—one that relied on persuasion, preaching, long-suffering,

selfless service, and personal example to effect change, without direct systematic

recourse to the levers of the State (though such recourse was taken indirectly at times).

The ‘alәma were the guardians of Islamic law—and it was through the law, enforced by

a just Muslim ruler within the domains of an Islamic state, that righteousness could be

  32 
  

established upon the earth. The Sufi saints, on the other hand, while sharing the goal of

establishing righteousness, sought its realization by “acting as a common source of

inspiration both to the rulers as well as the ruled.” Indeed, some scholars have argued

that Sufi influence resulted generally in a more “passive” subject population, less

disposed to unrest and rebellion. But their sway did not flow downward only; the Sufis

regularly, through advice-giving and sermons, are reported to have curbed the tyranny

of those less just rulers whose actions towards the common people might have required

attention.42

It should be noted that Sufi and ‘alym are not by any means mutually exclusive

terms (indeed, one scholar has called them “complementary,” while obviously

“nonetheless distinct”).43 In fact, many of the greatest ‘alәma were and are members of

at least one Sufi order, and often several. At times, and particularly in the

contemporary news media in the context of South Asian (especially Pakistani) Islam and

politics, the term “Sufi” is presented as being almost synonymous with “Barelvi” (a term

far less employed), while the Deobandis are considered part of an ‘alәma movement.

Such views are entirely erroneous, however, and may be attributed to the Deoband

school’s reputation as a “puritanical” institution (and a slight, gradual trend since its

founding towards a greater emphasis on scholarship), opposed to the assumed historical

Sufistic tendency to adopt local, possibly unorthodox ideas and practice—commonly

associated with the Barelvis. For the Sufi preachers’ missions of conversion by

persuasion “meant accommodating local needs and customs,” explained Robinson; such

“accommodation” meant

  33 
  

incorporating worship of trees, or fish, or crocodiles, or cults relating to

St George or Khwaja Khidr, into local sufi piety. It meant tolerating a

range of ritual practices: the lighting of candles, the smearing of sandal

paste, the tying of a piece of cloth to a shrine to remind a saint of a

request.44

This sort of “accretion” has indeed been the target of much Deobandi criticism, but one

must realize that there exists a wide spectrum of Sufistic thought and practice, from the

highly esoteric to the more orthodox; the Naqshbandiyya, for example, would probably

fall into this latter category. In any case, even within a single order, great variation in

practice and even doctrine has historically existed. Another potential source of this

misunderstanding may lie in what Sanyal observed as “one of the ways the Ahl-e-Sunnat

[i.e. Barelvi] movement has changed in the course of the twentieth century,” namely

“the leadership’s increased emphasis on the role of Sufism.”45 Simultaneously, a de-

emphasis on Sufism as a central tenet of religious practice occurred among the

Deobandis, whose focus slowly shifted towards the study of traditional Islamic sources

and shәri’at. In the northwest frontier area, for example, where Deobandism quickly

gained a major foothold, Haroon has pointed out that “accounts of religious pedagogy in

the region” from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century AD “all note madrasas

aimed at imparting a formal Quranic education. The centrality of tariqa [țәriqәt, or the

Sufi “way”]…began to diminish.”46

The fact of the matter is that both the Barelvi and Deobandi founder figures held

membership in multiple Sufi orders while simultaneously having attained the scholarly

rank of ‘alym. (Indeed, the Naqshbandi order has itself been dubbed by some as “one of

  34 
  

ulema.”)47 “Sufis are the dignity of Deobandism,” one of the school’s adherents, a local

dignitary in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Mansehra district, informed the writer, “and [the]

faith would be incomplete” without the belief that Sufis represent those closest to God,

“the most perfect” of all people.48 The mistaken scholar-Sufi binary characterizing the

two schools’s relation to each other may also be attributed to the fact that while the

Deobandis revere the Sufis and continue to be initiated into their spiritual lines (albeit

less and less), they believe that the “route to Allah” is discovered through emulation of

the Prophet’s life—in other words, living according to the shәri’at (what Robinson calls

“this-wordly piety”). The Barelvis, on the other hand, place added faith in țәriqәt—“the

Sufi route to Allah”49—which, in the words of one Deobandi, “cross[es] the boundaries”

which “Allah has set for his creatures” (and thereby approaches Robinson’s “other-

worldly piety”).50 The “Sufi route to Allah” involves the suggestion that the

intercession of a pir for man with God could have efficacy, an approach still clinging to

life in some Deobandi circles but very much alive within Barelvism. Thus only in

approach to Sufism and the Sufi orders, then, do the two schools differ. Sufism itself

plays a major role in both Barelvism and Deobandism. Still, perhaps in this admittedly

blurred dichotomy—between the ‘alәma and the Sufis—can be observed, however

faintly, one of the historical roots of what would become the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry.

Taken alone this would, in light of what has been written above, constitute a gross

oversimplification. But the difference in approach towards both religious orthodoxy and

the exertion of political influence that at least partly defined these two groups certainly

merits recognition as a significant thread in the fabric of modern-day Deobandi-Barelvi

dynamics.

  35 
  

Ghazni was burned to the ground in 1150/545 by a new power in Central Asia: that

of the Afghan Ghurids. And though the Ghurids would suffer a setback of their own at

the hands of the Seljuks, yet another group—the Oghuz Turks—finally drove the

Ghaznavids from their capital. They found refuge in Lahore, where their dynasty

continued. Meanwhile, the Ghurids, now recovered from their previous setbacks, took

Ghazni, Multan, and Uch (1175/571) under their leader Muhammad bin Sam, and made

an abortive attempt at conquering India through Gujarat in 1178/574. Though the

latter failed, another expedition was launched following the more well-worn path to the

north; in 1179/575 Muhammad bin Sam took Peshawar, in 1181/577 Sialkot fell, in

1186/582 he seized Lahore (thus effectively ending the Ghaznavid dynasty), and by

1191/587 he had taken Bhatinda, threatening Ajmer and, ultimately, Delhi. In

response, the Hindu rulers of those two citadel cities joined forces and marched on

Bhatinda, where a temporary victory could not shield them from their fate; both Ajmer

and Delhi fell to Muhammad the next year (1192/588). But the Afghan conqueror

wasn’t finished. Within a handful of years, Muhammad bin Sam had added Varanasi

and Kannauj to his empire, while one of his generals (Muhammad bin Bakhtyar Khalji)

conquered Bihar and Bengal. For the first time, “Muslim” rule extended across

northern India, and further expansion was only prevented by troubles in Central Asia.

He and his successors were known to “favour the ulema, by being generous to them and

paying attention to their words” (and by “bestowing on them large amounts of money”),

according to one Muslim chronicler.51 Simply “paying attention” to the ‘alәma was

requisite for the ideal ruler; in the modern era, in Pakistan, the perceived discounting of

both Deobandi and Barelvi scholars was one of very few things that might cause the

‘alәma to temporarily shelve their own dispute and oppose this or that regime as “un-

  36 
  

Islamic” or “anti-Islam.” On the other hand, political rulers that were wise enough to

meet with the ‘alәma and consider their point-of-view, to give them a voice—even if

their advice might be ultimately decided against—tended to meet with the scholars’

approbation (at which point the Deobandi and Barelvi religious leadership could return

to jockeying for power between themselves).

The Ghurids, like previous dynasties, patronized the ‘alәma with plunder gained

through the administration of their empire and the conquest of new lands. As political

rulers are wont to do, the Ghurids discriminated between the various schools of Muslim

thought, identifying and financially supporting this or that ‘alym, much to the chagrin of

those excluded (one of the many dangers of state patronage). In the end, the Shafi

leanings of the early Ghurids gave way to the Hanafi majority of Afghanistan (the

empire’s base of control) and the Ghurid soldiery that would go on to conquer India,

with great consequence for South Asian Islam.52 Muhammad of Ghur himself was

“reputed to be a mild and benevolent man,” the Muslim historian tells us, and “a good

general and a just ruler.”53 Like Muhammad bin Qasim and Mahmud of Ghazni, the

example of Muhammad of Ghur is celebrated today by millions of Muslims. The

Ghurid conqueror is considered a hero, possessing many attributes of the ideal Islamic

ruler type, despite the nature of his conquests (as “invasions”; after all, as Wood notes, it

was a “combination of brutality and high civilization” that characterized “medieval

Islam”).54

Delhi Sultanate.

A former slave of Muhammad of Ghur, Qutbuddin Aibak, became the first sultan of

Delhi in 1206/603, ushering in a new era in the history of the subcontinent: that of

  37 
  

sustained “Muslim” rule over vast Indian territory. Under the Mamluks (1206-

1290/603-689), the Delhi Sultanate expanded across much of north India. Their

successors, the Turko-Afghan Khaljis (1290-1320/689-720), extended the sultan’s

domains into central India while simultaneously holding back Mongol would-be

invaders—one of the few polities successful in this regard. The next dynasty (the

Tughluqs, 1320-1414/720-817, of Turkic origin), after some initial military success,

including the extension of the sultanate to its territorial height (almost conquering all of

the subcontinent under Muhammad bin Tughluq [r. 1325-1351/725-752]), ultimately

experienced a series of crippling setbacks. These obstacles included the loss of much

territory and, devastatingly, the invasion of Timur the Lame in 1398/801—an event

that resulted in the eight-day plundering of Delhi and the massacre of an estimated one

hundred thousand of the sultan’s subjects. Within a decade-and-a-half, the Tughluqs

had been replaced by the Sayyids (1414-1451/817-855), whose short rule ended with

the abdication of the last Sayyid sultan to a new dynasty: that of the Lodis (1451-

1526/855-933). The Lodis, ethnic Pathans, held the throne for three quarters of a

century, finally falling to a new power in South Asia—the Mughals—in 1526/933.

One might generally say, as Qureshi does, that the Delhi sultans “adhered to the

legal conception of the position of the sultan which was common throughout the

Muslim world.”55 And though, as Metcalf and Metcalf (and others) assert, “it

is…misleading to speak of this era as the period of ‘Muslim’ rule,” since other, “non-

Muslim” Indian states were organized and behaved in much the same way (Hardy

describes the Delhi sultanate as, for example, merely “pious policemen”—the sultans—

collaborating with “pious lawyers”—the ‘alәma), the fact remains that the period has for

centuries been regarded by Muslim scholars as distinctly Muslim, complete with several

  38 
  

ideal or at least near-ideal rulers (with a few rotten eggs thrown in).56 Gohar writes, for

example, that Ghiyasuddin Tughluq (r. 1320-1325/720-725) “reigned for five years

with justice and equity, restoring order and peace,” and that his son, too (Muhammad

bin Tughluq), though his rule would be marked by several major mistakes and

disappointments, nevertheless was “himself highly learned” and “greatly respected the

‘alәma” (though the same cannot be said about his position vis-à-vis the Sufi shixs); this

sultan’s setbacks are often glossed over as the result of natural impulsivity (and even

bad luck), despite his being pious and highly intelligent.57 On the other hand, Alauddin

Khilji (r. 1296-1316) saw his role as sultan as “separate from [shәri’at] and religious

tradition,” urging a sort of church-and-state separation that a few Pakistani leaders have

attempted to advocate, with mixed results. To Alauddin, shәri’at was the domain of

judges and muftis; as sultan he should be more concerned with “grain, cloth and basic

necessities for the people…”58 This dichotomy might justifiably be compared to the

competition, seven centuries later, between the religious parties on the one hand and

Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto’s PPP (especially during that organization’s early period) on the

other. At its heart, the issue was the role of government: was it to implement shәri’at

(which would, many of the ‘alәma argued, bring about prosperity and equity on its

own)? Or was it to act as a sort of paternal provider of temporal welfare (with the

scholars and muftis operating within their own sphere)? This is not to suggest that the

‘alәma themselves were not somewhat divided on this issue (they were, then as now), but

rather to underscore the long tradition of political rulers who have attempted the

construction of a wall between their own earthly responsibilities and those supposedly

more otherworldly tasks of the ‘alәma.

  39 
  

Like all good Muslim rulers, the Delhi sultans, often at the behest of their advising

‘alәma, typically sought legitimacy for their rule from the generally accepted caliph of

the Muslim world. For the early sultans, this meant applying for recognition from the

Abbasids in Baghdad. And even after the Mongols sacked that great city on 10

February 1258/7 Safar 656, and had the last Abbasid caliph wrapped in a carpet and

trampled to death by horses, the sultans in Delhi continued to more or less recognize

the dynasty for another four decades. One or two sultans later claimed that they were

caliphs (albeit only within their own domains), but this didn’t last long. Muhammad bin

Tughluq was convinced, perhaps by the ‘alәma counseling him, that recognition from

the reigning caliph was necessary to make his rule legitimate; this time application was

made to Cairo, from where the “shadow caliphate,” a line drawn from an Abbasid

survivor installed by the Mamluk Sultanate, sent Muhammad bin Tughluq a diploma in

1344/744. Feroz Shah received one, too, as did the breakaway Bahmani Sultanate in the

Deccan (though this last is debated). The Sayyids and Lodis also recognized the caliph

(at least on their coinage), and the former, as their name indicates, additionally claimed

to be descendants of the Prophet. All of this was consistent with the Muslim notion of

“singleness and political unity” defining the pan-Islamic world (a concept that

“resonate[s] among some Muslims even now,” says one modern Muslim writer; this is

certainly true of the two schools about which this work is concerned).59 Though the

reality on the ground might have reflected anything but a politically unified polity,

religious legitimization was important if the ruler wanted to exercise the “right” to such

plunder as land taxes. Such was the importance of the ‘alәma stamp of approval.

Official state positions for the ‘alәma during the Delhi Sultanate era were plentiful

and prominent. Throughout this period, religious affairs fell under the Sәdәr ul-Sudwr,

  40 
  

head of the Religious Affairs Department. Under the Sәdәr ul-Sudwr fell the shix ul-

yslam, an ‘alym responsible for handling state patronage of Sufis and other Muslim

divines. The position of qazi-e-mәmalyk—Chief Judge—was probably the most powerful

next to the Sәdәr ul-Sudwr; indeed, often both offices were combined in one individual.

The Chief Judge appointed all other judges in the realm (effectively making him the

head of the Justice Department), and additionally appointed ymams to lead prayers in all

mosques. To these highly significant responsibilities must be added the Department of

hysba—in essence, a Department of the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of

Vice. This morals-enforcement agency of government was, more or less completely, a

creature of the ‘alәma, and though its practical strength fluctuated over time, it often

enjoyed real power (as, ironically, during the reign of Alauddin, whose supposed

separation-of-church-and-state philosophy was evidently more separation-of-church-

and-sultan, granting the scholars free reign without intereference from the political

ruler). Thus there was ample room within the political structure of the Delhi Sultanate

for the ‘alәma to make their influence felt. “[E]ven when they could not influence a

sultan,” A. Ahmad informs us, their place within the state apparatus ensured that “they

could not easily be influenced by him.”60 In addition to their political role, the jurist-

theologians with the title mufti also acted as issuers of fәtawa, or juridical rulings, and

studied, analyzed, and wrote about the Qur’an, hәdis, and Islamic law (fyqħ).

One might generally say that the ‘alәma “occupied a position of great prestige”

under the Mamluks, reaching a peak in authority under Bahram Shah (r. 1240-

1242/637-639) thanks in part to matrimonial ties to the sultan’s house. This was

followed by a quieter influence during the latter half of the dynasty’s rule, though the

‘alәma continued to enjoy a close personal relationship with the sultan. Their authority

  41 
  

waned some during the short Khalji period, only to pick up again under the house of

Tughluq (especially during Feroz Shah’s reign: 1351-1388/751-790). Unfortunately for

the scholars, this coincided with the aforementioned decline of the Delhi Sultanate’s

power, specifically towards the end of the Tughluq period and throughout the Sayyid

period. This would change with the arrival on the scene of the Lodis, under whom the

Delhi Sultanate would experience somewhat of a resurgence—and the power of the

‘alәma, too, despite Sikander Lodi’s personal distaste for the scholars’ orthodoxy.61

Such authority often set the ‘alәma at odds with the Sufis. Indeed, it was not

uncommon for the court scholars to accuse the Muslim mystics of committing the great

sin of innovation (byd’at)—adding to or changing pure Islam as revealed to and by the

Prophet. This is the central accusation leveled by the Deobandis at the Barelvis.

Typically such an accusation would be made through the levers of the state, with formal

charges written up against an individual Sufi, resulting in a trial before a panel of ‘alәma

and Sufis. Sufis were dragged before such juries on a variety of charges—from listening

to music to adultery—though as often as not the verdict was decided in the Sufis’ favor

(and, sometimes, to the injury of the ‘alym from whence the charge originated).62 By

prohibiting an act by means of state-enforced legislation or mandate, a scholar’s nemesis

might be destroyed or otherwise marginalized. This mechanism was simply another

means by which the ‘alәma-Sufi rivalry played out.

A related phenomenon of this period was the establishment and proliferation of the

xanәqaħ, or Sufi shrine center—especially, during this period, of the Chishti and

Surawardy orders.63 From the thirteenth/seventh century, the Sufi shixs, or pirs (a term

prevalent in South Asia; in much of the rest of the Muslim world “pirs” are known as

walis—“friends of God”) had begun establishing themselves in many of the Islamic

  42 
  

kingdoms, centered around such xanәqaħs. Though these saints and their followers

considered God the omnipotent ruler of all, Allah was, for all intents and purposes,

“inaccessible to the common man.” And so God had spoken through prophets. The last

and greatest of these had been Muhammad, through whom the Qur’an had been

revealed for the benefit of humankind. But there were to be no more prophets after

Muhammad; the final great revelation for the world had been communicated. What,

then, of the rest of humanity—all of the billions born after Muhammad, who would

never have the benefit of a prophet to guide them? The pirs and their disciples had an

answer. Rather than leave His creatures with naught but the words of the Qur’an, as

sacred and perfect as they were, Allah in his mercy continued to provide living “guides

and guardians,” “friends of God” whose role was to maintain “the smooth operation of

the entire world” and continue to impart blessings to humanity. These pirs, all sәyyids

(descendents of the Prophet), could trace their authority back to an “original saint” (the

quțb, meaning “pole” or “axis”; one of these, for example, was the great Abdul Qadir al-

Gilani [d. 1166/561] of Baghdad, “founder” of the Qadiri order), and from thence to

Muhammad himself; thus by virtue of their place in the spiritual chain (sylsәla) and by

blood the pirs were to be vehicles of blessing to humankind. In northern Hindustan

(mostly in the northwest, in modern-day Pakistan) and neighboring Central Asia, the

xanәqaħs came to wield significant political as well as spiritual power in the region

round about. Oftentimes a tribal chief or other leader would approach the pir on behalf

of his entire group and submit to conversion through a ceremony of allegiance (bi’at).

Each year, the bond between pir and those communities tied to him would be bolstered

when he undertook a circuit of his spiritual domain, collecting donations for the

maintenance of the shrine center. In return, the pir was to act as a mediator between his

  43 
  

followers and God. It was through him that the surrounding communities were blessed;

their supplications to him were made in turn by him to the quțb, and by the quțb to the

Prophet Muhammad—who himself enjoyed direct access to God. Even after the pir had

been taken by death, his tomb continued to pour out blessings upon those tied to the

xanәqaħ, and worshippers of God made pilgrimages there to ask for help and pray for

guidance. In the meantime, his hereditary successor, or sajjada-nishin (in essence, as

Ewing points out, a “hereditary pir”), continued to act as the regional spiritual mediator

and maintainer of the shrine.64

Many a Sufi shix made temporal claims, too—to territorial wylayәt; that is, the pir

asserted authority (i.e. spiritual authority, though this often translated, of course, into

political authority) over a given area. A constant (though often subtle) struggle, about

which Digby has written much, was thus waged between the sultan and the Sufi shix for

control and dominance. Indeed, the contest had to be subtle, for many believed that the

very temporal survival of the empire, or at least of the territory over which the shix

claimed wylayәt, depended on the Sufi shix’s personal attendance, well-being, and

blessing. His words could, it was believed, literally bring a curse upon the land.

Prosperity (and even the enthronement of kings) might be attributed to his very

presence or promise, and natural calamity, foreign invasion, the impoverishment of a

city, the death of an emperor, or even the fall of a dynasty to his departure or spoken

words. The sultans endeavored to patronize the Sufis, and were largely successful vis-à-

vis those of lesser status (the greater mәshayx could not, by virtue of their claims, accept

official patronage); this fell under the purview of the aforementioned shix ul-yslam,

whose duty was to keep the Sufis in check through the distribution of state-garnished

plunder and other material favors. Much that was involved in this patronage betrayed

  44 
  

what was, perhaps, its true purpose—emphasizing, as it did, the supremacy of the

sultan’s authority over that of the Sufi shix. Land grants and religious endowments

from the state ensured the shix’s political support as an influencer of opinion (and even

as a military recruiter in times of civil strife).65 Sufis who refused the sultan’s largesse

were considered potential threats to the sultan’s authority (and their xanәqaħs potential

hotbeds of political rebellion). Thus we are told by one Pakistani historian that

Ghiyasuddin Tughluq, for example, was “fearful of the reach and influence of

Nizamuddin,”66 the most prominent Sufi (Chishti) shix of the time (perhaps Tughluq had

it right; some Muslim scholars later ascribed that sovereign’s untimely death—by

collapsing pavilion—to a pronouncement of this Sufi shix, thereby illustrating the Sufis’

perceived power over temporal affairs).67 Such suspicion was not entirely unfounded, as

from time to time, both during the Delhi Sultanate period and afterwards, a Sufi shix

would be involved in a political conspiracy against the sultan himself. Often the family

of a shix and that of the powerful Muslim landlord (zәmindar) class would join forces

through marriage, thereby further buoying the pir’s power and influence.68 Even under

the Mughals, emperors from Jahangir to Aurengzeb continued to employ the mostly

effective “payoff” tactic, granting these regionally influencial divines cash, lands, and

imperial authority, all in an attempt to influence the politically powerful pirs—and keep

them in line; the pirs had a history, after all, of organizing revolts against the emperor

(like the Pathan pir Roshan’s anti-Akbarian rebellion).69 Thus the supreme temporal

ruler and this host of lesser spiritual ones played a delicate game for political control.70

During this long period of predominantly “Muslim” rule in north Hindustan, the

‘alәma generally provided religious legitimization to the Muslim ruler, whether or not

the ruler in question actually strove for piety. Often dependent upon the state for their

  45 
  

livelihood—indeed, as a class of veritable spiritual courtesans—the ‘alәma remained

generally loyal to the sultan under whom they lived. For his part, the sultan—even if

he generally favored the Sufis over the ‘alәma whenever the two found themselves at

odds—respected the scholars as a means of consolidating his own power over the

Muslim elite and the army, over whom the ‘alәma held much sway.71 Despite numerous

rebellions, on numerous grounds, against kings and rulers from Morocco to Bengal,

“there is hardly any example available,” writes Mushir Haq, “of the uprising of the

‘alәma against the ruler on the ground of his irreligious activities.”72 No, the religious

scholars tended to need the court—and the plunder it gathered by threat of violence

from its subjects—too much to raise a fracas over issues of religious legitimacy. “In

Muslim history the [‘alәma] generally remained loyal to the throne so long as the ruler

professed to be a Muslim,” wrote M. Ahmad, “irrespective of the quality of his

administration.”73 Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the majority of the ‘alәma

were associated in some way with state (with “the court, the ruling elite and the

administration”).74 As long as the ruler acted in conformity with Islamic law, the ‘alәma,

according to Ahmad, “did not bother whether he was a despot or a tyrant or an unjust

ruler.”75 When questions of justice (i.e. tyranny and/or despotism) threatened the unity

of the ummәt, the latter (unity) took precedence; indeed, Muhammad himself had

exemplified this principle when he developed the concept of jyhad to preserve internal

unity among the Muslim tribes while still allowing for conquest and expansion

externally. In short, if the ruler was a Muslim, that ruler could typically count on the

‘alәma to support him, minor religious disagreements notwithstanding, for the sake of

union. It is easy to see, then, how a “pattern of dependence on princes,” as Metcalf

characterized it, naturally developed between the religious scholars and the court. This

  46 
  

being a general rule, there were, of course, several notable exceptions. Indeed, some of

the most eminent ‘alәma in history were imprisoned or tortured for their opposition to

the ruler of the day. (Several foundational scholars of fyqħ—Abu Hanifa [d. 767 AD],

Malik ibn Anas [d. 795 AD], Ahmed ibn Hanbal [d. 855 AD]—fall into this category.)

By and large, however, the ‘alәma “were content with official careers” within the

political structure of the state.76

One result of this scholarly dependence on the court (apart from the Sufi-scholar

rivalry, aforementioned) was the development of a distinction between “other-worldly”

scholars (‘alәma-e-axyrәt, or those devoted to study for study’s sake, or for the sake of

the glory of God, with an eye towards the afterlife) and “worldly” scholars (‘alәma-e-

dunia, i.e. those “professional” ‘alyms who “preferred a worldly career”).77 Both the

Sufi/‘alәma and the ‘alәma-e-axyrәt/‘alәma-e-dunia dynamics are relevant to the

Deobandi-Barelvi phenomenon that would emerge centuries later. This will, it is hoped,

become more obvious as the reader proceeds. At times, both schools have accused

members of the other of getting mired in “worldly” affairs unfit for the truly pious ‘alym

or shix. Ahmad Riza Khan, the “founder” of Barelvism, would himself level such an

accusation at the Deobandis, of whose anti-British machinations (including critical

involvement in the Khilafat Movement) he strongly disapproved. Meanwhile,

Deobandis have sought to defend their leaders as righteous men caught up in the

expediency of politics for the greater good, even as the Barelvi leaders mingled and

sided with the secular Aligarhists or even the British themselves (many Deobandis still

believe that Ahmad Riza was a British agent). These events and themes will be

presented at greater length in subsequent chapters.

  47 
  

Some scholars give the South Asian ‘alәma credit for enjoying “unchallengable

authority” when it came to interpreting shәri’at (and therefore the “formulation of the

policies of the realm”). One South Asian historian noted that “[no] ruler could ever

defy the shari’ah, or enforce any law that was repugnant to the shari’ah”; in addition, the

‘alәma “had always resisted the attempts of rulers to deprive them of their legislative

veto power.”78 Though this is probably an exaggeration, it nevertheless underscores

the important political role played by the Islamic jurist-theologians within the “Muslim”

Indian state. The religious scholars more or less maintained this position into the early

Mughal period (indeed, some of the ‘alәma from the Lodi dynasty were kept on by the

new Central Asian dynasty).

But such status wasn’t to last.

The Mughal State.

The first Mughal ruler, Babur, defeated the last Delhi Sultan in 1526/932, ushering

in the last major era of “Muslim” rule. But it wasn’t until Babur’s grandson, Akbar,

consolidated power as the third Mughal emperor that the dynasty truly established

itself as a durable polity with staying power on the subcontinent. And it was under

Akbar that the position of the ‘alәma was to change substantially, and not in the

scholars’ favor. It should be remembered, however, that for the first phase of Akbar’s

long reign, the ‘alәma, ironically, may have enjoyed more power than ever before.

Indeed, the young shaħәnshaħ likely started out as an orthodox Muslim, and he appears

to have shown great (even exceptional) respect for the religious scholars in his court.

“For some time,” Al-Badauni recorded, “the Emperor had so great faith in [his Sәdәr ul-

Sudwr] as a religious leader that he would bring him his shoes and place them before

  48 
  

his feet,” before listening to the ‘alym expound upon the life and teachings of

Muhammad. This particular scholar, Abdul Nabi, had earlier “abandoned” the Sufi

traditions of his fathers for the “rule of the traditionalists,” demonstrating, again, the

dichotomy between the two. It is noteworthy that Akbar would appoint such a man as

his Sәdәr ul-Sudwr, seemingly bespeaking a traditionalist bent of his own. The

traditionalist-Sufi schism, though certainly not an exact Deobandi-Barelvi match,

nevertheless reveals the early rumblings of both schools’ emergences. In any case, the

appointment of Abdul Nabi came in 1565/972, when the Mughal ruler was still in his

early twenties; he was yet to develop the religious positions for which he would be long

remembered. Surely Abdul Nabi did not foresee the transformation that would occur,

especially considering that, for a time, this venerable scholar was considered “so

powerful” that “never was there in the reign of any monarch” a Sәdәr ul-Sudwr his

political equal.79

Whatever Abdul Nabi’s own qualities (whether personal and academic), however,

over time Akbar developed a severe disenchantment for what he considered the

“arrogance, petty-mindedness, intolerance and mutual rivalries” of the ‘alyms at court.80

Badauni concurred, describing them as “time-serving muftis and stirrers up of strife.”

Akbar appears to have both lost patience with their wrangling over the meaning of

Islamic law and felt tied down by the seemingly constant reliance on their juridical

opinions. “Why do you not free me from dependence on these mullahs?” he reportedly

entreated one prominent advisor. And “at last,” Badauni lamented, “owing to the

disagreements of [Abdul Nabi] and all the other ill-dispositioned [‘alәma] the

Emperor’s opinion of him changed completely.” The situation inspired the historian to

compose the couplet,

  49 
  

All those who see for pride

Of place are fools,

Aye, those who style

Themselves the ‘alәma.

Subsequently the ‘alәma were commanded to gather together, many “against their will,”

and “forcibly seized and compelled” to attest to an imperial decree “affirming the

religious supremacy of the Emperor”—including “his superiority to all ecclesiastical

dignitaries.” Both Akbar’s Sәdәr ul-Sudwr and his shix ul-yslam were so disgraced that

they followed the assembly and attestation with long pilgrimages to Mecca. One not-

so-impartial turn-of-the-twentieth-century German academic would characterize the

display as part and parcel to the emperor’s more general “struggle against the most

destructive power in his kingdom, against the Mohammedan priesthood.”81 The jurist-

theologians would never regain the prestige and influence they had once enjoyed within

the state apparatus.

Some Muslim historians have attempted to explain the politico-religious aberration

that was the Akbarian period by blaming it on the emperor’s upbringing. He had, after

all, spent his childhood in Kabul in the care of an uncle, where, we are informed, “no

religious teaching was arranged for him.” After assuming the title of badshaħ as a young

teenager and then, at eighteen, finally taking the reigns of power, he spent much of his

early reign on military expeditions. He was thus “deprived of knowledge and a religious

education.” Others have asserted that Akbar’s turn from orthodox Islam was politically

motivated—meant to shore up Hindu (especially Rajput) support against his chief

  50 
  

political rivals, the (Muslim) Pathans.82 Whether or not there is merit to these

arguments, one phenomenon that was at the center of the emperor’s spiritual

transformation was his deep personal admiration for the more mystical strains of the

faith (and, eventually, even for the divines of other faiths). What he saw as the narrow-

mindedness of the court scholars had sowed doubt in his mind, at least as it pertained to

their traditionalist, orthodox path; he allegedly “would pass entire nights sitting out of

doors on a stone,” so tormented was he about his ‘alәma dilemma. Not so with the pirs.

With “regularity,” he made “yearly” pilgrimages to the graves of Muslim saints—and in

battle, he would vow to make a pilgrimage to a certain shrine if victory could be

achieved.83 The great emperor was said to have once walked two hundred miles, from

Fatehpur Sikhri to Ajmer, as a show of gratitude towards a pir for the birth of his son

Selim (later the emperor Jahangir). It was during Akbar’s reign, too, that Baqibillah (d.

1603 AD), who is credited with introducing the Naqshbandi Sufi order into India,

arrived on the subcontinent, eventually initiating several of the emperor’s military

leaders and courtiers into the order.84

Among the “great” Mughal rulers, Akbar’s reign was thus marked by a sharp

decline in the influence of the ‘alәma—and his son and successor, Jahangir, inherited the

political structure that Akbar had built (one in which the scholars played little direct

role). Unwittingly, perhaps, Akbar’s downgrading of the scholars’ importance in favor

of Sufi pirs and others naturally exacerbated the rivalry between the two, as the

demoting of any previous recipient of government preference is wont to do. Though

Jahangir was not particularly religious personally, his reign did allow for some

scholarly influence on the state, albeit indirectly—a phenomenon that had all but

vanished under his father. The influence of Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624 AD), for example,

  51 
  

may have been particularly significant. It should be noted that Sirhindi, a disciple of

Baqibillah, is perhaps most accurately described as a Naqshbandi Sufi (though he’d

received training in the Suhrawardy, Qadiri, and Chishti paths as well) first, and as an

‘alym second, well-known in his day for his opposition to the “peace above all” policy of

Akbar. The author of hundreds of letters, many of them written to the Mughal ruler,

Sirhindi is often credited with almost single-handedly steering South Asian Islam back

into orthodoxy, thereby “saving” it from falling victim to the syncretistic milieu of

Indian religious philosophy. It is through the Sirhindi line (the “Mujaddidi” branch,

which subsequently spread from South Asia into Central Asia and the Middle East) of

the Naqshbandi order, established partly in opposition to Akbar’s religious policies,85

that such future South Asian Muslim luminaries as Shah Waliullah, sәyyid Ahmad of

Raebareli, ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi, and virtually all of the founding fathers of Deobandism

(as well as many Barelvi guiding lights), trace their spiritual lineages. It might be

argued that the tradition that he established (or at least shored up) of scholarly

opposition to a regime’s perceived unorthodoxy continues to run strong as of the time

of this writing, especially as far as the Deobandis are concerned within the political

context of Pakistan. In any case, Ahmad Sirhindi’s efforts did not save him from prison,

where Jahangir eventually threw him; the scholar-Sufi died shortly after his release.

But in the day-to-day affairs of state, such influence was mild—and informal, in any

case. Still, after the Akbar aberration, the Mughal state under Jahangir regained much

of the “Islamic character” that it had once enjoyed—restoring, for example, the kәlymәħ

to Mughal coinage (which Akbar had erased), and reinstituting the hyjrәt-based

calendar.86

  52 
  

Even under Shah Jahan, Jahangir’s more religious son, the scholars “did not have

any say in the policies of administration”; the emperor’s relationship with the most

eminent ‘alym of the time, one Abdul Hakim Sialkoti, was merely “one of distant

patronage” (though, admittedly, he did have the man weighed in gold, and he did

patronize the scholar’s literary talents).87 Still, modern Muslim historians tend to see

Shah Jahan as a great ruler, for many of the usual reasons. He was pious—a practicing

Muslim who observed fasts and regularly said prayers. He was a man who patronized

the arts, particularly architecture; under him the Red Fort and jam’y mәsjyd in Delhi and

the Taj Mahal in Agra were all built, and the Agra Fort reconstructed. He governed

“firmly,” leaving a legacy of “magnificence, justice, and prosperity,” to quote one Muslim

scholar. He looked upon his subjects with a paternal eye, a contemporary chronicler

informs us, ever striving for the welfare of peasants and ridding the land of criminals via

harsh punishment. He successfully quelled rebellions, expanded the empire into much

of the Deccan, and played the crusader in punishing the newly arrived Portuguese for

their alleged Christian “depredations” against the local populace.88 “It can be fairly

said,” a Pakistani scholar writes, “that [Shah Jahan] surpassed all the Mughal rulers in

organization and public works and in protecting the life and home of the peasants and in

suppressing profiteers, exploiters and tyrants.”89 Shah Jahan thus joins the ranks of the

ideal Muslim rulers in the context of South Asia—and for centuries the magnificent

structures he left behind would (and continue to?) whisper to the ‘alәma and others

yearning for a return to Islamic political and cultural greatness.

Shah Jahan’s successor, Aurengzeb, is similarly looked to as an ideal type, despite

the disparagement heaped upon his memory by western observers and historians over

the centuries. Under this emperor, almost the entire subcontinent—indeed, more

  53 
  

territory than in any other South Asian regime from “the dawn of history to the rise of

British power” (to quote Sarkar)—fell under the Mughal banner. Muslim historians

insist that he “never shed unnecessary blood,” but was actually a model of piousness,

administrative acumen (a trait dominating the first half of his rule), and military

competence (a trait headlining the second half of his rule). He is described as having

lived an austere private life (differentiating himself thereby from his predecessor

Mughals, especially his father), as a “staunch” Muslim of the Sunni persuasion who

endeavored to govern as befitted a true Muslim ruler.90 He successfully fought off

pirates from Southeast Asia, settled eastern Bengal (Bang; this policy would have major

historical consequences in coming centuries), and heroically battled (though ultimately

without success) against the infidel Hindu Marathas. He went from “assured

administrator” in the pomp of Delhi to “embattled old man” in the military camp of the

Deccan, gradually assuming the role of “ascetic and sage, spending long hours in

prayers, fasting, and copying the Holy Qu’ran.” Where many in the west see Aurengzeb

as a battle-hardened symbol of intolerance (even incompetence), many Muslim

historians insist he was “both a most able statesman and a subtle character” more than

worthy of ideal Muslim ruler status.91

Even though the door for the ‘alәma to enjoy some limited role within government

had re-opened slightly under Jahangir and Shah Jahan after the Akbarian low, it wasn’t

until the reign of Aurengzeb, in the words of H. Khan “the most orthodox of the

emperors,”92 that the jurist-theologians somewhat regained their “traditional” political

role as a sort of Islamic council approving or rejecting policy based upon its compliance

with shәri’at. Still, this role was greatly curtailed by the emperor, upon whom the

scholars enjoyed virtually no control nor significant sway. “No doubt [Aurengzeb]

  54 
  

made use of the [‘alәma],” A. Ahmad writes, “but there is no evidence that he ever

allowed them to make use of him even in the slightest degree.”93 Upon gaining the

throne after defeating his rivals (including his much more religiously open-minded older

brother), Aurengzeb—typically regarded as the last of the “great” Mughals (though his

son Bahadur Shah probably deserves a place, too)—instituted a program of Islamization,

attempting to rule strictly within the confines of Islamic law. This included the

appointment of censors to keep public morals in check (in particular to restrain

prostitution, drinking, and gambling), the abolition of non-shәri’at-approved taxes, and

even the forbidding of music at his court. One would assume the ‘alәma would have

played a prominent role in this effort, but the emperor appears to have set at the task

through the secular hierarchy of the state rather than through the religious scholars or

the mosques. Things become a little clearer, perhaps, when one realizes that

Aurengzeb’s Islamization included, as a major component, the re-introduction of

jyziәħ—the traditional tax on non-Muslims; though apologists of this tax are quick to

point out that the Mughal ruler’s sole purpose in this regard was “to allow non-Muslims

to buy exemption from military service,” those non-Muslims forced by threat of violence

to turn over a portion of their property to the state might have regarded it in a different

light.94 Regardless, it is easy to see why the institution and enforcement of the jyziәħ

required the participation not of the scholars but of provincial and local officers of the

state. The ‘alәma under Aurengzeb were used by him, and not vice-versa; when he

needed his brothers dead, for example, the ‘alәma, “ever ready to oblige,” helped lend the

murders religious sanctification. And though the fәtawa-e-әlәmgiri, a collection of

Islamic juridical statements with which the ‘alәma obviously played a vital role, was

compiled under his patronage and by his order, the work bears his stamp as much as any

  55 
  

scholar’s; it was, in the words of one South Asian academic, “the theoretic crystallization

of Aurengzeb’s theocratic policies.”95 Still, the emperor seemed to possess a great

respect for the religious scholars, even if he didn’t accord them much in the way of

political power; whenever the ‘alәma compiling the fәtawa-e-әlәmgiri entered his court,

for example, Aurengzeb is reported to have arisen as a show of esteem.96

But with Aurengzeb’s death and the subsequent decline of the “Muslim” empire in

India (particularly following the short reign of his son, Bahadur Shah), new threats to

the faith began to emerge in the sub-continent. Indeed, the 1700s/1100s were a

watershed for Islam in South Asia. The crisis was interpreted both politically and

spiritually. To the west, the newly emergent Sikh state threatened Mughal dominance,

and to the south the Hindu Marathas were eating away at one-time Mughal territory at

an alarming rate. All the while, pesky foreigners whose significance was not yet

understood (in particular the French and the British) were beginning to make waves in

the south and east. In addition, the ever-widening political vacuum of the once-mighty

Mughal Empire was filling up with the fragmented polities of a multitude of “Muslim”

states (independent in all but name, and sometimes that, too), threatening the unity of

the ummәt. As a result, a revivalist spirit began to manifest itself, based at first, perhaps

predictably, in the waning old center of Delhi. Here the religious scholars, especially

influenced by the Naqshbandi Sufi order, attempted to standardize correct religious

practice and belief (for the ruling and religious elite, it should be noted) and reassert (or

at least re-emphasize) the proper relationship, as they saw it, between the ‘alәma and the

Muslim ruler. By the early eighteenth/twelfth century, Sunni scholar ‘Abd ur-Rahim

(d. 1718 AD) had established a mәdrәsәħ in Delhi, the Madrasa-e-Rahimiyya, that would

eventually play a vital role in India’s Muslim revivalist wave. This wave, in turn, would

  56 
  

spread to other Muslim lands, and provide a source to which later revivalists across the

Islamic world could turn for guidance and inspiration. “Thus,” Weismann notes, “as

political decay was faster and deeper in South Asia than in other parts of the Muslim

world during the past several centuries, it was here that ideas of religious revival and

reform were first conceived. When other Muslim countries followed suit, their men of

religion could draw on the already available reformist ideas of their Indian

counterparts.”97 Let us look, then, at the sources, as far as can be ascertained, of

Weismann’s “ideas of religious revival and reform”—in particular those which the

Deobandi and Barelvi schools claim as intellectual and spirital forbears.

The Waliullahi School.

What made ‘Abd ur-Rahim’s Delhi mәdrәsәħ unique, among other things, was its

focus on original sources. To return to the original purity of the first generation of

Muslims—and to avoid the pernicious dangers of accretion—knowledge by the ‘alәma

of the Qur’an and the sunnәt was absolutely essential. ‘Abd ur-Rahim particularly

emphasized the study of the latter. Between the Qur’an and the hәdis, one could find the

answers to life’s questions, great and small. Such renewal—for renewal was what it

was, a striving to restore Islam to its initial spiritual (and, subsequently, political)

glory—was nothing new; the faith had gone through periods of decline and renewal

before. “Islam was always…being re-discovered after being neglected,” one twentieth-

/fourteenth-century Muslim commentator opined. “…The sense of déjà-vu which

permeates Muslim society is not so much a reliving as the recreating of the past.”98

Such a recreation was necessary, ‘Abd ur-Rahim insisted, if the Muslims of India hoped

to witness a restoration of Muslim power. The problems facing the ummәt were internal

  57 
  

ones, and the answer, as always, lay in the revelation of the Qur’an and the personal

example and teachings of Muhammad. It was precisely because Muslims had looked

elsewhere for answers—to the pagan traditions of their neighbors, to legalisms, to the

false philosophies of men—that Indian Muslims found themselves in their present

situation in the first place. Deobandi scholars would later point to the establishment of

the Madrasa-e-Rahimiyya as a major stepping-stone toward the “religious emancipation

of Muslim India” (as well as the “breeding ground” of heroic mujahydin like Syed Ahmad

and his followers, on whom more later).99

Foremost among the revivalist ‘alәma in Delhi to be found at the Madrasa-e-

Rahimiyya was Shah Waliullah (d. 1762 AD), ‘Abd ur-Rahim’s son. Waliullah seems to

have imbibed an appreciation for original sources both from his father as well as from

his studies in Medina, a hub for hәdis-research at the time.100 But in order to study the

original sources, Shah Waliullah contended, one must be able to read and understand

them. To this end, he bravely translated the Qur’an into the lingua franca of the time—

Persian—despite the outcry of many of his fellow scholars. His sons would follow in his

footsteps in this regard, translating the revelations into Urdu. This emphasis on

original sources (called mәnqwlat, or the transmitted [or traditional] disciplines) was

important, for it would serve later as a major dividing line between Barelvis and

Deobandis. Generally speaking, there are two types of Islamic learning to be imbibed at

a Muslim seminary. First, there is the aforementioned mәnqulat, including

commentaries (tәfsir) on the Qur’an, the apostolic traditions (hәdis), and jurisprudence

(fyqħ). Second, there is the mәqwlat, or the rational disciplines. These include

instruction in grammar, logic, philosophy, rhetoric, mathematics, and astronomy. Shah

Waliullah considered this second type of Islamic learning (mәqwlat) potentially

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confusing for students and instead emphasized the first (particularly the Qur’an and the

hәdis, as previously mentioned). The Deobandis would follow suit, while the Barelvis

would lean toward the mәqwlat (plus fyqħ), just as their spiritual predecessors

(particularly the Khairabadi-Badayuni Group, about which more later) had before them.

For his emphasis on and elaboration upon the idea that the Qur’an, hәdis, and shәri’at

were to be the definitive guides to Islamic practice and the attaining of knowledge, Shah

Waliullah is regarded as the “spiritual and methodological successor” of Ahmad

Sirhindi; both helped establish a means by which Sufism could be reconciled with a

scholarly stress on the mәnqwlat (and fyqħ).101 To Shah Waliullah, mәqwlat could never

be anything more than a means by which to “provide rational proof” to “strengthen

faith” in what one would learn studying the far more important mәnqwlat. As such, he

did not advocate scrapping mәqwlat altogether, but merely using it as a tool in the far

more valuable study of mәnqwlat. (He evidently hoped, too, that this synthesis might

unite Muslims in the face of the Maratha onslaught; it wouldn’t be the last time

scholarly revivalism failed in an attempt to unify Muslim “schools” in the face of

common danger—indeed, to some this may be the story of the Deobandi-Barelvi

rivalry.)102

Perhaps more importantly, Shah Waliullah propagated several powerful ideas vis-à-

vis the ‘alәma and government. To more fully appreciate the context of Shah

Waliullah’s ideas in this regard, however, one must understand the history that the

revered ‘alym lived through. When Shah Waliullah was born, the empire of the

Mughals, Aurengzeb at its head, was still vast and militarily mighty. But before he was

even three years old—and in the final days of the emperor’s life—Mughal armies were

already suffering humiliating defeats in the wake of the Maratha wave. Over the next

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several decades, the losses—both military and territorial—continued to pile up.

Throughout his teens, too, Shah Waliullah would have watched anxiously as various

claimants for the throne plotted, killed, and wrangled for power. Then, when he was

thirty-four, Maratha forces finally reached the Mughal capital—and plundered it. Just

two years later, in 1739/1152, the Persian conquistador Nadir Shah sacked the city, too,

dealing what might be considered the deathblow to the once-hegemonic political entity

founded by Babur over two centuries before. Henceforth if the Mughal “empire”

extended beyond the city of Delhi itself, it did so in name only. “Not an earthen lamp is

there where once did chandeliers glow,” lamented one eighteenth/twelfth-century Urdu

poet on the desolation of once-mighty Delhi.103 To add insult to injury, in 1748/1161

the founder of the new Afghan dynasty, Ahmad Shah Abdali, raided Delhi, too.

(Significantly for this narrative, Ahmad Shah later convinced a group of Ahmad

Sirhindi’s descendants to relocate to Kabul, from where they firmly established the

Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi line in Afghanistan, enjoyed official patronage, and were granted

land in Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Herat, and Kohistan. The sylsәla was able to gain

something like pre-eminence among the Pathans of what is today southern Afghanistan

and northwestern Pakistan, setting the stage for that people’s easy acceptance of

Waliullahi revivalism and, later, Deobandism).104

It is easy to see, then, why at least one scholar has dubbed Shah Waliullah the

“Thinker of Crisis.”105 At the very least, it places his political ideas in historical context.

As shapers of Waliullah’s political philosophy should be added his time on pilgrimage to

Mecca, where he likely mixed with such Muslim revolutionaries as Abdul Wahhab and,

Deobandi historians insist, he “was inspired by a vision to replace the imperialist and

corrupt administration [of “European imperialism” and “oriental rulers” alike] by

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establishing a government based on principles of equality and justice.”106 For Shah

Waliullah, the man who had seen the rapid and violent fall of a once-vast empire, two

caliphates existed in the world. There was, first, the “outer caliphate” (xylafәt al-zahyr),

ruled by a caliph or, under less ideal circumstances, a sultan or some other Muslim

leader. Its purpose was practical: to maintain social order in the physical world.

Second, there was the “inner caliphate” (xylafәt al-batin). This far more critical realm

was presided over, crucially, by the ‘alәma. It was the task of these religious scholars to

ensure that the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve conducted their lives “in harmony

with God’s created nature.” Political decay didn’t occur in a vacuum; no, it was a direct

result of corruption on the part of the guardian ‘alәma. Spiritual decay led to political

decay. It followed, then, that in order to witness a return of “Muslim” political power in

the physical world, the ‘alәma must lead the charge. After all, it must have been the

scholars’ “neglect in performing their duties properly” that had brought about the

decline in the “Muslim” political position in the first place. Shah Waliullah would

identify some of these areas of neglect, pointing his finger at (among other alleged

scholarly follies) opportunism, claiming a monopoly on truth, unjustified severity,

misplaced intellectualism, and disunity.107

Little did he know, surely, that he was to be the “grandfather” of a whole host of

revivalist Islamic movements that would crisscross the subcontinent and, eventually,

much of the world, though he did consider himself “a champion of political Islam.”108

Notes one Muslim historian: “…Shah Walyullah appeared as the saviour of Muslim

culture and religion,” “a great reformer of law, morals and politics” who “paved the way

for the great Jihad movement against the Sikhs and later against the British rule.”109

His ideas on the role of the ‘alәma in the purification of the ummәt (including the

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preservation of Islamic knowledge in times of crisis and the impartation of that

knowledge within the community of the learned), the restoration of Muslim political

greatness, and the maintenance of the Islamic state would be seized later by the

Deobandis, not to mention a whole host of other movements. The dar ul’alwm at

Deoband would later claim to be the “inheritor” of the “rich legacy” of Shah

Waliullah;110 its scholars would even interpret the time of his birth—almost exactly one

century after the advent of the British on the subcontinent—as a token signifying that

his life was to be dedicated to “the purpose of opposing [the British].”111

The great man’s spiritual successor was his son, Shah Abdul Aziz (d. 1824 AD),

who, together with his brothers, studied, taught, and preached in Delhi, enlarging the

Waliullahi school and serving students from all over India and Central Asia. In the

tradition of their father and grandfather, Shah Abdul Aziz and his brothers stressed the

study of hәdis, and their translation of the Qur’an into Urdu has already been mentioned.

But perhaps Shah Abdul Aziz’s greatest tool for disseminating knowledge and judgment

based on shәri’at was through the many fәtawa that he authored. The translation of the

Qur’an into Urdu and, especially, the issuance of fәtawa in answer to the queries of the

faithful marked a turning point in the relationship of the ‘alәma with the people.

Heretofore the norm had been for juridical decisions to be issued within the context of

the court (i.e. by a mufti for the benefit of a qazi, and all within the framework of the

state, thereby excluding many issues of everyday concern for the masses), or at least to

be asked, answered, and circulated among the learned; even Shah Waliullah had acted

according to this standard. With Shah Abdul Aziz at the head of the Waliullahi school,

however, scholarly knowledge and interest gained, in the words of Metcalf, a “more

popular focus”—a perhaps not surprising development given the political and social

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changes then taking place in India. The new British power was then engaged in what

appeared to be a relentless swallowing up of “vast stretches of the Indian countryside.”

In 1803/1218, Delhi fell in all but name when the British replaced the Marathas as

protectors of the Mughal emperor. Over time, these aliens took over the government

(and land revenues) and the courts, seemed to favor a rising Hindu business community

over the old Muslim elite, allegedly wiped out the revenue-free grants enjoyed by

Muslim religious institutions in Bengal, and disbanded local armies so that they might

be replaced by British-trained forces. In the midst of such upheaval, Muslims of all

classes appear to have increasingly turned in on themselves as a community—and the

fәtwa provided a means for preserving cultural identity and living religion in the

absence of the state apparatus. Of course, by using fәtawa in such a way, the ‘alәma had

assumed the role of popular guide. This was somewhat new, and it was perhaps Shah

Abdul Aziz’s most lasting legacy.112 Shah Abdul Aziz also inherited and further

developed Shah Waliullah’s hostility towards the British, allegedly claiming that the

foreigners would not be satisfied in merely “taking” the Muslim’s “world, but[would]

also seize [their] religion” (italics added).113

Muhammad Ishaq (d. 1846 AD), Shah Abdul Aziz’s grandson (from a daughter) and

a master of hәdis, oversaw a continued spread of Waliullah’s reform movement before

relocating permanently to the Hijaz in the early 1840s/late 1250s.114 Before his

departure, however, he instituted, according to ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi, the agenda he had

inherited from Shah Abdul Aziz. The general plan, evidently tracing back to Shah

Waliullah, might be broken down (as Faruqi does) into two main parts: first, it called for

the strict adherence of the ummәt to the Hanafi school of Islamic law (necessitating, of

course, a core social and political role for the‘alәma). Second, it proposed an alliance,

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however ambiguously defined, with the sultans of Ottoman Turkey. The first aspect of

Muhammad Ishaq’s agenda dealt with the role and power of the ‘alәma in South Asian

Muslim society. The second carried implicitly anti-British (and pan-Islamic) meaning.

Even the great man’s departure to the Hijaz, often depicted as a simple emigration to

Islam’s “Holy Land,” was actually an attempt to establish contact with the Ottoman

authorities; indeed, it was in Turkey that Muhammad Ishaq died in 1846/1262.115

But he left behind a remarkable circle of students—a core group whose actions

would shape the destinies of millions of Muslims across South Asia. This group

included Ishaq’s successor, Abdul-Ghani Naqshbandi (d. 1878 AD), sәyyid Nazir

Muhaddis of Delhi (d. 1902 AD), Imdadullah (d. 1899 AD), and sәyyid Ahmad Khan of

Raebareli (d. 1831 AD). Along with this core group, Muhammad Ishaq’s associate and

friend, Mamluk ‘Ali, would also play a pivotal role in coming events. Indeed, Mamluk

‘Ali had been left as the chairman of a four-person committee, organized by Muhammad

Ishaq, to continue the propagation of his aforementioned agenda. It was in following

Mamluk ‘Ali’s example, too, that the man’s distant nephew, one Muhammad Qasim

Nanautawi, journeyed to Delhi to pursue his education. In Delhi, Muhammad Qasim

befriended a fellow pupil, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, and together they studied under both

Abdul-Ghani Naqshbandi and Mamluk ‘Ali, among others. Under the latter they would

adopt Muhammad Ishaq’s two-pronged program as their own and eventually

institutionalize much of it within the school they would found in Deoband.116 They

would also become xәlifәħ of Imdadullah (indeed, many among the dar ul’alwm’s

founding generation would count themselves his disciples), who himself had been

Mamluk ‘Ali’s student, and who had similarly imbibed Muhammad Ishaq’s agenda

therefrom.117

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Another defining movement should be mentioned here: that of sәyyid Ahmad Khan

of Raebareli. Ahmad Khan, who was at least in part, as mentioned above, a product of

the Waliullahi school, chose military jyhad as his method of cleansing the subcontinent

(in contrast to Shah Abdul Aziz’s gradualist emphasis on teaching, the dissemination of

knowledge, and right practice; Deobandis insist, however, that Shah Abdul Aziz not

only supported sәyyid Ahmad, but personally encouraged and inspired him in his efforts

as well). After years imbibing the teachings of scholars and shixs in Delhi, gathering

followers across northern India, and learning and teaching in Arabia, sәyyid Ahmad set

up a base of operations on India’s northwestern frontier with around a thousand fighters

drawn from his tens of thousands of disciples.118 From here, he launched an ultimately

unsuccessful jyhad against the Sikh state of Ranjit Singh. Today Deobandi historians

are quick to point out that sәyyid Ahmad’s targeting of the Sikh polity in the Punjab was

motivated first and foremost not by an animosity to the adherents of the faith of Guru

Nanak at all; no, it was an anti-British move. Their contention is that Ranjit Singh had

only been made “governor of the Punjab” with the consent of the British—and that his

government had gone on to steal Muslim land, kill Muslim scholars, and rape Muslim

women. This was why sәyyid Ahmad had chosen to throw his jyhadis against the Sikh

state first—wholly motivated by a determination to “take steps against the British.”119

Ahmad’s exploits—first as a student under the Waliullah family, then as a

cavalryman in the band of Amir Khan, then as a Sufi shix (with both Waliullah’s fiery

grandson Muhammad Ismail [d. 1831 AD] and Abdul Aziz’s son-in-law Abdul Hayy

[d. 1828 AD] acknowledging him as their pir), then as a pan-Indian missionary, then as

a haji, and finally as a jyhad-waging mujahyd—are well-known. What may be less

recognized is that sәyyid Ahmad’s activist movement continued through his successor in

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jyhad, Nasiruddin Dihlawi (and others; see endnote after next paragraph), who would

later initiate Imdadullah into his Sufi order. Thus it was through this Sufi line (sәyyid

Ahmad—Nasiruddin—Imdadullah) that the two most prominent founders of the

Deoband school, Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad, themselves traced their

spiritual lineages.120 In addition, several of the dar ul’alwm’s founding figures boasted

relatives who had fought with sәyyid Ahmad on the frontier.121 Over the last century-

and-a-half, prominent Deobandis have continued to invoke the memory of sәyyid Ahmad

(for one especially obvious example, see pp. 408-409). In addition to this first

“genealogical” line to the Deobandis, sәyyid Ahmad was able to establish, during his time

in the northwest, a second line: through the very powerful Akhund of Swat, Abdul

Ghaffur. The latter took to the Waliullahi emphasis on mәnqwlat and extra-dәrgaħ

religious practice and generally helped spread the great Delhi ‘alym’s revivalist ideas

among his people, where they were warmly received. Thus sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli,

thanks in large part to his association with Akhund Ghaffur, was able to lay the

groundwork for the future dominance of the Deobandi school of thought among the

Pathans (especially among the eastern tribes) of northwestern Pakistan and, later,

southern Afghanistan.122

sәyyid Ahmad’s headquarters in the northwest were at Sittana (about three miles

northwest of present-day Haripur in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province—and

now completely covered by the Indus-fed waters of the great Tarbela Dam). After his

death in battle in 1831/1246, two of his disciples (who’d survived because they’d been

sent to Kashmir on a diplomatic mission) continued the Sittana-based jyhad movement

to destroy the unbelievers and establish a true Islamic state. The first of these disciples

was Qasim Panipati, who went on to fuel the idea that sәyyid Ahmad had not, in fact,

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perished—but had been preserved by God and would return; this inspired many of his

followers (particularly in Patna, an erstwhile base on the plains) to make the long

journey to Sittana, where Qasim Panipati was engaged in organizing a regrouped

military force. The second disciple was none other than Nasiruddin, mentioned

previously as sәyyid Ahmad’s successor (and through whom the Deobandi fathers trace

their spiritual lineages); instead of remaining at Sittana, he traveled back to the plains

and in 1835/1250 led another force against the Sikhs. This force was waylaid for six

years in Sindh, however, only to answer a call by the Afghans for assistance in their

struggle against the British; about fifty survived the fighting—and these were all

executed by the puppet king installed by the British in Afghanistan, Shuja Shah.

Meanwhile, a council of sorts in Patna, initially led by one Shah Muhammad Husain,

continued to run operations from the plains, recruiting fighters and clandestinely

sending supplies and cash for the camp at Sittana. For decades, the Sittana group (or

“Hindustani Fanatics,” as they were known by some of the locals and the British; the

latter also simply referred to them, erroneously, as “Wahhabis”), with assistance from

the Patna group, continued to wage war from the frontier. The movement would later

play a prominent role in the British debacle at Ambeyla Pass and be linked to various

assassinations and assassination attempts.123 The legacy of sәyyid Ahmad within the

context of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry should not be sidenoted, as it injected into

Deobandism’s very roots the active spirit of jyhad and initiated a tradition of militarism

based in the subcontinent’s Pathan northwest.

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The Farangi Mahalis and the Khairabadi-Badayuni Group.

Around the same time Shah Waliullah was active in Delhi, another movement was

taking root to the east, in Lucknow (the capital of Awadh, an ascendant successor state

to the Mughal polity). Here the ‘alәma of Farangi Mahal, under the leadership of Abdul

‘Ali (respectfully known as bәhәr ul’alwm, or “Ocean of Knowledge”), similarly strove to

preserve religious learning in an era of waning patronage, at the same time mirroring

their Delhi contemporaries’ efforts at emphasizing the proper relationship between the

religious scholars and the temporal ruler. A crucial difference in the Farangi Mahalis’

approach, however, was their emphasis, not on mәnqwlat, but on mәqwlat; indeed, Shah

Abdul Aziz would criticize the Farangi Mahalis for their perceived ignorance when it

came to the Qur’an and hәdis, alleging that their time was misguidedly engaged instead

in the study of such free-thinking philosophers as Ibn ‘Arabi and al-Razi.124 The

mәqwlat emphasis was especially marked in the Farangi Mahalis’ creation of the dәrs-e-

nyžami, a standardized curriculum that underscored the rational disciplines (in order to

prepare students to be administrators within the state apparatus, argues Robinson). An

important ‘alym named Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi (d. 1861 AD) later adopted the Farangi

Mahali emphasis on mәqwlat, as opposed to Shah Waliullah’s emphasis on the original

sources like the Qur’an or hәdis. (The Deobandis would later adopt the Farangi Mahali

dәrs-e-nyžami, too, but would greatly augment its hәdis offerings.) And perhaps no other

family in northern India, apart from the Farangi Mahalis, had a greater impact on the

spread of this emphasis than the Khairabadis.125 A third family, that of the Badayunis,

might justly be combined with the latter and more accurately be identified as the

Khairabadi-Badayuni Group. By the second half of the 1800s/1200s the Khairabadi-

Badayuni Group had distanced itself significantly from the Delhi scholars, thus laying

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the groundwork for the future Barelvi-Deobandi schism.126 While Shah Waliullah’s

espousal of mәnqwlat would be taken up later by the Deobandis, then, the Barelvis’

emphasis, following the example of the Lucknow scholars and the Khairabadi-Badayuni

Group, fell upon the mәqwlat. (In truth, these emphases, highlighted significantly by

modern scholars, may have been less important than the more base rivalry between

different scholar-groups over power and influence, certainly not an uncommon

phenomenon within the domains of both academia and theology. In any case, the split

and subsequent coalescence around these two groups set the stage for the more

pronounced Deobandi-Barelvi schism of the next generation.)

Both of these phenomena—the establishment of the Waliullahi School in Delhi and

the Farangi Mahalis in Lucknow (then that of the Khairabadi-Badayuni Group offshoot

from the latter)—not only signaled a type of regenerative effort, but also bore witness of

the role the religious leadership, and particularly the ‘alәma, potentially could play even

without the patronage of princes, kings, and emperors. It should be noted that there yet

remained a few enclaves of Muslim power on the subcontinent where religious scholars

might obtain direct patronage, like the courts at Awadh, Rampur, and Kabul. And while

opportunities for employment in the courts on the plains would mostly shrivel up by the

mid-nineteenth century AD, the mәdrәsәħ-trained qazis among the Pathans of the

northwest continued to find patronage within the Afghan state into the twentieth.127

While the ‘alәma in the cities, near the seats of fading power, strove for renewal, the

landed Sufi pirs, based around the shrines, also asserted themselves politically; for them

the struggle was against local leaders who no longer enjoyed the protection of the

fading Mughal empire. This rise in local political power and influence naturally

propped up their own religious authority as spiritual guides. Picking up where their

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predecessors from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD had left off, these Sufi

mәshayx grasped political power as soon as it became available in the absence of imperial

authority. The religious scholarship in the cities and towns thus occurred at the same

time as the renewal of the political power of the pirs rurally. In the northwest, for

example, among the Pathan tribes of what is today southern Afghanistan and

northwestern Pakistan, the pirs became especially powerful. Among the western

Pathans, the pirs continued to be used, by virtue of their socio-religious (not to mention

political) position on the regional level, within the framework of the Afghan state; and

in a sort of feudal arrangement, the Kabul court even paid some of the pirs among the

eastern Pathans (technically located outside of the geographical boundaries of the king’s

practical, temporal authority) in exchange for their contribution of fighting men when

called upon. Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and some of the twentieth

centuries AD, pirs were used by the Afghan state for a wide variety of purposes, from

mobilizing opposition to Chinese incursions into Turkestan in the 1700s/1100s and

establishing a standardized legal code for the country in the 1800s/1200s to creating

and enforcing law at the local level and recording births, marriages, and deaths as

official registrars. In the 1830s/1240s-1250s, for example, Afghan ruler Dost

Muhammad called upon Abdul Ghaffur (later famously known as the previously

mentioned Akhund of Swat) to help recruit soldiers to fight in his war against the Sikhs

of the Punjab. In this the latter was successful and was, in turn, granted large tracts of

land. But by the late 1840s/mid-1260s the Akhund of Swat had established his own

independent Islamic state in the Swat valley, propping up his chosen әmir (Akbar Shah,

who had acted as a secretary to sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli) for almost a decade before,

upon the әmir’s passing, he personally took over command.128 And though, by the early

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twentieth century AD, the Afghan state from the west had begun to significantly

encroach upon these local religious leaders’ political sway (especially during the reign of

Abdur Rehman [r. 1879-1901 AD], when Afghanistan experienced a major increase in

centralization and bureaucratization), not to mention the ever-encroaching British from

the east, the pirs continued to weild considerable power.129

It is perhaps easy to see, then, how Barelvism, born of a Khairabadi-Badayuni

tradition less focused on the puritan revivalist study of the Qur’an and hәdis, would

(generally speaking) eventually envelop the more syncretist Sufi pirs of South Asia (with

rare, Akhund of Swat-esque exceptions, of course), too, in opposition to the orthodox,

mәnqwlat-focused Deobandis.

Shi’a Inroads in South Asia.

Another look at Awadh is warranted here. Like Bengal, Awadh was de facto

independent by the early eighteenth century AD. Though most of its Muslims, like the

Farangi Mahalis, were Sunni, its rulers were not—they adhered, rather, to Shi’a Islam

(as did Bengal’s, for a time). Throughout the century in question, Shi’a ‘alәma from

what is now Iran and Iraq migrated to Awadh, fleeing the instability then rocking

Central Asia and the Middle East. Safavid Iran—where the government had been their

patron, lavishing a monetary endowment upon the ‘alәma and enforcing sectarian

favoritism by the barrel of the gun—had fallen, and uncertainty plagued many Shi’a

scholars in Iraq’s shrine cities, too. The result for Awadh, where Shi’a Islam was the

state religion, was what one scholar has described as a “constant influx” of Shi’a ‘alәma

to the court and the region at large.130 The Awadhi state would decline rapidly by the

end of the century, but the influence of the Shi’ism that it helped more firmly establish

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in South Asia would live on, with major consequences. In the context of the Deobandi-

Barelvi rivalry, the presence of a significant population of Shi’a on the subcontinent

always gave the two schools a “bigger fish to fry,” so to speak; Deobandi thinkers from

Muhammad Qasim to Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi and Barelvi guiding lights like Ahmad Riza

Khan and Naimuddin Moradabadi saved their sharpest barbs, perhaps, for this

particular sect (one might argue that this specific designation should be attributed not

to the Shi’a but rather to the Ahmadis, but that is another discussion). The presence of

millions of Shi’a contributed, too (after the Iranian Revolution of 1979/1399), to the

organization of militant (mostly Deobandi) anti-Shi’a outfits—groups that would

subsequently set their sights on Barelvis, too.

The ‘alәma, the mәshayx, and 1857/1273.

The half-century following the Company takeover of Delhi witnessed the rapid

consolidation of British power on the subcontinent and the fall of the last mighty

indigenous kingdoms to these foreign invaders. The Marathas fell in 1818/1233, Sindh

was taken in 1843/1259, and by 1849/1265 even the Sikh kingdom in the Punjab had

fallen under the Company’s banner. With these victories came a decreased need to rely

on local alliances—with the result that the British absorbed some of this territory, too,

sometimes in violation of treaty arrangements. The British annexation of Awadh in

1856/1272 was a particularly grievous act in the eyes of many Indians. One

contemporary Muslim witness remembered, for example, that this move on the part of

the Company “was a cause of dissatisfaction to everybody, and gave rise to a general

conviction that the Honorable East India Company had violated treaties” (though this

particular commentator did not believe the Awadh annexation was itself a root cause of

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the following year’s “revolt”).131 The annexation would have been especially difficult to

swallow for Muslims, since Awadh’s government, as mentioned previously, was a

Muslim one. One third of the Bengal army—among whom the 1857/1273 uprising

fiercely manifested itself—actually hailed from Awadh. Such dominance, augmented by

what were seen as flagrant violations of the Company’s legal obligations, “loosed,” in the

words of Stein, “a deepening anxiety at the core of Indian civil society.”132 These

military and political triumphs were coupled with what many Hindustanis regarded as

British arrogance, as missionaries, administrators, traders, and soldiers seemed to be

attempting to make Englishmen out of Indians. There was also an undercurrent of

resentment among both the Indian peasantry and the alienated landed gentry over the

new British system’s perceived facilitation of the “unmitigated usury” of a new class of

moneylenders (dubbed bәndia ka raj, or “rule of moneylender-traders”).133 Indeed,

almost a century later Jawaharlal Nehru would trace the very “beginnings of the new

Hindu-Muslim problem” to the loss of land and position in Bengal by the Muslim

landed gentry to a mostly Hindu monied and business class in the years after Company

rule had been established there.134 Similarly, Faruqi blamed the “uneven and

unbalanced development” of Hindu and Muslim middle classes, beginning in Bengal (i.e.

the growth of a Hindu middle class concurrent with “the absence of the growth” of a

Muslim one).135 Perhaps the verse of renowned Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir, writing in the

1700s AD, could have applied equally in the minds of many Muslims a century later:

“men of means and money have joined the beggars’ fold.”136 Thus there was room by

1857/1273 for discontent on all sides—but, the argument could be made, especially

from within the Muslim camp.

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The conflict came to a head in 1857/1273, when many of the sepoys—the backbone

of British power on the subcontinent—revolted, followed by a general civil uprising

that spread to much of India (though mostly in the north) and lasted into 1858/1274.

For a time the revolt looked like it would succeed—and the British would be pushed out

of India forever. In the end (and after the loss of much life), the “Mutiny” was

unsuccessful, thanks in large part to the Company’s local allies. After the uprising (or,

according to Indian nationalists, India’s “first war of independence”) was over, both the

British and their Indian subordinates began looking for answers. One result of the

failed rebellion was that the Mughal line was finally severed, its last emperor, an old

man, shipped off to a Burmese prison, and his sons murdered. Another was that

Company rule in India ended, as the responsibility for the administration of the

subcontinent was shifted directly to the Crown. (In many ways East India Company

rule had been indirectly administered by the Crown, too—a point all too often

forgotten—but now the Company had been removed from the political landscape

altogether.)

The Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry is in part characterized by a contest over the memory

of 1857-1858/1273-1274. Both schools lay claim to having played a major—even

leading—role in the uprising, despite the haziness of the historical evidence or the

misgivings of Western scholars. Historians from both traditions proudly proclaim that

“the historic revolt of 1857 was led by the ‘alәma,” though they argue over which ‘alәma

played leading roles.137 The Barelvis single out “their” political and spiritual

“forefathers,” particularly Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, Fazl-e-Rasul Badayuni, and even Riza

‘Ali, as heroes of the period (and, in the case of Khairabadi, as the leader and chief

instigator of the revolt itself). Meanwhile, the Deobandis celebrate the alleged actions

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of those whom they consider their political and spiritual forebears, especially Imdadullah

(though Barelvis, significantly, today claim that he was “one of ours,” and that it was his

two students who went astray), Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, and Muhammad Qasim

Nanautawi. The idea that a jyhad had been proclaimed against the British by the

spiritual leaders of South Asia’s Muslim community held sway for some time after the

Mutiny had been suppressed (and still does, among both Barelvi and Deobandi

historians), especially in the weeks and months immediately following the fighting.

Both traditions, however, consider the same fәtwa to mark the beginning of the

1857/1273 “war of independence”: that of Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi.

But there was another fәtwa, issued a half-century earlier, that is likewise important

in this regard, and it is here that we must begin. Indeed, some scholars have identified

the seeds of 1857/1273 in this 1803/1218 fәtwa issued by Shah Abdul Aziz, in which

Shah Waliullah’s son characterizes north India as no longer dar ul-yslam:

In this city [Delhi] the Imam al-Muslimin wields no authority. The real

power rests with Christian officers. There is no check on them, and the

promulgation of the commands of [disbelievers] means that in

administration and justice, in matters of law and order, in the domain of

trade, finance, and collection of revenues—everywhere the [disbelievers]

are in power. Yes, there are certain Islamic rituals, e.g. Friday and Id

prayers, әzan [the call to prayer] and cow slaughter, with which they

brook no interference, but the very root of all these rituals is of no value

to them. They demolish mosques without the least hesitation, and no

Muslim or any źymi [“dhimmi”] can enter into the city or its suburbs but

  75 
  

with their permission. It is in their own interests if they do not object to

the travelers and traders to visit the city. On the other hand,

distinguished persons like Shuja ul-Mulk and Vilayati Begum cannot

dare visit the city without their permission. From here to Calcutta, the

Christians are in complete control. There is no doubt that in

principalities like Hyderabad, Rampur, Lucknow, etc., they have left the

administration in the hands of the local authorities, but it is because they

have accepted their lordship and submitted to their authority…138

Faruqi describes this fәtwa as “a landmark in the history of India in general and in

that of Muslim India in particular. It amounted to a call to religiously conscientious

Muslims to mobilize themselves, in the absence of any powerful Muslim warlord, under

popular leadership and rise in defiance of the foreign power.”139 Deobandi historians of

today likewise place great emphasis on this particular juridical pronouncement,

attributing many later movements (from sәyyid Ahmad’s “Balakot Movement” and the

1857/1273 Mutiny to the Silk Letters Conspiracy and the anti-British independence

movement in general) to Shah Abdul Aziz’s fәtawa.140 But later scholars have argued

that a stance like Faruqi’s erroneously places the fәtwa’s initiative too decidedly at Shah

Abdul Aziz’s feet. In reality, they contend, the learned ‘alym was merely responding to a

question, in the manner of a mufti, not making a statement originating with himself.

Others disagree for a different reason: that the fәtawa being issued during this period

were actually “ambiguous” when it came to India’s political status; their purpose was to

help people live righteous lives despite the less-than-ideal circumstances then extant on

the subcontinent, and thus Shah Abdul Aziz’s 1803/1218 fәtwa must be read in context.

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Moreover, if he had been calling for war, would he not have identified a neighboring

Muslim state from which jyhad should be launched (or a Muslim ruler to whom the

faithful might swear political allegiance), as Muslim law required? A third argument

posits that Shah Abdul Aziz’s fәtwa was actually written so that Muslims, many of

whom were suffering in terms of livelihood, could gain in that sphere, for many of the

economic restrictions by which the ummәt was expected to abide within a condition of

dar ul-yslam (prohibitions related to employment, interest earnings, and slavery, for

example) were lifted within dar ul-hәrb.141

Whatever the ‘alym’s intentions, the fәtwa makes evident that, at least for Shah

Abdul Aziz—one of the most powerful and influential of the ‘alәma in the world at the

time—the British presence was more than just a serious concern; it was to be regarded

as a call to action. The fәtwa is especially thick with expressions lamenting the loss of

Muslim political power—indeed, on almost every line; though Shah Abdul Aziz

acknowledges Muslim freedom to carry out worship and ritual, political “control” has

been wrested from the faithful in every meaningful respect. Political power was the

issue. Though the fәtwa may not be Faruqi’s “watershed,” it certainly merits attention

as a gauge, so to speak, on the attitude of arguably the most influential ‘alym

(particularly in terms of the movements he inspired) in Indian history. Perhaps most

importantly, many Muslim historians (and especially those of the Deoband school) trace

the beginning of India’s “freedom struggle” directly to the 1803/1218 Azizi fәtwa (and,

consequently, interpret the jyhad of sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli almost thirty years before

the Mutiny as the first attempt to execute Shah Abdul Aziz’s edict).142 Other Muslim-

led uprisings (of the Faraizis in Bengal in 1804/1219, by the soldiers at Vellore in

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1806/1221, of the Faraizis again throughout the 1830s and 40s AD) were similarly

interpreted.143

Company employee (and later Sir) Sayyid Ahmad Khan, in his 1860/1276 essay The

Causes of the Indian Revolt, rejected the notion that a call for jyhad had played any serious

role in the uprising of 1857/1273, even resurrecting the memory of the famous mujahyd

Muhammad Ismail (the grandson of Shah Waliullah and the chief lieutenant of sәyyid

Ahmad of Raebareli). Sir Sayyid’s argument was that when Muhammad Ismail had

called for volunteers to wage jyhad, it hadn’t been to fight the Christian foreigners from

the British Isles—no, it had been to destroy the Sikh state in the Punjab. (Many

Barelvis go one step further, insisting that, far from being anti-British mujahydin, sәyyid

Ahmad of Raebareli and Muhammad Ismail were actually working for the British; the

same accusation is directed later towards both Rashid Ahmad and Muhammad Qasim,

who “from the start” actually “fought for the British” as agents of the Empire).144 If

jyhad against the British-led government hadn’t been lawful then, Sir Sayyid posited,

why would it suddenly be so now? Later Deobandi historians, however, would

themselves insist that this was not the case—that, in fact, Shah Abdul Aziz himself had

requested that sәyyid Ahmad join forces with ‘Ali Khan (who had allied with Maharaja

Jaswant Rao) to fight against the British. It was only six years later, after ‘Ali Khan’s

plans to come to an agreement with the British were uncovered, that sәyyid Ahmad split

with the bandit chief. His subsequent jyhad against the Sikhs should not be

disassociated with the struggle against the British either, for, we are informed, the Sikh

state was itself “an ally of British imperialism.”145 Whatever the truth of the matter, Sir

Sayyid’s 1860/1276 tract confirms that, at least after the revolt had already begun,

“certain wicked persons” used the call to jyhad to rile up “ignorant people”—with the

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result that “large numbers” answered. In other words, jyhad actually did motivate a

significant number in northern India to war against the Company, even if it hadn’t been

one of the initial causes of the revolt (and even if Sir Sayyid himself was loathe to admit

it). Deobandi historians claim that a quarter of all those killed by Company forces

during the course of the revolt were ‘alәma (the figure given is 51,200)—and that five

hundred ‘alәma were hanged in Delhi alone.146

Even in the face of these debates over the role of a fәtwa calling for jyhad in the

Revolt of 1857/1273, the Barelvis unstintingly point to the fәtwa of Fazl-e-Haq

Khairabadi (as do the Deobandis, though for different reasons) as the uprising’s true

commencement. Fazl-e-Haq allegedly played the leading role in the issuance of this

fәtwa calling for jyhad against the British. Almost three dozen Islamic scholars and

Sufis in Delhi affixed their names to this famous ruling, including several of the

Deobandi founding fathers (hence its importance to them). Almost a century later,

during the 1940s/1360s—at the height of pre-Partition nationalist politics in India—

many within the Barelvi leadership began to publicly trace “their” role in the

independence movement to the fәtwa of Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi (“Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi

was [a Barelvi],” one ‘alym of the Barelvis’ largest Indian mәdrәsәħ informed the author,

handling a copy of Fazl-e-Haq’s famous autobiography baGi hyndwstan, required reading

for hundreds of the school’s students). There are multiple problems with this, not least

of which lies in the fact that Fazl-e-Haq was, at the time, in the employ of the British

(the East India Company) and, reportedly, “had hardly any sympathy for the freedom

fighters.”147 In any case, Barelvi recollection of Fazl-e-Haq’s judgment clearly

illustrates the movement’s preferred political pedigree, whatever its historical accuracy.

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Intellectually and philosophically, however, Fazl-e-Haq should certainly be

considered a forefather of the Barelvi movement, for several reasons. First, he was

perhaps the strongest critic of the “Wahhabis” during his lifetime (sometimes applying

the term to men whom the Deobandis revere as their intellectual and spiritual forbears),

a role Barelvis would later see themselves as assuming (and often they, too, would label

Deobandis “Wahhabis”). Second, he had famously written much against the idea of

ymkan-e-nažir (the possibility that God could create, if He so wished, another prophet

equal to Muhammad; his own position he called ymtina’-e-nažir : “the impossibility of an

equal”), in opposition, again, to scholars that Deobandis would later consider their own

religious forefathers (specifically Muhammad Ismail). Decades later, when the debate

heated up once again, Fazl-e-Haq’s ideas were taken up and given voice by Ahmad Riza

Khan’s father. Ahmad Riza was in turn influenced by his father as he, too, adopted more

or less the same position on the matter.148 After the quelling of the “Mutiny,” Fazl-e-

Haq Khairabadi was arrested by the British, put on trial (famously) in Lucknow, and

sent to prison on the Andaman Islands, where he died.

It should be noted that while many Western, Barelvi, and even some Deobandi

scholars credit Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi as the chief instigator of the fәtwa against the

British in 1857/1273, others point to Deobandi predecessor Shah Abdul Qadir

Ludhianvi, who had been serving as Shahi Imam of the Punjab since 1800/1215.

According to these voices, it was the venerable mwlana out of Ludhiana who was

actually the first to issue a fәtwa in 1857/1273 against the Company Bahadur.149 And

Shah Abdul Qadir Ludhianvi was no stranger when it came to anti-British

machinations, either; he’d previously been involved in efforts to rid Afghanistan of the

British presence, and several past Afghan rulers could be counted as his personal

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disciples. To this day, his descendants insist that he not only issued a juridical ruling

against the British before Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, but actually led the fighting in and

around Ludhiana against the European menace, successfully driving the foreigners out

of the city and holding it for a considerable period. An engraving on the side of the

mosque in old Ludhiana, erected in the 1890s/1310s, bears an inscription celebrating

his deeds, including, among other things, the following: “He led the forces in the

Punjab for the freedom movement in 1857. British troops were forced out from

Ludhiana. He is remembered as one of the greatest freedom fighters.” His successor’s

successor’s successor: Habib-ur Rehman Ludhianvi, one of the most renowned Deobandi

“freedom fighters” in the years leading up to independence (about whom more later).150

Alongside the towering figure of Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, Barelvis remember Fazl-e-

Rasul Badayuni—and even Barelvi founder Ahmad Riza Khan’s own grandfather, Riza

‘Ali Khan, is spoken of in terms of 1857/1273 and its aftermath. According to one

story, told by Zafaruddin Bihari, despite the “atrocities” being perpetrated by the British

in the aftermath of the “Mutiny,” unlike so many others Riza ‘Ali refused to abandon his

home for “the village”; the same applied to his daily routine, which involved prayer five

times a day at the local mәsjyd. Bihari notes that one day several Englishmen showed up

at the mosque with the intent to “beat up” (pyTna) any Muslims they found there.

When they looked inside, peering “this way and that,” they saw nothing but an empty

room, despite the fact that Riza ‘Ali was there, engaged in prayer, at the same time.

God had thus made Ahmad Raza Khan’s grandfather invisible to his would-be

attackers.151 Sanyal attributes accounts such as this one to Barelvis’ attempts to

establish both Riza ‘Ali’s piety as well as his “distance from the British;”152 indeed, the

story paints Riza ‘Ali as the latter’s “fierce opponent.”153 Incidentally, Riza ‘Ali was also

  81 
  

a “fierce opponent” of sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli and, especially, his disciple Muhammad

Ismail, and even urged one of his own disciples, Muhammad ‘Ali Khan, to write a book

disputing Ismail’s teachings, which Muhammad ‘Ali did—certainly a precursor to the

Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry.154

Meanwhile, the Deobandis celebrate the alleged exploits of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi

and Muhammad Qasim Nanotwi, among others. According to Deobandi historians,

both of these ‘alәma affixed their names to Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi’s 1857/1273 fәtwa

calling for jyhad against the British, as well as an 1856/1272 pronouncement (signed by

the “remaining ‘alәma,” i.e. those who had not been killed or chased away by the British

or their stooges) that had called for “steps” to be taken against the East India Company.

According to the Deobandi narrative, some of the ‘alәma at the 1856/1272 meeting had

voiced concern about the plausibility of success; after all, their numbers were so small

compared to the might of the British. It was at this juncture that young Muhammad

Qasim is reported to have leapt up and asked, “Are our numbers smaller than that of the

heroes [Gażi] of Badr?” He had thus invoked the 1,200-year-old memory of a key

battle—a crucial turning point for the early Muslims, in fact—in which the Prophet’s

forces had bested a far greater army; this victory over a numerical superiority had

reversed the fortune of the Muslims. Upon hearing Muhammad Qasim’s words, “the

fire of martyrdom was lit in the hearts” of the wavering ‘alәma and it was agreed that a

jyhad against the British should indeed be declared.155 This was accomplished the next

year. Two other names were also included among these ‘alәma: the Deobandi-revered

Hafiz Zaman (of whom it was written, “From martyrdom he was made great”; killed in

battle, his corpse was reportedly carried by Muhammad Qasim to a nearby mosque,

where the latter read from the Qur’an over his fallen comrade’s body)156 and J’afar

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Thanisri.157 What happened later, at Shamli and Thana Bhawan (north of Delhi and not

far from Deoband), is shrouded in uncertainty, though the Deobandis insist that their

aforementioned forefathers became veterans in the freedom fight there against the

British. They have even given the struggle it’s own name: the War of Shamli Field.158

Thana Bhawan today is non-descript among the highway towns around

Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur. Its single main street is crowded and lined with food-

sellers peddling biryani or curried vegetables as a seemingly endless stream of rickety

buses, three-wheeled autos, and bicycle rickshaws pass by. On either side, the old town

is mostly hidden within a maze of narrow alleyways, and beyond this cultivated fields,

punctuated by tall trees, stretch as far as the eye can see. It was here that Imdadullah

and his disciples, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi and Muhammad Qasim Nanotwi, relocated,

fleeing Delhi around August 1857/Dhu’l Hijja 1273. Allen speculates that this move

may have been motivated by “doubts about Delhi’s religious status as a seat of [jyhad],”

as well as a waning faith in the ability of the city to withstand the British onslaught.159

In any case, it was in Thana Bhawan that Imdadullah (upon winning over a powerful

local landlord named Inayat ‘Ali) established, briefly, an independent government, after

a council of local ‘alәma had elected him әmir ul-mwmynin (“Commander of the

Faithful”). Rashid Ahmad was appointed a qazi within the new village-sized

“independent Islamic regime,” settling several cases according to shәri’at during his

brief tenure.160 Muhammad Qasim, who evidently played a crucial role during the

aforementioned council in having jyhad against the British declared, was appointed a

military commander (and some say, too, that despite his being the youngest, it was

Nanautawi who eventually emerged as the “real leader” of the group).161 Deobandi

historians insist that Imdadullah had to be convinced by others to take up this position

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of “worldly guidance,” in particular by Rashid Ahmad and Muhammad Qasim, who not

only acted within their appointed positions but also as assistants to Imdadullah in the

everyday affairs of the village-state.162 Meanwhile, the Thana Bhawan group retained

contact with the Delhi rebels via a go-between named Rahmatullah Kairanawi.163

The seeming concerns of these Deobandi founding fathers about the Delhi rebels

proved accurate; by mid-September/late Muharram, the old Mughal capital was

burning, retaken by the British. Around the same time, the British (actually a force of

Afghans and Sikhs led by Muzaffarnagar’s British Collector and Magistrate, a Mr.

Edwards) attempted to take Thana Bhawan, but were repelled after incurring both

human and material losses (at least one source dates the “outbreak of the Thana Bhawan

rising” to the end of August/early Muharram).164 This initial attack having failed,

Edwards’ force turned to nearby Shamli, which he occupied and left in control of about a

dozen of his soldiers. When he returned to Shamli later, he found that the Thana

Bhawan fighters (described by Deobandi historians as “a Muslim army” led by

Imdadullah himself)165 had “stormed the government buildings” in the town, and killed

all of the troopers Edwards had left to defend it.166 And so the Collector attacked

Thana Bhawan, to which more than a thousand fighting men had flocked, a second

time—but once again he was driven back, with heavy losses. Along their retreat back to

Muzaffarnagar, Imdadullah’s men (it is supposed) continued to harass Edwards’ party,

and a number of his Muslim soldiers deserted. Finally the desperate Magistrate ordered

his men to turn around and charge directly at the Thana Bhawan “insurgents.” The

ploy worked; the sudden charge scattered Imdadullah’s soldiers and resulted in the

deaths of many of them (one British witness attested that there were “a hundred” Thana

Bhawan dead). Afterwards, Imdadullah (for whom an arrest warrant had been issued)167

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and Rahmatullah made their way out of India for the safety of Mecca, while Rashid

Ahmad and Muhammad Qasim went into hiding. Later, Rashid Ahmad would be

imprisoned briefly as a suspected rebel, but eventually released for want of evidence.168

The Thana Bhawan state and the War at Shamli Field were, to Deobandis, “the last

great attempt…to establish an Islamic government [in a long line of attempts, from

antiquity] to 1857.” Afterwards, the English, victorious and thirsty for retribution,

hunted down many of the country’s ‘alәma.169

Scholars like Metcalf argue that the account of these Deobadani fathers’

revolutionary struggles at Thana Bhawan—including their setting up of an independent

government, their appointments to position, and their battles against the British—are

likely a fabrication borne of excitement surrounding “the nationalist movement after

World War I.” As evidence, Metcalf argues that such accounts of these figures’

involvement in actual fighting didn’t appear until after 1920/1338; before that, she

points out, Deobandis were arguing the opposite—namely, that while Rashid Ahmad had

been imprisoned, he had also been set free, and Muhammad Qasim had never been

arrested at all, both evidence that they had not in fact taken part in the 1857/1273

fighting. Pre-1920/1338 biographies actually argue that those accusing these men of

involvement in the “Mutiny” were simply the enemies of the Deobandi movement

attempting to stain the reputation of the school and its mission.170 Of course, both

positions need to be taken in historical context. The position that the individuals in

question did not participate in the rebellion may be attributed to the fact that, in the

decades immediately following the quashing of the uprising, many in India were bent on

proving they had not taken part so as to avoid prison, the confiscation of property,

death, or exile. Later, especially after the First World War, such threats had become

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obsolete. Even Metcalf admits that “[i]t is possible that the nationalist accounts are

correct, and that some of the ‘ulama did play an important role in the Thanah Bhawan

disorders.”171 Indeed, Assistant Magistrate H. D. Robertson, a witness of and

participant in the violence in the Thana Bhawan area, like many British officials firmly

believed the revolt had been instigated by Muslims as an overtly political act. “Such

investigations as it was possible to make,” Robertson wrote not two years after the

Rebellion commenced, “…proved that the Mahomedans in this tract were throughout

the instigators to revolt.” According to Robertson, the Muslims recruited Hindus who

were in debt to moneylenders, who “ swelled their ranks, rendering the rising

universal…”172

To this day, Deobandis and Barelvis from Karachi, Pakistan to Azamgarh, India and

beyond debate the historicity of the 1857/1273 exploits of such figures as Fazl-e-Haq

Khairabadi, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Fazl-e Rasul Badayuni, Imdadullah, Riza ‘Ali

Khan, and Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi.

The decline (indeed, fall) of “Muslim” political power was only one—and perhaps

not the most significant—test facing South Asian Islam in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries AD. For it was during this period that several “new” strains of the

religion began making waves among the Muslims of the subcontinent. Such strains

might be classified generally into two principle groups: (1) the purifiers—reformists,

often erroneously lumped together and labeled “Wahhabis,” who blamed political

Islam’s decline on the corruption of the ummәt, especially in the subcontinent, in part via

the accretion of pagan ritual and philosophy and other false traditions, and (2) the

modernists—apologetics who sought to reinterpret Islam in light of “modern” (Western)

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science and philosophy. The latter, one might safely assume, appeared as a direct result

of British rule in Hindustan, as mostly British-educated, upper-class Indian Muslims

suddenly found themselves questioning certain aspects (or at least traditional

interpretations) of their faith. This second category is perhaps best represented by Sir

Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Anglo-Oriental Muslim University at Aligarh and the cadre of

Muslim modernists/secularists that it produced. Eventually the Deobandis, it appears,

would be considered by a majority of South Asia’s Muslims as falling within the first

category, despite the inaccuracy of the term “Wahhabi” as applied to them.

And rising from this milieu, this diversity of opinion and wide spectrum of

interpretation, would come the “torch-bearer” (Pakistani scholar Mujeeb Ahmad’s

term)173 of the aforementioned majority, crusading against both the Deobandis’ alleged

“Wahhabism” (not to mention that of actual, bona fide Wahhabis) and Aligarh’s

blasphemous modernism: Ahmad Raza Khan, “founder” of the Barelvi movement.

But first, a school would be founded at Deoband.

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2 - GENESIS OF A RIVALRY:

The Beginnings of the Deobandi and Barelvi Schools (1866-1921)

I’ll tell you, it is easy to pursue asceticism, and live the life of a recluse for years, and

enjoy its ecstacy. It is easy to opt for the study of voluminous books for years, and

demonstrate the power of deep knowledge. …I’ll tell you, it is difficult to submit before

God and, with devotion and piety, render selfless service to His Creations, always

nursing within the heart the desire for people’s wellbeing; that is to say, to have a

passionate and restless heart that sometimes takes you to the mosque, that sometimes

takes you to a study circle, that sometimes takes you to the pulpit to preach and caution

people—[and] that sometimes also takes you to the political platform, for the greater

well-being of your community and for upholding the truth.

SAYYID MUHAMMAD MIAN, IN әSIRAN-E-MALTA1

In the months and years after the violence of 1857/1273, the Muslim communities

of South Asia were generally considered enemies of the British, a sentiment perhaps best

expressed by Henry Rawlinson in 1875/1292; Muslim enmity in India was, he said, a

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“seething, fermenting, festering mass.”2 The irony is that Rawlinson’s “festering mass”

of hostility—the Muslims of India—not seventy-five years later would be referred to

often by British civil servants as “loyal people” (i.e. loyal to the British) whose friendship

was to be nurtured and whose allegiance must be maintained.3 Bamfield Fuller,

Lietenant-Governor of newly created East Bengal, even described the Muslim

community as the government’s “favorite wife.”4 By then it was the Hindu, represented

(at least in the eyes of many Britishers) by the Congress, who had become entrenched as

the Empire’s enemy. And it wasn’t just in the eyes of the British government that this

transformation had come about; Abul Kalam Azad speaks of the early twentieth century

AD revolutionary movements in India, too, as “all…actively anti-Muslim. They saw

that the British Government was using the Muslims against India’s political struggle

and the Muslims were playing the Government’s game… The revolutionaries felt that

the Muslims were an obstacle to the attainment of Indian freedom and must, like other

obstacles, be removed.” Abul Kalam Azad blamed at least a portion of this resentment

upon the fact that the government had “imported” a number of Muslim political officers

from the United Provinces to man the police’s Intelligence Branch, evidently out of a

mistrust of Hindu officers after the partition of Bengal; this highly unpopular move had

provoked what he described as an “awakening among the Hindus,” and illustrates

clearly the relational shift that had by then occurred vis-à-vis the Muslim-British

paradigm.5 One prominent Indian nationalist, writing in 1917/1335, put it more

succinctly: “The British wished for and tried to create an Ulster among the

Mohammedans of India.”6 Times had certainly changed from the days of Thana

Bhawan.

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In any case, the period under consideration in this chapter covers the transitional

era described above, from Rawlinson’s perceived “seething, fermenting, festering mass”

to Fuller’s allegedly “favorite wife.” It was within the context of these macro-

phenomena—of the “Muslim” search for a place in the new British order as well as the

perceived British policy substitution of enmity for India’s Muslims for enmity for the

rising Hindu—that the Deobandi school (grounded in Waliullahi thought) was founded

and developed, and the Barelvi counter-reformation (a continuation of the Khairabadi-

Badayuni tradition) launched.

A School is Founded: the Birth of “Deobandism.”

After the short-lived founding of the village-sized Islamic state at Thana Bhawan,

Imdadullah escaped by quickly emigrating to the Hijaz, where he lived out the rest of

his days (though his connection to the narrative at hand is not quite ended)—but

Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad stayed behind. The former, erstwhile military

commander of Thana Bhawan’s anti-Company forces, for whom an arrest warrant had

been issued,7 evaded British capture, hiding as a refugee about eighty miles north of

Delhi in a picturesque qәSbәħ named Deoband. The town was a natural hiding place, as

the one-time rebel enjoyed not only several family connections in the area but also had

spent time in Deoband as a student; later he married into a family native to the town,

too.8 It was likely during this period that Muhammad Qasim became familiar with the

new (i.e. immediately post-Munity) venture of his cousin, Mahtab ‘Ali,9 and two other

Deoband residents (‘Abid Husain and Nihal Ahmad): the founding of a small school

(mәktәb), connected to a local mosque. At least Mahtab ‘Ali had run a school before; in

fact, it had been to Mahtab ‘Ali’s (previous) “primary school” that the young

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Muhammad Qasim, before studying in Saharanpur and eventually Delhi, had carried out

a portion of his own religious instruction,10 mostly in Arabic.11 Regarded as “among

Deoband’s most distinguished teachers,”12 Mahtab ‘Ali had studied himself at Delhi

College with the likes of Mamluk ‘Ali and Sadr al-Din Azardah (leading poet, Arabic

specialist, and, at the time, the longest serving member of Delhi’s judiciary).13 In any

case, Mahtab ‘Ali’s new school met in “small and dark rooms” and was of the traditional

type: a simple appendage of the mәsjyd, operating under the guidance of informal

teachers to whom students, usually with some kinship connection to the teacher or the

mosque, would come for temporary instruction.14 According to one Deobandi historian,

Mahtab ‘Ali and his companions had entertained ideas related to the further

development and expansion of the little mәdrәsәħ, but such thoughts had been “limited

to their hearts and their tongues.”15 It would take the efforts of another to bring them

to life—and vastly transcend them.

It is unclear just when Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi took a personal interest in the

school, but it seems likely that, beyond preventing his own imprisonment by the now

seemingly invincible British, he would have been most concerned with carrying on the

struggle based upon the original aims imbibed by him from his teachers, in particular

from Imdadullah and, earlier, Mamluk ‘Ali. The same was almost certainly true for

Rashid Ahmad, who, though he languished for a period in a British prison as a suspected

rebel, must have counted the days until he could resume the fight, though in a

necessarily adapted form. But Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad couldn’t do it

alone; they needed the help of others not explicitly connected to the rebellion of

1857/1273. For years after the Mutiny, the ‘alym from Nanauta, whose name was

included among those of other known mutineers on official government lists, had

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“passed through thousands of temporary resting places” in an attempt to escape capture

by the British.16 But after a general amnesty was announced by Governor-General

Canning (January 1859/Jumada II 1275) for all who had taken a part in the 1857/1273

revolt,17 Muhammad Qasim felt free enough to travel between Nanauta and Deoband

out in the open, expressing passionately the need for a new kind of religious seminary.

He would have to found it through others—individuals not on the British radar—

because he suspected that British plainclothes police monitored his movements, even

after the amnesty. Indeed, Muhammad Qasim feared that if he were to found the school

himself, the government would persecute it relentlessly. No, he would need

intermediaries. Thus it was that, at some point in the decade after the Mutiny,

Muhammad Qasim, by now a highly respected religious figure, approached the tiny,

traditional school’s three founders.18

His vision was simple, grand—and highly unusual. Nothing like it had ever been

done before on the subcontinent. But Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi was adamant; this

would, with time, be the fulfillment of his original purposes. It would bring to fruition

the legacy of his teachers, Imdadullah and Mamluk ‘Ali, who had themselves imbibed

“the program” (Faruqi’s term) from Muhammad Ishaq, sәyyid Ahmad and Muhammad

Ismail, and Shah Abdul Aziz—the latter, of course, having succeeded his father, Shah

Waliullah himself. What was Muhammad Qasim’s grand vision? To the 21st-century

AD mind it seems anything but revolutionary, but within the context of his time and

place, of local tradition and South Asian Islamic custom, it represented a radical

departure.

Muhammad Qasim proposed that the small, mosque-connected school be moved into

a large new building, that it be independent of the mәsjyd entirely, that it stand on its

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own as an autonomous institution beholden to no government, no rich guiding patron,

no princely court; he would later write, somewhat unambiguously, that the

“participation of government and the wealthy is harmful.”19 Its teachers were to be

professionals, and regular, who were to be equal (in the sense that all of their opinions

were to be valued and weighed). It was to be run, true to Waliullahi principles, by a

mәjlys-e-shwra (or advisory council)—not according to the dictates of one man or a

single clique. It should have classrooms set apart for the teaching of specific subjects,

and it should have a large, central library. It should have a fixed curriculum, including a

fixed course of study and yearly examinations; this latter was important, for it

established a system of meritocracy. In short, the proposed institution should be not

only independent, and not only far larger than any other Islamic institution of learning

in southern Asia, but it should be organizationally based on, of all things, the British

model (to which the Deobandi founders had been exposed in multiple forms, whether at

Delhi College, or in observing Christian missionary organizations, or as employees

themselves within the British government apparatus).

From such an institution, the ummәt in South Asia (and beyond) might be preserved,

the greatness—both spiritual and political—of the Muslims might be restored, and the

Waliullahi vision might be spread far and wide as the school developed a growing

network of affiliated institutions. Indeed, the school should represent, in the words of

its official twentieth-century/fourteenth-century historian, “the greatest religious

achievement of the Muslims in [the modern] period,” preserving “the lamp of the

prophetic knowledge…in spite of the gusts of a contrary wind.”20 “A fundamental

orientation of [Shah Waliullah’s] work,” one scholar has written, “…had been the hope

that Muslim political leadership would be restored, with the [‘alәma] carrying on their

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collective role of teaching and advising the ruler of the state”; later ‘alәma were indebted

to Shah Waliullah “for a manifold legacy” that included “a sense of their importance as

leaders.”21 According to Muhammad Qasim’s vision, Deoband was to be the center of a

vast network of mәdarys (and indeed, almost from the outset of the school’s founding,

Muhammad Qasim was anxiously engaged in founding or inspiring the founding of

several other, affiliated institutions).22 The dar ul’alwm would thereby be able to realize

the original aims of its founders and their spiritual predecessors, including Mamluk ‘Ali,

Muhammad Ishaq, and Shah Abdul Aziz. (Thus, as Faruqi concludes, Deobandism’s

anti-British roots trace to the very foundation of the institution, in harmony, so the

Deobandis assert, with the Waliullahi tradition).23 M. Ahmad agrees, describing the

establishment of the dar ul’alwm at Deoband as “founded on the ideals of Shah

Walyullah” and thus “destined to play a prominent part in the political struggle of the

Indians against the British rule.”24 Faruqi describes this phenomenon in the following

words:

The part played by the Darul-Ulum in religious, social and political life of

the Indian Muslims can be legitimately interpreted in terms of the aims and

objectives that lay behind the actions of its founders during the days of the

Rebellion. Shamli and Deoband are, as a matter of fact, the two sides of one and

the same picture. The difference lies only in weapons. Now the sword and

spear were replaced by the pen and the tongue. There, at Shamli, in order

to secure political independence and freedom for religion and culture, resort was

made to violence; here at Deoband a start was made to achieve the same

goal through peaceful means. There, for the cause of religio-political

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freedom individuals were used; here for that purpose individuals were to

be produced. The roads, though diverging from each other, led towards

the same destination.25 [Italics added.]

It should be noted that, at least in the beginning, such black-and-white characterizations

(i.e. freedom through violent means at Shamli versus freedom through peaceful means at

Deoband) were likely not so clear. Still, in the early years some mockingly referred to

the school as the mәdrәsәħ-e-hәrbiyәħ (or “military school,” a pun on the institution’s

common name, the mәdrәsәħ-e-‘arәbiyәħ) on account of its unique physical education

curriculum, which included military-like drills and exercises.26 Perhaps Muhammad

Qasim and Rashid Ahmad still harbored some lingering hope that a cadre of soldiers

might be developed with the power to oust the British. Even so, within a few years such

martial displays had been more or less dropped from the curriculum entirely, and

viewed from within the context of Muhammad Qasim’s other pronouncements around

this time, it appears that the drilling was genuinely introduced as a form of physical

education after all. Such echoes of the transitory Islamic state at Thana Bhawan also

included a shәri’at court set up by Muhammad Qasim, through which was settled a wide

range of community disputes. The one-time military commander himself served as qazi

in the court, and for a time the official government court of Deoband tehsil “had a real

rival in it.” Though the court, like the army-esque drills, would fade with time, its

establishment further underscored “the spirit of non-cooperation” that the school’s

guiding lights had displayed in the years leading up to its inception.27

Earlier in this work, the two-pronged agenda passed on by Muhammad Ishaq to his

disciples, and in particular Mamluk ‘Ali and his committee-of-four, was mentioned.

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This, the Deobandi fathers insisted, was the Waliullahi vision. Indeed, over a century

after the founding of the institution, in 1978/1398, the dar ul’alwm’s vice-chancellor,

Muhammad Tayyib, would confirm the perpetuation of these original aims, identifying

two key issues addressed by the Shah Waliullahi program and dealt with via the school:

(1) the preservation of Muslim faith and practice and (2) the deliverance of India from

the foreign yoke.28 Muhammad Tayyib’s two-pronged mission statement for the school

more or less mirrors that of Muhammad Ishaq’s charge to Mamluk ‘Ali, passed on to

Imdadullah, Rashid Ahmad, and Muhammad Qasim, and built into the core philosophy

of the dar ul’alwm at Deoband. The school’s official history likewise frames the

institutional mission of the dar ul’alwm within the context of these early visions and this

“original” agenda, writing that the school “has been a dauntless standard-bearer of

Islamic life, calling people to ymam Abu Hanifa’s mәslәk [the first of Muhammad Ishaq’s

two-part program], the preacher of the thought of Shah Waliullah of Delhi, the

commentator of Shah Abdul Aziz’s knowledge, and the greatest trustee of mwlana

Muhammad Isma’il shәhid’s sentiments of liberty [the second of Muhammad Ishaq’s

two-part program].”29

The Deobandi argument that the two-pronged “Waliullahi” mission was largely

fulfilled—first via the institution, its graduates’ influence, and the subsequent network

of affiliated schools, and second through its leadership’s role in the independence

movement—is a strong one. The first half of the program was in a sense carried out via

the school’s adoption and adaptation of the Farangi Mahali-inspired dәrs-e-nyžami

curriculum, which contained both mәnqwlat (which, as previously mentioned, was the

specialty of the Delhi scholars, including the Waliullahi line) and mәqwlat (the special

domain of the Lucknow scholars and the aforementioned Khairabadi-Badayuni Group).

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The Deobandis, true to their Waliullahi leanings, placed far more emphasis on hәdis-

study, however, substituting the one text of hәdis selections in the traditional

curriculum with all six authoritative collections, in their entirety, in their own version.

Indeed, hәdis was considered “the crowning subject” to be studied at the institution—

and only the best and the brightest were encouraged to pursue it.30 The other, more

political prong of the agenda was met through a series of anti-British political schemes

spearheaded by university leaders, and by the heavy involvement generally of the

school’s teachers, administrators, and students in the pre-Partition politics of

independence in India, which shall be addressed later in this work.

Some historians and other scholarly commentators, perhaps within the context of a

post-“nine eleven” world, have seen in the founding of the school and the projection of

its mission a layer of foreboding. Allen writes ominously, for example: “The end result

[of the establishment of the school at Deoband] 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.”31 But however it’s founding has been interpreted, it is clear that, even for

Allen, the event represented more than the construction of a new kind of Muslim

school; it was the birth of a paradigm-shifting movement—or, rather, the continuation

of said movement via much more effective means. Faruqi, M. Ahmad, even the school’s

detractors (like Allen), and others thus see in the school’s founding—and by means of its

operation—an endeavor with overtly political ends. The dar ul’alwm was, in the words

of Goyal, “the offshoot of the inspiration that had motivated the [‘alәma] to actively

participate in the 1857 uprising to throw the British out of the country.”32

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But there are formidable scholars who oppose this view outright, and some mention

of their reasoning should be included. Barbara Metcalf, without question Western

academia’s leading scholar of Deobandism, has argued that the school’s political ties

have been “distorted” by scholars and others due to the later role many of its ‘alәma

would play in independence politics. The result of such distortion has been that, in the

context of academic writing, the dar ul’alwm has come off as “anti-British and

revolutionary” in character. With more than a little finality, Metcalf stated

unequivocally in a 1978/1398 article, “[T]he school’s concerns were entirely a-

political.”33 Other scholars, like Francis Robinson, have faithfully towed this line as

they cast doubt on (or simply outright deny) any militant motives on the part of Shah

Abdul Aziz, any political (much less militant) role for the Deobandi fathers in the events

of 1857/1273, or any political motivations in the founding of the school—all the while

citing “the conclusions of Barbara Metcalf’s deep study of the school…” As evidence,

Robinson points out that the school’s founders “were careful to steer clear of

government” and “stressed that it should not accept government help and that its

associates should not have recourse to government courts of law.”34 In so doing,

however, Robinson only demonstrates the very political nature of the Deobandi

endeavor; the British government was, ultimately, the enemy (however one might be

forced to “work with,” or at least tolerate, such an entity in the short run)—thus the

school would “steer clear” of it as far as practically possible, refrain from accepting,

much less soliciting, financial or political aid, and set up a righteous alternative to its

inferior (even wicked) legal system.

By the early 1980s/1400s, however, Metcalf would characterize the early Deobandi

movement (in her masterful Islamic Revival in British India) as “quasi-sectarian,”

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concerned more than anything else with “issues of the Law,” and involved in a struggle

of “identifying popularly based ‘ulama as the foci of religious leadership.” In addition,

the Deobandis, while “discreet in their political stance,” nevertheless “in fact held the

foreign rulers in deep contempt.”35 Even Robinson admits that “[p]ossibly the ‘ulama

of Deoband, having noted the problem of resisting British military might, were biding

their time.”36 Taken together, it is difficult not to interpret at least one strand of the

early Deobandis’ motivations in political terms, even when one is limited to using the

Metcalf-Robinson interpretation only. After all, it is widely recognized that the

Deobandis represent a successor movement to the Shah Walliulahi tradition, whose own

reformist movement, as Robinson himself has pointed out, was directly motivated by the

great eighteenth-century AD Delhi scholar’s “distress” at “waning Muslim power”—and

the hope that with such reforms in place “divisions would end and power would return”

(italics added). Indeed, Robinson rightly framed the founding of the school at Deoband

as representative of the shifting focus of the mәdrәsәħ—from a place to train scholars for

work within the state apparatus (up to the eighteenth century/twelfth century) to a

place wherein “training for Islamic survival in a world where Muslims had no power”

was the goal (an echo of Metcalf). The mәdrәsәħ had always been political to one degree

or another, and Deoband was no different. In fact, the university there stood as a

symbol—even the symbol—of the “institutionalization” of the above-mentioned focus

change, standing on that shift’s “leading edge.” “The training for empire built up over

800 years faded away,” Robinson wrote, to be replaced by an emphasis on survival and

internal, even individual, reform.37 And while it might be true that the Deobandis’

“were coping with the challenge of an infidel government by turning inwards and

fashioning the machinery of an Islamic community which need owe nothing to the

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state,” it would be absurd to think that the political goals of the mәdrәsәħ simply

disappeared altogether, especially given the Muslim religious leadership’s general

disdain for their alien rulers.38 No (and Deobandi historians are adamant on this point):

the goal was always political—and nothing less than the eventual establishment of

Islamic government.39 “After the failure of the 1857 uprising,” wrote Muhammad Mian

Ansari, a close associate of Mahmud Hasan (d. 1920 AD), “the desire arose to establish a

center under whose influence people would be prepared to exact retribution for the 1857

failure” (italics added).40

It likewise would be absurd to interpret the university’s very limited (perceived)

cooperation with (or, more accurately, some perceived lack of explicit hostility towards)

the British government as proof of some sort of apolitical position, a kind of approving

toleration, or any kind of endorsement on the part of the Deobandi movement’s

leadership. On the contrary, the focus shift that certainly took place within the

institution of the South Asian mәdrәsәħ never removed the seminaries’ overarching

objective—that is, the propagation of Islamic Law (within the framework of an Islamic

order), facilitated by able, moral, wise ‘alәma, with the purpose of establishing

righteousness upon the earth. The difference was that now Muslim society had to be

reformed first, from within, before political power could be obtained. This goal in no

way transformed the ultimate aim; rather, it inserted an additional step in that aim’s

achievement. “Islam envisages its adherants as a religious and political community,”

wrote Mujeeb Ahmad, “therefore, [‘alәma] claim for themselves a socio-political role

along with their religious functions.”41

Combined with the above, one final point (previously touched upon in Chapter 1)

might be repeated briefly here. That is: Islam is an inherently political system, a definition

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offered by its very own intellectuals. From the days of Muhammad, this was so. To

quote religious scholar Karen Armstrong at length:

In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred

scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical mission… A Muslim had to

redeem history, and that meant that state affairs were not a distraction

from spirituality, but the stuff of religion itself. The political well-being of

the Muslim community was a matter of supreme importance. Like any

religious ideal, it was almost impossibly difficult to implement in the

flawed and tragic conditions of history, but after each failure Muslims

had to get up and begin again.

Muslims developed their own rituals, mysticism, philosophy,

doctrines, sacred texts, laws and shrines like everybody else. But all these

religious pursuits sprang directly from the Muslims’ frequently anguished

contemplation of the political current affairs of Islamic society. If state

institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if their political

leaders were cruel or exploitative, or if their community was humiliated by

apparently irreligious enemies, a Muslim could feel that his or her faith in

life’s ultimate purpose and value was in jeopardy. Every effort had to be

expended to put Islamic history back on track, or the whole religious enterprise

would fail, and life would be drained of meaning. Politics was, therefore, what

Christians would call a sacrament: it was the arena in which Muslims

experienced God and which enabled the divine to function effectively in the

world. (italics added)42

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Afghan outfit Jamiat Islami mujahydin leader Burnhanuddin Rabbani would later

illustrate this concept when he told western reporters that he preferred the term

“Islamicist” to the oft-repeated “fundamentalist.” “For us,” he explained, “Islam is a

dynamic that concerns all aspects of human life.”43 With this understanding, and set

within the context of the decline and fall of “Muslim” power on the subcontinent, the

very political Shah Waliullahi tradition, the political violence of 1857/1273, the

university’s obvious contempt—from the very beginning—for dependence upon the

British government, and the subsequent, undisputed major role of many of the school’s

students and teachers (if not that of its founders) in the pre-Partition politics of India,

perhaps scholars can take the university’s leaders at their word when they proclaim the

founding of the great dar ul’alwm at Deoband to have been motivated in large degree by

the highly political Imdadullahi “program.” Indeed, Mahmud Hasan—more familiar

than perhaps anyone when it comes to the school’s founding and early development, as

the nephew of one of its founders, its very first student, personally the disciple of

Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad, and the undisputed leader of the university’s

“second generation”—once stated that, as far as he knew, “this institution [the dar

ul’alwm at Deoband] was established after the failure of the 1857 uprising with the aim

of preparing a cadre for avenging that defeat.”44

The local reaction to Muhammad Qasim’s grandiose vision was, perhaps predictably,

not entirely positive. ‘Abid Husain, who more than anyone else actually ran the little

mәktәb that Muhammad Qasim proposed to transform, rejected the scholar’s vision

entirely. But the mwlana from Nanauta eventually convinced even ‘Abid Husain, and

the project commenced.45

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So it was that the school that would become the great dar ul’alwm, originally known

popularly as mәdrәsәħ-e-‘arәbiyәħ,46 was founded in one of Deoband’s six mosques built

by the Delhi kings over the centuries, the mәsjyd-e-chhәttәħ, “where,” Metcalf informs us,

“the great Sufi Hazrat Baba Fariu’d-Din Ganj-i Shakar was said to have meditated.”

Deobandis still proudly motion visitors towards a pomegranate tree within the original

mosque’s grounds, said to have been the very one under whose shade the school’s first

instruction took place.47 But the school quickly branched out from this more traditional

setting to realize the Qasimi vision, acquiring a library, classrooms, and a permanent,

professional staff of administrators and teachers. Its students need have no familial tie

to the school in order to attend; all were welcome and invited to study there. The

institution was dependent on no government, court, or wealthy family, but relied,

instead, on private donations (typically as annual pledges) from a wide variety of

people—some rich, some poor, some socially connected, others virtually unknown

outside of their own neighborhoods; donations might be given in kind too—in food,

clothes, books, etc.48 (This same pattern of financing continues to this day; the

grandson of the Deobandi scholar Muhammad Shafi proudly displayed the donation

boxes in the main offices of the dar ul’alwm Karachi to the author in the summer of

2012/1433, while the grandson of Barelvi great Muhammad Hussain Naeemi did much

the same in the front office of the Jamia Naeemia in Lahore that same year). Donations

didn’t flow one-way, either; monies garnered via these collection efforts allowed

students to receive a religious education at the dar ul’alwm (plus clothes, laundry

money, shoes, medical care, a quilt, and oil and matches for light)49 more or less gratis,

and multitudinous are the stories of generous teachers or administrators, whose own

salaries were purposefully kept small, donating money, books, or other gifts to needy

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students.50 Eventually (by the 1890s/1310s) a boarding house was established,

replacing the old system of housing students in family homes or mosques; the new

arrangement facilitated the formation of bonds that transcended kinship or geography,

bonds based upon common experience within the dar ul’alwm system. Metcalf sees in

the boarding house brotherhood preparation for the “mutual cooperation” required for,

among other endeavors, future political undertakings.51

An organized hierarchy, drawn up along British-inspired lines, included the sәrpәrәst

(which Metcalf equates with “rector,” but which might also be translated as “guardian”),

a sort of “patron and guide” with no direct administrative role; a muhtәmim (Metcalf:

“chancellor,” though the school as of this writing refers to the muhtәmim as “rector”), the

institution’s head administrative official; an әrbab-e-yhtymam (or “vice-chancellor”),

perhaps the most important administrative officer in terms of day-to-day decision-

making; a Sәdәr mәdarys (or “principal,” though a more exact translation would be “head

teacher”), upon whom lay the chief responsibility for the school’s instruction (and

scarcely less important in decision-making than the vice-chancellor); a mufti (from

1892/1309), responsible, of course, for the juridical rulings emanating from the dar

ul’alwm (a dar ul-yfta, or center for juridical rulings, was formally established in

1893/1310, and between 1911/1329 and 1951/1370, almost one hundred fifty thousand

fәtawa emanated from the school);52 and, perhaps most importantly of all, a mәjlys-e-

shwra (or “advisory council”) composed of administrators, teachers, and seven others.

This last was given a central role in major decision-making for the school, thereby

preventing a single individual, family, or clique from dominating its affairs (with mixed

success).53 Still, though the school was organizationally British, the old personal ties

between teacher and gifted student—the shix-disciple relationship, the heart and soul of

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the traditional mosque-centered schools—were maintained, as students became disciples

of Sufi shixs (often their teachers). The Sufi shix especially cared for his disciples

thereafter; both shared a lifelong bond.54

Interestingly, neither Muhammad Qasim nor Rashid Ahmad held official posts

within the newly founded institution at Deoband for its first three years; indeed, in the

case of Rashid Ahmad, he never held any sort of permanent, day-to-day position at the

school. Rather, Muhammad Qasim is credited with informally though firmly guiding

the school’s founders during this early period from his printing house in Meerut fifty

miles away, in particular through his good friend Rafiuddin (d. 1890 AD), who held top

posts within the dar ul’alwm’s administration for almost two decades. His influence was

likewise felt through several other family connections he enjoyed with the school,

including his cousins, Muhammad Ya’qub (the institution’s principal from 1867-

1886/1284-1303), Zu’l-Faqar ‘Ali (a member of the advisory council for forty years),

Muhammad Munir Nanautawi (the school’s chancellor from 1894-1895/1311-1312),

and, of course, Mahtab ‘Ali (who also served as a council member).55 “Leadership in

Deobandi institutions has traditionally been influenced by clan and family loyalties,”

wrote one scholar, and this was true from the beginning; such a phenomenon was not

uncommon (and remains so) in the subcontinent among educational institutions of all

stripes.56 It should be noted, however, and evident from the aforementioned description

of the school’s genesis, that despite this role of informal influencer, Muhammad Qasim

was, in the words of Faruqi, “the guiding spirit of this venture,”57 and he did hold the

somewhat informal position of sәrpәrәst until his 15 April1880/5 Jumada I 1297 death

(perhaps to keep a healthy distance so as not to potentially “taint” the school in the eyes

of the British authorities, considering his 1857/1273 actions). Even with this family

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clique fully invested in the school, the administrative mechanisms set in motion by

Muhammad Qasim himself prevented the institution’s out-and-out “takeover” by the

family.

Meanwhile, Rashid Ahmad lived as a jurist, Sufi shix, and teacher of hәdis in Gangoh

(about thirty miles from Deoband); his opinions about the dar ul’alwm, however, “were

followed,” particularly as they pertained to the “organizing and shaping of the school,”58

and he would “succeed” Muhammad Qasim as sәrpәrәst after the latter’s passing. Not

infrequently the aged mwlana made visits from Gangoh to the university at Deoband,

counseling teachers and students and generally guiding the institution’s direction.

When students desired more advanced instruction in fyqħ or hәdis, they would often

travel to Gangoh to learn at the feet of the old scholar. It was here, too, that Rashid

Ahmad continued to initiate the best and the brightest into the four great South Asian

Sufi orders, as he had been initiated years before by his own murshyd, Imdadullah.59

Present during the weeks and days of Muhammad Qasim’s final illness was the dar

ul’alwm’s first student, who had studied hәdis under Muhammad Qasim in the Meerut

printing houses: one Mahmud Hasan.60 After the subsequent death of Rashid Ahmad

(who, along with Muhammad Qasim, had represented the dar ul’alwm’s “first

generation” of leadership), it was Mahmud Hasan—born in 1851/1267 and head of the

institution from 1890/1307—who would be considered the undisputed leading

personality of the institution’s “second generation.”61 In time, the young student-

turned-mwlana would become arguably the school’s most celebrated political activist

and one of India’s most revered Muslim shixs; indeed, his title, by which he was and

continues to be known to millions: shix ul-hynd, or “The Scholar-Jurist of Hindustan.”

Meanwhile, the old agenda, passed on down the Shah Waliullahi line, and inherited by

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Mamluk ‘Ali, Imdadullah, Muhammad Qasim, and Rashid Ahmad, was taken up now

with a vengeance by the dar ul’alwm’s first țalyb when his time came to lead. The

“program” may have been passed on as far back as 1877/1294, when Mahmud Hasan

accompanied Muhammad Qasim on the hәj to Mecca. In the holy city the future shix ul-

hynd met with Imdadullah himself, receiving bi’at under his hand—thereby “vowing

allegiance” to the one-time leader of the short-lived Islamic mini-state at Thana

Bhawan—and becoming his xәlifәħ. Around a hundred men, including Rashid Ahmad

as well as Muhammad Yaqub Nanautawi (Mamluk ‘Ali’s son and, at the time, the

principal of the dar ul’alwm; Mahmud Hasan would succeed him a few years after his

1884/1301 death), and Ahmed Hasan Kanpuri likewise participated in this special hәj

journey.62 We shall return to Mahmud Hasan and the political initiatives he

spearheaded shortly.

As the school developed throughout its formative decades, students began to flock

to the institution from all over the Muslim world. One observer (writing around

1917/1335) noted of the dar ul’alwm, “[S]tudents from Russia, China, Balkh and

Bukhara, Kabul, Turkey, Syria and Arabia and Persia—indeed, from every country and

city—are present there. By now more than a thousand scholars, graduated from the dar

ul’alwm, have spread throughout the country…”63 By the early twentieth

century/fourteenth century, the Muslim religious leadership had attained such elevated

status that even Muslims educated in the West began taking on religious titles (such as

mwlana), and were addressed as such by the public at large.64 And thus it was that,

along with its growing prestige, the school’s teachers and graduates began to exert a

noticeable influence on the day-to-day Islamic practice of the subcontinent’s Muslims,

especially concentrating on stamping out the “impurities” that had crept into the faith

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through its centuries-long contact with (indeed, through Deobandi eyes, the near-

complete encirclement by and infiltration of) local, mostly Hindu customs and ritual.

Practices of which the Deobandis were critical included the charging of interest on

loans, the array of rites and ceremony associated with the tombs of Muslim saints, the

forbidding of widow remarriage, and extravagant feasts and weddings. (For the

Deobandis, as discussed in Chapter 1, this did not include a rejection of Sufism, though

the movement clamped down, as mentioned previously, on what it considered the

inappropriate spiritual elevation of Sufi saints, among other sufistic “excesses”). For

Metcalf, for a group to qualify as an “Islamic reform movement” it must accept the

“period of the life of the Prophet and the first decades of Islam as providing the

fundamental examples of behavior and belief; all [Islamic reform movements] seek self-

consciously, by a wide variety of means, to relive that pristine time.”65 This is precisely

what the ‘alәma of the dar ul’alwm sought to achieve—the very aim of Muhammad

Ishaq’s two-pronged program—through these criticisms, in the tradition of their

spiritual forbears, going back to Shah Waliullah and beyond. The “accretions” that had

developed within South Asian Islam had to be removed, as they clearly represented

post-Muhammad, post-Rashidun innovations. Many Muslims in India and even beyond

became adherents of the new, more puritan (or “reformist”) school based in the little

qәSbәħ north of Delhi.

Others, however, pushed back.

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Counter-Reformation: The Birth of “Barelvism.”

The same year that the dar ul’alwm in Deoband was founded under the direction of

Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi, a Muslim holy man approached the dwelling of a noted

(but far from famous) ‘alym in the small western-U.P. town of Bareilly, one hundred fifty

miles east of Delhi. His knock brought the ‘alym’s ten-year-old son to the door; the boy

opened it. He looked up into the face of the fәqir, at which, Zafaruddin Bihari informs

us, the holy man abruptly placed his hand upon the boy’s head and said, “You are a great

scholar.”66 The ten-year-old boy was the young Ahmad Raza Khan, son of mwlana Naqi

‘Ali Khan and grandson of mwlana Raza ‘Ali Khan. The incident with the holy man

wasn’t the first time a pronouncement of spiritual or scholarly greatness had been made

about the child, either. Indeed, a decade before, shortly after Ahmad Raza’s 1856/1272

birth, his venerated grandfather had laid him on his lap and uttered very nearly the

same words. “This son of mine will be a great scholar,” he had said about the newborn.

Ahmad Raza Khan was of Pathan stock, his ancestors hailing from the Kandahari

region of what is today southern Afghanistan. During the Mughal era, some of the

family had moved to Lahore, then Delhi, eventually settling at the qәSbәħ of Bareilly in

Rohilkhand. Throughout their migrations, Ahmad Raza’s ancestors benefitted from

Mughal rule by fulfilling various government appointments, both military and civilian.

In Bareilly, the family continued to benefit from state employment, as well as the

income derived from government-endowed properties. Beginning with Ahmad Raza’s

grandfather, Raza ‘Ali Khan, however, a new family tradition was initiated: that of the

attainment of religious scholarship. Raza ‘Ali Khan was known in his day, according to

one Barelvi historian, as not only an “unparalleled scholar” but a “perfect saint,” thus

juxtaposing Ahmad Raza’s predecessors with those of the Deobandi fathers and

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declaring the former’s spiritual heritage the superior one. (It was Raza ‘Ali Khan, too,

who, it was said, had been made invisible to British thugs following the repression of the

Mutiny.) His son, Naqi ‘Ali Khan, a contemporary of Rashid Ahmad and Muhammad

Qasim, followed in the footsteps of his father, and was likewise recognized as a

“glorious, holy scholar” and, significantly vis-à-vis his Deobandi counterparts, an

“unequalled writer and critic [of deviant practices within Islam].” Thus the foundation

was laid by his fathers for Ahmad Raza not only to become a great scholar and teacher,

but also a critic, reformist (or counter-reformist), and opponent of “the enemies of Allah

and the Prophet.”67

Ahmad Riza’s father tutored him in religion at home; the two enjoyed a close

relationship. Stories abound concerning Ahmad Raza’s childhood and youth—about

how he had memorized the entire Qur’an by age four, that he was addressing

worshippers at the mosque by age six, that he had surpassed his scholarly and

distinguished father in knowledge and wisdom by his early teens (when he was already

issuing fәtawa). By age twenty Ahmad Riza was debating with and contradicting (and,

according to his followers, soundly defeating) several of India’s most prominent ‘alәma,

including those representing the Deobandi wave. When he was twenty-one years old,

Ahmad Riza (along with his father) became the disciple (murid) of Sufi pir and sәyyid

Shah Al-e-Rasul of Marehra, a small town southeast of Aligarh. Shah Al-e-Rasul was

affiliated with the Baghdad-born Qadiri order, belonging to the Barkatiyya branch of

that sylsәla. The Barkatiyya, renowned for its spiritual heritage, had sprung up in the

United Provinces town of Bilgram, about sixty miles southeast of Badayun, and was

named after the Aurengzeb-era Sufi master Shah Barkatullah, based in Marehra.

Marehra was one of several proto-Barelvi centers in what is today the northwestern

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sector of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh—centers that included Badayun, Rampur,

Pilibhit, and, of course, Bareilly itself.68

Shortly after attaining official discipleship under Shah Al-e-Rasul (and being named

his xәlifәħ), Ahmad Riza went on pilgrimage to Mecca, visiting Medina as well and

receiving recognition and authority from several powerful Muslim leaders and scholars.

By 1900/1318, Ahmad Riza was being referred to by most non-Deobandi ‘alәma in

India generally (and even by some ‘alәma in the Middle East) as the mujәddyd (or

“renewer”) of the present (fourteenth) Islamic century.69 In 1905/1323 he went on a

second pilgrimage to Mecca, spending several months there; during this visit, he was

treated with the utmost respect—as one of the Muslim world’s leading scholars and

teachers.

By the turn of the twentieth/fourteenth century, then, Ahmad Raza Khan was in a

position to seriously compete, as the leader of a rival “movement” that had “come into

its own,” with the Deobandis for the spiritual supremacy of the subcontinent’s Muslims.

Indeed, the counter-reformational sect had been identifiably distinct since the

1880s/1300s, “when,” explains Sanyal—certainly Western academia’s most renowned

scholar of Barelvism to the time of this writing—“the movement began to take shape.”

Throughout the 1890s/1310s, too, its core principles solidified, its tenets spread, and

the number of its adherents “grew steadily” across India (especially in the north).70

Ahmad Riza certainly viewed himself as the leading Muslim authority in India, too.

Once, he unilaterally appointed Amjad ‘Ali A’zami the judge of Islamic law for “the

entire Indian nation,” subsequently appointing his own son, Mustafa Riza Khan, and

Burhan ul-Haqq as the new judge’s assistants.71 (Amjad ‘Ali A’zami will be further

scrutinized later in this work.) Ahmad Riza’s disciples established several notable

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seminaries in which the Barelvi point-of-view was promulgated. The Barelvi counter-

reformation, like its Catholic predecessor, was itself reformist, but “central to the

formation of Ahl-e-Sunnat [i.e. Barelvi] ideology” was the “debate and rivalry amongst

the [‘alәma],”72 particularly the populous Deobandis; this is what made it a counter-

reformation. That debate was carried out in person and in print, in the case of the latter

via the Barelvis’ numerous journals, newspapers, and books. Indeed, during this period

(the turn of the century to 1921 AD, or from about 1318 to 1339 AH), the Barelvi-

Deobandi rivalry was characterized almost exclusively by the presentation of arguments

via the written word or the formal debate. Nothing like the political battles of later

years (and certainly not the murderous enmity displayed in 1990s and 2000s AD

Pakistan) surfaced during these early years, when the debate, though heated, remained

nevertheless “gentlemanly.”

The Early Disputes I: fәtwa War of 1902/1320.

Since the days of Shah Abdul Aziz, the fәtwa had been used as a popular form of

intercourse between the ‘alәma and regular Muslims—and also as a means of

discrediting, or striving to discredit, rival scholars and their schools of thought.

Perhaps no one ever wrote more fәtawa than Ahmad Raza Khan, however, who used the

juridical ruling as his chief weapon of choice within the context of his many scholarly

battles. At the same time, Ahmad Raza’s fәtawa earned him an unprecedented

reputation among thousands of South Asia’s Muslim scholars (as well many from

Central Asia, the Middle East, and beyond) as an eminent ‘alym, all the while serving to

expand his influence far and wide among ordinary Muslims across the subcontinent.

“Fatwa-writing was to be Ahmad Riza’s single most important scholarly activity,” noted

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Sanyal, who elsewhere described the pursuit as the “hallmark” of the man’s ‘alymi career;

indeed, the Barelvi “founder” was said alone to have produced the work of ten muftis. If

one were forced to place Ahmad Raza within a single occupational category, that of

fәtwa-writer might be the most accurate, as he was to spend the majority of his days

engaged in the activity. He is said to have interrupted his work composing fәtawa only

rarely, and then only to attend religious (and especially “Barelvi”) ceremonies like ‘urs.73

In 1902/1320, Ahmad Riza Khan kicked off a fәtwa war between the Deobandis

(based around the university) and the newly dubbed “Barelvi” ‘alәma (based around

Ahmad Riza). The initiatory event was the publication of a fәtwa, authored by the

tireless scholar out of Bareilly. Certainly, he’d previously published pronouncements

condemning this or that idea, or even this or that group or movement, as heretical,

Satanic, or otherwise erroneous. But in this ruling, Ahmad Riza did something he hadn’t

done before; that is, he named names. In all, he listed five individuals—all prominent

Indian ‘alәma—and declared them kafyr (“infidel” or “unbeliever”). Of the five men

listed, fully four were Deobandi. The fifth, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadiyan, was the

founder of the much-maligned “Ahmadiyya” or “Qadiyyani” movement (more on this

movement later). Thus not only had Ahmad Raza singled out four of the Deobandis’

most renowned scholars as infidels, he’d grouped them together with a man who was,

quite possibly, the most detested “Muslim” leader in all of South Asia.

The four Deobandis (all described using the catch-all term “Wahhabi”) thus singled

out included the school’s very “founders,” Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Rashid

Ahmad Gangohi. Muhammad Qasim, Ahmad Riza asserted, had denied the finality of

the Prophet (xәtәm-e-nәbәwwәt, i.e. that Muhammad was the last, or “seal,” of the

prophets); all who followed Muhammad Qasim, then, must have allowed Satan to plant

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“deceit in their hearts.” And Rashid Ahmad, in the tradition of Muhammad Ismail

(against whom Ahmad Riza had already written many fәtawa), believed that Allah could

lie—and additionally held that Satan’s knowledge (in particular his “knowledge of the

unseen” [ylm-e-Gaib]) was greater than had been Muhammad’s.74 These were

obviously very serious allegations, and clearly stemmed from the enormous emphasis

placed by Barelvis on respect—bordering on worshipful adoration—for the Prophet, as

well as for God. To lay such a juridical ruling at the feet of the Deoband school’s two

greatest guiding lights was akin to throwing down the gauntlet. “He who doubts that

they are kafyrs is himself a kafyr,” declared Ahmad Riza, with some finality.75 But the

deceased Muhammad Qasim and the still-leading Rashid Ahmad weren’t the only

Deobandi targets of Ahmad Riza’s ire. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, who would go on to

become one of the school’s most prolific writers (and who Robinson has described as

“the most influential Sufi of his day”),76 also attracted the Bareilly scholar’s literary

darts. His alleged crime: refusing, like Rashid Ahmad, to grant Muhammad ylm-e-Gaib,

thus, in Ahmad Riza’s eyes, equating the Prophet’s knowledge with that of any other

human or beast. (The Barelvi divine would author at least three book-length treatises

specifically denouncing Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, condemning the Deobandi for the content

of his juridical rulings and for his alleged disrespect of the Prophet).77 Along the same

lines, a fourth Deobandi scholar, Khalil Ahmad, was charged with believing that Satan’s

knowledge was greater than that of the Prophet. Both Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi and Khalil

Ahmad, the fәtwa severely declared, confused Satan with God.

As in his allegations against Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad, Ahmad Riza’s

emphasis in these last two anti-Deobandi decisions rested entirely on perceived

disrespect toward the Prophet (of whom they “decrease[d] the glory”) and, to a lesser

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degree, to Allah (to whom they “ascribed lies”). Thus was put into words the very

foundation of the theological Deobandi-Barelvi conflict; “it was the differing conceptions

of the Prophet,” wrote Sanyal, “…that lay at the heart of the Ahl-e-Sunnat [Barelvi]

denunciation of the Deobandis.”78 After Barelvi bodyguard Mumtaz Qadiri assassinated

Punjab governor Salman Taseer in 2011/1432, he admitted that he had been motivated

to do so after listening to the speeches of Barelvi cleric Hanif Qureshi Qadiri; in his

description of the speech, which he evidently heard in person, he described the scholar’s

behavior as well as the audience’s response—a perhaps powerful demonstration of the

Barelvi devotion to Muhammad. “Delivering the sermon, Hanif Qureshi expressed his

love for the prophet so passionately that his turban fell off, his hair got disshevelled, and

the microphone, too, fell off. The congregation was overwhelmed by grief and burst

into tears. Carried away by their love for the holy prophet, I, too, was in tears.”79 To

the Barelvis, emotionally and spiritually invested as they were in the Prophet as an

object of devotion, the Deobandi position seemed to smack of the worst form of

disrespect.

Heretofore, however, the proto-rivalry had been played out mostly indirectly, as the

two loosely organized scholarly groupings vied for influence and the right to speak for

truth and righteousness among South Asia’s Muslims. Now, finally, it had come head to

head.

It is interesting to note that these original arguments against Deobandism’s leading

figures have remained potent barbs within the Barelvi arsenal to the present day. For

example, observe the very same accusations, against the very same individuals, in the

following paragraph, taken from one Barelvi publication published over half a century

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after Ahmad Riza Khan’s original ruling (and consistently published in updated editions

to the time of this writing):

mwlwi Ashraf ‘Ali sahyb Thanawi, in [his book] hәfiz ul-iman [equated]

the knowledge of the Holy Prophet with the knowledge of animals.

mwlwi Khalil Ahmad sahyb Anbitwi makes the knowledge of Satan and

the Angel of Death [mәlәk ul-mwt] greater than the knowledge of the

Holy Prophet in his book bәrahin qaț’aah. mwlwi Ismail sahyb of Delhi

wrote that, during prayer, the thought of the Holy Prophet is worse than

the thought of a donkey or an ox. mwlwi Qasim sahyb Nanautawi, in [his

book] tәhźir ul-nas, denied the finality of the Holy Prophet—and said

that if other prophets come after the Holy Prophet, it would in no way

contradict that finality; “final” denotes the “True Prophet,” while other

prophets would only be temporary [‘aarżi]. On this, even Mirza Ghulam

Ahmad Qadiani said, “I am a prophet.” Thus [even] Mirza Ghulam

Ahmad is their student when it comes to this issue.80

In this modern-day Barelvi denunciation of Deobandism, the scholar (in this case a

learned and well-respected Pakistani) has accused both Ashraf ‘Ali and Khalil Ahmad of

disparaging the knowledge of the Prophet Muhammad, just as Ahmad Riza Khan had

done in his groundbreaking 1902/1320 ruling. Similarly, Muhammad Qasim here

stands accused of denying the Prophet’s finality—the same indictment directed toward

him by Ahmad Riza. Additionally, a characteristic jab is taken at sәyyid Ahmad’s

companion, Ismail (more on this later), while the final insult lies in the grouping of the

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four men named with the Ahmadiyya prophet-founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad; in this

last, too, the scholar has followed the lead of Ahmad Riza, who had done just that many

decades before. Not long after the publication of his 1902/1320 fәtwa, Ahmad Riza

applied for confirmatory signatures from esteemed ‘alәma in Mecca and Medina. The

signatures came. Perhaps with such an indictment, confirmed by the greatest scholars

of the holiest sites in Islam, the scourge of Deobandism might be finally stamped out.

But the Deobandis responded. Deobandi ‘alәma across north India were recruited to

gather signatures of their own in an attempt to countermand Ahmad Riza’s original

juridical ruling; the list of signees was impressive. This prompted a counter-response

from the Barelvis, who, in turn, gathered Indian signatures of their own to nullify the

opinion of the Deobandis.81 The fәtwa war drew thousands of Indian Muslim scholars

into its orbit, more or less compelling them to take a stand: either behind famed ‘alym

Ahmad Riza and the Barelvis or behind the ‘alәma trained at the great Deobandi dar

ul’alwm. Thus the line was drawn between the two camps, as scholars of various stripes

stood in support of one or the other position. Surely neither side would have guessed

that the same division, over the same issues, utilizing the same arguments, and leveling

the same accusations, would exist largely unchanged over a century later.

The Early Disputes II: the Battle for History.

For the Deobandis, the years after the fall of Muslim power on the subcontinent

literally represented a dark age, when “paganism and apostasy” (shәrk w byd’at) rose up

to engulf the land in the east and the west, in the north and the south.82 True religion

had only been saved—and not in a figurative sense—during the long night of Muslim

political fragmentation and British rule by the Deobandi fathers and the university they

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had established. Without these towering personalities and the institution that they

created, Islamic knowledge would have ceased to be a force in the lives of South Asia’s

Muslims (later Deobandi writers would interpret non-Muslim victories over Muslim

populations in Albania, Bosnia, and Kosovo in much the same way).83 Fortunately for

religion in the subcontinent, however, figures like Shah Waliullah, sәyyid Ahmad of

Raebareli and his loyal companion Muhammad Ismail, Imdadullah, Muhammad Qasim,

Rashid Ahmad, and the dar ul’alwm as an institution—perhaps not unlike the monks of

Ireland’s crag-clinging monasteries after the fall of Rome (or, later, the Muslim Arab

conquerors of Iberia)—had served as critical cultural and theological preservers.

“Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi,” one dar ul’alwm Deoband graduate told the author,

“was greater than your Voltaire.” Whether Muhammad Qasim can be compared to the

witty French writer-philosopher (let alone whether or not Voltaire qualifies as “the

author’s”) is up for debate, yet the fact remains that to the Deobandis, men like

Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi were not just pious religious scholars but among the

great movers and shakers of human history. To the Prophet Muhammad the final great

Revelation had been revealed, but it had been the founders of Deobandism who had

preserved the purity of the faith during a time of crisis that had threatened the very

existence of true religion.84 The university at Deoband played a redemptive role within

Islamic history; “this was certain—that here there was a way, a place where Muslims

could go to dispel the darkness from their hearts and minds”: thus proclaims the

Deobandi historical narrative.85

Moreover, Deobandi historians insisted that not only was their tradition the

standard-bearer for the rightful Sunni position, but that the Barelvis, and especially

Ahmad Riza Khan, should be equated with the ever-present opposition to the truth—

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with “groups originat[ing] from amongst the Muslims themselves whose distinction was to

deny the faith…” (italics added).86 From the very days of Muhammad, there had always

been those who, despite their own great knowledge and understanding, yet turned from

pure religion and persecuted its faithful adherents. The inhabitants of Mecca—the

Prophet’s own people—had rejected that greatest of men virtually wholesale. Not many

years later, the Shi’a sect had broken away from the ummәt and criticized the righteous

Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, and ‘Usman. The Khawarij and the Nawasib sects had, in turn,

sharply condemned ‘Ali—then murdered him in cold blood, all the while sure that they

were in the right. “Intellect-defying deviance like this,” proclaimed one Deobandi

writer, “can be found in abundance in the later periods of Islam also. And such people,

who made it their chosen pastime to oppose, [criticize] and offend the best and the most

pious people of their time continued to appear in different eras.”87 Ahmad Riza Khan

and his followers, then, were just the latest in a long line—even a tradition—of

“deviancy” that stretched all the way back at least as far as seventh-century/first-

century Arabia.

To buoy up this claim, the Deobandi historians dug deeply into Ahmad Riza Khan’s

past, where they emphasized the allegedly dubious ties of his genealogy (which, it is

pointed out, certainly did not include any of “India’s great families”) to the Persian

pillager Nadir Shah and, more importantly, the Shi’a sect. For Ahmad Riza Khan’s

family, so the Deobandi narrative asserts, descended from actual members of Nadir

Shah’s “Shi’a army”—an army responsible for numerous and sundry wicked acts,

including the sacking of Delhi and the murder of tens of thousands. Perhaps worse than

the mayhem meted out by his troops, however, was the fact that Nadir Shah was himself

a Shi’a, and his foray into Hindustan had been carried out not only in a quest for booty

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but out of a desire to crush the dominant Sunni faith of the subcontinent. Ahmad Riza

Khan’s family “was included among the Shi’a heretic’s [rafżi] army”—indeed, “they

came to fight”—and thus deserved a share of the ignominy associated with the Persian

raider’s Indian invasion.88

And in the Deobandi narrative, the alleged links to Shi’ism don’t end with Nadir

Shah. Deobandi historians also claim strong connections between the Shi’a nawabs of

Awadh and Ahmad Riza Khan’s ancestors. The Shi’a dynasty that ruled Awadh after

the fall of the Mughals has been briefly addressed already in this work, but Deobandis

emphasize that the royal family had displaced Sunni rule, besides exhibiting an

administrative style characterized by “unfair governance.” Most significantly of all,

however, they interpret the still-strong presence of the Shi’a minority in South Asia as a

distinctly Awadh-driven phenomenon; it was during this period that “this sect [the

Shi’a] was disseminated more than during any other time,” one Deobandi historian

declared. The Shi’a nawabs, in effect, had opened a floodgate and were thus directly

responsible, perhaps more than any other group or institution, for the “spread of the

Shi’a sect.” And in the midst of all of this, the Deobandis argue, Ahmad Riza Khan’s

family remained “highly sympathetic” to the Awadhi ruling family; the Bareilly scholar’s

great-grandfather, Kazim ‘Ali Khan, is particularly singled out in this regard as a Shi’a

sympathizer and a beneficiary of the Awadhi state.89

The Barelvi ‘alema, of course, look at Islamic history through a very different lens.

Among western academics, Sanyal has perhaps written the most concerning Barelvism,

though others, including Metcalf, have also touched upon the movement at some length.

Metcalf’s work focused on what she called “the reformist ‘ulama,” the “most important”

of which were the Deobandis. But she adds the following:

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Their opponents, the Barelwi ‘ulama or the Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama’at

adhered to a more custom-laden religious practice and a more

intercessory style of religious leadership linked to the pirs of the medieval

tombs. In fact, however, they also thought of themselves as reformist

(that is, as scholars engaged in tәjdid or renewal) and indeed—even if I

and the Deobandis begrudge them the title of reformers—in their self-

consciousness and their concern with disseminating familiarity with the

Law, they were, in the end, close to those they opposed.90

Thus the Barelvis, too, saw themselves (and particularly their movement’s guiding

light, Ahmad Riza Khan) as reformers and renewers of the faith. But their

interpretation of the historical threats to South Asian Islam differ significantly from

that of their Deobandi counterparts. For starters, Ahmad Riza Khan looked upon the

Deobandi guiding lights in much the same way as they looked upon him—as “the latest

in a line of kafyrs that went all the way back to the Prophet’s and ‘Ali’s own time.”91

Ahmad Riza and his followers attacked those movements and personalities considered

by Deobandis to be integral parts of their religious heritage.

Perhaps their most notable proto-Deobandi target: the jyhad movement of sәyyid

Ahmad of Raebareli and his top lieutenant and most trusted disciple, Muhammad Ismail.

The Barelvi narrative particularly singles out the latter as a deviant and a kafyr—and an

unabashed convert to the clearly un-Islamic Wahhabi movement launched in Arabia

under the leadership of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab. As proof, the Barelvis point to

Ismail’s book tәqwiәt ul-iman (“Strengthening of the Faith”), published in Urdu in India,

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claiming that Ismail simply plagiarized and summarized (xulasәħ kia) Abdul Wahhab’s

own kytab al-twhid (“Book of [God’s] Oneness”), a fundamental Wahhabi text. The

long-held assertion that Deobandis are nothing but Wahhabis in disguise is thus buoyed

by associating one of their predecessor-heroes directly with the Nejdi movement. Ismail

is further denigrated by the Barelvi assertion that he was not martyred in a sacred

struggle with the infidel Sikhs at all, but rather died unjustly fighting fellow Muslims, in

this case Pathans, who had rightly taken offense at his aforementioned book.

Meanwhile, sәyyid Ahmad is pilloried as a fraud whose first jyhad was not targeted

against the Sikhs, but against the Muslims “of Yaghistan” (i.e. the Pathans).92

Both schools likewise tend to view their own historical roles—essentially that of the

‘alәma—quite differently. While the Barelvis point to the heroic deeds of Fazl-e-Haq

Khairabadi and others during the Mutiny, this is rarely emphasized. The ‘alәma are not

portrayed, generally speaking, as political heroes, but rather as saints—and particularly

as anti-“Wahhabi” crusaders. This is the emphasis, mostly devoid of any overarching

“liberty” narrative (as opposed to the Deobandis, who tend to stress their scholars’

pivotal roles in the “independence movement”). The direst threat to Islam was from

within (i.e. not from the British), and it is thus the struggle against apostate groups like

the Deobandis, as well as the Ahl-e-Hadis, out-and-out Wahhabis, and the Shi’a sect,

that takes center-stage in the Barelvi (post-Mughal) “political” history of the ‘alәma. On

the other hand, the Deobandi histories and biographies tend to support a radically

different worldview, one in which it is a “fact [that] cannot be denied” that in the “effort

for independence in Hindustan, no other group can boast of being a rival to the proud

position held by the ‘alәma.” Indeed, the scholarly divines’ struggle stretched back to

the “first war of independence” in the mid-nineteenth/mid-fourteenth century:

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After the turbulent revolution of 1857, only this party [the ‘alәma] kept

the concept of independence alive. In the end, their continual endeavors

spread the spirit of freedom across the entire country. hәżrәt

[Muhammad Qasim] Nanotvi was the greatest instigator of [the spread

of] this concept, and the greatest preacher of this movement. With this

enthusiasm he nurtured this concept [India’s liberty]. It is a pity that

the writers of the history of the war of independence have not done

justice to him.”93

The Deobandi perception of India’s history thus places the ‘alәma, from Shah Waliullah,

not only at the center of the much-needed South Asian Islamic revivalist movement, but

also—and just as critically—at the very head of the subcontinent’s liberty struggle

against the tyranny of Britain. According to this Deobandi narrative, it is thanks to the

‘alәma that those who traditially have received credit for liberating India from its

British rulers (by leading the nationalist movement) were inspired to do so at all—the

“passion for freedom” kept alive by Muhammad Qasim after 1857/1273, infusing into

much of Muslim India (and beyond) by Mahmud Hasan, and, having “passed over from

the Muslims to the [other] sons of the nation [әbna’-e-wәtәn]” in the course of the

Khilafat movement (italics added).94 This is perhaps aptly illustrated by the cover art of

one Deobandi history, entitled tәhrik-e-rishmi-e-rwmal (“The Silk Handkerchief

Movement”), a tome chronicling the shix ul-hynd’s attempt to mount a Muslim-led

invasion of British-controlled India from that country’s northwest frontier (covered

later in this work). A map of the subcontinent is shown weighed down by four massive

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chains, while the Union Jack waves over it triumphantly from atop a flagpole planted in

the middle of India. Only one place-name (apart from the Indian Ocean and the Bay of

Bengal) graces the cartograph: Deoband—and flames are rising therefrom.95 Deobandis

see themselves, their scholar-jurist leaders, and the revivalist movement out of the dar

ul’alwm as the liberty spark that eventually set fire to British machinations on the

subcontinent.

The Early Disputes III: “Rationalist” versus “Transmitted” Traditions.

Meanwhile, both schools continued to espouse different emphases when it came to

the various Islamic sciences (as reflected in the curricula of their respective mәdarys).

An introduction to mәnqwlat (the “transmitted,” or traditional, sciences) and mәqwlat

(which Sanyal calls the “rational position”) was given previously. While the Deobandis,

like Shah Waliullah and the “Delhi Group,” emphasized mәnqwlat (and especially the

study of hәdis), Ahmad Raza Khan and the Barelvis, like the Khairabadi-Badayuni

Group, favored an emphasis on mәqwlat (plus the study of fyqħ). The debate over which

group of subjects should take precedent in a given curriculum had flared up repeatedly

over the years, long before the establishment of either school, with scholars like Fazl-e-

Haq Khairabadi carrying the mәqwlat standard in the 1820s AD (1220s and 1230s AH),

especially against his Delhi-based academic opponents. By the 1850s and 1860s AD

(from the mid-1270s to the mid-1280s AH), Ahmad Raza’s father, Naqi ‘Ali Khan, had

entered the fray, echoing much of what Fazl-e-Haq had said several decades earlier.

From the 1890s/1310s into the early twentieth/fourteenth century, the mantle, so to

speak, of leadership among the mәqwlat scholars had fallen upon the formidable

shoulders of Ahmad Raza Khan himself, despite his family’s relative obscurity—even

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when it might “naturally” have been carried by the sires of, say, the Khairabadi or

Farangi Mahali families. But it just so happened that Ahmad Raza’s light shone

brighter; it was Ahmad Raza, after all, who is said to have bested the more senior ‘Abd

ul-Haqq Khairabadi, son of the great Fazl-e-Haq, in a debate at the Rampur court when

he (Ahmad Raza) was only twenty years of age.96

In any case, the same debate over curricula and emphases that had raged among

scholars for years was inherited by the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry and taken up by its

divines. Deobandis continued to battle perceived Barelvi disregard for hәdis instruction

by augmenting the traditional dәrs-e-nyžami curriculum with half a dozen hәdis

collections of their own, in their entirety, and continued to hold up mastery of hәdis as

the crowning achievement of one’s education.

The Early Disputes IV: Other Points of Doctrine.

True to the reformist spirit of their time, the early ‘alәma associated with the dar

ul’alwm at Deoband opposed a number of doctrines and customs that had, they asserted,

crept into the practice of many Muslims on the subcontinent. Such allegedly impure

elements were condemned as innovations or as synthesized Hinduism. One of these was

the celebration of the anniversary of Muhammad’s birthday. Deobandis renounced such

events as encouraging “the belief that a dead person was actually present.” Celebrating

mwlyd, these scholars noted, “elevated the importance of a fixed day” and “resembled

practices of the Hindus.”97 Though Deobandis and other reformists opposed many

“Barelvi” practices, such as ‘urs (literally “wedding” [Arabic], but in South Asia a ritual

observance of the death anniversary of a pir), controversy over mwlyd was the most

heated.98

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What did a Barelvi mwlyd celebration look like during this formative period?

Employing as her source a Rampur-published newspaper (dәbdәba-e-sikәnderi), Sanyal

describes a mwlyd celebration in 1916/1334 as commemorated by Ahmad Riza Khan.

After dawn bathing and the donning of new clothes, Ahmad Riza’s disciples, admirers,

and others “hurried to the mosque to greet him,” hoping for a chance to kiss the man’s

hand. Thereafter began a poetic recitation of the Prophet’s qualities, after which the

crowd all stood in remembrance of Muhammad’s birth. Ahmad Riza then delivered a

sermon in which many of the doctrines embraced by Barelvis (but reprehensible to

Deobandis) were uttered; in particular, he spoke of Muhammad as the first of Allah’s

creations, formed of the very light of Allah himself—and, as the first light, the

originator of all light, including that of the sun. In this, one might observe the mystical

sheen Barelvis place upon Muhammad, much to the chagrin of their Deobandi

counterparts. After Ahmad Riza’s sermon, another poetic reading “calling down Allah’s

blessings…on the Prophet” concluded the meeting and was immediately followed by a

feast.99

The concept of nwr-e-muhәmmәdi—positing Muhammad as pure light, or a “being

with his own natural light”100—is distinctly Barelvi, as opposed to the Deobandi

position that Muhammad, though God’s true and greatest Messenger, was yet a man

(however perfect he might have been). Echoes of the Barelvi stance, however, can be

heard in Ibn Ishaq’s eighth-century/first-century biography of the Prophet, later

encapsulated by Lings in his Muhammad. “Aminah’s [the mother of Muhammad] one

consolation was the unborn child of her dead husband,” we are informed,

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and her solace increased as the time of her delivery drew near. She was

conscious of a light within her, and one day it shone forth from her so

intensely that she could see the castles of Bostra in Syria. And she heard

a voice say to her, “Thou carriest in thy womb the lord of this people; and

when he is born say: ‘I place him beneath the protection of the One, from

the evil of every envier’; then name him Muhammad.”101

Ahmad Riza would write several book-length treatments on the subject of Muhammad

as a source of light (and hence a being without shadow); some are listed in the footnotes

to this work.102

In any case, from the initial emergence of debate between Barelvi and Deobandi

adherents over doctrine in the late nineteenth/early fourteenth century, it has been the

sects’ relative stance on the attributes of the Prophet Muhammad that have most

widened the divide.103 The ritual of the Barelvis compounded this doctrinal difference,

particularly as they celebrated the birth of the Prophet. Indeed, mwlyd is often

characterized by processions in the streets, massive gatherings, the recitation of

religious poetry, prize-giving, sweets-giving, prayers, and feasting (in Pakistan the date

has traditionally been marked as a public holiday, typically complete with speeches by

high government officials at both the national and provincial levels—and even the

screening of films with “morale-building themes” in place of the “usual movies”),104

much of which is considered “innovation” by Sunnis of the Deobandi persuasion. More

recently, several deadly clashes between Deobandi and Barelvi groups have taken place

on this significant date of the Islamic calendar.

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But Barelvi rituals associated with mwlyd were not the only ones with which the

Deobandis took issue. The Barelvi celebration of ‘urs also sparked the ire of the school

out of Deoband. A typical Barelvi ‘urs celebration, centered on the saint’s dәrgah, lasted

three to five days and included night-long reading of the Qur’an, the recitation of n’ats

(poetic compositions praising the Prophet) and other verse lauding various religious

figures, sermons delivered by the ‘alәma, and possibly a pilgrimage to visit relics of the

Prophet, saints, or other Sufi predecessors. The last day of the ‘urs celebration included

Gwsәl—the washing of the saint’s tomb (though, outside of the context of ‘urs, Gwsәl

refers to a full-body ablution necessary in some circumstances before prayer, among

other rituals).105 Barelvi observation of ‘urs as of this writing follows much the same

pattern. The ninetieth ‘urs of Ahmad Riza Khan himself, for example, for which his

dәrgah served as venue, took place between 20 and 22 February 2009/24 and 26 Safar

1430. The celebration involved numerous speeches from some of Barelvism’s greatest

guiding lights and boasted some five hundred thousand attendees gathered in the UP

town of Bareilly.

On the other hand, the Barelvi denunciations of the Deobandis mostly rested on

theological matters rather than ritual or practice. Some of Ahmad Riza Khan’s

objections vis-à-vis the Deobandi founding fathers and their disciples—dealing with the

finality of the Prophet and the Prophet’s “knowledge of the unseen”—have been

touched upon briefly, above. But the issues brought up in Ahmad Riza’s 1902/1320

juridical ruling were not the only ones dividing the Deobandi and Barelvi schools of

thought. Some other points at which the Barelvis took offense include:

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• The issue of mәsәlәħ ymkan-e-kәźb—that is, whether or not God can tell a lie.

Barelvis point to several works, notably Khalil Ahmad’s aforementioned

bәrahin qaț’aah, as well as Mahmud Hasan’s jahәd ul-mәqal, as evidence that

the Deobandis do indeed believe that it is possible for God to lie. The

Barelvis hold that a lie, being “an evil, like theft,” could never be associated

with God. Besides, God’s attributes are constant and unchanging (wajyb),

thus the idea that He might “possibly” lie is absurd.

• The issue of the Prophet’s place as the most excellent of all mankind.

Barelvis claim that the Deobandis believe that any member of the ummәt may

attain the same level of excellence in deed that Muhammad enjoyed—and

even excel beyond the Prophet’s level in this regard. In this, Barelvis point

to Muhammad Qasim’s tәhźir ul-nas.

• The issue of referencing the Prophet. Barelvis insist that Muhammad must

not be called by “ordinary names,” but should always be referred to as ya

rәswl allah or some similarly respectful designation. The Deobandis, they

claim, teach that Muhammad, being just “a man,” may be referred to as

“brother.” The writings of Muhammad Ismail, as well as Khalil Ahmad’s

bәrahin qaț’aah, are often used to support this claim.106

• The issue of the application of the classifications dar ul-hәrb and dar ul-yslam.

For Deobandis, Hindustan had been dar ul-hәrb since at least the days of

Shah Abdul Aziz, whose famous 1803/1218 fәtwa, it will be remembered, had

more or less propagated this view. It should be noted that the issue is not

black-and-white, and differences have existed even within the most elite of

Deobandi circles on this issue. For example, while Muhammad Qasim had

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ruled that India was dar ul-hәrb (or at least “gave preference” to such a

position), both Rashid Ahmad and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi indicated that India

was in fact dar ul-yslam (though in the context of other questions rather than

in answer to direct queries concerning India’s status). Later Deobandi

opinion (especially from the first decade of the twentieth century AD) clearly

indicated that India was dar ul-hәrb. Meanwhile, Ahmad Riza Khan was

consistent and unambiguous in his ruling that India was absolutely dar ul-

yslam; since Muslims could freely worship according to shәri’at, it must be so.

The Bareilly divine would write several books on this subject alone (some of

which are listed in this work’s endnotes).107 Thus the early Barelvis,

generally speaking, did not support either the hyjrәt or jyhad movements in

which Deobandis and others took active part.108

Muslims, Hindus, and Politics: c.1875—1916/c. 1292—1334.

The seemingly endless speculation surrounding the great 1947/1366 partition of a

subcontinent began years before the event itself even occurred, and continues to

fascinate scholars to the present day. Was the episode that gave birth to Pakistan,

ripping two wings off of India—West Pakistan in the west, East Bengal (later East

Pakistan, then Bangladesh) in the east—inevitable? If not, what event or series of

events are to blame for setting in motion the greatest schism of the twentieth century?

Was it the refusal of the princes to join the All-India Federation, provided for under the

constitution of 1935/1354? After all, it was this decision that caused the British

government to place its hopes, previously invested in the princes, firmly in the lap of

Jinnah and the League, certainly a major turning point that receives relatively minor

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notice.109 Or was it the resignation of the Congress’s provincial ministries in

1939/1358? This move, in hindsight almost certainly a major blunder, created a power

vacuum in the country—of which Jinnah took full advantage (and which pushed Viceroy

Linlithgow to lean ever more heavily on the League). Speaking of Linlithgow, was it

the Viceroy’s conviction, and actions to that end, that Jinnah should be built up as the

“sole spokesman” of all of India’s Muslims that led, eventually, to India’s great split?

Linlithgow himself had stated, after all, that his goal was to “shepherd all the Muslims

into the [Muslim League] fold.”110 Along these lines, was it the British tactic of playing

off the Muslims, in the form of the League, against the Congress, thus “[creating] the

conditions on the ground that made partition possible” just a few years later?111 Or was

partition born, as some scholars insist, of the British need to preserve an imperial

foothold in South Asia (one that could protect India from Soviet influence and Central

Asia from Soviet designs on oil), a need that led to the Anglo-Muslim League alliance

and, eventually, the emergence of a separate (British-friendly) state called Pakistan?

Whatever the answer to this highly controversial interrogative, one thing is certain:

at least some of the more significant roots of Partition can be clearly identified several

decades before any of the above-mentioned phenomena—within the politics of Hindu-

Muslim unity (and disunity) in the quarter century between about 1890/1307 and

1915/1333, and particularly in the year 1905-1906/1323-1324. For it was over the

course of that brief latter period that several major developments emerged,

developments that would push Muslims of varying stripes into a seemingly single

“Muslim” fold in the name of sticking together against what was perceived as a rising

and even militant Hindu tide. Indeed, one could make a strong argument (and many do)

that the “Hindus” of “Hindustan” were largely indifferent “towards Muslims as

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Muslims,” until the very period in question—when “a separateness began to be asserted

by the Muslims themselves.” Enter Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Barelvi guiding light

Ahmad Riza Khan, poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, and, eventually, League head

Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah. This alleged prior Hindu indifference “suggests that [the]

political question of whether ‘Muslims are a separate nation’ was fundamentally

misplaced, which is why it became and still remains so divisive.”112 In any case,

something happened over the course of this period (c. 1890/1307 and c. 1915/1333) that

abruptly made Muslims highly aware of their own “separateness.”

In the Deccan, Tilak’s “strictly Hindu” cultural nationalism had roared to life in the

1890s/1310s through a combination of his Marathi-language political paper (Kesari,

meaning “The Lion”) and the revival of a centuries-old Hindu festival commemorating

the birth of one of India’s most popular figures of worship: Ganesh, Shiva’s elephant-

headed son.113 The latter became an annual affair lasting ten wild days, as rural

peasants poured into central India’s towns and cities to sing, dance, eat, and experience

“patriotic” presentations based on stories from ancient Hindu scripture. The dark side

of these “Ganapati festivals,” however, lay in the communalism that they fostered,

particularly in the form of the “Ganesh guards,” organized groups of armed young

Hindus who sought to disrupt the worship of Muslims by means of raucous

demonstrations outside of mosques. Such displays obviously alienated the local (and

sizable) Muslim communities. Things got worse for the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity

after 1895/1312, when Tilak inaugurated a second major festival, this one

commemorating the birth of the great Maratha soldier-king Shivaji, who had fought so

relentlessly against both the Bahmani sultans of the Deccan and the Mughals to the

north. Shivaji was cast as a heroic warrior for Hinduism crusading against the evil

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forces of Islam (like the British cast as invading aliens), and while millions of Indians

became caught up in the nationalist movement by means of such symbolism, millions of

Indian Muslims—a quarter of the subcontinent’s population—found no comfort, and

more than a little trepidation, in this explosion of stringently Hindu nationalism. In

1897/1315, that nationalism produced its first act of violent terrorism when one of

Tilak’s disciples, almost certainly inspired by Tilak’s appeal to Hindu scripture as

potential justification for killing, assassinated a British official.

Similar Hindu nationalist surges were then occurring in Bengal, where, by the turn

of the century, “bәnde matәrәm” (“I bow to thee, Mother”)—an explicitly Hindu

equivocation of India with the Hindu goddess, or “Mother,” Durga—had become the

clarion call for Hindu nationalists both in Bengal and beyond to struggle for

independence against the British yoke. “Bande Mataram…was the cry of the day,”

wrote one Indian nationalist of prominence. “It was chanted in schools, in colleges, in

streets, in houses, in public squares, almost everywhere.”114 (In 2009, the dar ul’alwm at

Deoband issued a fәtwa forbidding Muslims to utter the phrase, despite its patriotic

symbolism, setting off a firestorm of controversy and prompting some Indians to call for

the Deobandis’ immediate expulsion from the country).115 Meanwhile, members of the

Hindu revivalist Arya Samaj (a phenomenon one British observer predicted could

become “the most important religious movement in the whole of India”), founded in

1875/1292 in Bombay, were highly active across Hindustan—and often regarded as the

bane of both “the Musulman Mullah and the Christian missionary” as a result of their

often successful efforts aimed at the “reconversion” of formerly Hindu (and now mostly

Muslim) populations.116 By the first decade of the twentieth/fourteenth century, the

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movement would motivate Hindu nationalist political activists, too, particularly in the

Punjab.

Set within this context, perhaps the divided “Muslim” reaction to the organization of

a pan-“Indian” entity challenging (however gingerly at first) British authority is not so

surprising, especially given the fact that the entity in question was widely regarded as a

Hindu one. In 1885/1302, less than two decades after the founding of the dar ul’alwm at

Deoband, a group of sixty-nine British-educated Indians (mostly Hindus from the

Madras and Bombay presidencies), one Englishman, and two Scots gathered together at

Bombay’s Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College. Their purpose: the founding of an

organization that would stand as a voice (nay, the voice) of the Indian people; they called

it the Indian National Congress. The group attracted scant attention at first, relative to

its later importance, but by 1888/1305 its activities had elicited a response—highly

negative—from the great Islamic reformer and founder of the Muslim university at

Aligarh, the aforementioned Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Decidedly a man of action, the

modernist Muslim leader—who had supported the British during the 1879-1882/1296-

1299 Ahmed Arabi-led Egyptian revolt, and would do so again when the British more

or less backed the Greeks in their quarrels with the Ottoman empire in 1897/1315—

created his own organization, clearly meant to be a “Muslim” alternative to the mostly

Hindu Congress, which he named the United India Patriotic Association. The group

was explicit in its opposition to the Indian National Congress—and, just as importantly,

was committed to actually “strengthen[ing] British rule in India.”117 “The bulk of the

educated Mohammedans has opposed the Congress,” wrote Lala Lajpat Rai, “in order to

please the Government and win their gratitude.”118

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The Deobandis responded to the INC-UIPA division quickly. In an 1888/1306

fәtwa written by Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, and despite the communalist tensions

brewing in various parts of India at the time, the aged mwlana declared that, when it

came to worldly affairs (like politics), cooperation with the Hindus was permitted. As long

as said cooperation did not cause “damage to the faith,” the Deobandi leader could find

no fault in it. Additionally, Rashid Ahmad warned the Muslims of India that they

“should not unite [themselves] with Sayyid Ahmad,” his organization, or his political

movement and philosophy.119 The Deoband-Aligarh breach that grew mostly from this

incident would create in the minds of historians and scholars of later generations the

idea that the major political rivalry within the pre-Partition Muslim community was

between these two parties. There is some truth in this, certainly—but the divide

foreshadowed the political schism between Deobandi and Barelvi that was soon to

follow (and which, it could be argued, would have far more significant and lasting

implications). After all, it was from the ranks of the Aligarh school that the leaders of

the Muslim League would come, and the Barelvis would throw their weight, however

reluctantly, behind them. The Deobandis, by and large, chose to cooperate with the

Congress; by 1916/1334, J. T. Sutherland could write that the INC was “the most

important political organization in the country.”120 It might be said that the seeds of the

Deobandi-Barelvi political rivalry were thus sown when Sayyid Ahmad Khan decided

not to embrace the INC, but to oppose it.

(Incidentally, if any group could claim political leadership of India’s Muslims in the

early twentieth century/1320s, it was, thanks to their position and organization,

probably the Aligarh party, whose stance, generally speaking, was one of loyalty to the

British regime and aloofness from the nationalist movement. But the tenuousness of the

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Aligarh group’s position was revealed beginning in 1912/1330 with the publication of

Al Hilal, Abul Kalam Azad’s highly nationalist Urdu journal; its high circulation—

reportedly twenty-six thousand per week after only two years—and popularity were

evidence that a significant number of educated Muslims did not, in fact, feel politically

represented by the Aligarh party.)121

In any case, and even in the face of a rising Hindu consciousness enmeshing itself

into the pan-Indian nationalist movement, the Deobandis had proclaimed that

cooperation with the Hindus, however limited by appropriate bounds, was the proper

course of action. This was to mark the first major political schism between Deobandi

and Barelvi, for though the very name “Pakistan” wouldn’t emerge until 1933/1352,

Barelvi leader Ahmad Riza Khan was a staunch advocate of his own “two-nation

theory,” one predating Jinnah’s, Iqbal’s, and even Choudhary Rahmat ‘Ali’s by several

decades. In the words of one of his supporters, “[Ahmad Riza] raised the voice against

composite nationalism at a time when Iqbal and the Qaid-e-Azam were captives of [the

idea]… One might say that Imam Ahmad Riza was the leader while these two noble

individuals were the followers with the respect to the Two-Nation Theory.”122 In the

midst of Tilak’s politicization of Hindusim, the founding of the mostly Hindu INC, the

Deobandi call for Hindu-Muslim unification within the political realm, and Sayyid

Ahmad’s plea against any sort of Hindu-Muslim political cooperation, Ahmad Riza

Khan argued that India was essentially composed of two very distinct groups: (1) the

idol-worshippers (but pәrәst) and (2) the idol-breakers (but shykәn; incidentally, this title

is popularly applied to Mahmud of Ghazni as the destroyer of a major idol at

Somnath).123 In so doing, Ahmad Riza was applying a term that had been used to refer

to India’s pagan population since ancient times. Indeed, the term but pәrәst had

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probably first been applied by the Central Asian Zoroastrians, in reference to Buddhist

(hence but) penetration into the region. By the time Muslim armies began pouring into

the subcontinent via the northwest, but pәrәst had come to refer to an “idol-worshipper”

generally, without distinction between sects or religions.124 Unification of these two

diametrically opposed groups into a single polity, Ahmad Riza argued, would be

impossible—indeed, it violated shәri’at, since Hindus were clearly to be looked upon as a

people with whom to be at war, making any sort of united front with them forbidden.125

When, decades after Ahmad Riza’s death, the call came for just such a division (and

despite its source), perhaps it was only natural for most Barelvis to interpret the

League’s demand for Pakistan through this lens—and lend their voices to those

advocating Partition. After all, their movement’s greatest teacher had promoted

something similar. It may not be an overstatement to say that Ahmad Riza’s own

political philosophy had thus laid the groundwork for a general Barelvi acceptance of

the demand for Pakistan a quarter-century after his passing. The challenge, of course, is

that, should Ahmad Riza Khan and Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah ever had had the chance to

sit and chat about their separate visions for a Muslim homeland on the subcontinent

after winning the Partition battle, they likely wouldn’t have agreed on much at all. Still,

to the time of this writing, Barelvis continue to accuse Deobandis of “generally being

with the Hindus”; Deobandis, according to the Barelvi argument, literally “hate” (nәfrәt

kәrna) Muslims, against whom “their attacks” are “always” aimed.126 This position

traces back to the original political positions taken by Rashid Ahmad Gangohi and

Ahmad Riza Khan. To this day, too, a common Barelvi claim is that the Pakistan

Movement may never have been born if not for Ahmad Riza’s original denunciation of

composite nationalism—and any meaningful cooperation with Hindus whatsoever.127

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In any case, Ahmad Riza’s stance was strictly communal, forbidding Hindu-Muslim

political cooperation. But his reasoning went beyond the idea that the two communities

were simply too different—indeed, opposed—to ever practically unite within the

context of politics. Indeed, Ahmad Riza’s definition of religious community was spelled

out in “cultural rather than political terms” (italics added), according to Sanyal. Within

this cultural framework, Ahmad Riza Khan explicitly advised his followers not to engage

in political action against British rule in India. The British, he argued, had not

interfered in the internal affairs of the Muslim community over which they governed.

He pointed out that Muslims were still free to practice their religion, in private and in

public. And he backed up his arguments with examples from classical Islamic sources.

Ahmad Riza’s teachings in this regard naturally rubbed up against strong opinion to the

contrary, even among his own followers, and, sure enough, a schism developed; some

followed his entreaty while others rebelled.128 Despite this, Ahmad Riza maintained

what one renowned scholar of South Asian Islam described as “his normal stance of

support for government…”129 But many Muslims disagreed with Ahmad Riza’s

assertion that the British had not interfered in the Muslim community’s ability to

practice their faith. This was particularly true when it came to the law. Early company

officials (under Warren Hastings), like well-known Orientalist Sir William Jones, for

example, strove to specifically delineate “Mohammadan” law as a basis for its practical

application within British courts. Whatever the intention of such efforts, this almost

certainly had a rigidifying effect on what had most likely been a far more fluid system,

with the several Islamic legal schools and their variants being variously applied across

the subcontinent according to local conditions. Indeed, the British invested “almost

exclusive authority” in a small handful of medieval Islamic legal texts that they

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considered authoritative.130 Later, an 1860/1277 penal code effectively prevented

Islamic criminal law from being applied in British courts altogether; the move was

justified in the name of “unity, precision, and simplicity,” as central authorities are apt to

do.131 Many Indian courts went without a Muslim qazi, or judge of Islamic law, forcing

some ‘alәma (both Deobandi and Barelvi) to create their own shadow court system.

In any case, Ahmad Riza Khan’s assertion that “there was no religious justification

for Indian Muslims taking an anti-British stand” drew hisses from many rival ‘alәma,

who accused him of being pro-British.132 Many Deobandis even came to regard Ahmad

Riza as an out-and-out British agent, a charge consistently leveled against the Bareilly

scholar to the time of this writing, despite the lack of any hard evidence. These

allegations aside, Sanyal describes Ahmad Riza’s more complicated relationship with

British authority as follows:

Ahmad Riza indicated his distance from the British Indian state in a

number of small but nonetheless significant ways. He himself cited some

of these. He had written anti-British poems, he said, in some works he

named; he had spoken out against the Nadwa [who were close to the

Deobandis], which enjoyed British support; he had opposed ‘Abd ul-

Bari’s fatwa on the Kanpur mosque affair of 1913, in which ‘Abd ul-Bari

had said that the demolition (by the British civil authorities) was

permissible as it had taken place outside the mosque proper, and so on.

When mailing a postcard he would deliberately affix the stamp (which

had a picture of Queen Victoria on it) upside down as a mark of disrespect

to the Queen. More importantly, his refusal to attend a British-run court

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in 1916 showed that he did not acknowledge its authority over himself.

But he never made the British a target of his writings—as he did

numerous contemporary Muslim movements and even, to some extent,

Hindus—because they did not really matter to him. Had the British had

an active anti-Muslim policy in terms of interference in religious affairs,

however, Ahmad Riza would undoubtably have become very anti-

British.133

Thus, according to Sanyal, Ahmad Riza’s aloofness to the politics of British rule in

India was rooted in the fact that he and all Muslims remained free to practice their day-

to-day religion. British interference here would likely have driven him to agitate

against the government, though, unlike the Deobandis, such agitation would almost

certainly not have included any sort of joint effort with India’s Hindu communities. It is

possible, too, that Ahmad Riza’s seemingly gentler attitude towards the British had

something to do with the political situation in which he was raised—circumstances that

were quite different from the Deobandi fathers’. After all, Ahmad Riza’s home territory

of Rohilkhand had fallen under British East India Company rule more than half a

century before he had even been born (1801/1216; Ahmad Riza was born in

1856/1272). Perhaps British rule was, for him, “normal”—or at least the only sort of

government he had ever known, as opposed to the experience of military and political

loss felt firsthand by the founders of Deobandism.

It was also during this period that the Indian Councils Act (1909/1327)—known

commonly as the Morley-Minto Reforms—was passed, among other things granting

Indians (of privileged class) a layer of self-government, however thin. Such Indians

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could now elect other such Indians to seats on provincial legislative councils, where

previously such seats had been either held by a British person or by an Indian appointed

thereunto. Crucially, the Act granted Muslims reserved seats on these provincial

legislative councils out of proportion to their population, a decision borne of the Muslim

fear that without such safeguards, they would be reduced to second-class citizen status

in a Hindu-dominated country. The reforms are relevant to this study in that they

paved the way for further reforms in 1919/1411 and 1935/1354, galvanizing the ire of

Indian (mostly Hindu) nationalists who viewed separate electorates as a communalistic

measure that would prevent the sort of Hindu-Muslim Indian nationalism they were

ostensibly trying to foster. By institutionalizing separate electorates, the Act pushed

the Congress, in 1916, to accept the arrangement in the Lucknow Pact—and when, with

the coming forth of the Nehru Report, the separate electorates system was dismissed, it

led to a permanent breach both between many Hindu and Muslim political leaders and

their parties and organizations and between Muslims who had, up to that time, been

supporting the Congress.

Meanwhile, events overseas contributed to the development of a sort of pan-Islamic

resurgence among Muslims of otherwise diverse political worldviews. In particular, the

Balkan Wars (1912-1913/1330-1331), which saw various once-Ottoman polities

attacking the Ottoman empire (claiming that their territory, based on ethnic

considerations, should extend further into the Ottoman domain), motivated Muslims

around the globe to rally to the cause of the Turks against what was interpreted as a

mostly Christian attempt to hack away at a once-proud Muslim empire. Deobandi

leaders enthusiastically united their voices with those advocating pan-Islamic solidarity

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in the face of non-Muslim incursions; Mahmud Hasan and other divines of Deoband

were particularly vocal in this regard. On the other hand, Ahmad Riza and many of his

Barelvi acolytes shied away from such advocacy, and indeed, many of the subcontinent’s

‘alәma followed suit. Several fәtawa began circulating around India, arguing against

any sort of pan-Islamic intervention into the affairs of the Turks. These dissenting

scholars saw the conflicts then embroiling the Ottoman Empire as more of a civil war—

one that certainly did not affect Indian Muslims. In any case, they argued, the war was

a political one, not a religious one; not even Islam’s holy sites (over which the caliphs

had long been the guardians) were in danger. Finally, these juridical rulings pointed

out, as did Ahmad Riza Khan explicitly in 1913/1331, that the Ottoman sultanate was

not the true Islamic caliphate—and thus Muslims were under no spiritual obligation

whatsoever to go running to its defense. On multiple occasions, Mahmad Hasan

harshly criticized such fәtawa (in particular one written by ‘Abdul Haq and signed by

many others, which was brought to his attention several times and evidently received

wide publicity); their writers criticized back, and the issue remained divided.134 Still, for

millions of Muslims around the globe, including in India, the events rocking the

Ottoman regime drove solidarity more than division.

The next year (1914/1332), Turkey entered the Great War and Sultan Mehmed V

issued a proclamation of jyhad against the Allies (including the British, of course)—a call

that the British tried to squelch by assuring the Muslims under its rule that Islam’s holy

sites would under no circumstances be harmed. In India, Muslims of all stripes rushed

to affirm their fealty to London (though, in the case of some who did this—like

‘Ubaidullah Sindhi—such affirmations should be taken with a grain of salt, especially

considering their political machinations at the time, not to mention their subsequent

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anti-British activities). Once again, too, the Deobandi-Barelvi dynamic was made

evident when the British government induced leading loyal ‘alәma, including Ahmad

Riza Khan, to issue juridical rulings supporting loyalty to the British government, in

opposition to such “extremists” as Mahmud Hasan and Farangi Mahal’s ‘Abdul Bari.135

The rulings echoed those of previous years advocating for Indian Muslims to leave the

Turkey issue well enough alone. Still, such events drove millions of Muslims into a

more explicitly anti-British camp, one that would facilitate cooperation even with

Hindus in order to rid the subcontinent of its foreign overlords.

Perhaps the greatest force influencing Barelvi rejection of Muslim-Congress

cooperation was the ardent devotion that its founder demonstrated towards the self-

reliance of the Muslim community. In fact, according to one fәtwa, written in 1913/1331

(one which Sanyal asserts may have been his only juridical ruling, from among

thousands, dealing strictly with practical, political issues rather than purely religious

ones),136 Ahmad Riza encouraged the adoption of a four-pronged program aimed at

insulating the Muslim community of India from both potential Hindu predators and the

British Raj. In effect, he was offering an alternative to the Deobandi approach. The

fәtwa suggested Muslims should: (1) boycott British Indian courts, instead relying on

local Muslim law; (2) purchase what they needed only from fellow Muslims (and never

go into debt to Hindu moneylenders); (3) if wealthy and city-dwelling, open up interest-

free banks for the use of fellow Muslims; and (4) acquire additional light and knowledge

pertaining to their faith, thereby strengthening the Muslim community as a whole.137 If

the fәtwa represents Ahmad Riza’s political philosophy vis-à-vis the political situation

facing the Indian Muslim community of the time, it may be highly instructive. For it

reveals, first, a desire to see the Muslim community function separately from all others;

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in other situations, as previously mentioned, Ahmad Riza and his followers would go

further, refusing to work even with fellow Muslims if they belonged to “lost” groups or

espoused “bad” doctrine. Second, it suggests that Ahmad Riza did not feel that the

Muslims were in any state to take an active role in the politics of the time; they needed

first to shore themselves up, both temporally and spiritually. Third, it demonstrates a

desire on the part of Ahmad Riza to see a restoration (even elevation), however slowly,

of the traditional role of the ‘alәma within the Muslim community. A boycott of a major

pillar of the British Raj—that of the court system—was a bold move, one that he would

take himself in 1917/1335. All of this goes a long way in explaining Barelvi opposition

not just to standard Deobandi political positions, but to Deobandi involvement in

nationalist politics in the first place.

But perhaps the most important event in its long-term ramifications for the

possibility of Hindu-Muslim unity came in 1905/1323. It was in this year that the great

partition of Bengal into more or less Muslim and Hindu sections took place. The action,

described by Gokhale as “concocted in the dark and carried out in the face of the fiercest

opposition,” would foreshadow the far greater partition that would follow around forty

years later. Viceroy Curzon insisted that the move was strictly practical, meant to deal

with what otherwise represented the bureaucratic nightmare of administering a

province of almost ninety million inhabitants. But to the Bengali-speaking Hindus of

Bengal, and particularly the bhadralok of Calcutta, whose fearless opinion had so long

irked the Crown’s representatives on the subcontinent, the move was clearly meant to

isolate and nullify any influence they might have enjoyed as a majority constituency. By

dividing the province down its middle, with the new border just to the east of Calcutta,

the British—whether by coincidence or by design—had neatly created a Muslim

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majority province to the east (in Eastern Bengal and Assam) and a Hindu-majority

province to the west in which Bengali-speakers suddenly found themselves a minority in

their own bifurcated country (outnumbered by the combined Bihari- and Oriya-speaking

peoples inhabiting the newly created political zone).

While Hindus across Bengal and Hindustan protested vociferously, the Muslims of

newly created Eastern Bengal and Assam, previously dominated politically by Calcutta,

suddenly found themselves un-beholden to the Hindu moneylenders and landowners to

the west, and their one-time backwater of Dhaka abruptly elevated to provincial capital

status. Indeed, to these millions, it was difficult not to interpret the hotly contested

partition of Bengal as a very good thing. But beyond the political freedom that came

with the move, it was the Hindu reaction across India that really isolated many

Muslims, causing them to band together in opposition to their fellow Indians of Hindu

persuasion. Muslim leaders in Dhaka and Aligarh reached out to one another as a

result, and in October of 1906/Sh’aban of 1324, a delegation of said leaders under the

nominal headship of the twenty-nine-year-old third Aga Khan—ostensibly representing

the community of Islam in Hindustan—met Viceroy Minto. Their purpose: to lobby for

the political rights of India’s Muslims. This initial delegation would later evolve into

what the world would come to know as the All-India Muslim League, officially

organized and founded (significantly, in Dhaka) two months later, on 30 December

1906/14 Dh’ul Q’adah 1324. The partition of Bengal had thus awoken the Muslim

minority—or at least the most financially, socially, and politically elite among them—

and provided the stimulus necessary for their initial political organization. From now

on, the fate of the independence movement would, in large measure, be dictated by the

dynamic between these two now-politically-organized groups. The battle lines had

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been drawn, and the Deobandis and the Barelvis, by and large, would choose to stand on

opposite sides.

With the anullment of the Bengal partition in 1911/1329 under largely “Hindu”

pressure, “Muslim” disappointment only increased. Indeed, the British decision to

restore Bengal “annoyed the Muslims” and was “a clear breach of assurances and

commitments made by the British regarding the inviolability of the partition.” And the

following years clearly demonstrated that a sort of political “turning point” in the

history of Indian Muslims had occurred. “It could be argued,” one Pakistani legal

commentator would opine decades later, “that the seeds of Pakistan were sown by this

one event.”138

With the passing of a couple years, however, there were signs that the communalism

might actually be ebbing in the face of a common enemy. A younger cadre of

Aligarhists (whence came the core of the League), disaffected by Sir Sayyid’s old loyalist

policy, pushed a more ardently anti-British agenda. Many of these had been influenced

by a rationalist-traditionalist scholar from Azamgarh, mwlana Shibli (d. 1914 AD),

whose passion for the glorious Muslim past seemed veritably contagious and whose

politics lined up more or less with the Deobandi leadership’s.139 Under this pressure

from within, in 1913/1331 the Muslim League adopted a position much like that of the

Congress’s, advocating for a level of self-government in India, albeit still under the

auspices of the British Crown. This shift in stance opened the way for a brief period of

communal unity, generally speaking, exemplified by the Lucknow Pact of 1916/1334

(according to which the Congress agreed to the League demand for separate communal

electorates) and the subsequent cooperation of the Muslim League with the Indian

National Congress. One of the most dedicated proponents of Hindu-Muslim unity was

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a young London-trained lawyer named Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah. Ahmad Riza Khan and

many of his Barelvi followers, meanwhile, were fierce opponents of the Pact; the divine

out of Bareilly characterized Deobandi cooperation with the Hindus as nothing more

than a disgraceful “sell-out.”140

Spreading the Rivalry: the Proliferation of mәdarys Networks.

Rashid Ahmad Gangohi passed away in 1905/1323, and with him the last of the

major “first generation” founders. The Deobandi university’s first student, Mahmud

Hasan, easily slipped into the role of the revivalist movement’s leader. Described by one

of his more illustrious students as “of spare frame, unassuming” (and even “skeletal,

frail,” though in his capacity as a teacher or lecturer reportedly able to assume the

presence of “a lion of God”)141 Mahmad Hasan had, to quote Faruqi, “drunk deep in the

spirit and the ideas underlying the foundation of the [dar ul’alwm]” and was a “man of

action.”142 Virtually since birth, Mahmad Hasan—by virtue of his family—had been

tied to the institution at Deoband and the movement that grew out of it. His father,

Zulfiqar ‘Ali (d. 1904 AD), had studied at Delhi College with the great Mamluk ‘Ali and

Sadr al-Din Azardah, as had his uncle, the aforementioned Mahtab ‘Ali. Later, Mahtab

‘Ali would be numbered “among Deoband’s most distinguished teachers,” while Zulfiqar

‘Ali, who worked as a professor at Bareilly College and as deputy inspector of mәdarys in

Meerut before relocating to Deoband, would gain a significant reputation as a great

scholar himself, particularly of Arabic (but also of Farsi and even “western knowledge”).

At Deoband, Zulfiqar ‘Ali’s family acquired a sort of scholarly distinction in the area,

despite the proliferation of both noted local ‘alәma and great families for whom religious

scholarship was a long tradition; his three younger brothers, mwlana Hakim

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Muhammad Hasan (who worked in the service of Rashid Ahmad in Gangoh, studied at

the dar ul’alwm in Deoband, and later served as a teacher there for over four decades),

mwlana Hamid Hasan, and mwlvi hafyž Muhammad Mahasan, all achieved impressive

levels of scholarship. Both Mahtab ‘Ali and Zulfiqar ‘Ali had served as teachers to the

young Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi, both were among the Deobandi university’s most

distinguished and active founders, and both became “pillars” of the dar ul’alwm’s mәjlys-e

shwra. In fact, Mahmad Hasan’s “entire household participated in this scholarly

movement [the founding of the dar ul’alwm at Deoband].”143 Thus it was perhaps only

natural that under Mahmad Hasan—evidently the xәlifәħ of Imdadullah himself—the

Deobandi movement would enter its first explicitly political, even anti-British, phase.

Concurrent with that development was the establishment and spread of a Deobandi

“network” of associated mәdarys, typically run by former students of the dar ul’alwm at

Deoband and dedicated to the spiritual (including political) vision of the school’s

founders and current leadership. During Mahmud Hasan’s tenure as the university’s

Sәdәr mәdarys, the student population is reported to have tripled, from around two

hundred when he first took office to over six hundred when he passed away. Around a

dozen schools associated themselves with the institution at Deoband by 1880/1297, ten

years before Mahmud Hasan began as principal. By 1900/1317, a decade into his

tenure, there were around forty.

Indeed, by the turn of the twentieth century AD (a decade after Mahmud Hasan was

made principal) the dar ul’alwm had associated schools established as far east as

Chittagong, and in Dhaka, Calcutta, Patna, Arrah, Darbhanga, Benares, Ghazipur,

Mubarakpur, Jaunpur, Fatehpur, Shahjahanpur, Karnal, Lahore, Gujranwala, and as far

south as Madras.144 In the northwest (especially in Peshawar) among the Pathan tribes,

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Deobandism quickly established itself, too. Thanks in large part to the groundwork laid

by the combination of Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidi dominance (set in motion after the

1748/1161 Afghan raid of Delhi) and the influence of sәyyid Ahmad and, later, the

powerful Akhund of Swat, many among the tribal ‘alәma—and particularly those of the

eastern Pathan, in what is today northwestern Pakistan—looked to Deoband for

religious inspiration and spiritual guidance. After all, Akhund Ghaffur had acted as a

major player in what might be considered a nineteenth-century/thirteenth-century

microcosmic precursor to the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry: the feud between the divine of

Swat and the Kotah Mullah, Muruf Bey. The latter had supported the British (as did, in

the eyes of many Deobandis as of the time of this writing, Ahmad Riza Khan, however

tacitly) even as the Akhund actively fought against them. In addition, the Akhund was

a dedicated revivalist, while the Kotah Mullah, according to Abdul Ghaffur,

incorporated un-Islamic ritual into his religious practice (the same charge, of course,

leveled by Deobandis against Barelvis a few years later). Later, too, the pir of Manki

Sharif would split with the Hadda Mullah, by far the Akhund’s most prominent spiritual

successor, over similar religious differences; the schism would foreshadow the divide,

half a century later, between the pir of Manki Sharif (now classified as Barelvi and a

hard-core Muslim League supporter) and the (mostly Deobandi, INC-supporting) “Red

Shirts” in the years before Partition. As the Akhund’s “pedagogic line” was the

“dominant one” among the eastern Pathans, perhaps it was only natural that

Deobandism would find such ready acceptance there.145 Thus, to quote Haroon,

The pirimuridi line of the Akhund Ghaffur-Hadda Mulla, unified by the

bait and directed by the Hadda Mulla into the twentieth century, became

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the vehicle for the dissemination of a revivalist ideology of religious

practice through the eastern Pakhtun regions, and, with its creation, the

Tribal Areas.146

The continuity that existed between the Akhund Ghaffur’s line of authority and the dar

ul’alwm at Deoband—a continuity that resulted in the widespread establishment of

Deobandi mәdarys among the Pathans—may be demonstrated by the example of the

Hadda Mullah’s “most important” disciple, Fazal Wahid (d. 1937 AD), later known as

Haji Turangzai. Fazal Wahid initially studied under one of the Akhund’s murids, then

in a Waliullahi mәdrәsәħ in Tehkal, before relocating to Deoband in order to study at

the now-famous university there. Just the fact that he chose to make the long journey

to the UP to study at Deoband demonstrates, perhaps, the institution’s powerful pull in

the Pathan northwest. In any case, at Deoband he became friends with Mahmud Hasan,

with whom he performed the hәj to Mecca. While in Arabia, Fazal Wahid met with and

received bi’at from none other than Imdadullah, to whom he swore to carry on the

legacy of sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli—to “promote revivalism and opposition to the

British,” specifically among the Pathans. After returning home, Fazal Wahid became a

student of the Hadda Mullah, only to become a famous ‘alym himself, helping to spread

Deobandism in the tribal areas.147

A number of other prominent Deoband graduates moved to the Pathan northwest

after the completion of their religious training, along with several Pathan ‘alәma who

likewise received their education at the dar ul’alwm. Many of these former students

established Deobandi seminaries of their own in the frontier region. One of these

Pathan Deobandis (described by Haroon as “the most important”) was Saifur Rahman,

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from Mathra. After studying at Deoband, Saifur Rahman taught for some time in an

‘Ubaidullah Sindhi-founded school near Delhi, where he (Saifur Rahman) recruited

many other Pathan students to join him. After 1914/1332, he moved back to the

northwest frontier (followed by many of his students) to carry on the revivalist

endeavor among his fellow Pathans.148

From the very beginning, the Barelvis lagged behind their Deobandi counterparts

within the domain of mәdrәsәħ-building. Sanyal attributes Ahmad Riza Khan’s seeming

lack of emphasis on the religious seminary (at least in its revivivalist form, as in the case

of the Deobandi dar ul’alwm or even Sir Sayyid’s college at Aligarh) to his own

educational experience, gleaning as he did the vast majority of his own knowledge by

himself from books, or at the feet of a small handful of teachers in the traditional, one-

on-one setting. Still, by 1920/1338 the movement could claim a number of institutions

as adhering strictly to the “Ahl-e-Sunnat” (i.e. Barelvi) way. In 1904-1905/1322-1323,

with Ahmad Riza Khan’s personal approbation, one of the great man’s students—

Zafaruddin Bihari (later to become one of Ahmad Riza Khan’s authorized

biographers)—together with Ahmad Riza’s young son Hamid Riza (d. 1943 AD) and

brother Hasan Riza (d. 1908 AD), founded the mәdrәsәħ Manzar al-Islam. It would

never become a great dar ul’alwm (in this early period the school graduated a mere four

to ten students per year), much less the institutional hub of the movement, but as

Ahmad Riza Khan acted personally as its sәrpәrәst and his son Hamid as its chief

administrator (with their descendents—to this day—running the school attached to the

mәsjyd Bibiji), the seminary quickly acquired, from the beginning, a sort of symbolical

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status as an Ahl-e-Sunnat center. Indeed, as early as 1908/1326, its graduation

ceremony was attracting scholars and Sufis from hundreds of miles away.149

But there were other, grander schools (mostly in northern India), which, by the

early twentieth/fourteenth century, had established themselves as belonging to the

movement. These included the centuries-old mәdrәsәħ ‘Aliyya in Rampur, where,

perhaps appropriately, Barelvi predecessors Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi and ‘Abd ul-Haqq

Khairabadi (d. 1899 AD) both had taught; the mәdrәsәħ al-Hadis in Pilibhit, founded in

1893/1310 by Wasi Ahmad Muhaddis Surati; the mәdrәsәħ Shams al-‘Uloom in

Badayun, founded by ‘Abd ul-Qayyum (d. 1900 AD) in 1899/1317; and the mәdrәsәħ

Hanafiyya in Patna, established by ‘Abd ul-Wahid Firdausi Azimabadi (d. 1908 AD) in

1900/1318. Other schools, too, associated with Ahmad Riza Khan and Barelvism,

proliferated across the subcontinent, especially from the 1920s/1340s (like the Jamia

Naeemia in Moradabad, about which more later). Each of these institutions was

formulated with an express purpose: to combat the pernicious spread of “Wahhabism,”

including more than any other sect that of the Deobandis. To illustrate the point, one

Barelvi commentator, lauding the efforts of Didar ‘Ali Alwari (who founded the dar

ul’alwm Hizb al-Ahnaf in Lahore in the 1920s/1340s), wrote that, if not for his (Didar

‘Ali’s) endeavors, “the whole Punjab would today be full of ‘Wahhabis’.” Such

sentiments reinforce the status of Barelvism as a counter-reformational movement. In

any case, as Sanyal concludes, these early-twentieth-century AD Ahl-e-Sunnat

seminaries were nonetheless “instrumental in creating a network of personal links

between ‘ulama’ and in producing new leaders.”150 Still, the early characterization of

Barelvi efforts to build mәdarys as trailing that of the Deobandis would continue to be an

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accurate portrayal through Partition, in Pakistan, and into the twenty-first/fifteenth

century to the time of this writing.

Given the now-established preponderance of Deobandism in the northwest frontier

region—plus its long history of insurgency against the encroaching British leviathan,

especially via Deobandi forebear sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli and his various jyhadi

successors—perhaps it is only natural that the Deobandi leaders, no longer fearful of

being associated with a long past “Mutiny,” would select this very area as the staging

ground for their first major anti-British scheme since the school’s founding. After all,

Mahmud Hasan himself had long been establishing “rapport” with the religious scholars

of the northwestern frontier regions, many of whom were former students of the dar

ul’alwm.151 Remarked one official at the Deobandi university in 1947/1366 of Mahmud

Hasan and his compatriots,

[T]he passion of these great men against British power was neither for rank nor

station, was not for ministerial chairs, was not for the power of any one party,

but it was only for this: that the oppressed country be taken out from an

oppressive nation’s grasp…

The principal pastime of these great men was always talk and anxiety—[about]

how to throw from [their] shoulders the yoke of the British. This was the focus

of their predictions and revelations…152

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In addition, “large groups” of the Sәdәr mәdarys’s associates, including teachers, former

students, disciples, and other contacts, many of whom had taken part in the countless

clandestine meetings held in the dar ul’alwm principal’s own house, had already “fanned

out in India and abroad…striving ardently and with temerity to put into action

[Mahmud Hasan’s] prepared plan.” Present at those secret meetings were “some men

of the northwest border.”153 The future president of the tens-of-thousands-strong

Pathan xuda-e-xydmәtgar (also known as the “KKs”), Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (later

dubbed the “Frontier Gandhi”), would visit Deoband in 1914/1332 after receiving a

personal invitation by letter from Mahmud Hasan. In Deoband he met with several of

the university’s most eminent scholars to discuss the establishment of a base (or

“center”) within one of the northwest frontier’s “free areas”—a base from which to

launch the movement that would finally free Hindustan from British tyranny and pave

the way for an Islamic resurgence.154

The Deobandi leader’s idea was simple, grand, and infused with the hope of

generations for the return of Islamic power on the subcontinent. Today it is described

by Deobandi historians as more or less naturally occurring within a succession of

political action whose players included, in order, “hәżrәt Shah Waliullah, hәżrәt Shah

‘Abdul ‘Aziz, hәżrәt sәyyid Ahmad shәhid, and hәżrәt Shah [Muhammad] Isma’ail

shәhid… and hәżrәt Nanautawi and hәżrәt Gangohi.”155 This was to be shix ul-hynd’s

contribution to the great struggle as the spiritual and political successor of the

aforementioned freedom-fighting scholars. Mahmud Hasan’s plan (evidently in

incubation since at least 1905/1323):156 to start a tribal insurrection against British

authority among the Pathans of the frontier, with the aid and support of Britain’s

enemies—namely Afghanistan, Ottoman Turkey, and, to a lesser extent, Iran, imperial

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Germany, and even Russia. Islamic law demanded that military jyhad be launched from

the base of a Muslim state; in this case that state was to be Afghanistan. The British,

fully invested in the violence of the Great War, half a world away, would be unable to

quash the seemingly spontaneous militant movement, and Muslims across India would

thereby be inspired to join the ranks of their frontier brethren in a pan-Indian Islamic

revolt that would ultimately drive the foreign scourge from the subcontinent altogether.

The “banner of Islam” would be planted in Hindustan once again, and Muslims would

finally be free to practice their religion—including, essentially, the institution of its

political structure. This was the plan. But first, the governments of Afghanistan,

Turkey, Iran, and Germany would need to be convinced of its feasibility.

With this in mind, in October 1915/Dh’ul Hijja 1333 Mahmud Hasan sent one of his

most trusted disciples, the “highly trained” and indefatigable ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi, to

Kabul.157 Sindhi was a converted Sikh who had worked on political projects before—

like the mysterious jәm’aiәt ul-әnsar,158 and the establishment of the Nazaratul Ma’ariful-

Quraniyya school in old Delhi. The latter endeavor was designed to increase the

‘alәma’s influence among the more Westernized segment of Muslims.159 Working

under Mahmud Hasan’s direction, Sindhi (who, according to one London newspaper,

had “infected some of the [dar ul’alwm’s] staff and students with his own militant and

anti-British ideas”)160 would spend the next seven years in Afghanistan’s capital city,

meeting with disaffected Indians and other enemies of the British presence in Hindustan

(by December 1915/Safar 1334 he had already met with the Berlin-Indian Committee),

organizing them into an effective resistance, helping to establish an Indian government-

in-exile (including individuals tied to the Ghadr Party),161 and even setting up a branch

of the Indian National Congress, himself at its head and officially affiliated with the

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main organization in India. (It is interesting to note—and characteristic of the

Deobandi modus operandi, that the head of the Sindhi-organized provisional government

featured a prominent Hindu, Mahendra Pratap, as its president). On the way to Kabul,

too, Sindhi had met with the still-active remnants of the Indian fighters originally

organized by sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli around eighty-five years previously—the

“Hindu Fanatics” as they were known by some (or, as a British report put it, “the

fanatical India party of fighters”), originally based around Sittana.162 Sindhi hoped that

from his Kabul base, he would be able to organize a great Muslim army, headquartered

in the Hijaz (more specifically Medina, where Mahmud Hasan was to be commander-in-

chief) but with regional command centers in Istanbul, Tehran, and Kabul (where he

himself would act as regional commander). And though the әmir of Afghanistan never

fully committed himself to out-and-out supporting an anti-British uprising among the

Pathans—crucial to the success of Mahmud Hasan’s original plan—’Ubaidullah Sindhi

was able to build very warm relations with the royal court, and played a significant role

(sometimes directly, often indirectly) as an influencer of Afghanistan’s India-related

foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Mahmud Hasan (some say to avoid arrest)163 traveled to western

Arabia, to Islam’s holiest cities, ostensibly to perform the hәj. The Hijaz was mostly

intended as a springboard, however, from where he might journey to Istanbul to meet

with representatives from the Turkish government. Such travel became unnecessary

when, in 1916/1334, Turkish War Minister Anwar Pasha met with the Deobandi leader

in Arabia. Mahmud Hasan also met with Ghalib Pasha, the Turkish governor of the

Hijaz. Both officials seemed open to the idea of supporting Mahmud Hasan’s plan to

incite insurrection in India’s northwest frontier areas. In fact, the high-ranking Anwar

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Pasha even penned a letter, subsequently distributed widely by ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi and

others (including one of Mahmud Hasan’s traveling companions, Muhammad Mian

Ansari, who had acted as messanger in actually bringing the letter back to the

subcontinent from Arabia and who was later charged with “inculcat[ing] jihad”164

amongst the Pathan tribes)165 in Afghanistan and northwestern Hindustan, promising

Turkish support and calling for a general Muslim uprising against the British in India.

All seemed to be going according to Mahmud Hasan’s original plan. It was now time

for him to return to India’s borderlands to rescuscitate the old jyhad of sәyyid Ahmad.

Unfortunately for the movement, the whole anti-British scheme—which would have

been hard-pressed to work anyway without full support from Kabul, let alone help from

a soon-to-be ousted government in Istanbul—went up in smoke when the the British

government in India, through its secret police network (the CID), intercepted

communications from Sindhi meant for Mahmud Hasan, relating to his progress in

Afghanistan. Thus the great pan-Islamic plan was discovered in 1916/1334, almost as

soon as it had been set in motion, and a flurry of arrests followed in India. Later that

year, Sherif Hussein bin ‘Ali launched the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turk rule in

Arabia; and through the Arabs—for now, allies of London—the British were able to

capture Mahmud Hasan (in fact, he and four of his associates were first arrested by the

Arabs themselves, and only later handed over to British authorities).166 Eventually he

was interned at St. Clement’s Barracks, a British prison on the island of Malta, where

the old Deobandi cleric and anti-British activist was “among the world’s most renowned

political prisoners.”167 Here he received some comfort through letters from home,

particularly those written by his little brother, Muhammad Mahasan, who kept him

apprised of goings-on in the outside world.168 The whole affair was painted by the

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British media as a Berlin-directed conspiracy (the headline screamed, “German Plots in

India”); the one-hundred-fifty-page “Rowlatt Report,” too, commissioned by the

Government of India, characterized the “Silk Letters’ Plot” as “an amazing story of

sedition” that “equaled any romance of Robert Louis Stevenson”—behind which lurked

the inciting Germans.169

Khilafat: Ephemeral High Point of Hindu-Muslim Unity.

By 1920/1338, when the British set Mahmud Hasan free in Bombay (the old man,

suffering from a debilitating case of tuberculosis, evidently no longer seemed like much

of a threat), most signs indicated that the future would be characterized by united

Hindu-Muslim activism. For long, many Muslims, as members of a minority

community, had remained at least implicitly loyal to the British, more wary of the

perceived threat of the majority Hindu population. But the first two decades of the

twentieth century AD saw the British government’s foreign policy continually

ostracizing its Muslim subjects, especially as the Russian threat—for long the British

impetus for maintaining the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire—began to

subside in the wake of a new, German one. During the 1911-1912/1329-1330 Tripoli

War, London had been more interested in good relations with Rome than the negative

repercussions its actions might induce across Muslim communities worldwide (despite

Viceroy Hardinge’s warning of “considerable effervescence” on the matter among

India’s Mohammedans), and similar results came of Britain’s overtures to Greece in the

subsequent Balkan Wars (Hardinge: “In all these wars against Turkey, it is we out in

India who in reality have to pay the piper”).170 Indeed, one prominent Indian nationalist

would write in 1917/1335, “Turkey’s war with Italy followed by her struggle with the

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Balkan States, has done wonders in nationalising the Indian Mohammedans. At the

present moment the Mohammedans perhaps feel even more intensely than the

Hindus”—certainly a wind change in Indian politics.171 Later, during the Great War,

Turkey made the disastrous decision to forego neutrality in order to side with the

Central Powers, prompting a secret 1916/1334 agreement between London and Paris

(with the consent of St. Petersburg) to carve up a post-war Ottoman empire between

them; this, of course, famously contradicted previous British promises to the Arabs of

the Hijaz, who expected to inherit a large, independent Arabia when the fighting was

over. After the war, the “hated” Treaty of Sèvres (1920/1338) threatened the

geographical integrity of Turkey by adding once-Ottoman territory to several

neighboring states, including Greece; the agreement also tore all non-Turkish

territories from the empire.172 These incidents caused trepidation among Muslims

worldwide, who feared not only for the caliphate, but also for other Middle Eastern

“Muslim” lands then under the control of non-Muslim powers. As a result, Muslims in

India launched the Khilafat (xylafәt) Movement, protesting these developments, calling

for the preservation of the integrity of the caliphate, and generally rallying Muslims

against non-Muslim intervention in Muslim lands. The movement, organized in large

part by the ‘Ali brothers and Abul Kalam Azad, joined forces with the Indian National

Congress; Gandhi agreed to support Khilafat and the Khilafatists agreed to support the

INC’s non-cooperation movement. (Jawaharlal once opined that, though there was

certainly “no lack of vulgarity” when it came to the addresses of Congress leaders to one

another during their various conferences, “some of the minor Khilafat leaders probably

led the rest” where the use of the expletive was concerned).173 Thus by “declaring his

support for the Khilafat, Gandhi secured the allegiance of an impressive array of Muslim

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ulema and political activists for his policy of non-violent non-cooperation.”174 One

western newspaper correspondent observed that the British were by now “so

unpopular…among Indian Mahomedans…that if an Indian Musulman cannot find an

obvious cause for a political evil he [n]aturally blames it on Lord Curson [sic] as a sort

of fons et origo of the evils that beset the Mahomedan world.”175

At the same time, the British government had created a detested common enemy for

both Hindus and Muslims alike to hate (i.e. itself) through a succession of highly

unpopular domestic moves. The generally detested Press Act of 1910/1328 (recalling

smoldering memories of the Vernacular Press Act of 1878/1295) had threatened the

forfeiture of a press’s security deposit as well as the seizure of all copies of any offensive

(i.e. “allegedly seditious”) publications. Meanwhile, newspapers considered loyal to the

regime were subsidized in order to provide “wholesome literary food for the masses.”176

The result, according to one Hindu commentator of the period, on Muslim newspapers:

“All the independent Muslim papers have either been wiped out or are dragging on a

lifeless and miserable existence.” Many of these publications were Deobandi, or at least

tended to be Deobandi-leaning in tone and political philosophy. “The Comrade is gone.

The Hamdard has been strangled to death, the Muslim Gazette ceased to exist long ago,

Al-Hilal is no more, the Zamindar is carrying on its colorless existence with a sword of

Damocles always hanging over its head.”177 Then, during the Great War, the

government passed the Defence of India Act (1915/1333), legislation that greatly

curtailed civil liberties, among other things bypassing due process. The act was an

attempt to deal with pesky nationalist “schemes” during a time of war (similar

legislation was passed in Britain itself), and its “emergency powers” were to remain in

force for six months after the war ended. It was during this period that the

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aforementioned Lucknow Pact, uniting Muslim League and Congress efforts, was

forged. Perhaps the words of the League’s newly elected president Mazhar ul-Haq,

spoken on the occasion of the party’s December 1915/Safar 1334 conference in Bombay,

best exemplify the wind change in Indian politics during this period. “We are Indian

Muslims,” he said.

These words, “Indian Muslims,” convey the idea of our nationality and of

our religion, and as long as we keep our duties and responsibilities

arising from these factors before our eyes, we can hardly go wrong.

Indian Muslims are Indians first!178

Considering the party’s major course adjustment only a few years later (not to mention

its hard-line separatist position later on), such sentiments may seem out of place at a

Muslim League conference, yet they are illustrative of the sort of united, nationalist

feeling then extant within such circles during and immediately after the Great War.

For now, the pendulum was swinging the Deobandis’ way, even if the League’s

pronouncements stopped far short of denouncing its loyalty to the British

government.179

When, with war’s end, the time came for normalcy to be restored after the

imposition of the Defence of India Act, the Imperial Legislative Council refused to enact

the promised restoration (despite Montagu’s 1917/1335 assurances to the contrary),

and on 10 March 1919/7 Jumada II 1337, the tyrannical measures enacted four years

previously (including indefinite detention sans trial, two years’ incarceration for those

merely suspected of being terrorists, warrantless arrests, juryless trials, and a curtailment

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of freedom of speech vis-à-vis the press) were extended indefinitely. The 1919/1337

legislation—known as the Rowlatt Act, named after the chief of the committee who had

recommended the measures—prompted wide criticism from Indian political leaders and

activists, and Gandhi organized a nationwide fast and strike (the “Rowlatt sәtyagrәhә,”

the latter meaning “truth-force”), to be held on 6 April/5 Rajab, in protest. But the

Mahatma, an integral part of whose strategy was the use of non-violence as a moral

means of struggle, was unable to contain the pent-up frustration felt by millions of

Indians at these political developments; a series of riots in the Punjab caused him to

suspend the sәtyagrәhә only days later. Then on 13 April/12 Rajab, one hundred fifty

troops led by British General R. E. H. Dyer opened fire on a crowd of around twenty

thousand Indians gathered in Jalianwalla Bagh, Amritsar, to protest the Rowlatt Act;

the volley continued at least six minutes without pause, resulting in piles of bodies: over

three thousand civilian dead and one thousand five hundred wounded. If the

nationalists—Hindu, Muslim, and otherwise—hadn’t been fired up and united before,

this event (and the follow-up violence meted out by the British government in the

Punjab in the days following) fueled the movement like none before it. Even many

Barelvis joined the fray, despite their leader’s stance to the contrary. “The most

significant development of Nationalism,” wrote Arya Samajist and Indian activist Lala

Lajpat Rai three years after the end of the Great War, was “the unity between Hindus

and the Mohammedans on the question of self-government.”180

When Mahmud Hasan arrived in Bombay, then, it was this show of unity that

greeted him. The news of his freedom had been published in “all the great newspapers

of Hindustan,” and immediately Khilafatist and Cogressite leaders alike scrambled to

arrange a grand reception for him upon disembarkation.181 Indeed, Gandhi himself

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traveled down from Ahmedabad just to meet the Deobandi leader—and to explain the

political situation, much to shix ul-hynd’s approbation. Soon thereafter, Farangi Mahal’s

‘Abdul Bari likewise met with Mahmud Hasan, outlining for him the joint Khilafatist-

Congressite plan. In response, Mahmud Hasan penned a fәtwa (whose “each and every

word spilt fire,” opined one Deobandi commentator)182 in support of Khilafat and non-

cooperation; it would be signed by almost a thousand Muslim scholars.183 The

Deobandis were officially on board the Khilafat/non-cooperation program. To continue

to garner support, Mahmud Hasan—despite his worsening condition—embarked on a

tour of the United Provinces, delivering speeches and meeting with Muslim political

and religious leaders to encourage them to buoy up the Khilafatist (and non-

cooperation) effort.184 Mahmud Hasan had no problem working with Hindus (and

others) in accomplishing the shared goal of bringing down the British government. “If

the people of another community come forward and help in your pious mission and

extend support in crisis, you should cooperate with them,” he urged fellow Muslims in

1920/1338. “You should be equally courteous to them. [In fact], you should act more

generously.”185

But the Barelvi guiding lights did not support the Deobandi position on the Khilafat

issue. Indeed, Ahmad Riza Khan of Bareilly had a completely different take on the

situation then embroiling what was once the mighty Ottoman Empire. The Barelvi

divine opposed the Khilafat movement outright—though not necessarily because he

disagreed with its aims. Instead, Ahmad Riza, who interpreted the actions of the

Khilafatists as mere “political fuss and noise,”186 approached the matter practically (as he

saw it); he felt that, given the state of the Indian Muslim community, there was not

much it could do to really help its Turkish counterpart in any functionally useful way

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(eventually he would admonish Indian Muslims to donate a month’s salary to Turkish

relief). Mostly the Ahl-e-Sunnat leader thought all of the Khilafatists’ travels and

meetings and goings-on were a big waste of money. Indeed, once he himself had been

charged by a Deobandi political organization (called the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind; jәm’aiәt

‘alәma-e-hynd, or “Assembly of Indian Clergy,” hereafter JUH) ) of doing nothing for the

cause of the Turks or the Muslim holy sites; in reply, Ahmad Riza countered that,

simply put, neither had the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind—the difference was that the latter had

taken large sums of money from Muslims in the process!187 He also took issue with the

general Muslim defense of the “caliphate,” arguing that the sultan of Turkey, not even

of the Quraysh line, could not rightfully enjoy the title of caliph. Besides, Ahmad Riza

argued, the whole Khilafatist issue was a front; its members were insincere at best and

manipulators at worst—for, said he in one 1920/1338 fәtwa, the movement’s leaders

were merely using the issue of the Ottoman caliphate as a smokescreen for their real

aim: political independence from the British.188 Gandhi was a charlatan anyway; after

all, how could a man embroiled in a nationalist cause genuinely adopt an internationalist

movement with explicitly pan-Islamic aims? The Barelvis interpreted the Mahatma’s

maneuverings vis-à-vis the Muslim Khilafatist leaders as nothing more than shrewd

politics—and shame on the Deobandis and their cohorts for being so easily duped into

the Gujarati’s game. Some amongst the Khilafatist leadership even seemed, through

Barelvi eyes, to lavish praise upon Gandhi fit only for a bona fide prophet of Islam; once,

Ahmad Riza is reported to have compared the esteem which Khilafat leaders granted

Gandhi to that which the leaders of that most apostate group, the Ahmadiyya, accorded

their own false prophet. “Neither can Gandhi be an ymam, nor [Mirza Ghulam Ahmad]

Qadiani a mujәddyd,” he reportedly told one Deobandi with whom he was acquainted.

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Of course, any perceived affront to Muhammad (as the Khilafatist attitude toward

Gandhi was interpreted) only further alienated the two groups politically.189

Most of all, however, Ahmad Riza opposed the Khilafat movement because he refused

to work together with many of those associated with it. In his view, a significant number

among the Khilafat leadership were “bad” Muslims, or those who had “lost their way.”190

Such exclusion would characterize the Barelvi attitude towards Deobandi cooperation

with the Indian National Congress through the Partition period; such a united front was

simply unacceptable “Hindu-Muslim unity.” In the words of Sanyal,

Ahmad Riza Khan believed that the relationship between Hindus and

Muslims being advocated by the non-cooperators was one of love,

intimacy, even unity, all of which, being forms of muwalat, were

forbidden; while, on the other hand, worldly or social relations with the

British were being forbidden although they had shar’i approval.191

Once again, Ahmad Riza’s exclusionary social worldview was made manifest, an outlook

perhaps best illustrated by one incident involving the INC’s most famous icon. At the

advice of several of his high-ranking Muslim counterparts—including the ‘Ali brothers

and ‘Abdul Bari—Gandhi reportedly tried to arrange a meeting with Ahmad Riza to

attempt to win the Barelvi divine over to the Khilafat cause. Upon hearing that the INC

leader was looking to meet, Ahmad Riza is alleged to have said, “What would he speak

about? Religion or worldly affairs? If it is wordly affairs, how could I partake—for I

have [chosen to] abstain from the world, and have no interest in it.”192 In fact, Ahmad

Riza took a great interest in the world, but refused to meet with Gandhi or align himself

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with his allegedly Hindu-dominated movement.193 To Ahmad Riza and his followers,

the Khilafatists were striving for “nationalist” (qwm pәrәst) goals while ignoring the

potential such action possessed—the potential, quite literally, to “destroy the true faith.”

In such a threat to Islam they were playing an active part, since, in the words of one

Barelvi commentator, “swәraj means Hindu Raj.”194

It is interesting to note the difference in philosophy here, generally speaking,

between Ahmad Riza Khan and his disciples and the Deobandi leadership. The latter

saw no contradiction in their position as ‘alәma, dedicated to the acquisition and

communication of religious knowledge, and their participation in Ahmad Riza’s

“worldly” (i.e. political) affairs. On the other side of the rivalry, Ahmad Riza emphasized

his own personal detachment from such things—an implicit jab at his scholarly rivals

who participated in the political arena. But Muhammad Mian would later justify the

Deobandi position in this regard in his book әsiran-e-malTa (“Prisoners of Malta”), in

his preface to the work’s mini-biography of Husain Ahmad Madani. To Muhammad

Mian, the elders of Deoband had taken the more difficult road, while the Barelvi head

and his kind had elected for the path of least resistance. It is obvious, reading

Muhammad Mian’s words, whose path he considers worthier of praise. “It is easy to opt

for the study of voluminous books for years…[but] it is difficult to submit before your

Creator and, with devotion and piety, render selfless service to His Creation…” Often,

Muhammad Mian argued, such submission involved going to the mosque, or leading a

study group, or preaching from the pulpit. But sometimes, too, it meant standing upon

“the political platform, for the greater well-being of your community and for upholding

the truth.” Such action often earned such men “abuse” from their “own people” (an

obvious reference to the literary barbs of Ahmad Riza and others)—and even “fetters

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and a dark cell from your oppressive enemy.” Such a man, willing to selflessly endure

the privations heaped upon him by both friend and enemy: this was “the true follower of

the Prophet,” Muhammad Mian insisted. After all, religious leaders had always played a

political role in Islam, from the beginning. For a religious scholar to become a recluse

(a form of “asceticism”) when his community needed him far more urgently in another

capacity was, certainly, the less noble path.195

Thus, as one scholar of political Barelvism has noted, in 1920/1338—the very

height of the Khilafat movement—“no one was ready to listen [to] any anti-Khilafat

and anti-non-cooperation statements,” even from the likes of Ahmad Riza Khan.196

While this statement is obviously an exaggeration if taken literally, it nevertheless

captures to a degree the general feeling of the period, or at least the way the political

winds were blowing. In time, however, that wind would change, as many Muslims

became disillusioned with Khilafat, the politics of the Congress, the Congress’

leadership, united political efforts with the Hindus, and/or the Deobandi political

leadership—and turn to voices like Ahmad Riza’s. In a sense, over the coming decades,

the denunciations by the Barelvi “founder” of both Khilafat’s ineffectuality and a united

Hindu-Muslim India would be more or less vindicated by history; whether or not such

vindication was “natural” or merely self-fulfilling is, of course, open for debate.

In any case, as Deobandis rallied behind the anti-British Khilafat-INC banner,

Ahmad Riza and his followers more or less supported the British government of India

throughout the Great War years and throughout the Khilafat movement period.197

(Remember, Ahmad Riza considered India, without question, a dar ul-yslam. At least the

British were Christian; would it not be worse to be led by a government of pagans—i.e.

Hindus?) And though Nehru would later describe the Khilafat Committee of 1920/1338

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as “powerful and far more representative” than the League198 (which also opposed

Khilafat), it must be pointed out that the Barelvis, by and large, were not represented

therein. On the contrary, they would form their own Turkish relief groups and

organizations; the most prominent was the Ansar al-Islam, an association made up of

Ahmad Riza’s inner circle, including Muhammad Mian Marahrawi, Zafaruddin Bihari,

Naimuddun Moradabadi, and Didar ‘Ali Alwar. The organization was formed according

to the admonition of Ahmad Riza Khan (outlined in his 1913/1331 juridical ruling): to

avoid association with Muslims who had, in their view, spiritually lost their way—and,

of course, to avoid “unity” with Hindus outright. Most of its tenets involved the

implementation of Ahmad Riza Khan’s (predominantly economic) reforms. But

unfortunately for the Ansar al-Islam, the group was constantly fighting off the charge of

being a British front organization.199 In fact, Barelvi self-imposed insulation from other

groups during the 1910s/1330s and 1920s/1340s, at that time centered mostly around

helping the Turks, foreshadowed the movement’s general behavior during the late

1930s/1350s and 1940s/1360s. Over the course of the latter period, too, Barelvi

organization—even whilst supporting the call for Pakistan—tended to include only

other Barelvis (or at least Barelvi-leaning scholars and pirs—the “proto-Barelvis” of

today’s Barelvi majority among South Asian Muslims), and certainly not Deobandis or,

heaven forbid, Hindus. This would have serious political consequences for the

movement later, in the new state of Pakistan, despite its numerical majority.

When, in 1919/1337, the Congress held its special session in Calcutta, partisans of

the Khilafat movement, fueled by the admonitions of the Deobandi ‘alәma, played a

major role in propelling Gandhi into the position of uncontested leader of the INC.

Indeed, thousands of the Mahatma’s Muslim Khilafatist supporters flocked to the

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gathering, making up a considerable portion of the approximately fifteen thousand

observers present (five thousand official delegates from across the country additionally

were in attendance). This groundswell of popular support, made up in part by Deobandi

or Deobandi-leaning Muslims seeking to protect the Ottoman caliphate, marked a

turning point for the Indian National Congress; henceforth the party’s base would be

swelled with Indians of the lower classes, not just those of the upper-middle-class elite.

By December of the same year (Rabi I 1338), the new-look Congress (during its Nagpur

conference, attended by fourteen thousand delegates) was shouting down the

aristocratic Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah and his warnings about sәtyagrәhә. Politics was a

gentleman’s game, as the League leader was apt to say, and Gandhi had dirtied the

party with his appeal to the unwashed masses, not to mention his infusion of religion

into what should be preserved as a strictly secular arena. (Ironically, this is, in effect,

precisely what Jinnah would do from the late 1930s/1350s as League head.) The

Khilafat movement, which had “swamped the politics of the Muslim League,” together

with the ascent of Gandhi and his quasi-spiritual form of resistance, had changed

politics, dragging it out of the smoking rooms and marble chambers and onto the

streets.200 Thanks to Khilafat, wrote one Indian commentator in 1917/1335, “the

political influence of the Muslim League among the people was…little as compared with

the influence of the Pan-Islamic party.”201 That party had already alienated the Barelvi

religious leadership, and this new political development alienated the more secular-

minded elites like Jinnah.

After the December/Rabi I conference, the future qayd-i-ә‘ažәm abruptly left the

Congress “in disgust,” never to return.202 Khilafat, wrote one noted South Asian

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historian, “by one of those quirks of Indian history had put the Mahatma into the saddle

of the Indian National Congress.”203

The Barelvis had a difficult time jumping onto the non-cooperation bandwagon, too;

Ahmad Riza’s attitude towards Gandhi has already been mentioned. Such involvement,

after all, would be unacceptable Hindu-Muslim unity. It would also mean working with

those (Muslims) of “bad” faith, in particular the Deobandis. In 1920/1338, leading

Barelvi alym Naimuddin Moradabai—who would, in the coming decades, play a major

role in the political promotion of the Barelvi religio-political agenda—issued a fәtwa

that out-and-out forbade Muslims from participating in the non-cooperation movement

(warning the ummәt, for example, of the dangers of working together with the Hindu

majority).204 That year Ahmad Riza Khan did the same, accusing the non-cooperation-

supporting Muslims (like the Deobandi leadership) of confusing that which was neutral

(represented by the Christian British) with that which was expressly forbidden

(represented by the pagan Hindus). After all, the Muslim non-cooperationists were

loudly denouncing a government that was not interfering in Muslim worship (the

British one) in favor of one that would invariably be led by those already meddling in

that worship (the Hindus; this was a reference to the cow slaughter controversy then

rocking the subconinent, in which some Hindu groups sought strict legislation banning

the sacrifice of cows, a regular Muslim ritual).205 It should be noted, however, that such

declamations as these were not unanimous among Barelvis; there were a handful of

dissenters. For example, xәwajәħ Muhammad Ziauddin Sialvi went along with

Gandhi’s program, at least as far as non-cooperation was concerned; the xәwajәħ went

so far as to reject all gifts from any of his disciples working for the police or the British

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Indian Army, a move that clearly supported the Congress-led non-cooperation

movement.206 Another Barelvi leader, Abdul Majid Badayuni (elements of whose family

had been involved in a sort of power struggle with Ahmad Riza for some time) actually

helped found the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind. Similarly, powerful pir Jama’at ‘Ali Shah, who

would later help found the mostly Barelvi All-India Sunni Conference, supported the

Khilafat movement with his time, money, and speeches—and went so far as to

characterize anyone who didn’t do likewise as “non-Muslim.”207 But generally speaking,

Barelvis fell in line behind Ahmad Riza and his disciples. (This went both ways; one of

the Deobandi greats, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, evidently opposed non-cooperation along

lines similar to those of Ahmad Riza Khan).208

The heads of both schools (Deobandi and Barelvi) would issue at least one highly

circulated fәtwa supporting their positions on the Khilafat issue, including views on

non-cooperation. Mahmud Hasan’s 1920/1339 juridical ruling (though technically he

did not consider it to be a true fәtwa; “I am not a mufti,” he wrote, “[thus] to write a

fәtwa is the work of other ‘alәma [who are muftis]”)209 has already been mentioned, but

it is worth examining at greater length, revealing as it does much in terms of Deobandi

political philosophy and worldview. Ahmad Riza Khan’s own 1920/1338 ruling

likewise sheds critical light on the general Barelvi approach to politics and British

rule—and on their position vis-à-vis the Deobandis, who, in supporting the “Hindu”

Congress, according to Ahmad Riza, were merely “running from the rain only to enter

the drainpipe.” It may be useful, then, to compare and contrast these two diametrically

opposed fәtawa.

To buoy up his argument that cooperation with the Hindus was futile (not to

mention hәram) Ahmad Riza emphasized what he described as the “oppressive

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viciousness” of Hindus generally. As examples, he pointed to recent communal

tragedies in Katarpur, Arrah, “and elsewhere.” Three years earlier, Katarpur—a two-

third Hindu, one-third Muslim village where tensions had long been simmering on

account of the cow slaughter issue—had been the scene of a brutal mass killing. The

Hindu perpetrators, allegedly motivated by the report of a Muslim individual who had

assaulted a Hindu untouchable, had set fire to a mosque and houses after burning thirty

Muslims alive; a later court decision confirmed the Hindus’ guilt when one hundred

forty-two of them were convicted for the crime, their punishments ranging from a

couple years’ imprisonment to the death penalty.210 Around the same time, the cow

slaughter issue had likewise ignited an anti-Muslim riot in Bihar’s Arrah district (as

mentioned earlier, a Barelvi stronghold, and thus naturally on Ahmad Riza’s radar),

where, in the words of nationalist leader M. A. Ansari, “Muslims…suffered untold

miseries” at the hands of the hooligans.211 Deobandis and other composite nationalists

insisted that such incidents were the work of individuals, anomalies vis-à-vis the general

Hindu whole. Ahmad Riza rejected this. The individuals and groups involved in the

Katarpur and Arrah riots, and countless others, were most certainly representatives of a

larger “Hindu nation.” The Deobandis were kidding themselves if they believed

otherwise.212

Both Deobandis and Barelvis cited the Qur’an as the ultimate proof that their

respective positions were God-sanctioned, and, of course, such citations could be found

in abdundance in their respective fәtawa. Mahmud Hasan cited Surah 60 (Al-

Mumtahanah), verses 8-9:

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8 Allah does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of

religion and do not expel you from their homes—from being righteous

toward them and acting justly toward them. Indeed, Allah loves those

who act justly.

9 Allah only forbids you from those who fight you because of religion and

expel you from your homes and aid in your expulsion—[forbids] that

you make allies of them. And whoever makes allies of them, then it is

those who are among the wrongdoers.213

Ahmad Riza answered back with another Qur’anic reference, earlier in the scripture

but chronologically received by the Prophet later—and thus, according to the most

generally acceptic theory, considered more authoritative and, in the case of

contradiction with earlier revelations, possessed of an annulling power. The reference

was Surah 9 (At-Tawbah), verse 73:

73 O Prophet, fight against the disbelievers and the hypocrites and be

harsh upon them. And their refuge is Hell, and wretched is the

destination.

The trouble was that such verses held an entirely distinct meaning for the

Deobandis, who interpreted “disbelievers” in a different light altogether. Observe, for

example, the following Qur’anic citations, used by Mahmud Hasan in his fәtwa.

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O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as

allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is any ally

to them among you—then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah

guides not the wrongdoing people. (Surah 5:51)

Let not believers take disbelievers as allies rather than believers. And

whoever [of you] does that has nothing with Allah, except when taking

precaution against them in prudence. And Allah warns you of Himself,

and to Allah is the [final] destination. (Surah 3:28)

Give tidings to the hypocrites that there is for them a painful

punishment—Those who take disbelievers as allies instead of the

believers. Do they seek with them honor [through power]? But indeed,

honor belongs to Allah entirely… O you who have believed, do not take

the disbelievers as allies instead of the believers. Do you wish to give

Allah against yourselves a clear cause? (Surah 4:138-139, 144)

These examples, cited by Mahmud Hasan to buoy up his argument against

cooperation with the Christians (i.e. the British), clearly illustrate the disconnect

between the Deobandis and the Barelvis. Indeed, for Ahmad Riza, the above citations

would only strengthen his own position; “disbelievers,” after all, referred to pagans like

the Hindus, not the Christian British. As for the verse from Surah 5, few Barelvis would

have considered the British an “ally” in any true sense of the term; a lack of desire on

their part to agitate against British rule did not make them the Christians’ “friends.”

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No, their motivation lay strictly in action based on shәri’at (as they interpreted it). The

same interpretational disengagement could be applied to the other Qur’anic verses cited

by Mahmud Hasan in his ruling; “how wretched” that “many of them [become] allies of

those who disbelieved” (Surah 5:80), “[y]ou will not find a people who believe in Allah

and the Last Day having affection for those who oppose Allah and His Messenger”

(Surah 58:22), “O you who believed, do not take My enemies and your enemies as allies”

(Surah 60:1)—and so on. Each of these verses might be used by both groups, the

Barelvis interpreting “disbeliever” as “Hindu” and the Deobandis interpreting

“disbeliever” as “Britisher.” When Mahmud Hasan asserted that “cooperation with

infidels [kuffar, which might also be translated as “idolaters,” “deniers,” or

“unbelievers”] is not permissible,” Ahmad Riza would have agreed wholeheartedly. The

question revolved around the identity of the kuffar—the British or the Hindus? The

Deobandis insisted on the former (especially given the political situation of the

subcontinent; had not the British made war upon the Muslims?), while the Barelvis

vehemently pointed to the latter.214

Mahmud Hasan considered Muslim quietism in the face of British tyranny a

refutation of the “the first duty of every Muslim.” Indeed, Muslims who harbored such

positions (like the Barelvis) had simply been fooled by “a cunning trick”—one that,

without shame, would steal the “most precious wealth of the Muslims”: that is, their

very faith. Thus Ahmad Riza and his ilk were only playing the British game, like

pawns. The great threat to Islam wasn’t Hinduism; Hinduism could be dealt with

peaceably over years of proselytization. Islam’s greatest threat was the theft of its faith,

led by the British by means of tyrannical government. A cursory look at the Muslim

world (and the vast portions of it then under the direct sway of London) should have

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been enough to convince any Muslim of this reality. Amongst a Hindu majority for a

thousand years, Islam had yet experienced major growth; under the British yoke for

barely a century-and-a-half, the faith had been battered and beaten by a waide variety of

forces, including political and social ones. And now, Mahmad Hasan lamented, “Iraq,

Palestine, and Syria” were “the targets of greed of the enemy of Islam,” while “the honor

of the caliphate” lay “in tatters.” Truly, there was no doubt in his mind about who the

real enemy of Islam was; that enemy certainly wasn’t the Hindu, however religiously

misguided Hindus might be. Was it because of the Hindus that the Muslims had “lost

their dignity, their honor, and their self-respect”? No—the British were the enemy,

combined with the Muslims’ own “ignorance and over-indulgence in frivolities.” That

Mahmud Hasan’s stance in this regard was adopted generally by the Jamiat Ulema-e-

Hind was expressed at that party’s October 1920/Muharram 1339 conference; during

the event the organization declared unequivocally, “The greatest enemy of Islam and

Muslims is the British.”215 And now Barelvi Muslims like Ahmad Riza Khan and

Naimuddin Moradabadi had the audacity to forbid their brothers from assisting fellow

Muslims—“the eagerness to earn the goodwill and friendship of a kafyr has led a brother

to chop the head of his own brother. Muslims have drunk the blood of Muslims.”

Indeed, the condition of the caliphate had much to do with Muslim collaboration with,

of all things, the British behemoth.

You know it better than me that the thunder and fire that burned the

tents of the Islamic world and set fire to the castle of the Islamic

caliphate came from the hot blood of Arabs and Indians. And a great

portion of…the wealth with which the Christians have succeeded in

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subjugating Muslim nations came from your hard labor. Thus, is there

any stupid and thick-headed Muslim who won’t understand the results of

cooperation with the Christians? (Italics added.)

Among Mahmud Hasan’s “stupid and thick-headed” was the Barelvi leadership. To

them he said, “[This] is the time to act with Islamic spirit for the honor and prestige of

our religion.” And then the olive-branch: “I fear that differences, big or small, among

‘alәma might dampen [our] spirit and courage.” Despite those differences, then, they

should work together—not necessarily by “grab[bing] a sword and go[ing] to Iraq

and Syria for jyhad,” but to prevent at all costs the “strengthen[ing of] the hands of

[the] enemies of Islam.”216

Non-cooperation and Khilafat enjoyed initial success, organizing demonstrations,

strikes, protests, and general civil disobedience across Hindustan. When Mahmud

Hasan died on 30 November 1920/18 Rabi I 1339 (eleven months before Ahmad Riza

Khan, his true contemporary), things were looking up. The passing of shix ul-hynd,

leader of the second generation of Deobandi scholars and the inheritor of the Qasimi

program, occurred just months after his being released from prison and in the midst of

carrying out the political agitation for which he was known. He was buried at the small

cemetery adjacent to the school that had played such a central role in his life, next to the

grave of his own mentor, Muhammad Qasim. But shix ul-hynd didn’t give up the ghost

before presiding over the second annual conference of the JUH in Delhi, and traveling

to Aligarh to lay the foundation of the Jamia Millia Islamia.217 The latter school would

later move to Delhi, where it is located at the time of this writing.

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The meeting in Delhi was momentous; an estimated five hundred scholars from all

over India—hailing from as far afield as the northwest frontier and border areas, Sindh,

Punjab, Bihar, Bengal, and Assam—there resolved to call upon Muslims across the

subcontinent to cease any form of support for the British government. This was clearly

a move inspired by the non-cooperation program, tied up in the efforts of the Khilafat

movement. The presence of the old Deobandi head, who served as the assembly’s

presiding officer, added to the meeting’s importance; for those assembled it must have

been thrilling, injecting a psychological boost to morale, to see the aged Mahmud, fresh

from his Malta prison but now free and politically active once more, seated on the

platform before them (little did they know, surely, that he would pass away only days

later). In the end, the November 1920/Rabi I 1339 Delhi conference of the JUH

produced a juridical ruling, signed by four hundred seventy-four religious scholars,

forbidding Muslim employment in any capacity whatsoever within the British

government structure—whether as a municipal council member, a soldier, or even a

businessman engaged in a transaction with the “enemies of the faith.” The ruling was

distributed far and wide across Hindustan. (The next year, 1921/1339, the British

government reportedly confiscated all copies of the fәtwa that it could find, while many

of its signers were arrested and incarcerated, sentenced to two-year imprisonment.)218

Immediately after the Delhi JUH conference, in an initiatory speech at the Jamia

Millia Islamia inauguration at Aligarh, Mahmud Hasan described the institution as “an

independent university which has nothing to do with government subsidy and

interference [an obvious jab at Sir Sayyid’s school, as well as some Barelvi educational

institutions then accepting grants from the British ruling power as Ahmad Riza had

instructed] and whose organization is based on Islamic principles and national

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aspirations.” He may as well have been describing the dar ul’alwm at Deoband. It was

fitting, perhaps, that he would eulogize such an establishment—like the one around

which his own life had revolved—in the final hours of his life.

Accompanying him on this, his final journey, was one of the leaders of Deoband’s

“third generation”—a middle-aged ‘alym who had helped him write his masterwork (a

multi-volume commentary on the Qur’an) and who had been as politically active and

ardently loyal as anyone at the university in Deoband. His name was Shabbir Ahmad

Usmani.

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3 - THE IDEA OF PAKISTAN: The Rivalry in Pre-Partition

Politics, 1921-1947

‘See for yourself,’ Bakshiji said. ‘In our group there are Sikhs, Hindus and

Muslims. There stands Aziz. Here is Hakimji.’

‘Aziz and Hakim are the dogs of the Hindus. We do not hate the Hindus, but we

detest their dogs.’

EXCERPT FROM BHISHAM SAHNI’S TAMAS

The year 1921/1338-1339 was, in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, “a year of great

tension,” with “much to irritate and annoy and unnerve the official” and “a strange

mixture of nationalism and politics and religion and mysticism and fanaticism.”1 Such

was the atmosphere when the political aspect of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry came into

its own within the context of pre-Partition independence politics in India. In order to

faciliate an in-depth examination of the rivalry during the period in question, the reader

will be presented with the brief biographies of four ‘alәma (two Barelvi, two Deobandi)

in addition to the continuation of the central narrative. Each of the four scholars was

born between 1879/1296 and 1886/1303, and each passed away not long after the

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subcontinental Partition, between 1948/1367 and 1957/1376. Most importantly, each

played a major role within their respective communities in the religio-political battles

waged across the Indian subcontinent before 1947/1366. It is hoped that their histories

might bring the political contest between Deobandi and Barelvi—and the intra-sect

divisions that accompanied it—to life.

By the early 1920s, “it was Hindu-Musalman ki jai everywhere,” according to one

eyewitness, though behind the ambiguous Indian nationalism “could be distinguished a

Hindu nationalism” and “a Moslem nationalism partly looking beyond the frontiers of

India,” though “for the time being they overlapped and all pulled together.”2 As Britain

pushed back the implementation of any meaningful reforms in government that might

allow for “Indian governance over India,” the “feeling against Great Britain” was

“aggravating…every day.”3 The frustration over seeming British intractability was

thus the glue holding the two communities together. Meanwhile, the JUH continued to

campaign for the protection of the caliphate. In December 1922/Rabi II 1341, the JUH

held a conference at Gaya, conferring upon Mustapha Kemal the grand title of “Savior

of the Caliphate,” at the same time passing a resolution requesting the Kemalists to “try

to keep the Calpih’s prestige and power intact.” Critically, the JUH officially

acknowledged Sultan Abdul Medjid as Islam’s one and only xәlifәħ (in stark contrast to

the Barlevi position, aforementioned).4 The JUH may have truly believed that Atatürk

would protect the caliphate (though it was clear from some of the conference’s speeches

that Mustapha Kemal’s curtailment of the sultan’s powers had the ‘alәma worried), but

it seems more likely that the organization was simply hoping that an ego-stoke might

soften the Turkish leader’s attitude towards the sultan. In any case, the JUH enjoyed

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the Congress’ support in these efforts. Indeed, the “Moslem Conference” (as it was

known) of December 1922/Rabi II 1341 was more or less a Congress meeting for

Muslims only; its resolutions were even submitted afterwards to the Congress “for final

decision.” The arrangement underscored the Muslims’ resolve for joint action with

Hindus against the common British threat. Indeed, along with the conference’s Turkey-

centric agenda, the Muslim assemblage advocated “the formation of a national pact to

secure Hindu-Moslem unity.”5

And Muslim members of the Congress weren’t only interested in the caliphate issue.

Some of the most radical elements within the Congress were Muslims—like

Muhammad ‘Ali (at the time, Deobandi-leaning, though this would change later when

he “repented” at the feet of Barelvi leader Naimuddin Moradabadi). On 1 January

1924/23 Jumada 1342, for example, Muhammad ‘Ali declared that “a demand for swәraj

is impossible without complete independence,” and that independence was “essential

whether Indians were within or without the British Empire.” India must, ‘Ali

contended, “cut the cackle”—in other words, stop all the chattering and actually do

something. ‘Ali was tired of all the talk; it was time for action. “By merely shouting for

liberty Indians [make] themselves the laughing stock of the world,” he said. Perhaps it

was time to “walk out of their [the British] Empire” for good. With this position,

Muhammad ‘Ali had surpassed even Gandhi in his demands. Just over a year after the

JUH’s December 1922/Rabi II 1341 Conference, the party met again (1 January

1924/23 Jumada I 1342) for a conference in Cocanada (present-day Kakinada) on India’s

east coast, where delegates continued to express confidence in the new Turkish regime.

Still, it was clear that patience was running thin—shouldn’t this issue have been put to

rest by now? An idea was presented: the ‘alәma, as guardians of the ummәt, should hold

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a global conference “of Muslim divines and leaders from all parts of the world” in order

to finally settle the question of the caliph’s political position “in light of the injuctions of

the Koran.” This was necessary because the caliph “must be a link between Moslems

throughout the world” (a poisition that obviously flew in the face of Ahmad Riza’s

rulings).6 The Muslims of India, too, “must owe him allegiance.” In all of this, and

despite the pan-Islamic nature of Khilafatism (including their calls for allegiance to a

technically foreign politico-religious figure), the Congress continued to support the

Khilafatists and the JUH. Had the caliphate been preserved, it likely would have

remained a hot-button Deobandi-Barelvi issue, widening the gulf between the two

schools.

But this soon became a moot point—as did Hindu-Muslim unity, which unraveled

quickly when Khilafat became a non-issue. On 9 March 1924/2 Sh’aban 1342, the New

York Times headline, TURKS STIR ALL ISLAM BY DEPOSING CALIPH, signaled the abrupt

removal of the Khilafat phenomenon’s central purpose; just like that, the movement to

protect and restore the caliphate came crashing down. There was no caliphate. This

meant, of course, that the hoped-for world conference of Muslim scholars proposed by

the JUH never took place, and it was soon made evident that any confidence in the

Turkish government had been seriously misplaced. In the end, Barelvi leader Ahmad

Riza Khan’s warnings about the practical inability of the Indian Muslims to affect the

Ottoman caliphate situation proved annoyingly correct.

The 1924/1342 collapse of the Ottoman caliphate pushed Muslim politics in India

into a state of confusion. The Muslim League was still more or less a non-entity, made

seemingly insignificant by the Khilafatists over the previous several years. With the

Turkish sultan’s fall, the Khilafatists themselves lost the proverbial wind in their sails.

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As for the Congress Muslims, these were “in disarray” without the propellant of the

Khilfatat issue driving their base.7 It was a time of regrouping, of licking wounds and

figuring out where to go from here. For many, the zeal of the last several years

wouldn’t return until Gandhi’s relaunch of the non-cooperation movement in

1930/1348. The “fall[ing] apart” of 1920s/1330s-1340s national Muslim politics was

helped in part, too, by the Government of India Act of 1919/1337, which

institutionalized the concept of diarchy, shifting politics away from the center (and from

pan-Indian issues) to the provinces. The shift helped bring local issues to the fore,

issues that were less likely to be split along broad, communal lines—which might have

resulted in less communal politics at the national level. But with separate electorates,

elites continuted to stress their “Muslimness.” After all, the reforms that had granted

the Muslims an official, state-sponsored separateness motivated such individuals to step

forward and claim to be the legitimate representatives of the community (and thus

deserving of the new government’s “patronage”).8 And while it may be exaggerating

the effect of the 1919/1337 Act to say, as some scholars of South Asian history do, that

it was the legislation that was mostly responsible for terminating the united Hindu-

Muslim political activism of the 19-teens/13-thirties (Khilafat remained a force, for

example, years after the act was made law), the Act did pander to influencial Muslim

elites, many of whom continued to be—or quickly became—loyal to the British

government.

Even before this, however, the joint Hindu-Muslim movement engineered by the

Khilafat Committee and Gandhi’s Congress had suffered a set of debilitating losses from

which it would never recover, at least in terms of presenting a unified front. The

Mahatma’s own languishing in prison (arrested for “sedition”) for almost two years,

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from early 1922/mid-1340 to early 1924/mid-1342, removed a key facilitator of Hindu-

Muslim cooperation; for years after he emerged, too, the symbolic leader of the

nationalist movement distanced himself from politics significantly (despite his being

made president of the Congress in 1925/1343), preferring instead to concentrate on

local, internal efforts for social reform rather than on grand, nationwide political

agitation. Then there was the Muslim League; it had never embraced Khilafat, and held

fast to its position. Some Hindu organizations, too—including the now-powerful Hindu

Mahasabha—were critical of the Khilafat movement’s goals and of the Congress for

seeking out partnership therewith. Meanwhile, Muslim scholars like Ahmad Riza and

his disciples had continued to criticize both the effort itself as well as the movement’s

cooperation with Hindus; their arguments struck home to many, who watched new

developments—like the highly successful recoversion efforts (usually from Muslim to

Hindu) across India of Swami Dayanand Saraswati’s disciples engaged in shuddhikәrәn

and sәngәTәn (popularly known as the Shuddhi Movement, and considered by many

Muslims as nothing more than an “armed terrorist” phenomenon).9 In 1921/1339,

Muslim peasants in India’s Malabar region (known as Mohplas), who “became

convinced that the rule of the Khalifa had been established in India,” violently rioted

against their Hindu landlords; thousands died, mostly among the Moplahs themselves,

during the six-month-long government attempt to quell the uprising.10 This was a

period, too, when the Urdu-Hindi conflict was flaring up again (provoking Gandhi to

push for a single, merged language—Hindustani—written in either script; his efforts

failed). The Muslim hyjrәt movement, in which thousands of Muslims had migrated out

of India to Afghanistan only to be turned back, penniless, by the Afghan government,

had resulted in numberless cases of Muslim families returning home only to find their

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property occupied by erstwhile (and mostly Hindu) neighbors; tension over the issue

turned violent in several instances. To top it off, many of the Hindu and Muslim leaders

who had helped foster inter-communal unity—and might have continued to do so had

they been free—were locked up in British prisons, having organized demonstration after

demonstration in the wake of the highfalutin November/Rabi I visit to India of Britain’s

Prince of Wales. Indeed, by year’s end some twenty thousand Indians had been

imprisoned in the British backlash to these and other anti-government protests.11

But worst of all, just before Gandhi’s March 1922/Rajab 1340 arrest, two dozen

policemen were burned alive by a mob at Chauri Chaura; the event prompted Gandhi to

completely suspend his non-cooperation movement, a move that stunned thousands of

already-jailed non-cooperation activists and led to bitter criticisms against the Mahatma

from Khilafat leaders like the ‘Ali brothers. Indeed, after the Chauri Chaura incident,

the ‘Alis disassociated themselves from Gandhi altogether (they would later join the

League—and many Muslims would follow their lead in this regard). Later that year,

the police and military were forced to occupy Multan, where the “tension” was “acute,”

in order to stop the deadly communal riots rocking the city;12 many Hindus would

subsequently rally to the cry of “Malabar and Multan” as part of this revitalized

“communal resurgence.”13 Indeed, almost a full year before the Ottoman caliphate was

scrapped, W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez, a New York Times correspondent who had been

born in India and toured the subcontinent between 1921 and 1922/1339 and 1340,

described “Moslem Indian” support of Gandhi as “half-hearted,” anyway. “Even as I

write,” said Tinckom-Fernandez, “Moslem and Hindu communities at Ahmedabad, at

Multan and other places in India are being kept from doing each other violence by

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British troops and police.” The subtitle of his May 1923/Shawwal 1341 article: “Bonds

With Hindus Weakening.”14

Indeed, Atatürk’s abolishment of the caliphate was simply the deathblow to any

comparable future Hindu-Muslim cooperation. In the words of Tinckom-Fernandez,

“the Treaty of Sèvres wrecked Gandhism.”15 He was half-right.

Naimuddin Moradabadi: father of political Barelvism.

Many of Ahmad Riza Khan’s inner circle (his xәlifәħs) would, in the decade

following his death, play leading roles as representatives of the Barelvi movement

during Khilafat’s heyday, in the face of a surging Indian nationalist movement. Sanyal

describes this group as Ahmad Riza’s “lieutenants or right-hand men who could be

counted on to debate with an opponent, run a newspaper or school…and generally

promote the goals of the movement in their hometowns.”16

One of these men was Naimuddin Moradabadi. Born in 1882/1299 in what is today

the northwestern corner of Uttar Pradesh (about a hundred miles from Delhi) in

Moradabad, young Naimuddin had, by age twenty, memorized the Qur’an, learned

Persian and Arabic, trained in traditional medicine (țybb), completed the dәrs-e-nyžami,

and trained as a writer of fәtawa. Most of his education had taken place in a school

called Madrasah Imdadia, located within a stone’s throw of the Muhammad Qasim-

founded Jamia Qasimia Madrasah-e-Shahi; “what impact this proximity to a Deobandi

school may have had on the young Na’im ud-Din is unknown,” writes Sanyal. What is

known is that his father was a disciple of Muhammad Qasim—until, so the story goes,

he read Ahmad Riza Khan’s 1902/1320 juridical ruling harshly condemning the chief

founder of Deobandism. It is likely that Naimuddin Moradabadi played a role in his

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father’s rejection of the Deobandi school, considering that he (Naimuddin) was in his

twenties at the time and already a devoted follower of the Bareilly divine. In any case,

Naimuddin early on published works in defense of Muhammad’s knowledge of the

unseen, in addition to works attacking “Wahhabism,” and thereby quickly gained the

notice and admiration of Ahmad Riza Khan. Naimuddin also rapidly developed a

reputation as a skilled debater, taking on Deobandis and others as his opponents.

Indeed, just as the fәtwa was Ahmad Riza Khan’s forte, the debate became Naimuddin’s,

and Ahmad Riza would often ask the young Moradabadi, a quarter-century his junior,

to represent the Barelvi side in such contests all over India.17 But by the time of

Naimuddin Moradabadi’s 1948/1367 death, he would be known for much more than his

semantic skill.

After the passing of Barelvism’s “founder,” Naimuddin Moradabadi quickly moved

into a powerful position of leadership within the movement, partially (some would say

mostly) filling the vacuum left behind by the larger-than-life Ahmad Riza. One of his

first moves was to found the Jamia Naeemia (around 1920/1338, perhaps before the

divine out of Bareilly died), arguably his most long-lasting legacy, and certainly so

outside of the political realm. (This was around the same time that Naimuddin had

issued the famous Barelvi fәtwa, aforementioned, opposing non-cooperation, forbidding

Muslims from participating in it, and warning them of the dangers of Hindu-Muslim

cooperation.) The school was located in Naimuddin’s hometown of Moradabad and

became a regional center for Barelvi activism. At least three years before the founding

of the school however—in 1917/1335—Naimuddin organized the Jama’at-e-Riza-e-

Mustafa, a group whose mission was to curb, and if possible reverse, the tide of

reconversions threatening the Muslim community in the wake of the Shuddhi

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movement;18 it would also act as a quasi-political organ when required (as in opposition

to the Deobandi-dominated JUH, for example). The Jama’at-e-Riza-e-Mustafa is

credited with preventing around four hundred thousand reconversions to Hinduism,

especially among the poor Muslims of the eastern UP and in the area known today as

the Indian state of Rajasthan.19 His reputation as a Barelvi divine was such that both

‘Abd ul-Bari and Muhammad ‘Ali—major Muslim religious and political figures in their

own right, of course—came to him to perform twbәħ, or repentance; this was partially to

absolve them of sins they had ostensibly committed as leaders of the Khilafat

movement.20 Indeed, on this occastion ‘Abd ul-Bari explained that he had “accepted the

viewpoint of Ahmad Riza Khan,” and his statement in this regard was published on 20

May 1921/12 Ramadan 1339 in a Lucknow newspaper. Muhammad ‘Ali’s own

“repentance” came almost a decade later, in 1930/1349, towards the end of the year.21

This is significant in that these two well-known leaders, in denouncing their “old ways”

(including intimate cooperation with both Deobandis and Hindus), came to one of the

most visibly “Barelvi” figures (perhaps the most “Barelvi,” along with Ahmad Riza’s own

son, Hamid Riza Khan) in all of Hindustan. In the mid-1920s/1340s, Naimuddin

Moradabadi—who warned his fellow Muslims that the rising Hindu generation would,

in the coming decades, “play Holi with [Muslim] blood”—invited “Sunni” (i.e. Barelvi

and Barelvi-leaning) religious scholars and pirs “from all parts of the country” to gather

together in a grand meeting in his hometown.22 It was time to deal with the Deobandi

threat to the ummәt .

But before examining this meeting, a quick note on what might be called “the

Hindu-Muslim political spectrum” may be in order. Over the coming years, the various

parties populating the Hindu-Muslim political spectrum might generally be classified

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into four groups—two Muslim, two Hindu (see figure 3.1). The first Muslim group

(M1) might be called the “Islamic exclusionists,” made up of the retooled Muslim

League (especially from the 1930s/1350s), most Barelvis, and generally any Muslim

who refused to work with the Hindus in any political capacity. At first, this group

sought power and security by means of its relationship with the British; as long as the

latter were in charge, the Muslims’ vulnerability as a minority people surrounded by the

Figure 3.1. The Muslim-Hindi political spectrum within the context of pre-

Partition independence politics.

majority Hindu population remained more or less a non-issue. Later, as the

independence movement heated up and it became clear that the expulsion of the British

from the subcontinent was no longer a wishful nationalist dream (but was, in fact, a

likely scenario), this group would advocate the partition of Hindustan into completely

independent Muslim and majority-Hindu zones as the solution to the minority-majority

problem. This first Muslim group would be mirrored on the other end of the spectrum

by a similar Hindu one (H1), the “Hindu exclusionists,” made up of Hindutva-inspired

entities, the Hindu Mahasabha, its offshoots, and other explicitly Hindu nationalist

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organizations—groups that would, like their Muslim counterparts in M1, refuse to

work with Muslims. It was largely the actions of these two groups that fueled each

other, driving Hindus and Muslims alike (who otherwise might have found a place

among the “inclusionists” of their spheres) into the exclusionary camps. In the middle,

M2 and H2 represented the “Muslim inclusionists” and the “Hindu inclusionists,”

respectively; the former was made up of Congressite Muslims, most Deobandis, and

other Muslims who felt that the risks of working together with Hindus were far

outweighed by the danger posed to Islam, the Muslim community, South Asian Islamic

culture, and the future prospects of Islam on the subcontinent by the creation of

Pakistan. At first many of these Muslims would be driven by a hatred of the British,

deep-seeded and passed on over several generations since the collapse of Muslim power

in the eighteenth/twelfth century. Later that animosity would be supplemented by a

belief that Islam could flourish (and her cultural centers be preserved) best in a united

India, as well as by the resolution that if a “Pakistan” were to be created in South Asia, it

would only give the British a continued foothold in the region.

Sentiments expressed by Ahmad Riza Khan’s son, Hamid Riza Khan, illustrate well

the early position of the Muslims of M1, and it is here that we return to Naimuddin

Moradabadi’s seminal meeting. The year was 1925/1343, and the occasion was the All-

India Sunni Conference’s first summit; the AISC was a Barelvi-dominated organization

whose aims included the unification of “the Sunni majority” under a single political,

economic, and socio-religious platform. The four-day gathering, from 16-19 March/20-

23 Sh’aban, was held at Naimuddin Moradabadi’s recently founded Jamia Naeemia, and,

as previously mentioned, the more than two hundred and fifty religious scholars in

attendance (like the influential Punjabi pir Jama’at ‘Ali Shah) came at his personal

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invitation.23 Just a few months before, Moradabad had been the scene of serious

communal riots, as “a large number of Mohammedans” had attacked and seriously

injured a group of Hindus, then desecrated several Hindu temples.24 This communal

schism only served to reinforce what seemed to be the consensus of the conference.

Facing the voluminous crowd of religious scholars gathered together in this volatile

district, Hamid Riza argued that political independence from the British for India would

only lead to Hindu domination over the Muslim minority. As long as British power was

secure, so, too, was Muslim security in an India populated mostly by Hindus. Remove

that power and the Hindus would lord over the Islamic community, among other

depravations enacting legislation—enforced by the guns of government—repugnant to

shәri’at. No: Muslim religious leaders should stop wasting their time working with the

nationalist movement in the vain dream of pushing out the British (in essence digging

their own graves) and instead focus, as Ahmad Riza Khan had always admonished, on

bettering the economic situation of and improving education within the Muslim

community. Hamid Riza’s statements at the 1925/1343 All-India Sunni Conference

meeting clearly reveal M1’s loyalist preferences—a loyalty not borne of any sense of

real fealty to the British, but rather out of a practical anxiety for what a Hindu-

dominated Indian state might do to Islam’s prospects on the subcontinent. For now,

independence was far from a certainty; once that changed, however, the Barelvi call, like

that of the rest of M1, would be for complete political and territorial partition. Other

themes prevalent at the gathering included the Muslim migration option, the Khilafat

movement, right-wing Hindu groups, and “the final fate of the Muslim community’s

independent identity.”25 Barelvi scholars and pirs were determined to set up branches of

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the All-India Sunni Conference, as well as a mәdarys network to rival their Deobandi

counterparts, all over India.

The All-India Sunni Conference (or, as it was officially known, the Jamiat-e-‘Aliyah

al-Markaziah) arose as a mostly Barelvi response to the Deobandi-dominated JUH and

the Khilafat movement. The group was “the first political platform of the Barelvi

[‘alәma].”26 Membership criteria were kept strict so as to prevent any Deobandi from

becoming one with the party; indeed, only a true (or “orthodox”) “Sunni” could join its

ranks, with orthodoxy explicitly defined by the group on the organization’s membership

form. A true Sunni, the AISC held, was one who followed the mәslәk of the great

Jahangir- and Shah Jahan-era Islamic scholar and Sufi Abdul Haqq Dehlavi;

seventeenth-century/tenth-century Farangi Mahali scholar Abdul ‘Ali (the

aforementioned bәhәr ul’alwm); the aforementioned Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi; Fazl-e Rasul

Badayuni (who, mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, was a contemporary of Fazl-e-Haq

Khairabadi, a chief “Barelvi” Mutiny figure, and a fierce opponent of Wahhabism); and,

of course, first “Barelvi” Ahmad Riza Khan of Bareilly.27 The Conference admonished

Muslims everywhere against joining the Indian National Congress. And though Hamid

Riza Khan would participate as a speaker, and influential Muslim leaders like Jamaat

‘Ali Shah (the pir of ‘Alipur Sayyidan Sharif) take prominent roles (the sәyyid was elected

the organization’s president at the 1925/1343 meeting), the true founder of the

organization was Naimuddin Moradabadi, at whose institution the conference took

place. Naimuddin would be elected the group’s first general secretary (nazym-e-‘alәħ).

The All-India Sunni Conference came away from its first meeting with a set of

specific objectives, touched upon by Hamid Riza and outlined in the organization’s six

official aims. First and foremost, the Conference would strive to act as a vehicle of

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unification for the subcontinent’s Sunni community. “Sunni” here was, as always, a

(Barelvi) catchword for the Barelvis themselves, or “Ahl-e-Sunnat wal Jamaat” (defined

by one Barelvi group as “the largest group of Muslims and the only group whose beliefs

and teachings are truly in accordance with the Holy Quran and Sunnat of the Holy

Prophet”);28 perhaps more accurately, though, the label might be considered an

exclusionary term, discounting not only the Shi’a but also Sunnis possessed of a more

“Wahhabi” bent—by far the most prominent (and populous) among them the

Deobandis. By using the term, the Barelvis were pushing the Deobandis and others out

of the Sunni umbrella altogether. The goal to unite Indian “Sunnis” was to be brought

about through a variety of means. These included the establishment of regional and

local religious organizations, active in their areas but linked to the subcontinent-wide

All-India Sunni Conference; the organization of proselytizing efforts (especially aimed

at Muslims who might otherwise fall under Deobandi sway); and the founding of

religious schools—certainly a reaction to successful Deobandi efforts in this regard.

The rest of the Conference platform dealt with the improvement of Muslim social

conditions vis-à-vis the promotion of intra-community (i.e. Muslim community)

business and trade, the fulfilling of the employment needs of Muslims, and the freeing of

Muslims from the shackles of debt.

The AISC would meet at least four more times between 1925/1343 and 1930/1349,

with conferences in Bihar (16-18 May 1927/14-16 Dh’ul Q’adah 1345; it was during this

gathering that Hamid Riza was elected the organization’s next president), again in

Moradabad (in August 1928/Safar 1347), a month later (September/Rabi I) in the same

city, and in Bengal (20-21 May 1930/21-22 Dh’ul Hijja 1348). The September

1928/Rabi I 1347 conference in Moradabad was particularly significant in that the

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AISC came out strongly and formally against the Nehru Report (about which more

later). The Congress-produced document was proof, alleged the Barelvis, that the

Hindus were only manipulating their Muslim co-activists for their own political

advantage. A resolution passed (“unanimously”) by the conference on this regard stated,

“This meeting considers the Nehru Committee Report as dangerous for the interests of

the Muslims, and condemn it.”29 The 1930/1348 Bengal conference went further,

admonishing Muslims to stay away from the INC, out-and-out condemning the JUH for

its pro-Congress stance, and describing its (the JUH’s) leadership as “working like

puppets in the hands of the Hindus.” The Deobandis, the Sunni Conference had

officially asserted, had lost any mandate it might have once possessed as representatives

of Islam or the ummәt in South Asia.30 By 1930/1348, then, it can be accurately stated

that the Barelvis and the Deobandis, heretofore engaged in what might be called a

political cold war among the subcontinent’s Muslim communities for religio-political

supremancy and “sole spokesparty” status, now faced one another as explicit political

enemies.

In December of 1930/Rajab of 1349, the Muslim League held its all-India

conference at Allahabad, none other than Muhammad Iqbal presiding. The poet-

philosopher emphasized what would become the underlining facet of the League’s

Pakistan pitch: “The principal of European democracy cannot be applied to India

without recognizing the fact of communal groups. The Muslim demand for the creation

of a Muslim India within India is, therefore, perfectly justified.” Indeed, Iqbal went on

to call for just that—and got specific, proposing the creation of a separate, Muslim state

on the subcontinent, carved out of the northwestern regions (more or less equivalent to

Pakistan’s present-day boundaries). “I would like to see the Punjab, North-West

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Frontier Province, Sindh, and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State.” This, he

said, was “the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.”31 Around the

same time, of course, Choudhary Rahmat ‘Ali and his friends—students at Cambridge—

used the designation “Pakistan” for the first time. Their fantasy state, like Iqbal’s,

essentially included what one would recognize as Pakistan as of the time of this writing.

Interestingly—and perhaps significantly—neither Iqbal nor ‘Ali included Bengal in

their hoped-for scenarios for a new Indian Islamic state. And at least one Pakistani

historian has identified Naimuddin Moradabadi as “most probably” the first Barelvi

scholar to embrace the propositions of Iqbal’s 1930/1349 Allahabad address.32

Thousands would follow suit, even if their collective vision for the exact nature of a

future Pakistan almost assuredly differed from that of Iqbal himself. (One historian has

deftly observed that “there is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it,”

an idea that seems to aptly describe the various “images” of a future Pakistan; the big

question was this: whose “mythic images” would serve as the true reflection of

Pakistan’s “quintessential national culture?”)33 Most Pakistan supporters seem to have

been driven less by an animosity against the British (one Pakistani scholar has noted

that even into the early 1930s/1350s, the Muslim League continued to be “dominated

by pro-British elements”)34 than anxiety about how Muslims might fare in a Hindu-

majority (and therefore Hindu-controlled) western-style democracy—just as Iqbal had

said. Some, too, were driven to support Pakistan despite opposition to the League (and

to Congress, for that matter). “Already there is no justice and much faction,” one

Muslim subedar near Shewa told an English observer in 1946/1365. “We don’t want

either League or Congress. What we want is tranquility, so there must be division” (italics

added).35

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Speaking of Iqbal and the League, it should be noted that later Barelvi scholars

would appropriate the legacies of Iqbal and even Jinnah as part of their own narrative.

While Deobandi histories write of the “freedom movement,” expounding upon the

religio-political exploits of figures like Mahmud Hasan, Husain Ahmed Madani, and

even (in Pakistan) Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, they remain mostly quiet when it comes to

Iqbal and Jinnah (and, of course, any of the Barelvi leadership). Meanwhile, Barelvi

historians write of the “Pakistan movement,” granting space to Iqbal and Jinnah as well

as Ahmad Riza Khan, Naimuddin Moradabadi, and the All-India Sunni Conference.

Iqbal’s positions vis-à-vis the Khilafat movement, as well as his two-nation theory, are

prominent and underscored in the Barelvi narrative (often including verse he composed

to communicate his political views). Jinnah’s role as a model Muslim—a devout Sunni,

it is insisted, not a Shi’i—who has unfairly been labeled a secularist is also highlighted

in the Barelvi histories.36 The Aligarh movement revolving around Sir Sayyid’s Anglo-

Oriental University is similary treated as part and parcel of the Barelvi story.

Deobandi historians are less kind to Jinnah, the League, and the Aligarhists—a

phenomenon that is especially true in India.

The rumblings for a separate state surely lent added political emphasis to the All-

India Sunni Conference’s second subcontinent-wide gathering in 1935/1354 at

Badayun, a town that, as previously mentioned, had long been a seat of Barelvi

influence. It had been a decade since the organization’s first gathering in Moradabad,

and five years since Iqbal’s statements to the Muslim League, but the AISC under

Naimuddin Moradabadi (and pir Jamaat ‘Ali Shah, who was again elected the

organization’s president on this occasion)37 had decided the time had come to make

several formal pronouncements. First, the Barelvi organization officially declared its

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support for the “two-nation theory” (though the gathered scholars were apt to trace the

idea to Ahmad Riza rather than to Jinnah or Iqbal). Second, and perhaps more

importantly from a political point-of-view, the Sunni Conference called for outright

independence for the subcontinent’s Muslims—independence not so much from the

British as from Hindu-dominated India. Geographically, that independence should

resemble the proposition put forward by Iqbal and subsequently adopted by the All-

India Muslim League.38 Though the Conference kept its distance, technically speaking,

from the League (not declaring itself, for example, an official ally of the secular AIML,

nor seeking out Jinnah to organize united efforts in support of their joint political

goals), it unambiguously fell in line with the League’s political agenda, even as the

Deobandis, under the leadership of the JUH, were striving for “composite nationalism”

and a united India. Such “falling in line,” however, was not done without reservation—

and conditions. Yes, the Barelvis at Badayun had articulated their vision, however

broadly, of a South Asian Islamic state. But they would support the League “only to the

extent that, in one part of Hindustan, the free governance of the Qur’an, of Islam, will

prevail.” Should the League pursue a different course, “no Sunni [Barelvi] will accept

it.” The League’s secular roots obviously clashed with the Barelvi ‘alәma’s goal of the

establishment of an explicitly and unambiguously Islamic state. Such fears were

articulated at the conference, too; those “professing the [kәlymәħ]” yet are “irritated by

the thought of an Islamic authority” should meet with disfavor in Pakistan, it was

argued. Thus the AISC’s support of the League was conditional, even if its call for

Pakistan was officially unequivocal. In a formal resolution adopted at the Badayun

conference, the Barelvi guiding lights announced that the AISC “fully supports the

demand for Pakistan,” an “Islamic state” for which the Barelvi ‘alәma and mәshayx were

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“prepared for whatever sacrifice may be necessary.” Pakistan, they maintained, would

be guided by “the Qur’an, hәdis, and the principles of fiqh.”39 These were the Barelvis’

“mythic images,” the symbols of their “quintessential national culture,” whatever the

League’s might be. (Jawaharlal Nehru would touch upon the ambiguous idea of

“Moslem culture” around this time, too, writing, “Is [Muslim culture] a kind of racial

memory of the great deeds of the Arabs, Persians, Turks, etc.? Or language? Or art

and music? Or customs? I do not remember any one referring to present-day Moslem

art or Moslem music. …[T]he influence of Persian has no element of religion about it.

…[Persian language and culture] is a common and precious heritage for all of us in

India. I have tried hard to understand what this ‘Moslem culture’ is, but I confess that I

have not succeeded… The Moselm peasantry and industrial workers are hardly

distinguishable from the Hindu.”)40

After the Congress’s landslide electoral victory in 1937/1356, the face of Indian

politics began to change quickly. This was, in some part, the fault of the INC itself,

which, flush with victory, rejected Muslim League participation in government

(actually, the League had demanded that any Muslim considered for governmental

position be vetted by itself—as self-appointed spokesparty of India’s Muslim

population—but the Congress had refused to recognize this foundational League claim).

Muslim leaders and their parties all over India looked on with mounting trepidation at

such developments, which seemed to confirm Jinnah’s long-time assertion that the

Hindu majority would be an abusive ruler. In the face of this perceived “Hindu”

arrogance, one by one these influencial figures (among them “large numbers” of Barelvi

or Barelvi-leaning pirs, ‘alәma, and other religious leaders) and Muslim parties began to

align themselves with Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah and his party. All-India Sunni

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Conference leader Jamaat ‘Ali Shah, for example, in 1938/1357 launched a tour of the

largely Congress-controlled northwestern frontier in support of Jinnah, the League, and

Muslim separateness, addressing “huge gatherings” in Rawalpindi, Kohat, Sialkot, and

Peshawar. This major figure within the predominantly Barelvi AISC condemned the

Deobandi ‘alәma who had sided with the Congress, praying “to God to unite the

Muslims and save them from the clutches of [the] pro-Hindu coterie of the so-called

Muslim scholars.” (By 1945/1364 he would characterize the Congress, with direct

allusion to its Muslim supporters, as “the party of infidels and apostates” and “the worst

enemy of the Muslims.”)41 Thus, and thanks in significant measure to Barelvi support,

the great electoral loser of 1937/1356 was transformed into “the champion of free Islam

against Hindu dominance.”42

From the late nineteenth century/thirteenth century, the division between the

Barelvis and the Deobandis was, in the words of Jaswant Singh, “exploited by the

British to neutralize the Deobandis and to entrap the Barelwis in the loyalist camp:

Quad Erat Demonstrandum.”43 This may have been true, but became more complicated

after the October 1921/Safar 1340 death of Ahmad Riza Khan, when a Barelvi split—

which had commenced in the volatile political climate in the decade before the great

man’s passing—saw many younger Ahl-e-Sunnat leaders move to the overtly anti-

British camp. But the British soon found an answer for that, too. In August

1938/Jumada II 1357, Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah met with India’s acting British viceroy

and offered his foreign overlord a deal. Simply put, the League leader promised that his

organization would remain loyal to the British—if the government recognized the

League as the sole mouthpiece of India’s Muslims (something Minto had agreed to back

in 1906/1324, when the League was founded, but had subsequently carried little weight

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due to realities on the ground, until recently). It was a wry move, but one that would

pay off, despite the viceroy’s initial dismissal of the offer, for after the breakout of World

War II the government of India readily agreed to Jinnah’s proposal, in line with its

long-established policy of setting up “the Muslim minority” as “the hope of the British

Government in India,” in the words of one Indian commentator writing many years

before the Jinnah-Linlithgow meeting.44 For decades, the British government had been

rewarding loyal Muslims with educational grants, a disproportionate number of

government posts, titles, honors, disproportionate representation in the councils, and

separate electorates, to name a few. Now the government had identified what it viewed

as the premier Muslim organization in India (or at least the one it preferred the most)

and offered its patronage in order to ensure its loyalty. Jinnah thus won his place as the

“sole spokesman” of South Asia’s Muslims—a position on which he would never

compromise, despite South Asian Islam’s multiplicity of communities, interests, and

divergent parties, and despite the fact that others claimed to possess similar status (or at

least a more legitimate claim to it); among these could certainly be counted the AISC

Barelvi leadership, who saw themselves as the standard-bearers of Indian Islam’s

majority (their foundational claim), as well as the JUH, who had long viewed itself as

the premier ‘alәma party in South Asia and who pointed to its central role in many a

national (and even pan-Islamic) movement for almost twenty years as compelling

evidence. (The idea that Jinnah could be the sole spokesman of India’s Muslims could

only have been motivated by political considerations, since it was obviously a ludicrous

claim. Even within the League, there were powerful voices opposing Jinnah’s

separatism. In fact, the Muslim League premiers in the two major provinces claimed by

Jinnah for Pakistan—the Punjab and Bengal—both stood adamantly against the idea;

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the Punjab’s Sikandar Hayat Khan mockingly referred to it as “Jinnahstan.”45 Right up

to independence, in August 1947/Ramadan 1366, the League was unable to win

absolute majorities in any of the Muslim-majority provinces. In the words of one

historian personally close to these events, “Jinnah’s scheme would foist Pakistan on

those not interested in it and leave out those who might welcome it.”)46 The terms of

the League head’s offer fit more squarely with the general Barelvi political position,

obviously, than with the Deobandi one. From the beginning, Ahmad Riza had preached

Muslim reform from within, and had identified the subcontinent’s Hindus (and its

apostate Muslim collaborators) as subcontinental Islam’s greatest threat. Viewed from

this perspective, Jinnah’s proposition entailing loyalty to the British was justifiable, and

it was therefore natural that so many Barelvis would fall into line behind the wiry

Karachi-born politician (something many of their leaders had done at the 1935/1354

Badayun conference of the AISC), while so many Deobandis, reared within the context

of a virulently anti-British tradition, would reject him entirely, especially after this

latest treachery.

That so many Barelvis, including several of its most notable leaders, had in fact done

exactly that vis-à-vis Jinnah and the League (that is, fallen in line behind them) was

demonstrated powerfully on 22 December 1939/10 Dh’ul Q’adah 1358, when Muslims

across India observed the Jinnah-inspired “Day of Deliverance” in celebration of the

resignation from provincial and national government office of Congress position-

holders across the country. The Congress move—supported strongly by Nehru but

only reluctantly by Gandhi—was meant as an INC protest against both not having been

consulted before Indian resources and military forces were committed to participation in

the Second World War as well as for the usual lack of any sort of independence promise

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from the government. As usual, Jinnah (who was reportedly “overjoyed” at the news of

the INC’s decision) took full political advantage of what was probably a rash move on

the part of the Congress, utilizing the situation to consolidate his position relative to the

British by promising “honorable” Muslim support while calling for an increase in

protection for Muslims by the government. His call for a Day of Deliverance—that is,

deliverance from Congress “tyranny”—was hailed by a segment of Muslims (including

many Barelvis) but condemned strongly by others (notably, the Congress’s Deobandi

supporters).

On the occasion of the controversial Day, two-time AISC president and influential

pir Jamaat ‘Ali Shah addressed a crowd in his hometown of ‘Alipur. “There are two

flags [in India],” he said, “one of Islam and the other of kufәr.” This would be the sharp

diametric presented by advocates of Pakistan in the months running up to Partition. “O

Muslims,” the great pir continued, “under which flag will you stand?” The crowd

reportedly answered, “Under the flag of Islam!” Jamaat ‘Ali then asked, “If anyone

standing under the flag of kufәr died, [would] you bury him in the Muslim graveyard?

[Would] you pray at his funeral?” “No! No!” came the multitude’s answer. And then

the critical statement: “The flag of the Muslim League,” proclaimed the eminent pir, “is

the flag of Islam.” His final enjoinder: “We must all join the League.”47 (Jamaat ‘Ali

Shah reportedly made similar statements even before the “Day of Deliverance.” On 22

April 1938/21 Safar 1357, he had addressed a crowd in Sialkot thus: “Dear Muslims,

today there are two banners. One belongs to Islam and the other to infidels. Which

will you choose?” The gathering allegedly “vowed to close their graveyards” on

Deobandis and other “co-religionists who have gone under the non-Muslim banners.”

Several other reports confirm that the old pir routinely equated rejection of the League

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with kufәr, or “disbelief.” “It is binding,” he told a gathering on 11 May 1938/11 Rabi I

1357, “on all the Muslims of India to join the Muslim League.” Such language would be

repeated by Jamaat ‘Ali in the critical years leading up to Partition, from 1945/1364 to

1947/1366).48 The effect on public (Muslim) opinion by such calls is difficult to

measure, of course, but was likely considerable. Indeed, without the League’s change of

strategy—without the co-opting of the pirs and mәshaix, of men like Naimuddin

Moradabadi and Jamaat ‘Ali Shah (not to mention, later, some key Deobandis like

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani)—it is difficult to see how Jinnah would have secured the

victory he eventually won.

General Barelvi support for the League was further cemented by that organization’s

formal adoption, in March 1940/Safar 1359, of the Lahore Resolution—a clear-cut

statement of purpose on the part of Jinnah and his party.49 As Hindus and Muslims

were two different nations, “the only course open to us,” Jinnah declared on the occasion

of the resolution’s passing, “is to allow the major nations separate homelands.” The

goal was now an unambiguously separate, absolutely independent (i.e. from Hindu

India) Muslim polity (or polities) on the subcontinent; “[t]he Muslim-majority

provinces in North Western and Eastern Zones of India should be grouped to constitute

Independent States,” the Resolution announced, “in which the constituent units shall be

autonomous and sovereign.”50 Before this momentous resolution, the idea of Pakistan

had been the domain of a small group, and the destiny of India’s Muslims had remained

a hotly contested topic possessed of a long spectrum of opinion voiced by a wide variety

of both secular and religious leaders. Post-Lahore Resolution, however, an increasing

number of Muslims appear to have been drawn to the League’s new, simple, and

infinitely measurable aim. This trend continued despite efforts by the JUH, the Ahrars,

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Shi’a political groups, and others to challenge the League’s claim to represent all

Muslims. In April 1940/Rabi I 1359, for example, the JUH—together with the Shi’a

Political Conference and the Majlis-e-Ahrar—organized an Azad [“Free”] Muslim

Conference, accusing the AIML of ignoring the real Muslim minority in the Hindu-

majority areas of India in favor of the Muslims who already enjoyed majority status in

their respective areas; Jinnah responded that these minority Muslims would be

minorities whether Pakistan was created or not—it was a choice between all Muslims

under Hindu Raj, or only some.51 Perhaps these challenges from within the Muslim

community didn’t matter, since the British had already selected the League as its

approved Muslim voice.

Most Barelvis, it seems, could be counted among those supporting the League, at

least as far as the organization’s call for a separate homeland (i.e. separate from the

Hindu majority) was concerned, however their visions of a future subcontinental Islamic

state might have diverged from Jinnah’s in other respects. The AISC, under the

direction of Jamaat ‘Ali Shah and Naimuddin Moradabadi, sent delegates to the

League’s annual session on the occasion of the Resolution’s passing (Abdul Hamid

Badayuni and Abdul Ghafur Hazarvi, both actually League members), and Jamaat ‘Ali

himself issued a statement in the decision’s favor: “The Muslim League is the only

Islamic organization,” he said, taking a swipe at the Deobandis and their JUH.

“Therefore, I advise the Muslims [of India] to join it [the League], as no other party is

a well-wisher of the Muslims.” And then the final jab, a la Ahmad Riza: “It is futile to

think that the Hindu-dominated Congress can be sympathetic to them and support their

cause.”52 For his part, after the passage of the Lahore Resolution, Naimuddin

Moradabadi crisscrossed north India, delivering speeches in favor of Pakistan and the

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All-India Muslim League.53 In April 1941/Rabi I 1360, the Lahore Resolution’s call for,

essentially, the creation of Pakistan (Jinnah would say as much in an April 1941/Rabi I

1360 statement)54 was strengthened and clarified by the Madras Resolution (as it was

passed in a session of the League in that city), demanding “completely independent

States” carved from India’s northwest and eastern regions that together would

constitute “Muslim Free National Homelands.” Two years later (April 1943/Rabi II

1362) Jinnah would specifically admonish the pirs of India “to pray and exhort their

followers” to be willing to lay down their lives, if necessary, for the attainement of an

independent Islamic state on the subcontinent.55 The League’s appeal motivated many a

Barelvi leader to take to the road to campaign for Jinnah and Pakistan; Jamaat ‘Ali Shah,

for example, “despite old age and deteriorating health [being over a hundred years old

at the time],” toured eastern Punjab in 1944/1363 on just such a platform. The next

year he and other Barelvi scholars and shixs stumped for the League in, among other

places, Amritsar, where their party (dubbed by followers “the caravan of light”) was

greeted with the slogan-shout, “Long live әmir-e-myllәt [Jamaat ‘Ali Shah’s honorary

title], long live the Muslim League, and long live qayd-i-ә‘ažәm [Muhammad ‘Ali

Jinnah]!” An AISC meeting at the Jama mәsjyd in Amritsar saw Naimuddin

Moradabadi, along with several other powerful scholars (plus pir Jamaat ‘Ali Shah),

deliver “forceful” addresses in support of Pakistan.56

In January 1946/Safar 1365, thousands of Barelvis, including many scholars and

shaixs, traveled to Bareilly in order to commemorate the death anniversary of Ahmad

Riza Khan (who had passed away exactly twenty-five years before). It was normal, of

course, for throngs of disciples to assemble for the great divine’s ‘urs, but this particular

gathering in Bareilly evolved into a political meeting of sorts. The massive assemblage

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produced a formal expression of support for Pakistan. Perhaps more significantly, the

meeting clarified just what that meant—a state in which shәri’at must be established and

enforced. Anything less was unacceptable. A similar meeting, this time officially under

the aegis of the AISC, took place the next month in Etawah district, about ninety miles

due south of Badayun. Its call matched that of the Ahmad Riza ‘urs gathering.57 The

spontaneous nature of the political meeting brought forth by the annual ‘urs gathering

in Bareilly makes clearly recognizable the way the religio-political winds were blowing

among Barelvis across India. The general support for Pakistan was there, yes—but for

Pakistan as an explicitly Islamic state established according to the Sunni (i.e. Barelvi)

interpretation of Islamic law. Such powerful expressions underscore, perhaps, the

future disappointments of the Barelvis and their leaders when the Deobandis were given

an official place at the constitution-crafting table in independent Pakistan—while the

Ahl-e-Sunnat ‘alәma were left seemingly out in the cold. That perceived exclusion

would be even more painful given the fact that, four months later, on the occasion of the

All-India Sunni Conference’s largest gathering to date, Naimuddin Moradabadi would

be appointed chairman of an official AISC committee created to formulate a plan for

enshrining Islamic law within the Pakistani constitution. The result of this committee’s

work, largely undertaken by Naimuddin himself, was known as the “Eleven Points.”

The mega-gathering took place four months after Ahmad Riza Khan’s ‘urs and the

spontaneous political meeting that had accompanied it. According to Barelvi reports,

some five hundred Sufi shixs were joined by around seven thousand Barelvi or Barelvi-

leaning ‘alәma and not less than two hundred thousand other attendees. Led by

Naimuddin Moradabadi, as well as Zafaruddin Bihari and Ahmad Riza’s younger son

Mustafa, the conference’s focus was familiar to those who had attended the

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organization’s first two India-wide gatherings: on the spiritual uplift of Indian Muslims

through, among other things, preaching and missionary work (tәbliG) and the extension

of the Barelvi (or “Sunni”) mәdrәsәħ network through the establishment of more

mәdarys. But what made this mega-conference different, apart from the sheer number of

its attendees, was its enunciation of a hoped-for goal, the very purpose of such self-

improvement efforts. That goal was “Pakistan,” or a land of purity—a play on the

meaning of the word that would shortly become the name of a new Islamic state. “The

meaning of ‘Pakistan,’” newly elected AISC president Muhammad Ashrafi Kachhuchhavi

(d. 1961 AD) told the assembled thousands, “is an independent state of Islam and the

Qur’an, in a small part of India...” And then the crux of Muhammad Ashrafi’s point:

“[B]ut we [the AISC] are working for a grand ‘Pakistan’…the rule of Islam all over the

world.”58 This was where Muslim League goals diverged from those of the Barelvis

(and where Deobandis, in a future independent Pakistan, could later find some common

ground with their long-time theological rivals). What debate may have occurred at the

conference vis-à-vis Pakistan we may never know (there were, after all, some Barelvi

scholars and pirs who opposed the establishment of Pakistan, and certainly cooperation

with the Muslim League; support of the latter, according to one scholar of Barelvism,

was “the subject of considerable controversy” among Barelvi ‘alәma),59 but the

overarching message of the Varanasi (then called Benares) gathering was that the

Barelvis had much more revivalist (or, depending on one’s point-of-view, anti-revivalist)

work to do, especially in light of Deobandi and other “Wahhabi” gains among South

Asian Muslims; all this was to be done with the goal of “Pakistan” in mind. If the

League was to be the vehicle to accomplish the latter, it seems most Barelvi leaders

were willing to accept it as such. In any case, the resolution in favor of Pakistan at the

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1946/1365 Benares AISC gathering represented, in the words of M. Ahmad, “the climax

of support of the Sunni [Barelvi] [‘alәma] for the cause of Pakistan”—though the

Barelvi contribution on the frontier and in the Punjab (two crucial provinces the League

could ill-afford to lose) might arguably lay claim, too, to the Pakistani historian’s

classification.60

Naimuddin Moradabadi’s “Eleven Points” showcase what might be considered the

general Barelvi point-of-view, at the time, vis-à-vis Pakistan as an Islamic state. The

document defined “Pakistan” as a “free Islamic government” in Hindustan, established

“according to shәri’at and the principles of fyqħ.” What this meant in practical terms

was outlined in Moradabadi’s eleven points, which underscore not only the role of the

‘alәma in government, but also the right kind of ‘alәma. In fact, the first nine points, if

implemented, would have effectively shut out any meaningful Deobandi participation in

Pakistan’s governance. Point #1 (“This government will be ruled by a Sunni әmir”)

would have placed a “Sunni” (read: Barelvi) әmir at the head of the state. That an әmir

of the proper sectarian persuasion be elected would be ensured by Point #2 (“This әmir

will be elected by the majority of the Sunni [әhl-e-sunnәt ] Muslims”), which not only

excluded non-Muslims, but also Shi’a Muslims and, potentially, all “Sunni” Muslims

who failed to meet a state requirement of orthodoxy. Based on the AISC’s membership

criteria, the Deobandis would have fallen far outside such a requirement and may

therefore have been unable, under Naimuddin Moradabadi’s constitution, to vote for the

әmir. Once a Barelvi (or “Sunni”) әmir had been elected, he would create a shwra

(“advisory council”), as per Point #3 (“That әmir will appoint a group of pious

[Muslim] people and statesmen for a shwra”), almost certainly, of course, stacked with

those of the Ahl-e-Sunnat persuasion—and traditionally made up mostly of ‘alәma.

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Point #4 (The jәma’at-e-shwra will be directed by the әmir) and Point #5 (The suggestions

of the jәma’at-e-shwra will be considered final after the әmir’s acceptance) assured the Barelvi

religious leadership a powerful place within the political apparatus—that is, direct

access to the ear of the head of state, with that head’s general compliance with their

suggestions (as implicit in Point #5) constitutionally binding. Point #6 further ensured

that a Pakistani government would be in good “Sunni” hands by having the (almost

certainly Barelvi) әmir in charge of appointing a Prime Minister with “responsibility”

(nәžәm w nәgrani) over “all internal and external affairs” (according to Point #7).

Department heads would be nominated by the Prime Minister (as per Point #8)—but

only after approval by the әmir himself (Point #9). Rounding out the “Eleven Points,”

#10 and #11 dealt with taxes and the status of non-Muslims, respectively.

Moradabadi’s constitutional framework underscores the Barelvi leadership’s belief that

they did indeed represent the “Sunni majority,” and could thus rest easy that in a true

Islamic state like the “Pakistan” they envisioned, one incorporating democratic

mechanisms (like voting), they would naturally emerge electorally victorious and thus

occupy high places of power. The draft made no mention of bicameral or unicameral

assemblies, provincial assemblies, or any other republican-style entity, emphasizing

instead rule by a righteous әmir (under the firm guidance of his ‘alәma-filled shwra) or

әmir-approved officers and their respective departments.61

Na’imuddin Moradabadi never migrated to Pakistan, either at the time of

Partition or afterward. He did visit the new Islamic state, however, meeting with

Barelvi leaders and others in Lahore, Karachi, and elsewhere.62 (Naimuddin

Moradabadi’s activities in Pakistan during his final months are addressed at some

length in Chapter 4). But lasting influence within the Barelvi school even in Pakistan is

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demonstrated by the achievements of his many students there, hundreds of whom went

on to establish schools of their own in the new “Muslim” state. Muhammad Hussain

Naeemi, for example (born in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad District in 1923/1341), was

one of those disciples. Muhammad Hussain’s father had died young—at only nineteen

years of age—so Muhammad Hussain had been left in the care of his sister and her

husband, who had eventually enrolled him into Naimuddin Moradabadi’s Jamia Naeemia

mәdrәsәħ in Moradabad. He was ten years old, and the Jamia Naeemia, as

aforementioned, was one of Barelvism’s most influencial institutions on the

subcontinent (and still listed, as of the time of this writing, on the Raza Academy’s list

of “Prominent Sunni [Barelvi] Madresas in India”).63 Muhammad Hussain would have

witnessed Moradabadi’s many pro-Pakistan activities over the years first-hand, and the

impression that these early years under Moradabadi’s tutelage made on the young man

is difficult to overstate.64 But the critical moment came when Naimuddin Moradabadi

asked Muhammad Hussain to move to Lahore, despite the fact that all of his

(Muhammad Hussain’s) siblings and his parents opted to remain in the Moradabad area

(even after Partition; Raghib Hussain Naeemi, Muhammad Hussain’s grandson in

Lahore, lamented in 2012/1433, “We are alone here”). For a while he stayed at the old

Chowk Dalgirah mosque, about a quarter-mile west down the road from the Lahore

train station, but eventually he would found his own institution. Within six years,

however, space at the newly established school no longer sufficed and he was forced to

publish an advertisement asking for land to build something bigger. His efforts were

rewarded when the real estate upon which the Jamia Naeemia of Lahore (named, of

course, after Naimuddin Moradabadi’s school) currently resides was gifted to him.

Work began on the new site in 1959/1378. The mәdrәsәħ’s alumni would eventually be

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found leading prayer or otherwise filling positions in mosques and mәdarys across the

world, while the Jamia Naeemia is considered one of the most important Barelvi

institutions of learning in Pakistan (and even the target of deadly Deobandi violence).

Hundreds of Naimuddin Moradabadi’s other students followed paths similar to

Muhammad Hussain Naeemi’s.

Naimuddin Moradabadi died in 1948/1367. In his early years, his reputation had

been that of a great debater. But by the end of his life, he was described by one of his

followers as “hәżrәt, priest of Islam, [the] dignity of religion…unparalleled learned

man, incomparable orator, [the] embodiment of inward and outward virtues…[and

the] Defender of [a] strong religious code of life.” One eulogy included the following:

“The eye of India [had never seen] such an eloquent speaker…whose every word

captivated the heart.”65 Unfortunately for the old Barelvi ‘alym, his organization, which

would basically become the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (on which much more later), as

well as his thirteen-point draft for a Pakistani constitution would be sidelined in the

new “Islamic” state in favor of a mostly western, qausi-secular system—one that tended

to favor Deobandism, anyway.

Husain Ahmad Madani: Taking up the Mantle of Mahmud Hasan.

In 1879/1296, Husain Ahmad Madani was born in Bangar Mau, a village fifty-five

miles west of Lucknow where his father, Habibullah, was working as school headmaster.

Habibullah set him upon the path of religious scholarship and imbued within him a

hatred of the British government. From his mother he learned Arabic and a love for the

Qur’an. Both brought him up in an environment of strict discipline; despite his

“inclination to playfulness” he was not allowed to frolick with the other village children

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and only occasionally was able to steal a few minutes for marbles or playtime with a

nearby cousin. Even these tiny infractions were enough to worry his father, who

eventually sent him to the dar ul’alwm at Deoband to keep him out of trouble. He was

twelve or thirteen years old,66 but due to his “weak constitution and short stature” the

boy didn’t “look more than eleven.”67 In time millions would know him as shix ul-yslam:

“the Spiritual Leader of Islam.”

Husain Ahmad Madani’s ancestors (led by one Shah Noor ul-Haq) were sayyids who

had come to India sometime around the beginning of the sixteenth/tenth century,

subsequently establishing a xanәqaħ on the banks of the Ghagra River about a hundred

miles east of Lucknow (near present-day Tanda in India’s Uttar Pradesh). For several

generations Shah Noor ul-Haq’s descendants enjoyed prominence, wealth, and the

notoriety of being a pir family, living off of generous revenue grants from the Mughal

government (garnered from no less than twenty-four villages) and generally enjoying

the patronage of the state. But the family’s fortunes began to decline in the

nineteenth/fourteenth century, and by the time of the Mutiny, the number of villages

from which the house drew revenue had been reduced almost by half. The downward

trend continued late into in the century, underscored by the drowning in the Ghagra of

family head Akbar ‘Ali, the deaths of several of his heirs, and the loss of virtually all of

their property. As a result, little Habibullah—Akbar ‘Ali’s grandson and the future

father of Husain Ahmad Madani—grew up very differently than had his ancestors,

raised on the earnings of his adoptive mother, who herself spun cotton to put food on

the table.68

Habibullah possessed the natural inclinations of the scholar. As a student, he

memorized the Qur’an, learned Persian, and composed poetry in Persian, Urdu, and

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Bhasha. After the completion of his studies, he took up a job as a primary school teacher

in a small town a few miles outside of Tanda. Some time later he earned a teaching

diploma from a school in Lucknow and won a headmastership at a middle school in

Safipur, a village fifty miles west of Lucknow. In time he was transferred to Tanda,

where he was able to slowly but surely re-possess some of his ancestral land and build

an independent house for himself. At one point he was “tempted” to learn English—a

move that likely would have opened up more lucrative career opportunities—but, he

told his son later, a dream in which his hands were covered in excrement (which he

interpreted as a sign that learning English was “dirty”) convinced him not to embark on

such a path. The story hints at a hatred for the British, then recently and firmly

established as a more or less invincible power on the subcontinent (his choice to send his

sons to the university at Deoband also suggests such an aversion). Apart from the

dream, he’d been told by his mother and other family members since he was a boy that it

was largely due to British machinations that the family’s land had been lost around the

time of the Mutiny. Much of Habibullah’s animosity towards the British would be

passed on to his son. Once, he told Husain Ahmad and his brothers (at the time all

adults), “I have brought you up with the aim that you should perform jyhad in the path

of God and attain martyrdom in the process.” Not long after this pronouncement

(probably in 1898/1316),69 Habibullah migrated with his entire family to the Hijaz,

never to set eyes upon India again.70

Speaking of Husain Ahmad’s brothers, each of them attained prominence as religious

scholars—just as their father had hoped. His oldest brother, Muhammad Siddiq,

attended the dar ul’alwm at Deoband, impressing Mahmud Hasan and becoming a

disciple of old Rashid Ahmad Gangohi. (Later, the British would imprison Muhammad

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Siddiq’s son, Wahid Ahmad—who had also attended the dar ul’alwm—with his uncle

Husain Ahmad and Mahmud Hasan on the island of Malta after the latter was caught up

in the “Silk Letters Conspiracy”). Another brother, Ahmad, attended the university at

Deoband, likewise became a disciple of Rashid Ahmad, and was later imprisoned during

the Great War in Turkey while his brother and nephew were languishing in Malta;

afterwards, he set up a combined orphanage-school in the Hijaz. A third (and Husain

Ahmad’s younger) brother, Mahmud Ahmad, would become qazi of Jeddah, and

Mahmud Ahmad’s son Habib Ahmad would go on to run the orphanage-school set up

by his uncle. Still, some of Habibullah’s five scholar-sons, including Husain Ahmad

Madani, would re-migrate to India from the Hijaz, a move that would have major

consequences for the political situation in Hindustan, the political dynamics within the

Deobandi school, and the history of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry.71

As a student at the dar ul’alwm, Husain Ahmad Madani studied under Mahmud

Hasan (reportedly receiving considerable personal instruction therefrom on account of

his exceptional abilities as a promising young scholar) and, like his older brother,

eventually became the disciple of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi. The latter is significant in

that the brothers had first requested that Mahmud Hasan be their Sufi shix—but

Mahmud Hasan had recommended them instead to the much-revered Rashid Ahmad.

Such a turn of events was rarely seen, but in this case Rashid Ahmad, on Mahmud

Hasan’s personal and fervent recommendation, agreed to be the brothers’ mentor.72

Afterwards, Husain Ahmad migrated with the rest of his family (at his father’s request)

to the Hijaz. But the continuity he’d already experienced with the Deoband movement’s

founders continued even in Arabia, for it was here that Husain Ahmad trained for a time

under Muhammad Qasim’s and Rashid Ahmad’s own spiritual mentor: Imdadullah. The

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great shix died just weeks after making Husain Ahmad’s acquaintance, but the

connection had been made between Deobandism’s grandfather figure and a leader from

its “third generation.” The period was financially a rough one for Madani’s family, but

Husain Ahmad was able to obtain work as a religious teacher in Medina. Eventually he

achieved some renown as a lecturer at the Mosque of the Prophet—probably Islam’s

most sacred site apart from the holy sanctuary in Mecca—where, for ten years, he

reportedly taught hәdis for twelve hours a day;73 the fact of his position at such a

prominent location would hold significance for the entire Deobandi movement later on,

after his return to India. “The reason for such powerful attraction toward and general

popularity of an Indian religious divine in the holy land of Hejaz[,] especially in the

Prophet’s Mosque,” explains one official biography of Madani, “should be attributed to

[the peculiar method] of teaching that he had imbibed and inherited from the teachers

[from] the [dar ul’alwm ].”74 Upon receiving an invitation from Rashid Ahmad

Gangohi to visit him in India, Husain Ahmad and his older brother Muhammad Siddiq

returned to India. While in Gangoh visiting their aged shix, Rashid Ahmad

distinguished the brothers as among his foremost spiritual successors.75 Soon

afterwards, Husain Ahmad returned to the Hijaz, where he remained between

1913/1331 and 1916/1334.

And it was during this three-year period that Husain Ahmad Madani’s world

changed. He would later identify the very year; “I have been associated with

Hindustan’s freedom movement since 1914 [1332],” he reportedly said. What drove

such an association? In short: a determination to expel the British entirely from the

subcontinent. “I consider it the religious duty of every Muslim to oppose the British”

(italics added).76 It was no coincidence, either, that this stage saw Husain Ahmad pick

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up the anti-British charge; Mahmud Hasan, it will be remembered, arrived in the Hijaz

during the same period. One official historian of the JUH would later record that

Husain Ahmad “took to revolutionary activities” while Mahmud Hasan was in Mecca; it

seems, too, he accompanied the great ‘alym when the latter met with Turkish War

Minister Anwar Pasha and Medinan governor Jamal Pasha.77 Indeed, when, in

1916/1334, the shix ul-hynd was arrested by British authorities and eventually placed in

the Malta prison, Madani went with him—despite his not being charged of any crime.

The move was a voluntary one, a demonstration of support for his teacher and political

mentor. It would cost him three years and seven months confined to a prison cell.78

Upon his release (together with Mahmud Hasan) and return to India, Husain

Ahmad Madani quickly agreed to the Khilafat and, especially, non-cooperation platform.

In June of 1920/Shawwal of 1338, Husain Ahmad agreed to back Khilafat at the

movement’s pre-launch conference in Allahabad; Khilafat officially commenced that

August/Dh’ul Q’adah. When Mahmud Hasan passed away in November/Rabi I,

Husain Ahmad Madani “was unanimously acknowledged,” according to one official

biography, as the shix ul-hynd’s successor.79 Then in 1921/1339, this time at a

conference organized by Muhammad ‘Ali in Karachi, Husain Ahmad earned a reputation

as a particularly passionate champion of collective Hindu-Muslim action. Indeed, after

the Karachi meeting, the up-and-coming mwlana was praised not just by Muslims

within the Khilafat movement but Hindu religious and political leaders as well,

including the Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Puri, Swami Bharati Krishna Tirath. But

the British were none too amused; for his sentiments of “sedition” (and for his

distribution of the now-banned Mahmud Hasan-authored juridical ruling in support of

non-cooperation and Khilafat, discussed earlier)80 Ahmad Husain Madani, so recently a

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British prisoner on Malta, was put behind bars, this time in his own land. He was

locked up for two more years.81

Imprisonment seemed only to drive the one-time student of Mahmud Hasan to

further pursue his anti-British purposes. Indeed, upon his release one of the first things

Husain Ahmad did was address the fifth annual conference of the JUH at Cocanada

(over which he served as president; this was the same meeting mentioned previously at

which confidence was expressed in the Turkish regime and the idea of a worldwide

conference of Muslim scholars put forth), in January of 1924/Jumada I of 1342. The

mwlana’s message hadn’t changed; it had only gained in strength. An excerpt from his

presidential address to the assembled Muslim clergy and others aptly demonstrates this.

Hindu-Muslim unity is a prerequisite to freedom in this country. It is the

religious and political duty of the Muslims that they should work for the

freedom of India and continue this struggle until the government accedes

to their demand. It is their duty, which they must do with or without

companions—it is the order of the Almighty. If non-Muslims extend to

you the hand of friendship, you too must extend yours, for compromising

for the right cause will establish you as true believers in God. And, if

they [non-Muslims] turn their back on you and leave you alone, you

should not complain about it because God is your biggest supporter.82

The general Deobandi point-of-view, borne of the juridical ruling of Rashid Ahmad

Gangohi (and alive and well, some Deobandis would argue, since the days of Thana

Bhawan, when Hindus had fought side-by-side with Muslims against the British to

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defend Imdadullah’s mini-state) and developed by Mahmud Hasan, had now come into

its own, and Husain Ahmad Madani was its standard-bearer. In March 1926/Sh’aban

1344, the JUH officially adopted Husain Ahmad’s position when it passed a resolution at

its seventh conference (in Calcutta) for India’s complete independepence.

Madani and the majority of his Deobandi brethren cultivated a nationalism tied as

much to the land as to the faith. This allowed Deobandis to identify with both Islam

and India. “Our religion tells us that Adam descended in India,” he would write later, in

a booklet well known in its time called “Our India and Its Glories” (hәmarah hyndustan

әwr uske fәżail). Adam, then—the father of the human race—had been sent by God to

India first. “He inhabited this land and it was from here that his race spread… It is

necessary for the Muslim to understand that this country is his ancient home.” “Our

India” reminds the South Asian Islamic community that Muslim remains have been

buried in Indian soil since time immemorial—and while Hindus and other Indian

communities cremated their dead, the Muslim dead still lay in the Indian earth (and

would till the Day of Judgment). Indeed, “it is an unchallengable fact that from the very

beginning India has been the land [vәtәn] of Islam.” Even from a historical point-of-

view, Husain Ahmad argued, and taking into account all of the subcontinent’s invading

populations (Aryans, Greeks, Parthians, Huns, etc.), Muslims could stake a more ancient

claim to the land, as so many Indian Muslims were descended from the subcontient’s

aboriginal, pre-Aryan populations, subsequently converted to the one true faith.83

Husain Ahmad and the Deobandi fathers thus strove to tie Muslims to India specifically;

a Muslim could be as strong and fervent an “Indian” as any Hindu—indeed, stronger.

In any case, Deobandi support for the Congress and a united India came not from “ideas

of parliamentary democracy” or faith in some other “modern” political system. No—the

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scholars “still thought in terms of the self-regulated millat. In direct continuation of the

position of the earlier ‘ulama, they believed that with independence they could in fact

form their own community, with their own shar’iat-based courts and their own

educational institutions, inhabiting the same space as Hindus but culturally apart—until

such time, at least some of them thought, as their example would win the Hindus to

Islam at last.”84

The (general) Deobandi view of the Muslim place vis-à-vis the Indian subcontinent,

elucidated above, stood in stark contrast to that of the Barelvis, who by and large saw

“nationhood” in more ummәt-based terms—as a space (any space) governed by shәri’at.

The emphasis for the self-styled Ahl-e-Sunnat was not geographically demarcated,

bordered on the north and south, the east and west, by mountains, deserts, and seas.

No, Barelvi “nationalism” was based soley on the Islamic concept of the pure society (as

interpreted by Barelvis). It was defined by faith, existing in the minds of its people,

however scattered amongst the non-Muslim population they might be. Possessed of

such an emphasis, it was only natural for the Barelvis to look not towards cooperation

with Hindustan’s non-Muslim communities but rather towards a sort of strict self-

segregation. In time, of course, that self-segregation would evolve into a more complete

separation—and culminate in the Indian subcontinent’s extraordinary Partition.

Ironically, it was out of the Barelvi, ummәt-based conception of “nationhood” that the

necessarily geographically demarcated Pakistan call would emerge.

Now recognized by many as Mahmud Hasan’s most likely heir, Husain Ahmad was

appointed Sәdәr mәdarys, or head teacher, of the university at Deoband in 1927/1345

(when Anwar Shah Kashmiri resigned amidst a political rift that saw several of the

school’s teachers expelled, followed by scores of its students, addressed later in this

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work), as well as head of the hәdis department (a decision that did not come without

consequences for intra-Deobandi unity, either), in 1924/1342.85 (It was tradition at the

school that the head teacher also teach hәdis).86 He would hold both of these positions

until his death in 1957/1377. (Husain Ahmad taught off-and-on, too, at the Jamia

Qasmia Madrasah-e-Shahi in Moradabad for a decade-and-a-half—the school mentioned

previously as being only a stone’s throw from the institution attended by Barelvi leader

Naimuddin Moradabadi, the Madrasah Imdadia.) As Mahmud Hasan’s seeming political

heir, as well as the head of the Deobandi movement’s central religio-educational

insititution, Husain Ahmad Madani, all in a few years, abruptly and fortuitously found

himself poised to finally institute Mahmud Hasan’s political vision (one he’d inhereited,

in large degree, from his own spiritual mentors) for India’s Muslim millions. This

position was strengthened when his own faction within the school at Deoband won out,

in 1927/1345, against the Anwar Shah Kashmiri-led faction (the latter allegedly seeking

an apolitical stance for the institution); teachers belonging to the Kashmiri group were

expelled (or resigned), and scores of students followed them, many to a new school in

the village of Dabhel near the Gujarati coast.

From 1924/1342 to 1929/1348, in addition to the numerous duties connected to his

positions at the dar ul’alwm in Deoband, Husain Ahmad led “hundreds” of public

meetings across India (not to mention literally thousands of political discussions with

smaller groups; the teacher of hәdis was known for rarely eating dinner with less than

“ten or fifteen guests” at his table).87 His emphasis, as always, was communal unity

against the subcontinent’s number one threat: the British. These two emphases—(1)

Hindu-Mulsim cooperative action and (2) the British as Islam’s biggest threat—were

fully in line with the political philosophy of Husain Ahmad’s mentor, Mahmud Hasan.

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(The Barelvis, of course, differed with Madani and the Deobandi mainstream on both

counts.) At one JUH conference in Saharanpur, Husain Ahmad elucidated on the British

threat. London’s policy in India, he explained, was to divide and rule; as long as the

major communities remained divided, the British could rule. Thus parties like the

Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League played right into the hands of the British

authorities. Such groups actually served the British purpose, prolonging the English

presence on the subcontinent and ensuring Indians’ continued subjugation. The British

political method of divide-and-rule was, Madani insisted, the single greatest danger

facing India. The only way to fight it was to make such division impossible—and that

meant Hindu-Muslim political unity.88 Interestingly, both Gandhi and Jinnah made

similar appeals during this period—at least in terms of the importance of Hindu-Muslim

joint action—calling for a revitalization of the spirit of 1916’s/1334’s Lucknow Pact.

But the two leaders’ own incompatibility vis-à-vis one another symbolized the deaf ears

with which their calls were met by their own constituents, not to mention the Hindu

and Muslim communities at large, and such a revitalization never took place. As if to

make the point, Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta were at one another’s throats for

weeks in 1926/1344; the riots were so bad that around a hundred were either killed or

injured and the city ground to a halt for a month-and-a-half. Incidentally, the violence

happened to coincide with the arrival of Lord Irwin, India’s new viceroy.

Nationalist tempers flared across India in 1927/1345 after the Secretary of State for

India, Lord Birkenhead, announced the makeup of a special commission charged with

the task of making recommendations for the establishment of a more “responsible

government.” Part of that task entailed finding ways to further develop the country’s

representative institutions. Perhaps the establishment of such a commission might have

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brought nationalist Indians hope that much-needed change was on the way, but the

group’s makeup suggested that the British weren’t interested at all in what Indians

thought about their government, let alone hoped; all seven members of the commission,

led by Sir John Simon, were British. It was, to borrow a phrase from Motilal Nehru,

simply “eye-wash,” nothing more. Husain Ahmad Madani agreed wholeheartedly, and

said as much at the JUH’s Peshawar Conference that year. He urged fellow Muslims

and “composite nationalists” to boycott the commission—to refuse to speak or otherwise

cooperate with its members. In this, the Congress eventually followed Husain Ahmad’s

lead,89 organizing black flag demonstrations and strikes all along the commission’s path

after it arrived in 1928/1346; “Simon go back!” was the slogan of the day. Many of the

demonstrations were joint Congress-JUH affairs; many demonstrators were arrested,

imprisoned, and beaten—some even killed. Mounted police charged into Indian crowds,

hammering at demonstrators with metal-tipped bamboo lathis or trampling them down.

(This was Nehru’s first personal experience with physical injury at the hands of

government; at least one of his own wounds, sustained at the time, would ail him for the

rest of his life).90 Meanwhile, ever prepared to fill a vacuum left by the Congress, the

Muslim League (albeit only a section), plus several smaller parties, did meet with and

make reccomendations to the commission.91

After the Simon Commission left India, having earned the abhorrence of millions of

Indian nationalists (though its recommendations would largely be used as the

foundation for the Government of India Act of 1935/1354), the British government

turned the tables. If the Indians didn’t want their European overlords to recommend an

improved government for India, perhaps they themselves could offer one. Of course,

British authorities were confident that such a challenge would never be met, divided as

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Indian politics remained. The differences between the Hindus and the Muslims, the

Hindu/Muslim nationalists and the composite nationalists, the Deobandis and the

Barelvis, the Congress and the League—all of these schisms would virtually guarantee

that any Indian attempt to come up with their own consititution (and one that they

would all agree to) would end in colossal failure. The Indians needed the British. Much

to the dismay, perhaps, of the colonial government, however, Indian political parties

representing a wide variety of opinion—from the Hindu Mahasabha to the Muslim

League, and including the Congress and the JUH—met in an All-Parties Conference in

mid-May 1928/late Dh’ul Q’adah 1346 in Calcutta. But British worries soon

evaporated; Indian schismatics did win the day, for the result of this brief episode was

the Nehru Report—a document which, to the relief of the British government, did

indeed fail to bring the subcontinent’s divergent communities together. (Indeed, it was

probably the last real chance for Hindu and Muslim leaders to restore the unity of the

Lucknow Pact era—and that opportunity had been lost.) Unfortunately for the

Deobandis, the report was not to their satisfaction, either. The biggest complaint

among the Deobandi leadership was that the Nehru Report failed to include any

substantive provisions safeguarding the rights of minorities. Thus something of a split

occurred, however temporary, between the two parties (Congress and JUH) for the first

time, almost, since the days of Khilafat.

What provisions was the JUH actually seeking in an Indian constitution? For

starters, the party insisted upon a truly federal system possessed of highly autonomous

states. Certain specifically enumerated powers would be granted to the center, but all

residual powers would be reserved to the states and the people. The JUH additionally

desired a sort of US Bill of Rights-style constitutional guarantee that the federal

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government would never interfere in the realm of Muslim education, Muslim religious

institutions, religious traditions, and Muslim personal law. Muslim religious cases

should only be decided by Muslim religious officers, they maintained, and Muslim areas

like Baluchistan and Sindh (both singled out by name) should receive state status, on par

with any other Indian state. The autonomy of the states was to be further reinforced by

a provision that any change to the federal consitution must be approved not by a

majority or a super-majority but by full-fledged unanimity. Interestingly, the JUH did

not demand reservations for Muslims in either Bengal or Punjab, a major policy

difference between the Deobandi party and the League.92 (Compare this to Jinnah’s

reaction to the Nehru report: the League leader stormed out of Calcutta and traveled

straight to Delhi—the venue of the Aga Khan’s All-India Muslim Conference. This

latter gathering resolved absolutely to stand firm on its bid for separate electorates.)93

The JUH-INC divide was somewhat bridged on Christmas Day 1929/23 Rajab

1348, when the Congress passed a resolution calling for complete independence. (In

1927/1345, Nehru had visited the Soviet Union—on invitation from the Stalinist

regime—to celebrate the Russian Revolution’s tenth anniversary. The experience

evidently thrilled him, and he returned to India seemingly charged with added vigor,

energizing the leftist elements within the Congress.94 Thus, the next year, and together

with quasi-communist Subhas Chandra Bose, Nehru organized the Socialist

Independence for India League, which quickly demanded complete Indian independence,

as opposed to the official Congress demand—including that of Gandhi and Nehru’s own

father, Motilal—for Dominion status within the British Empire. Astutely measuring

the way the political tides were turning, however, Gandhi and the Congress later

adopted Nehru’s position as the party’s goal.) In such a declaration the JUH, “largely

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due to the efforts of Madani,” could offer its strong support. After all, the JUH’s official

stance—since 1926/1344—had been to demand complete independence.

But after the Nehru Report, things were never quite the same between the Congress

and the JUH. Indeed, even at the Jamiat’s ninth conference (at Amroha), in May of

1930/Dh’ul Hijja of 1348, there were considerable murmurings against a continued

alliance with the INC; the Nehru Report had sown the seeds of mistrust among some

within the upper echelons of Deobandism.95 Despite the opposition, the party was able

to pass a resolution for full cooperation with the Congress, moved by Hafizur Rahman

and supported loudly by Husain Ahmad Madani.96 Once again, Husain Ahmad

demonstrated through his actions that he really did consider Hindu-Muslim unity in the

quest to free India from the British the number one priority. Despite the reservations—

some quite vehement—that plagued several of his brethren, Husain Ahmad had argued

that the overarching goal was worth a rapprochement. Most Deobandis would follow

him, but the rumblings of dissent within the movement had begun to sound, as a small

faction of the school began agitating for Muslim separatism. Some of the loudest

Deobandi dissidents were Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi and his two students, Shabbir Ahmad

Usmani and Muhammad Shafi (on whom more later),97 a split that would have major

repercussion for both Deobandism and the political structure of South Asia. Thus even

the Congress’ adoption of complete independence as its goal didn’t fully heal the wounds

inflicted during this brief period of division. The Congress had gone back on its word

(in 1916/1334, it should be remembered, it had committed to separate electorates, for

example, but the Nehru report had run roughshod over the idea, dismissing it

completely), and for some Deobandis their trust in the mostly Hindu INC had been

permanently removed.

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On 12 March 1930/11 Shawwal 1348, now sixty-one-year-old Mohandas Gandhi

left Sabarmati Ashram with seventy-eight personally selected men and set out on what

would become a twenty-four-day, two-hundred-forty-mile journey to the sea. It didn’t

take long for the whole world to notice. In the end, the prolonged demonstration

resulted in the “Gandhi-Irwin Pact” (through which the government agreed, among

other things, to release all non-violent political prisoners, lift the ban over the Congress,

and restore confiscated property to political activists), the eventual repeal of the Salt

Act, and the galvanization of tens of thousands of nationalists in their opposition to the

British. The Gandhi-led “Salt March,” supported by Husain Ahmad and the JUH, did

much to rekindle the fire of Indian nationalists, including some Deobandi Muslims. The

JUH did much to publicize the event, especially through its newspaper, al-jәm’aiәt.

Many respected Deobandi ‘alәma actively participated in the Salt March (like Hafizur

Rehman, who would, a couple months later, help pass the resolution affirming JUH

cooperation with the Congress at the Jamiat’s Amroha conference, and who marched to

Dandi from the village of Dabhel—home to the recently erected Deobandi mәdrәsәħ

mentioned previously.98 Some Deobandi and Deobandi-leaning leaders were arrested

and imprisoned for their involvement in the Dandi march, including Abul Kalam Azad,

Hafizur Rehman, Fakhruddin, Muhammad Mian, and Bashir Ahmad Bhatia.99 Other

Deobandi and Deobandi-leaning figures, notably Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, were

arrested in other parts of India, having participated in or organized demonstrations

connected to the march; indeed, in the northwest, between two hundred and two-

hundred-and-fifty Muslim Pathans were massacred as British troops and armored cars

opened fire on a crowd of non-cooperators demonstrating in support of Abdul Ghaffar

and Gandhi. (The agitation was so effective—and the ire of the Pathans so white hot—

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that British control over Peshawar didn’t resume until May/Dh’ul Hijja.)100 But the

march also demonstrated that a large section of Muslims (including, generally speaking,

the Barelvis) were not interested in any Gandhi-led resistance; as a result, Muslim

participation in the Salt March and its aftermath has been described by some historians

as “paltry.”101 Such descriptions, however, ignore the involvement, active participation,

and support of many notable Deobandi leaders, the JUH, Abdul Ghaffar’s Servants of

God (xuda-e-xydmәtgar) organization, and the hundreds of Muslims who perished in

Peshawar on 23 April/24 Dh’ul Q’adah.

At the same time, Gandhi launched a massive civil disobedience operation—his first

major attempt at non-cooperation since the “embarrassingly abrupt withdrawal” of the

original campaign after the Chauri Chaura incident of 1922/1340.102 Indeed, the Salt

March had only been the launch event of the new round of non-cooperation, agitation

that would last (with a temporary hiatus in 1931/1349) through 1934/1353.

Churchill’s “half-naked fakir” was able to energize hundreds of thousands who hadn’t

readily taken part in the first non-cooperation efforts a decade before, including women,

populations in central India, and Indians from the south (by the mid-thirties the INC

would replace the Justice Party as the latter region’s foremost political organization),

and the period saw the emergence, too, of the “Red Shirts”—or, more correctly, the

aforementioned xuda-e-xydmәtgars (sometimes referred to as the “KKs”) in the Pathan

Muslim northwest.103 These last were led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier

Gandhi,” and his brother Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan (or “Dr. Khan sahyb”). The brothers

and their organization (which, by 1930/1348, counted around fifty thousand members)

worked closely with the Congress; its supportive action connected to the Salt March has

already been mentioned, and in 1931/1349, Abdul Ghaffar was even offered the position

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of Congress president, but he humbly refused. (Ironically, KK envoys had previously

been sent to the Muslim League in an attempt to obtain support from that body for Red

Shirt endeavors in the northwest frontier areas, but the ML rejected Abdul Ghaffar’s

organization and the opportunity to bring it into the League fold; League leaders likely

regretted this decision after their party’s overwhelming loss to the Congress in the

Muslim-majority NWFP, thanks largely to KK efforts. At the same time, the Congress

embraced the movement—as long as its members joined the INC—and for the next

decade-and-a-half the two parties worked hand-in-hand.)104 But the Gandhi-led civil

disobedience campaign of 1930-1931/1348-1349 also led to around one hundred

thousand arrests (including Gandhi’s own). Both JUH president Kifayatullah and party

general secretary Ahmad Sayeed Dehlawi were likewise arrested and imprisoned for

civil disobedience. While the Deobandis actively participated in non-cooperation, the

Barelvis played little to no meaningful role, relatively speaking, in Gandhi’s India-wide

movement to paralyze the British Indian machine.

In November 1930/Jumada II 1349, the first Round Table conference on India’s fate

took place in London. But devoid of even a single Congress represetative (Gandhi was

in a British prison at the time as punishment for the aforementioned civil disobedience

campaign, then in full swing in India), the gathering was almost certainly doomed to

failure from the start. Indeed, the whole affair was rather “like trying to stage Hamlet

without the Prince of Denmark,” in the words of one historian.105 Muslim princes, the

Aga Khan, and Jinnah participated (indeed, the League’s delegates outnumbered those of

any other party by a large margin, not counting those of the many princely states), but

neither the Barelvis nor the Deobandis could claim any real place at the conference’s

table. In terms of political demands, at least the Barelvis could mostly count on the

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League to push for “their” general positions. Even if they’d wanted to attend, many of

the Deobandi leadership were in prison for their participation in the salt sәtyagrәhә

earlier in the year. The only result of the first Round Table conference was a vague

resolution to work out an All-India Federation plan.

In early 1931/mid-1349, Gandhi met with Viceroy Irwin. The result of these

deliberations would be known to history as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, aforementioned.

According to their agreement, the government would set all political prisoners free in

exchange for Gandhi’s assurance that the Congress would call off the civil disobedience

campaign. Gandhi additionally agreed to act as the INC’s lone representative at the

second Round Table conference later that year. Many celebrated the pact as an Indian

victory, but others viewed it as an unnecessary concession to the enemy. Indeed, to

some the agreement was nothing less than a betrayal of Congress’ bedrock principles,

not to mention its official position in support of outright Indian independence. Nehru

reportedly shed tears of grief upon hearing news of the pact.106

And so the second Round Table conference (held in late 1931/mid-1350) did include

a Congress representative—Mohandas Gandhi himself. Before leaving to attend the

deliberations in London, Gandhi sought earnestly for a compromise with Muslim

leaders. The Mahatma was convinced that unless Muslims and Hindus (or, in this case,

the Congress and other Muslim parties) could arrive in Britain under the banner of a

joint platform, the talks would be useless—even an embarrassment. Indeed, he made

this his motto in the run-up to the London talks: that “London was out unless unity was

in.” As such, Gandhi attended the JUH’s annual conference in Delhi, emphasizing the

futility of any Round Table discussion without “a communal agreement,” and essentially

handed the non-Congress Muslims “a blank check”; let them name their demands, and if

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it meant unity, Gandhi would accept. Even so, the communal oneness that the

Mahatma sought was not forthcoming, in part thanks to the intractability of some

Congress Muslims.107 In the end, the loincloth-clad “fakir,” who claimed that the

Congress was the political voice of India, was alone at this second London gathering—

and the INC’s political rivals easily shouted him down. This second round table attempt

was a non-success like the first. A year later, a third conference was attempted, but

without any Congress representative (not to mention the absence of Jinnah) the meeting

ended in yet another failure.108 Perhaps the only development of significance was

Choudhary Rahmat ‘Ali’s use of the term “Pakistan” during the conference’s

proceedings—a first.

After Gandhi returned to India from the second Round Table talks, he decided to

relaunch the civil disobedience campaign, which had been put on hold under the terms

of the Gandhi-Irwin pact. Civil disobedience would thus resume from January

1932/Ramadan 1350. As part of the effort, the Deobandi JUH set up a sub-organization

called the daira-e-hәrbiyya, or “Circle of War,” to recruit activists and generally organize

resistance in support of the nationwide non-cooperation movement. The Circle’s first

president, former JUH head Kifayatullah, was arrested after leading tens of thousands of

demonstrators (Deobandis claim a full one hundred thousand) in procession through

Delhi. Leadership then fell on Husain Ahmad Madani, but he was arrested in turn on

his way to Delhi from Deoband. The pattern continued, too; Ahmad Saeed Delhawi,

Hafizur Rahman Ludhianvi, and others were all arrested soon after becoming daira-e-

hәrbiyya chief. Most were jailed for one to two years, along with thousands of their

followers.109 To add to the loss of these influential men, in September 1934/Jumada II

1353 Gandhi himself resigned from the Congress; he would go on to suffer a set of

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nervous breakdowns, become estranged from his wife, and move to a one-room hovel in

the middle of nowhere in central India.

The year after Gandhi’s resignation, the British enacted the 1935/1354 Government

of India Act—legislation that was viewed by many Deobandi nationalists and others as

simply one more British exercise in delaying the inevitable. The Act produced no new

preamble, instead retaining the ambiguous introduction to the old 1919/1337 Act

(which had vaguely defined the purposes of the Act as the “gradual” establishment in

India of self-governing institutions and responsible government—all as an “intergral”

part of the British Empire, of course). To Madani and other Indians of similar political

bent, the Act smacked of insincerity and the usual British deception. And despite the

Act’s dismantling of the dyarchy system in the provinces and its veneer of increased

democracy, it actually granted the Viceroy and his appointed (British) provincial

governors the authority, when considered necessary, to seize the government within

their spheres and act, for all intents and purposes, as quasi-dicatators (something some

governors did from 1939/1358, after the Congress ministries resigned). As part of its

divide-and-rule strategy—meant to curb the influence of parties like the Congress while

simultaneously increasing the power of “collaborator” groups—the British via the

1935/1354 Act widened the voter base and, crucially, granted separate electorates not

only to Muslims, but also to Sikhs and Christians.110 Of course, only members of the

community tied to those reserved seats could vote for them, thereby fostering both a

dependence on government among minorities and a communal spirit in politics. The

League, many Barelvis, and others applauded such measures as necessary for the

protection of minority populations; the Congress, most Deobandis, and their allies did

not.

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The 1935/1354 Government of India Act also set the stage, to the dismay of Husain

Ahmad Madani, for a very brief alliance between the All-India Muslim League and the

JUH, signaling a win (however brief) for the aforementioned Deobandi faction opposed

to the Congress. This faction was led by Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, who was not only known

for his support of the League and League positions, but had, the same year the

Government of India Act came into being, cancelled his patronage of the dar ul’alwm—a

major act of dissent. His reason? In a resignation letter sent at the time of his

cancellation, he explained that he deemed unacceptable the “Madani group’s”

introduction at the school of “the Congress ideology.”111 But since the Act had widened

the voter base and further institutionalized separate electorates for Muslims, it made

little sense for the JUH to continue to campaign with the Congress, as the majority of

Congressites were Hindu and thus could not vote for its candidates. Seeing that only

Muslims could vote for Muslims where the reserved seats were concerned, the JUH

leadership reluctantly agreed to join forces with the League after passage of the Act.

Signs of a JUH-League rapprochement had been visible as early as November 1932/Rajab

1351, when the working committee of the JUH met with the Council of the AIML in

Delhi. The occasion was the repudiation of a Hindu-Muslim-Sikh “Unity Conference”

organized, at least in part, by the Congress in Allahabad to demand joint electorates.

But the repudiation of the Allahabad meeting was less important than this rare show of

solidarity between the Deobandi ‘alәma and the Muslim League. It was, wrote one

newspaper correspondent covering the event, “the most impressive demonstration of

Moslem unity seen in India for many a long day.”112 The reporter’s remark is telling in

that it speaks not only of the sudden appearance of apparent unity among two of that

community’s most politically relevant organizations, but also of the politically,

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regionally, theologically, and even linguistically fractured nature of the state of affairs

among South Asia’s Muslims previous to the Delhi conference.

In any case, the period of League-JUH unity, throughout which the latter worked

under Jinnah’s leadership, was short-lived.113 At a JUH conference in April

1936/Muharram 1355, Jinnah addressed the JUH personally, urging its members to

“organize separately” from “the Hindus,” and then—only after this separation—could

the two groups “together tread the path of cooperation.”114 What this meant in practice

was unclear, but the new separate electorates system naturally engendered a new level

of political mudslinging between the League and the Congress that weakened the

strength of Jinnah’s call, much less any contrivance of Hindu-Muslim unity, however

“separate” their organization. For many in the JUH, the blatant communalism of the

campaign became too much to bear. Jinnah, too, disapproved of the JUH’s continued

ties with the INC.115 Eventually, the Deobandi ‘alәma leading the Jamiat, fearing that

they were being used, decided enough was enough, and after the 1936-1937/1355-1356

elections (in which the Congress came to power in every province but Bengal, Punjab,

and Sindh, and in which the League failed to form a government in any province,

including a pathetic showing in the Muslim-majority provinces) the short-lived alliance

was broken.116 The exact date of the fateful break may have been 15 July 1937/6

Jumada I 1356, when Congress leaders formally asked League leaders, via an Abul

Kalam Azad-delivered letter (dubbed a “death warrant” by some), to consider dissolving

their party and uniting with the INC; the JUH subsequently broke with the League—an

act later Pakistani historians described as “a political abduction,” and its participants as

“political turncoats.”117 Jinnah had thus lost both the election as well as the support of

the influential JUH.

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Perhaps as a reaction to the League’s non-success, as well as the JUH’s passing stint

as ML ally (a move he had almost certainly opposed loudly), in 1938/1357 Husain

Ahmad Madani published his groundbreaking muttәhydәħ qwmiәt әwr yslam (“Composite

Nationalism and Islam”). The book prompted “an instant reaction” from Muhammad

Iqbal and produced a years-long controversy over the nature of South Asian Muslims’

separate identity. Madani’s position, in his own words, was that in “the modern age,

nations are founded on homelands; nations are not founded on the basis

of race or religion. The dwellers of England are recognized as one

nation, whereas they have Jews and Christians as their citizens, and such

is the case with America, Japan, and France.118

Iqbal would compose his own refutation—in verse, of course—directed unswervingly at

Husain Ahmad Madani:

Hasan from Basrah, Bilal from Abyssinia, Suhayb from Rome;

Deoband produced Husayn Ahmad, what monstrosity is theirs?

He chanted from the pulpit that nations are created by homelands;

What an ignorance regarding the position of Muhammad!

Take thyself to Muhammad, because he is the totality of Faith;

And if thou [dost] not reach him, all [thy knowledge] is Bulahabism.119

(Bulahab was a wealthy Arab man whom the Prophet cursed for rejecting the message

of Islam; he is a symbol of rejection.) One of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s students (his

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nephew, in fact), one Zafar Ahmad Usmani, in the late 1930s/1350s put together an

attempted refutation of the concept of composite nationalism, too, highlighting the

intra-Deobandi schism in this regard. The effort, included in Zafar Ahmad’s yla al-sunan

(a legal commentary on hәdis), was evidently undertaken under the direct guidance of

Ashraf ‘Ali himself and reportedly motivated, at least in part, by a dream he (Zafar

Ahmad) had had in which he had seen the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad had given

him “glad tidings” of a “near victory for the Muslims,” which Zafar Ahmad’s admirers

have interpreted as an obvious allusion to the creation of Pakistan ten years later.120

Thanawi himself was so opposed to Madani’s decision to work for composite

nationalism (and that with the Congress) that he issued a juridical ruling in 1939/1358

stating that the only shәri’at-worthy course for Muslims was to join with the All-India

Muslim League; thereafter the prolific Deobandi scholar, as mentioned previously,

resigned from the dar ul’alwm at Deoband—and immediately joined the League. His

fәtwa, wrote one Pakistani scholar, “had a far reaching impact on Muslim politics.”121

Probably thanks to this faction’s continued influence within Deobandi circles, JUH

leaders were attempting, as late as 1940/1359, to find some sort of common ground

with the AIML—a shared overarching goal, something—but Jinnah insisted that the

only way such cooperation could be forthcoming was for all JUH members to resign

from the Congress. This was too much, of course, and the gulf dividing the two parties

remained permanently unbridged.122 Incidentally, Thanawi’s break with the main dar

ul’alwm was a permanent one. His grave lies within the grounds of his old Thana

Bhawan mәdrәsәħ on the outskirts of town, surrounded by cultivated fields. A small

blank slab of stone marks the muddy mound, nothing more. Outside of the diminutive

cemetery, affixed to the wall of the dilapidated seminary, is a plaque engraved in Farsi

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lettering. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi lived a modest life, it declares, and he left this world in

similarly humble circumstances. When asked about any remnants of the scholar’s life

that might remain in and around the old mәdrәsәħ, the aged custodian informed the

author that, after all, in terms of material possessions Husain Ahmad Madani’s political

nemesis, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, never had much.

In any case, the tide turned relatively quickly for the League when, in 1939/1358,

the Congress ministries across India resigned over Britain’s committal of India to the

war effort without consulting Indian leaders, as well as the British declaration of

Dominion status as India’s goal—something to be discussed as soon as the war was

over. More vague promises were not what the Congress leaders had had in mind, and

so the Congress ministries stepped down in protest. With no ministries, under the

terms of the 1935/1354 Government of India Act the provincial governments fell into

the hands of the British governors. Jinnah couldn’t have been happier, and celebrated

this turn of events on 22 December/10 Dh’ul Q’adah as the aforementioned “Day of

Deliverance.” Combined with the League’s new emphasis on wooing the ‘alәma and pirs

to its side, an endeavor for which the party had made “serious efforts” since

1937/1356,123 the move marked the turning point of the League’s fortunes as a political

force in India. By March of 1940/Safar of 1359, newspapers were describing “Moslem

India” as being “on guard” against the alleged “dangers of Hindu ‘democracy,’” painting

“Mr. Jinnah” and his League as a veritable catch-all for India’s Muslims. (British

newspapers like The Times of London jumped at the League position, decrying Congress

control of the provinces under its ministries as “a dictatorship.” The INC’s electoral

victories, winning eight of eleven provincial ministries, had “warped the judgment of

Congress leaders,” whose subsequent attempts, via its “mass contact” campaign, to

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attract Muslims to the Congress fold had only succeeded in pushing them further away.

The Congress was trying to divide the Muslims—this was the allegation, and for many

Muslims it was enough to drive them to the League and its Pakistan demand. The

effect was to deligitimize the JUH and place the erstwhile loose-knit and hapless

League, abruptly, on a pedestal as the chief representative organization for India’s

Muslims.)124

On 11 March 1942/22 Safar 1361, Winston Churchill announced another special

mission to be sent to India, this one led by Sir Stafford Cripps. Its mission: to “rally the

forces of Indian life to guard their land from the menace of the invader” (by promising

each province the post-war opportunity to remain united with or secede from British

India, the latter as independent Dominions within the Empire). Considering the

independence agitation then extant in India against what was perceived as the long-

entrenched British invader, Churchill’s choice of terminology seems odd indeed. But the

invader of which he spoke, of course, was of the Japanese variety. A “crisis in the affairs

of India” had arison “out of the Japanese advance,” and thus the time had come to solve

the Indian question once and for all, and then get to work defeating the enemy. One

contemporary Indian commentator described Churchill’s statement as merely another

“sweet nothing,” and most Indian nationalist leaders were likewise skeptical. Husain

Ahmad Madani no doubt fit within this latter category. Still, he would listen to what

the old man had to say. Several weeks later, Cripps arrived in Hindustan.

Stafford Cripps met in turn with Abul Kalam Azad (then serving as the president of

the Congress), then Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah, then Mohandas Gandhi. It is interesting to

note that Cripps’ choice of audience vis-à-vis the Muslim political leaders—meeting

with both Azad, a Congress-supporting (and Deobandi-supported) Muslim and Jinnah,

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the (generally Barelvi-supported) League leader, was a tacit acknowledgement of the

schism that existed within South Asia’s Islamic community. Soon afterwards the British

representative proposed (via radio broadcast from Delhi) that India obtain

representation on both the British war cabinet and the Pacific War Council, then offered

Indians (once again) a chance to write their own constitution—along the road to

Dominion status, of course. But the general reaction to Cripps’ proposal was one of “too

little, too late.” Gandhi famously described the offer as a “post-dated check,” and at a

conference of the JUH in Lahore, Husain Ahmad likewise rejected the proposal,

characterizing it as a last, futile British attempt to meddle in purely Indian affairs.125 On

10 April/23 Rabi I, the Congress formally rejected Cripps’ proposal, a move followed by

most every other Indian political party (though each for their own reasons). Cripps left

India in shame, having utterly failed in his quest, two days after the formal Congress

rejection.126 But the event, underscoring as it did the opposition from seemingly every

quarter to Britain’s belated attempts to preserve some vestige of empire on the

subcontinent, left London and Delhi more dependent than ever on Jinnah and the

League. It also gave “greater strength to the Pakistan demand in that the offer of the

British government brought discussion of partition into the open,” in the words of one

Pakistani historian.127

During the Second World War—and despite Gandhi’s admonishments to assist the

British against what he perceived as the greater, Nazi evil—the JUH, led by Husain

Ahmad Madani, condemned the war effort, vehemently opposing any support from the

Indian quarter for Britain in her struggles against Hitler in Europe, Africa, and the

Middle East and Tojo in Asia and the Pacific. The crippling of British power was a

good thing; let the great colonialist powers pound themselves to dust. The greatest

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threat to India wasn’t Hitler—it was the British foreign policy of imperialism. The call

for independence must not be suspended out of deference to yet another war. Besides,

the memory of broken British promises dating back to the first Great War still

smoldered in Indians’ collective memory. The JUH’s Bachar Ayun conference (23-25

April 1942/6-8 Rabi II 1361)—convened as the Japanese were making serious headway

in British-occupied Burma, German subs were sinking British vessels in the Atlantic,

and British bombers were flying missions over Germany, and just days after Cripps left

India—saw Husain Ahmad call, once again, for Hindustan’s complete independence.

Such a declaration, in the middle of the war, was certainly not welcomed by British

authorities, who by now had been monitoring JUH activities for years. As a result of his

independence and liberation rhetoric and obvious sway over a large population, Madani

was arrested (during the conference’s very proceedings) and thrown into prison.

(Ironically, the arrest occurred on the same day that Churchill, addressing the British

House of Commons, declared that the “main war plan” of the country was the liberation

of Europe.) Except for a very brief moment of release six months later, Husain Ahmad

would remain behind bars until August 1944/Sh’aban 1363—almost two-and-a-half

years.128

Between late June and early July 1945/mid- to late Rajab 1364, British Viceroy

Wavell met with Indian leaders at Simla to discuss his future plans for India. The

Muslim League delegation, led by Jinnah, made discussions all but impossible when it

demanded recognition as the sole spokesparty for India’s Muslims. The Congress, in a

wily move, had sent its delegation (the Congress working committee) under the

personal leadership of a Muslim: Abul Kalam Azad. To further buoy up the Congress’

own claim that it, too, represented a sizable proportion of Muslim opinion—and should

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therefore be regarded as representative of not one Indian community but all Indians—

the JUH, in the form of its president, also attended at least a portion of the conference,

specifically the deliberations of 4 July/23 Rajab. (This was the same day that, quite by

accident, Jinnah and Nehru crossed paths in the Hotel Cecil lounge nearby; evidently

these two political opponents “had a couple of minutes’ friendly conversation” before

moving on to their separate business.) In any case, the intractability of both sides led to

the breakdown of the talks, and on 14 July/3 Sh’aban Wavell announced that his

attempt at negotiating a plan with India’s leading political parties had failed.129

In September of 1945/Shawwal of 1364 (just over a year after his release from

prison), Husain Ahmad tried to address the League threat by hosting a conference of

Muslims on an all-India level. One hundred fifty Muslim representatives of other

political parties and organizations (i.e. non-League) reportedly attended the gathering.

The conference produced what Husain Ahmad called the Muslim Parliamentary Board,

a body (ultimately of little significance) meant to reinforce to the now many wavering

Muslims that they were not alone—that a strong section of the South Asian Islamic

community was, in fact, made up of composite nationalists. But the divide between

Leaguers and composite nationalists was apparent even in Deoband. One prominent

Deobandi cleric remembered joining a “children’s Muslim League” in the town at the

age of eleven, a group that was composed of some six hundred kids. “Every Friday,” he

recalled years later, “we took out a procession through the bazaars and important

places.” But the youngest composite nationalists—or “children from the Congress”—

would come out in full force, too, marching through the streets and competing with the

young Leaguers for decibal supremacy. “[S]ometimes we hurled stones at one

another,” the League-supporting cleric remembered. One or the other procession would

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raise “faith-inspiring slogans,” stopping in front of the police station or the revenue

office to chant raucously. “The officers of the British Government locked the gate from

the inside on hearing the slogans from a distance which prompted us to become more

vociferous and we stayed there for a long time.” The composite nationalists would

shout, “Hindu, Muslim, brother, brothers!” to which the Leaguers would answer,

“Muslim, Muslim, brother, brothers! We will not stop till we divide India! We will

create Pakistan! At the cost of our head, we will create Pakistan! Will bear the bullet

on our chest, but create Pakistan! Rivers of blood will flow, but we will create Pakistan!

Pakistan, zyndabad!” Both sides practiced the South Asian martial art of club-fighting

(bynnwt) in preparation for the coming violence (according to Muhammad Shafi’s son,

bynnwt was even incorporated into the dar ul’alwm’s curriculum during this period);

apparently the local Hindus “stood in awe” of their Muslim neighbors’s skills in this

regard.130 For the adults, however, the Pakistan-India tug-of-war was more than a

competition to see who could shout the loudest, and even in the children’s words more

than a mere hint of future violence might be clearly discerned.

Given Husain Ahmad’s uncompromising position when it came to preserving a

united India, it came as a shock to the old ‘alym when, on 14 June 1947/25 Rajab 1366,

the Nehru-led Congress formally accepted a plan of partition. The sense of betrayal

must have been acute, for Madani—long a staunch supported of the INC, even in the

face of opposition from his Deobandi brethren—railed against it.131 But it was too late.

On 14 August 1947/27 Ramadan 1366, the state of Pakistan came into existence, sawn

asunder from the now-separate state of India. As for the latter, it officially emerged

from under British paramountcy the next day.

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That night (15 August 1947/28 Ramadan 1366), the vice-chancellor of the dar

ul’alwm at Deoband addressed the students and faculty of that institution. Mention of

Pakistan was brief. The focus, as always, was on the freedom narrative based on the

Waliullahi program kept alive and, eventually, spread far and wide by the Deobandi

movement. “It is the mujahyd party of Shah Waliullah’s daring disciples that, for two

hundred years, has been lighting the path in this effort [to bring freedom to India]—

not only with pen and ink, but also with sword and blood.

hәżrәt Shah Abdul Aziz gave a fәtwa against the British and [therein] declared

that Hindustan was dar ul-hәrb. hәżrәt haji Imdadullah sahyb and hәżrәt mwlana

Muhammad Qasim sahyb Nanautawi used this fәtwa, and drank this prescription

for recovery, [albeit] their own special mixture—and gave [it to others] to

drink. hәżrәt shix ul-hynd preserved this same prescription, [this] compounded

medicine, and made it so that anyone could use it. Thus, having begun to be

used, [such use] became widespread. In the Khilafat movement, too, everyone

used it despite [the fact that] the prescription was bitter. And anyhow, having

begun to be used generally, the passion for freedom passed over from the

Muslims to the [other] sons of the nation and they too became zealous, and [the

fruit of] the sacrifices and joint Hindu-Muslim efforts [is] before us in the form

of the independence of the country...132

The Deobandi worldview—with the (Deobandi and proto-Deobandi) ‘alәma playing the

central role in the Indian independence struggle—is clearly evident here, but so, too, is

an emphasis on its culmination: the “efforts” and “sacrifices” of a joint Hindu-Muslim

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front. Such a speech would have been highly unlikely to be uttered from a Barelvi

xuțbәħ gaħ, but even now, in the midst of only a half-victory, Deobandi leaders

underscored Indian independence as a product of Hindu-Muslim unity (albeit inspired

originally by their own tradition).

But the issue of Pakistan was yet to be addressed. “The independence of India is the

independence of the entire Islamic world,” the vice-chancellor continued. And then the

delicate topic was broached: “Both the states of India and Pakistan deserve our

congratulations,” he said, in conciliatory fashion. Now that Pakistan was a reality—and

the fight for a united India finished—a paradigm shift was in order. The League, with

the help of its mostly Barelvi supporters, not to mention a handful of key Deobandi

dissenters, had prevailed; it was time to move on. “We congratulate Pakistan as

Muslims and India as our native land.”133 It was possible to celebrate both the

expulsion of the British (and the subsequent independence of India) as well as the

emergence of Pakistan, whatever the “Deobandi” position might have been before this

momentous day.

After India won its independence from the British, Husain Ahmad Madani withdrew

to a large extent from politics, preferring instead to concentrate on his routine at the

dar ul’alwm (prayer, zykr, fulfilling chancellor duties, Qur’an reading, tea and breakfast,

hәdis-teaching, lunch, prayer, answering mail, entertaining guests, prayer, more hәdis

instruction, recitation of the Qur’an, prayer, dinner, prayer, and still more hәdis-

teaching until midnight). In 1957/1377, while traveling in Madras, Husain Ahmad

suffered a heart attack, but survived. Upon his return to Deoband, he was seen by

doctors, experienced what seemed to be a general improvement in his health, and then

suddenly passed away in his sleep on 5 December/12 Jumada I.134

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Amjad ‘Ali A’azmi: Chief of Islamic Law.

Amjad ‘Ali A’azmi’s educational pedigree was impressive—and very Barelvi. Apart

from his blood tie to both a scholar-grandfather and a scholar-brother, it was the

connection to his renowned teacher, the great Hidayatullah Khan Rampuri (d. 1908

AD), which stood out most. Hidayatullah had studied at the feet of none other than the

famous spiritual forefather of Ahmad Riza’s movement, Fazl-e Haq Khairabadi, and

during Amjad ‘Ali’s formative years taught in Jaunpur. The journey from Azamgarh,

where Amjad ‘Ali lived, to Jaunpur, where the young man studied—a distance of about

forty-five miles—was one bereft of any sort of regular transportation option, so Amjad

‘Ali made the trip mostly on foot, catching a camel cart part of the way when he could;

but the arduous back-and-forth, spread out over years, foreshadowed the redoubtable

‘alym’s future career, marked as it would be by much journeying in the cause of the Ahl-

e-Sunnat wal Jamaat, often on the errand of its spiritual head, Ahmad Riza. After

completing the dәrs-e-nyžami under Hidayatullah Khan Rampuri’s supervision, Amjad

‘Ali studied under another distinguished scholar, Wasi Ahmed Surti (d. 1916 AD), in

Pilibhit, just over twenty miles northeast of Bareilly. Ahmad Riza Khan had once

referred to mwlana Surti as Hindustan’s premier expert on hәdis (a compliment that

doubled as a jab at the hәdis-emphasizing Deobandis)—a good thing, since Amjad ‘Ali

aspired to follow in Wasi Ahmad’s footsteps in this regard. Thus Amjad ‘Ali’s education

brought him progressively closer, both academically and geographically, to the spiritual

guide whose impact upon his life would be greatest.135

Indeed, it didn’t take long for the separate paths of Ahmad Riza and Amjad ‘Ali not

only to cross but to unite; soon after Amjad ‘Ali A’azmi’s 1902/1320 graduation at

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Pilibhit, Ahmad Riza selected him to fill a teaching position at his fledgling Bareilly

seminary, the aforementioned “dar ul’alwm” Manzar-e-Islam, and Amjad ‘Ali was only

too happy to accept. His responsibility at the school quickly widened to include the

issuance of juridical rulings (including at times the writing of fәtawa at the dictation of

Ahmad Riza himself; the Barelvi leader would later describe Amjad ‘Ali as his “most

skilled” student in the writing of juridical rulings)136 and a supervisory position over a

major Barelvi printing press, and he soon developed a reputation for being a “work

machine.” But it was his purely spiritual responsibilities, obtained during this period,

which held deeper meaning for the Azamgarhi; he took bi’at at the hands of Ahmad Riza

Khan, helped the latter produce his translation of the Qur’an (under the title kәnz ul-

әiman), and then, after some time, was honored as the Barelvi founder’s xәlifәħ. One

Muslim scholar later characterized Amjad ‘Ali as “probably the best loved and most

erudite xәlifәħ of [Ahmad Riza Khan].”137 Over time Amjad ‘Ali A’azmi thus earned

the title by which he would be known by future generations: Sәdәr ul-shәri’at, meaning

“Chief of Islamic Law”; many of his rulings would be gathered and published as the four-

volume fәtawa әmjәdiәħ, and his bhar-e-shәri’at (written over the course of three decades

and only completed after his death by family members and former students) is

considered by Barelvis to be a veritable encyclopedia of Hanafi jurisprudence.138

It was here in Bareilly, too, where Amjad ‘Ali A’azmi became politically active,

faithfully towing the line of his mentor, Ahmad Riza Khan. Part of that activism was

manifest in his capacity as president of the education wing of Naimuddin Moradabadi’s

aforementioned Jama’at-e-Riza-e-Mustafa. For example, one Thursday in March

1921/Rajab 1339, the Deobandi-Barelvi political antagonism came to a head in

Bareilly—where the JUH had decided to hold its convention in this, Ahmad Riza’s

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hometown. The gathering was dubbed “the Khilafat Conference,” and Congress

stalwart Abul Kalam Azad (who, two years later, would become the Congress’s

youngest president) was just one of many prominent “nationalist” Muslims in

attendance. Of course, Deobandis dominated the organization itself. Four months

before, it should be remembered, the JUH had held its second major gathering in Delhi,

with none other than Mahmud Hasan presiding. On this day, the old Deobandi head

had been dead for three months, but the party very evidently lived on. By now a leading

Barelvi scholar, Amjad ‘Ali (following the example of his shix) strongly opposed the sort

of “Hindu-Muslim unity” espoused by the Deobandi jәm’aiәt, and his ire may have been

exacerbated by the fact that one of the Barelvis’ own, mwlana ‘Abd ul-Majid Badayuni

(whose rivalry with Ahmad Riza has already been touched upon), was at that moment

acting as the conference’s secretary.139 In any case, on this occasion the Sәdәr ul-shәri’at

Amjad ‘Ali personally approached the JUH convention with a seventy-point

questionnaire dealing specifically with the communal issue—and demanded a reply.

The Barelvis would later insist that the JUH “failed to send even one reply to the

questions posed,” despite “repeated reminders.”140 According to Naimuddin Moradabadi

(who considered Amjad ‘Ali’s questionairre so “inspired” as to leave the Deobandis with

“[no] room for a convincing reply”), Abul Kalam Azad himself addressed the issue of

the questionnaire at the Bareilly train station before his departure. “All the various

objections raised in the questionnaire are real and correct,” he is purported to have said,

before allegedly admitting that the JUH had made indefensible “errors” that the Barelvis

could now “seize.”141 Amjad ‘Ali’s opposition to cooperation between Muslims and

Hindus clearly demonstrated continuity with the views of his aged teacher, Ahmad Riza

Khan, who, as mentioned previously, felt strongly that “political alliances forged with

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Hindus for the sake of overthrowing the British were misplaced.”142 As previously

mentioned, too, Ahmad Riza Khan had just appointed Amjad ‘Ali ‘Azami qazi for all

India, with Ahmad Riza’s son Mustafa and Burhan ul-Haqq Jabalpuri to assist him as

muftis.143 His formal and highly visible opposition to the JUH on this occasion,

therefore, was significant—and appropriate, given his new appointment.

But the Deobandis were intent on convincing their Barelvi counterparts that

political unity, at least within the context of opposing the British, was necessary. The

next month, another meeting was called by the JUH, likewise in Bareilly—this time

chaired by none other than Abul Kalam Azad (casting some doubt, perhaps, onto the

details of Naimuddin Moradabadi’s train station story). The JUH delicately invited a

group of Barelvi dignitaries, including the aforementioned mwlana Muhammad Burhan

ul-Haqq Jabalpuri, mwlana Sayyid Sulayman Ashraf, and Ahmad Raza Khan’s own

grandson, mwlana Hamid Raza Khan. It is likely Amjad ‘Ali attended as well. This

invitation was a more or less unprecedented opportunity for the two sides to come to

some sort of rapprochement. But the Deobandi effort to win over these pious scholars

failed, in part because the Barelvis seemed intent only on proving the other side wrong.

To make the point, mwlana Sulayman Ashraf addressed the gathering personally,

contending that the JUH and others of their ilk were acting without religious

sanction—and that, in fact, no such sanction existed justifying cooperation with Hindu

people.144 Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations—an idea promulgated by

Ahmad Riza and even at this early stage ingrained into the political philosophy of the

movement—and thus Barelvi historians continue to label the Deobandi scholars and

leaders of the JUH “pro-Hindu.” Meanwhile, Amjad ‘Ali stood as a stalwart even at this

early date for “Muslim nationhood” and the “Muslim entity,” having “defended and

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extolled the Islamic nation.”145 Thus the meeting ended without resolving the issue; or,

rather, resolving in the minds of both parties that the respective differences dividing

them were more or less irreconcilable. The Deobandis apparently made no effort,

either, during this second Bareilly conference to answer Amjad ‘Ali’s seventy-point

objection delivered to them at the first, though the very fact that they invited the

Barelvi scholars indicates some desire on their part to develop warmer relations with

their Barelvi brothers. Unfortunately for the Deobandis, and perhaps for the history of

the subcontinent, the opportunity was squandered and no rapprochement was

forthcoming. When the conference ended, the Deobandis and the Barelvis were as

divided as ever. For Amjad ‘Ali’s part, he left the next year (1922/1340) to perform the

hәj to Mecca.146 He would return to Bareilly almost every year afterwards (for the ‘urs

of Ahmad Riza Khan), dutifully met and welcomed at the train station on each occasion

by Ahmad Riza’s son (and eventually spiritual successor), Mustapha Riza.147

In 1924/1342, Amjad ‘Ali A’azmi left Bareilly to accept an appointment as head

teacher at Ajmer’s dar ul’alwm Mu’iniyah Usmaniyah. The desert town of Ajmer, long

a pir center and place of Muslim pilgrimage (remember Akbar) in Rajasthan, would be

his home for almost a decade. Here the mufti’s talents as an organizer and administrator

were put on display, both in his capacity as head teacher and, especially, in his

spearheading of an impressive tәbliGi movement whose purpose was to revitalize and

reform the “nominal” faith amongst the region’s formerly Hindu descendants of

Prithviraj Chauhan (d. 1192 AD). Evidently this specific population practiced Islam

only superficially, having kept on or adopted many of the old Hindu worship customs (a

charge, ironically, leveled by Deobandis against the Barelvis). Many in the community

were falling prey, too, to the seemingly ever-present Shuddhi movement. Apparently

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the efforts of Amjad ‘Ali and his cohorts had “pleasant effects,” in that the Muslims of

the area “clustered around these enthusiastic preachers” and “resolved to act upon [their

admonitions].”148 Such action is instructive in the context of the Deobandi-Barelvi

rivalry, as it illustrates that both groups were reformist in nature (often the Barelvis are

portrayed as staticly traditional and thus not revivalist in the true sense of the term),

seeking to reinvigorate the subcontinent’s Islamic community, rooting out innovation

and revitalizing the faith. One aim of Amjad ‘Ali’s missionary endeavors, certainly, was

to prevent Muslim communities like Ajmer’s from falling prey to such “deviant” sects as

that represented by the Deobandis.

A quick note on the place of the anti-shuddhi activities of the Muslim scholars and

their students and disciples is in order here. The Barelvi historians, in particular, tend

to place a heavy emphasis on the efforts of the Ahl-e-Sunnat ‘alәma in combating Hindu

reconversion. Interestingly, such activism on the part of the Barelvi fathers is set

within the context of the pre-Partition “Pakistan movement.” (Such placement stresses,

perhaps, the religious lens through which the Muslim scholars viewed history in

general, even what was otherwise strictly political history.) Deobandi histories may

make mention of the Shuddhi movement, but it is typically given short shrift, if it is

treated at all. The reason? Perhaps the Deobandis have plenty of other political

material to cover—from their front-and-center involvement in the Khilafat movement

to the organization and activism of the JUH, not to mention the life stories of political

crusaders like Mahmud Hasan, ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi, and Husain Ahmad Madani. Indeed,

Deobandis would later look back on this period—this time of pre-Partition political

struggle—as a badge of honor, particularly vis-à-vis their Barelvi opponents. After

Habibur Rehman Ludhianvi’s great-grandson, speaking to the author, had finished

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extolling the sacrifices of the Deobandis as an integral part of the freedom movement,

he asked rhetorically (and sarcastically), “How many Barelvis spent time in prison?”149

This, according to many Deobandis, is why the Barelvi histories of the freedom

movement spend so much time dealing with seemingly non-political things like

combating the shuddhi movement. But to Barelvis such activities were wrapped up with

the renewal of the faith in the subcontinent along the road to establishing Islamic

government in a free and independent Muslim state.150

Another issue that features prominently in the Barelvi version of the “Pakistan

movement” (as opposed to its near-absence in the Deobandi “freedom movement”

narrative) is the Shahid Ganj mәsjyd incident, which took place while Amjad ‘Ali was

back in Bareilly on a brief three-year teaching stint (1933-1936/1352-1355). The

incident stands as another example of a less explicitly political issue being inserted by

Barelvi historians into an (or “their”) explicitly political narrative. Built as a Muslim

mosque in Lahore in the early eighteenth/twelfth century during the Mughal period,

the compound was captured forty years later—along with the rest of the city—by

victorious Sikh troops of the western Punjabi Bhangi mysәl (a state within the Sikh

Confederacy), trading hands again (though those hands remained Sikh) in the wake of

the establishment of Ranjit Singh’s empire. Muslims were subsequently forbidden to

worship at the mәsjyd, and soon it had been converted into a Sikh gwrdwara, the main

mosque edifice serving as housing quarters for Sikh priests. When, in the mid-

1800s/mid-1200s, the British in turn conquered Lahore, some Muslims began agitating

for a restoration of the mosque, but the Sikhs were allowed to retain the property.

Then, in 1935/1354, Muslims got wind of Sikh intentions to demolish the mosque

(“owing to its dangerous condition”),151 and Muslim groups around the country, led in

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large part by Barelvis, but including important (usually Barelvi-leaning) pirs (including

erstwhile Sunni Conference president Jamaat ‘Ali Shah) and religious scholars from both

sides, rallied around the issue of saving Shahid Ganj from destruction. One Barelvi

group, the Anjuman Hizb al-Ahnaf—connected to Lahore’s Wazir Khan mosque, tied to

a number of powerful Sufi pirs, and set up as an opposition organization to the JUH and

other Deobandi groups active in the city—played a prominent role in the affair.152 As

per the general Barelvi position, the Anjuman Hizb al-Ahnaf (which typically reserved

its activities to internal behavioral and spiritual reform within Lahore’s Muslim

community) “seems to have been far more sympathetic to the British administration,”

but in the case of Shahid Ganj came out strongly against it (or, perhaps more accurately,

against the Sikhs whose claims were supported by the government).153 In particular,

Barelvis point to the involvement of Ahmad Riza Khan’s son, Hamid Riza, as well as

“other Ahl-e-Sunnat ‘alәma” including Amjad ‘Ali (who was with Hamid Riza at the

time) in the movement to restore Shahid Ganj mәsjyd to Muslim control. “The effort to

recover the mosque,” Hamid Riza is reported to have proclaimed, “was, from an Islamic

point of view, a…[religious] duty,” one for which it was worth laying down one’s life;

such a potentiality would, “with certainty,” earn one holy martyr status.154 This may be

compared to the position of the major Deobandi leaders and organs in the city, who

seemed to cultivate more of a hands-off policy when it came to the issue of the mosque.

The heavily Deobandi Majlis‐e‐Ahrar‐e‐Islam (hereafter MAI), for example, “shied

away” from the spirited agitation that centered around Shahid Ganj; once, hundreds of

Muslim demonstrators amassed threateningly outside the party’s Lahore office,

protesting the organization’s lack of enthusiasm—indeed, its perceived complete

indifference—on the issue. Lahore’s leading Deobandi scholar, the famous Ahmad ‘Ali

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Lahori (who had been imprisoned by the British in 1914/1332 for his role in the

Mahmud Hasan-led “Silk Letters Conspiracy”), likewise played no active role in the

campaign. Neither did his Anjuman Khuddam al-Din, a group (still functioning as of

the time of this writing, under the leadership of Ahmad ‘Ali’s grandson) not unlike the

Barelvi Anjuman Hizb al-Ahnaf (but which more strongly focused on the personal

application of the message of the Qur’an). Notable MAI/Deobandi leaders like Ataullah

Shah Bukhari did not, like their Barelvi counterparts, come running to Lahore to take

part in the Shahid Ganj campaign, but stayed away. Such leaders would later explain

their actions by enunciating a desire to have seen the issue dealt with via constitutional

means. (By 1937/1356, it should be noted, the MAI had caved to pressure and joined in

the fray over the mosque, very much on the table as the issue had stubbornly remained;

the party’s non-intereference had evidently been causing it real political damage).155 In

any case, the attitude of the Ahrars vis-à-vis the Shahid Ganj episode, in the words of

one commentator of the time, “lessened its prestige among orthodox Muslims.”156

Led by such parties as the Barelvi Anjuman Hizb al-Ahnaf, Muslims gathered in

front of the one-time mosque by the thousands (between four and five thousand, to be

more precise, many of them armed with sticks and hatchets), creating an armed human

wall protecting the edifice. The British governor of the Punjab did attempt a Sikh-

Muslim negotiation—and even obtained Sikh assurances that the demolition would be

postponed—but to no lasting avail; a week later some Sikhs involved with the gwrdwara

began demolishing it by night, much to the shock and dismay of the city’s Muslims, as

well as Muslims around the country. Communal riots, Muslim versus Sikh, erupted in

Lahore’s streets, prompting a quasi-military response from the British. Indeed, by the

8th of July/6th of Rabi II, planes were “circling the city,” British soldiers were “patrolling

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the streets with armored cars,” and a curfew “proclaimed by the beat of the drum” had

been enacted.157 158 In mid-July/mid-Rabi II, a march was organized, beginning at

Lahore’s mighty Badshahi Mosque and culminating in the procession’s arrival at Shahid

Ganj. Unfortunately for the demonstrators, however, the British met the crowd with

bullets; by the time the Royal Scots had stopped firing, around a dozen Muslims lay

dead in the streets, and several British soldiers lay wounded or dead as well, victims of

stoning, trampling, beating—or some deadly combination. By 21 July/19 Rabi II, the

crowd was still “menacing” and “refused to leave the streets” despite the curfew,159

though the next day the multitude reportedly dispersed (after “sitting in the same place

for 36 hours”) at the injunction of their religious leaders.160 By the 29th/27th the British

Official Wireless could report that “the situation in Lahore was…quiet,” and that the

Muslims had decided to pursue the matter via “constitutional methods.” This last

referred to a plan to appeal through the British Indian court system.161 (This had been

tried before, for years directly following the British occupation of the city; British

authorities had ruled in favor of Sikh ownership). In any case, the most serious phase of

the crisis had passed.

After his threee-year residence in Bareilly, Amjad ‘Ali took up another head teacher

position, this time at the dar ul’alwm Hafiziah Shervani in Aligarh. He worked in this

capacity for seven years (also serving as a curriculum advisor at Sir Sayyid’s Anglo-

Oriental College), and one of his fellow teachers would later describe him as one who

had “full command over the profession of teaching.” Even as a writer of fәtawa (it was

in Aligarh that he came to be known as Sәdәr ul-shәri’at), a debater, a Sufi shix, and a

political agitator, Amjad ‘Ali was first and foremost a teacher; many of the religious

scholars, on both sides of the Deobandi-Barelvi divide, would likely view themselves in

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much the same way. Even so, and despite his multitude of responsibilities, the political

questions facing Muslims in India weighed heavily on the mufti’s mind. In 1939/1358,

on the occasion of a major All-India Sunni Conference gathering, Amjad ‘Ali—like

hundreds of other prominent Barelvi ‘alәma—made the trip to Naimuddin Moradabadi’s

hometown of Moradabad, where the meeting took place. None other than Ahmad Riza’s

son and xәlifәħ ul-әwwәl (“number one successor”) Hamid Riza Khan chaired the

conference on this occasion, while “hәżrәt Sәdәr ul-shәri’at [Amjad ‘Ali],” wrote one

Barelvi historian later, “was prominent by his august presence.”162 The respected

Azamghari was now sixty years old.

In 1943/1362, Amjad ‘Ali moved to Varanasi for a year before returning once more

to Bareilly. In 1946/1365 another major All-India Sunni Conference convention took

place (the organization’s last pan-Indian gathering) in Varanasi. This last assembly, as

previously mentioned, was the Sunni Conference’s largest by far, with an estimated five

thousand scholars and pirs in attendance, plus another two hundred thousand of their

students and disciples. Of course, Amjad ‘Ali (now sixty-seven and beginning to suffer

from a series of serious physical ailments) attended, too, weighing in often on the topic

about which the conference mostly revolved: the practical creation and functioning of an

Islamic government on the subcontinent, now that the real emergence of an

independent Pakistan glistened on the horizon. In order to facilitate the production of a

formal resolution, the Conference created a committee to draft a blueprint for an Islamic

state. Naturally, Naimuddin Moradabadi served as a member of said committee, along

with Ahmad Riza’s son, Mustapha Riza—and Amjad ‘Ali.163 Their production—

Moradabadi’s “Eleven Points”—has already been mentioned.

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The mega-conference in Varanasi was in large part organized by mwlana Abdul

Hamid Badayuni (d. 1970 AD), a scion of the famed Khairabadi-Badayuni Group and a

fourty-eight-year-old Barelvi leader whose association with the Muslim League dated

back to 1918/1336. In March of 1940/Safar of 1359, Abdul Hamid had voiced his

support for the League’s Lahore Resolution—when the ML, that same month, had

called for the creation of a federation of “autonomous and sovereign” Muslim states in

the subcontinent, later interpreted as the League’s first formal demand for Pakistan.

Thereafter Abdul Hamid had campaigned hard within the Barelvi community of South

Asia in a highly successful attempt to see the idea of a separate Muslim state accepted

generally.164 Perhaps it was natural, then, for the AISC to appoint him as its Secretary

of Propaganda.165 A fәtwa out of Bareilly’s Manzar-e-Islam supporting the League,

authored by a murid of Hamid Riza named Ijaz Wali Khan (a future head of the hәdis

department at a major Barelvi school in Lahore), had also experienced significant

circulation at that time.166 To see so many scholars, pirs, and regular “Sunnis”—Amjad

‘Ali among them—now gathered together in Varanasi signified the culmination of

Badayuni’s years of effort. Significantly, on the occasion of the Varanasi conference the

Badayuni mwlana endeavored hard to convince his fellows to actually merge the AISC

with the League—a move that would likely have had major consequences vis-à-vis

direct Barelvi influence in the future Pakistani state (and especially in a constituent

assembly), particularly as it was measured against that of the Deobandis’. But Abdul

Hamid Badayuni’s efforts were in vain, his idea batted down by the many Barelvi

guiding lights who looked to the League only circumspectly (not to mention a few

whose attitude thereunto was nothing short of hostile), and valued their trademark holy

separation.167 (Even Naimuddin Moradabadi, in a letter to a fellow AISC leader in the

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Punjab around 1946/1365, wrote, “Jamhurriyyah-e-Islamiah [a name adopted by the

Conference in the 1940s/1360s, though the organization continued to be referred to as

the All-India Sunni Conference] in no circumstances can give up the demand for

Pakistan, whether Mr. Jinnah himself remains its supporter or not.”168 The statement

illustrates the distinction in the eyes of some Barelvi leaders between support for an

Islamic state and support for the political means to create it. The end was to be

Pakistan.) In any case, it is perhaps a testament to the lack of unity on the issue of

Jinnah and the League among Ahl-e-Sunnat leaders that Badayuni’s proposal was

rejected. “We did not think it proper for [the ‘alәma ] to come on the platform of the

Muslim League,” Naimuddin Moradabadi explained, of the AISC’s decision in this

regard, “but we countered the activities of the opponents of the League [i.e.

predominantly, among Muslims, the Deobandi JUH].” (“This was not to oblige the

League,” Moradabadi would add, somewhat tellingly, “as our attitude was always

governed by the dictates of Islam.”)169 The decision to deny Abdul Hamid this

additional victory (and the AISC’s general attitude of maintaining some distance,

however small at times, from the League) cleared the way for Shabbir Ahmad Usmani

and the better-organized Deobandi network to assume a more powerful (not to mention

official) political role within the soon-to-materialize Pakistani state. Still, the general

assembly’s decision not to officially join with the League didn’t stop a core group of

fifty-six scholars and pirs at the Benares conference from issuing a joint statement

supporting the ML.170

Perhaps it is not coincidental, then, that that same year two other events occurred

which helped bring the Muslim League and the Barelvi mәshayx and ‘alәma together.

The first was the sending of an official AISC delegation overseas—to the Arabian

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peninsula and elsewhere within the Islamic world—to present the pro-Pakistan

argument to fellow Muslims abroad and thereby garner an increased base of

international Muslim support for the cause. Abdul Hamid Badayuni led the delegation

himself. When the group returned to India, it met with Jinnah (on 3 May/1 Jumada II),

who lauded its international efforts. (The meeting with Pakistan’s qayd-e-ә’ažәm seems

to have fired up Abdul Hamid, who, just three days later, reportedly declared before a

sizable Lahore audience, “For us, Pakistan is a matter of life and death.”)171 The second

event was the organization, spearheaded by the Muslim League, of a committee of

mәshayx made up of prominent Muslim religious figures to help drum up support for the

party and for Pakistan (a move in line with the League’s now Islam-centric policy, a

policy that made it possible for ML leaders to go over the heads of regional politicians

and admonish religious power-holders across the country); the committee included

powerful individuals like the pir of Manki Sharif, Makhdum Riza Shah of Multan (whose

father had been mayor of Multan, and who himself served, from 1946/1365, as a

member of the provincial legislative assembly after beating out the Unionists),172 AISC

leader Jamaat ‘Ali Shah (who, among his many other pro-League activities, was heavily

involved in the “condemnation of pro-Congress Muslims and Muslim groups,” like the

Deobandis),173 and the powerful pir of the far western Punjabi shrine city of Taunsa

Sharif. Other influential pirs or sajjada-nishins, especially in the Punjab (a province

where League victory was vital to the establishment of any sort of meaningful

“Pakistan”), were likewise swayed to Jinnah’s side, including those tied to the shrines at

Sial Sharif, Golra Sharif, Pakpattan Sharif, Jabalpur Sharif, and Chura Sharif.174 The

next year, of course, all this effort would pay off, and the Sunni Conference’s political

goals—if not its spiritual ones—would see fruition. “The Sunni [‘alәma] fully

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participated in the freedom movement,” wrote M. Ahmad, with particular emphasis on

the AISC, “and played an important role in the last and final phase of the Pakistan

Movement.”175

Unfortunately, it was around this time that, combined with his advancing age, a

series of personal setbacks (the deaths, in a short three-year span, of eleven of his family

members) took a serious toll on Amjad ‘Ali. Indeed, by 1946/1365, the Azamgarhi

scholar had lost his sight completely; for the first time since childhood the prolific

scholar was bereft of the ability to read and write. His published works thus all pre-date

this pivotal year. His condition prevented him, too, from traveling to the northwest

frontier during the controversial “Frontier Referendum,” but many other Barelvi ‘alәma

and pirs made the trip (joining those already based in the region) in order to garner

support—and critical votes—for the League. The Referendum will be discussed in

more detail in the following section (following the career of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani),

but it should be noted here that, if not for Barelvi support, it is doubtful that Jinnah

would have been able to eke out a victory in the NWFP (indeed, minus fervent Barelvi

cooperation a victory would have been almost certainly impossible). One Barelvi whose

participation remains legendary was the pir of Manki Sharif who, in October

1945/Shawwal 1364, organized the Jamiat al-Asfiah, an organization made up of

hundreds of scholars and mәshayx.176 That organization’s support of the Muslim League

was critical in the region; without it, opined both M. Ahmad and K. Sayeed, “the Muslim

League could not have [built] up its position in the Frontier,” let alone gone on to win.

It is clear, too, from Jinnah’s letters that he had used promises hinting at the

implementation of shәri’at in a future Pakistan to woo the pir and his party to his side;

this was in line with League policy aimed at the Muslim religious leadership since the

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1937/1356 election debacle. Notice the wily politician’s ambiguous, non-committal

language, from an oft-reproduced November 1945/Dh’ul Hijja 1364 letter to the

abovementioned pir: “It is needless to emphasize that the constituent assembly which

would be predominantly Muslim in its composition would be able to enact laws for

Muslims, not inconsistent with the Shariat laws and the Muslims will no longer be

obliged to abide by the Un-Islamic laws.”177 Other big-name “Sunnis” played a similarly

major role in stumping for the League, including the aged but seemingly indomitable

Jamaat ‘Ali Shah, whose “whirlwind tours” helped mobilize considerable support for

Jinnah and Pakistan.178

The League’s Referendum victory was a critical stepping stone in the achievement

of its ultimate aim—the establishment of Pakistan—and Barelvi backing, with the

perhaps equally critical help of some dissident Deobandis, made that win possible. The

issuance in both the Punjab and the NWFP of a handbill containing a juridical ruling in

favor of Pakistan and the League and signed by thirty-five ‘alәma illustrates this

phenomenon well. The pamphlet, entitled hәżrәt-e-Swfi-e-kyran ka ә’alan-e-hәq: Muslim

League ki hymayәt kәrin (“Eminent Sufis’ and Honorable Ones’ Declaration of the Right

Way: Support the Muslim League!”), included mostly Barelvi signatories; however,

three Deobandi ‘alәma could also be found among the scholars listed thereon.179 A

Frontier Referendum loss in this critical Muslim-majority province would have been a

crushing blow to the League—an organization claiming to be the sole spokesparty for

India’s Muslims; in the end, the support of the (mostly Barelvi) ‘alәma and pirs ensured

victory. Barelvi leaders likewise helped secure a League win in the east, where a

referendum at Sylhet (in what is today the far eastern corner of Bangladesh) decided, in

early July 1947/mid-Sh’aban 1366, in favor of joining East Bengal; here Barelvi notable

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Abdul Hamid Badayuni, for example, campaigned hard for the ML, delivering

passionate speeches in favor of Pakistan.180

Even in Amjad ‘Ali’s debilitated state, the old ‘alym set out with his wife and a small

party (including Ahmad Riza’s son Mustapha Riza Khan) on 1 September 1948/26

Shawwal 1367 for Mecca to perform his second hәj. Hundreds gathered at the railway

station to see him off, surely wondering if this might be the last they’d set eyes on the

great mufti. Unfortunately for Amjad ‘Ali, the fever that developed soon after

embarkation turned into full-fledged pneumonia by the time his party reached Bombay.

He remained mostly unconscious for a year. Before Mustapha Riza continued on to the

Arab peninsula he is reported to have recited an Ahmad Riza-authored poem of praise

for the Prophet to the ailing and unresponsive Azamgarhi; Amjad ‘Ali evidently opened

his eyes immediately, was propped up by means of a pillow, and listened intently to

Mustapha Riza’s words. When he finished, Ahmad Riza’s son is said to have whispered,

“Go on [to the next life], I shall follow behind you.”181

Then, a year to the day, almost, since his departure from home, Amjad ‘Ali Khan

passed away on 2 September 1949/9 Dh’ul Q’adah 1368, aged seventy-one. His dәrgaħ

is in Ghausi, near Azamgarh, and every year, as of this writing, pilgrims continue to

flock to the spot on the anniversary of his death to pay the crusading ‘alym homage.

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani: Jinnah’s Gamechanger.

Previously it was suggested that the dar ul’alwm at Deoband could boast first-

generation leadership under Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad and second-

generation leadership under Mahmud Hasan. With the latter’s death, a third generation

of leaders was now pushed to the forefront, most notably including Husain Ahmad

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Madani, hafyž Muhammad Ahmad, Anwar Shah Kashmiri, and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani

(the latter aided by his indomitable relative, mufti Muhammad Shafi).182 Of this group,

it was perhaps Shabbir Ahmad whose actions would have the most lasting effect on the

movement—and on the political evolution of South Asia. Despite Husain Ahmad

Madani’s tireless efforts to keep Deobandism firmly beneath the Congress umbrella, it

was Shabbir Ahmad’s breakaway Deobandi faction that would eventually ensure the

emergence of Pakistan and, ultimately, dominate Deobandi politics in the new “Muslim”

state.

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani was born on 27 September 1885/17 Dh’ul Hijja 1302, about

one hundred miles from Delhi in the north Indian town of Bijnor. His father, Fazl al-

Rahman Usmani, was a gifted poet and “a great Islamic scholar of his time.” After

completing an elementary Islamic education in Deoband, Fazl al-Rahman especially

excelled at Persian and poetry while at Delhi College, where he was a stand-out student

of the venerable Mamluk ‘Ali (whose acolytes, as previously mentioned, also included

founding fathers of the Deobandi school Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Rashid

Ahmad Gangohi). As a result of his scholarly gifts, Fazl al-Rahman was appointed

deputy inspector of schools in the town of Bijnor and other towns across the United

Provinces—a pensioned position. But “the movement of Muhammad Qasim” beckoned,

and Fazl al-Rahman united with it. As such, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani’s father helped

found the dar ul’alwm at Deoband, and served on the school’s mәjlys-e-shwra until his

death in 1907/1325. To this day Fazl al-Rahman is considered one of the university’s

“Six Great Ones” responsible for the institution’s very establishment.183 One twentieth-

century Pakistani historian would write of him, “He remained a pillar of the mәdrәsәħ to

his last breath.”184 He was married three times, two of the unions producing children—

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and it was one of Fazl al-Rahman’s sons who would go on to change the course of

history for hundreds of millions of people.

But even apart from the towering legacy of his father, Shabbir Ahmad’s own mark

on the university at Deoband was significant—indeed, far greater. From early in his

childhood, Fazl al-Rahman’s son had seemed possessed of a serious nature. “Games and

amusements evoked no apparent interest in him,” wrote one biographer, adding that,

since boyhood, “he had a boundless interest in study.”185 As such, six-year-old Shabbir

Ahmad was placed in the hands of hafyž Muhammad ‘Azim Deobandi for religious

education, and the next year he was accepted at the dar ul’alwm where his instructors

included the indefatigable Mahmud Hasan (a teacher of all-important Arabic). After

graduation, the young, newly minted mwlana moved to Delhi, where he taught at a local

“Arabic” mәdrәsәħ; during this period, too, the young teacher was married (1905/1323).

It didn’t take long, however, for the university at Deoband to decide to avail itself of

Shabbir Ahmad’s special talents (әsәl mәshGәlәħ) as a teacher-lecturer; he was hired in

1907/1325 at a salary of 35 rupees a month.186 The man’s ability to give a great speech

would come in handy later within the context of independence politics.

But first he would be tested within the administration of the dar ul’alwm. As an

administrator, Shabbir Ahmad appears to have been especially involved in the

university’s fundraising efforts (a duty especially pertinent to one possessed of the

talents aforementioned), once journeying all the way to Dhaka—a distance of almost a

thousand miles, as the crow flies—to help secure a sizable sum from the city’s ruler.187

He also played a role, about six years later (1927/1345-1346), in facilitating a

substantial increase in the annual donation of the Nizam of Hyderabad.188 In fact, it was

later reported that the Nizam had only pledged the monthly donation that he did after

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hearing Shabbir Ahmad Usmani’s religious lectures. The ruler of the Deccan even

offered the now-famous scholar a very lucrative position in Hyderabad—but Shabbir

Ahmad, apparently fully invested mentally and spiritually in the life of the dar ul’alwm,

turned down the powerful Nizam in favor of his modest university salary. “’alamәħ

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani,” wrote of his biographers, “was a soldier of Islam.”189 But he

was active politically, too, in cooperation with others at the school, in the Khilafat

movement of the early 1920s/late 1330s-early 1340s.190 As part of the latter, his

reputation for delivering “impassioned sermons” with the capacity to energize his

listeners (and, indeed, the “Muslim nation” at large, according to some) grew, along

with his standing within the Deobandi movement and his general fame throughout

India. These early years saw Shabbir Ahmad as an “avid” member of the Deobandi

school’s political organization, the JUH, which had been organized, as aforementioned,

in the wake of the Khilafat movement in 1919/1337.191 Indeed, Shabbir Ahmad was

among its founding figures, along with such luminaries as Abul Kalam Azad and ‘Abd

ul-Bari of Farangi Mahal.

But his greatest contributions to the Deobandi movement during this earlier period

fell within the realm of scholarship. When the king of Afghanistan visited the

university in 1939/1358, it was the work of Shabbir Ahmad, along with that of Mahmud

Hasan, which was displayed most prominently (the Afghan government would go on to

translate it from Urdu to Persian).192 When a new section of the university library was

added in the mid-1960s/mid-1380s, Shabbir Ahmad’s works were specially arranged

and showcased along with those of other leading scholastic luminaries at the school.193

Leading mufti Muhammad Shafi would later compare Shabbir Ahmad during this time

to the great Sunni theorists, philosophers, and mystics Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-

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1111/450-505) and Fakr al-Din al-Razi (1149-1209/543-606), a tribute of very high

order. Indeed, Muhammad Shafi likened the level of saintliness, learning, and

scholarship then extant at the university at Deoband to “an assembly of angels” that

included, by name, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani. (Just as significantly, Muhammad Shafi

added that this assembly “[ultimately] broke up”).194 Muhammad Shafi’s son, a

prominent Islamic scholar in his own right, would later describe Shabbir Ahmad as

having achieved “complete mastery of every science.”195 When shix ul-hynd Mahmud

Hasan, principal of the university at Deoband since 1890/1307, was called to lay the

foundation stone of the Jamia Millia Islamia at Aligarh—despite his exceedingly frail

condition at the time; he would pass away one month later—it was Shabbir Ahmad,

among a few others, who accompanied him.196 One of the most prolific Islamic scholars

of the last century would write that God had “blessed hażrәt ’alamәħ Shabbir Ahmad

sahyb Usmani with both writing and speaking ability unique in the world.”197 Then in

1934/1353 Shabbir Ahmad Usmani was appointed acting vice-chancellor, only to be

made chancellor the next year. From 1935 to 1942/1354 to 1361, he occupied this

exalted post. According to one official source, the school’s advisory council had decided

to appoint him to this supreme position on account of his “esteemed personality,

knowledge, and integrity” (‘ažim shaxSiәt әwr ‘alm w fәżәl).198 Despite his newfound

position, Shabbir Ahmad’s biographers insist that he continued to live humbly,

materially speaking (and even later, when he obtained significant political power)—“to

the end living modestly.”199

It is not without some irony, then, that of all the Deobandi ‘alәma to reject the

position of the school’s main political wing, rupturing friendships and associations and

splitting the movement, it should be Shabbir Ahmad Usmani. Perhaps a hint of

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contrarianism on Shabbir Ahmad’s part might have been perceived when, in the mid- to

late 1920s/mid-1340s, he sided with a raucous student group at the university against

school administrators; many of the students and a handful of teachers and

administrators were consequently expelled or otherwise let go, though Shabbir Ahmad

retained his position (in name, at least).200 Perhaps an intimation of fickleness might

have been detected, too, in his spending most of his time as university chancellor not in

Deoband at all, but seven hundred miles away in Dabhel, a village on the southern tip of

modern-day Gujarat (about 20 miles south of Surat), where a Deobandi seminary had

recently been founded.201 In fact, the Dabhel school—Jamia Islamia Talimuddin

Dabhel, still functioning and, at the time of this writing, boasting around a thousand

students—might offer a key to understanding Shabbir Ahmad’s somewhat mysterious

(and “sudden”) quasi-break with the institution which his father had helped found and

which he himself had led.

The “Dabhel Jamia Islamia,” as the Dabhel school is commonly known, was founded

in the late 1920s/mid-1340s—just after students and, crucially, some teachers at the

university at Deoband had been expelled or otherwise let go on account of their

agitation-related activities, aforementioned. Shabbir Ahmad had sided with them, at

least for a time, as stated above. It seems that some of these dissenters, led by Anwar

Shah Kashmiri, decided to establish an institution of their own (though certainly still

Deobandi in organization and philosophy [mәslәk], and even affiliation). Shabbir

Ahmad would rationalize the situation in terms of “divine will” when he wrote, shortly

after becoming chancellor at the university in Deoband in the mid-1930s/mid-1350s,

that the contention a decade previously might be compared to a “storm” or a “squall”

which, though raging, in the end becomes “the immediate cause of the freshness and

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greenness of the earth,” despite “partial losses” incurred during the storm itself. In

other words, “by the arrival of the ‘alәma of Deoband there the magnificent mәdrәsәħ

that came into existence at Dabhel…is today watering every part of Gujarat…”202 Thus

the removal of rebel faculty and students at Deoband had providentially resulted in the

founding of a sister institution at Dabhel—run by the same. And it was as dean of the

latter that Shabbir Ahmad spent the vast majority of his time as chancellor of the former.

But what had been the reason for the agitation in the first place—agitation that had

been so serious as to drive a luminary like Anwar Shah Kashmiri from Deoband itself?

The dar ul’alwm’s official history remains vague on the issue, and, when the author

visited Dabhel in August 2012/Ramadan 1433 specifically to inquire as to the reason for

the schism, no one at the school seemed to know much about it. At least one scholar has

identified some rumblings of dissent within the Deobandi movement in the 1920s/1340s

over the school leadership’s sanction of, participation in, and cheerleading for the

“Hindu-led” non-cooperation movement (a deal chalked out with Gandhi in return for

his support vis-à-vis the Khilafat movement, as previously noted); evidently there were

those who felt that working with the Hindus was too steep a price, whatever the cause.

Could it have been this issue that eventually led to the exodus of teachers and students

from Deoband to Dabhel? Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, once singled out by Ahmad Riza Khan

as an apostate, and head teacher Anwar Shah Kashmiri had, at least since the Khilafat

days, spearheaded a faction within the school that felt that the dar ul’alwm’s “primary

objective” should be the pursuit of scholarship and religious learning (i.e. not politics or

even relgio-political “movements”). (As early as 1920/1338, Abul Kalam Azad had

made reference to two factions present at the school within the ranks of the Deobandi

leadership, each vying for influence over the other, thus providing a clue as to how early

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an intra-Deobadi political schism had begun to materialize).203 In other words, direct

political involvement should be avoided. Shabbir Ahmad, despite his own personal

involvement in the JUH, evidently agreed that the school itself should adopt an apolitical

stance—and for years he had acted as one of the faction’s chief spokesmen. In the end

the other faction, governed by the thinking of Mahmud Hasan and ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi

and lead most prominently by one Husain Ahmad Madani, won out, and in 1927/1346

the Kashmiri faction was expelled from the institution altogether. Noting Shabbir

Ahmad’s personal support of this group (indeed, his part as an active member of it), it is

not surprising that he should hold a similar view a couple decades later over the JUH’s

alliance with the INC. In this context, Shabbir Ahmad’s repudiation of the mainline

Deobandi political position—indeed, his active struggle against it—perhaps loses some

of its mystery, for he’d been associated with a more dissenting element within

Deobandism all along. In 1928/1347, Shabbir Ahmad left Deoband, too, pushed out by

Husain Ahmad; the latter apparently had opposed the proposition, put forward by some

within the school’s administration, that Shabbir Ahmad be promoted to higher office.

The idea had sparked “controversy,” and Madani’s viewpoint prevailed.204 Between

1928 and 1934/1346 and 1353, Shabbir Ahmad taught at the mәdrәsәħ in Dabhel, acting

as head of the school’s hәdis department for several years.

Another theory, explained to the author by one of the dar ul’alwm’s top officials in

2012/1433 and backed up later by one of the university’s other old-timers, holds that

Shabbir Ahmad expected to become head of the hәdis department after Anwar Shah

Kashmiri but was snubbed by the appointment of Husain Ahmad Madani, whose

experience teaching hәdis in Medina reportedly granted him an aura of respectability

with which even Shabbir Ahmad could not compete. Shabbir Ahmad was considered the

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school’s preeminent authority on hәdis before Madani arrived; it was customary, too, at

the university for the head teacher to augment his duties with hәdis-teaching, thus

combining the position with added prestige. Apparently, then, somewhat of a rift

developed between the two men as soon as Madani began working at the school.

“Husain Ahmad Madani, when he started teaching here [at Deoband],” explained the

great-gransdon of Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi, “Shabbir Ahmad Usmani had

differences with him.” If Shabbir Ahmad did indeed feel unfairly treated vis-à-vis

Madani and the hәdis department position, it would have only been exacerbated by the

fact that Husain Ahmad was also widely seen as the head of the highly politicized,

overtly anti-colonial (Mahmud Hasan-inspired) faction within the school, opposed to the

Thanawi- and Kashmiri-inspired group of which he (Usmani) was a vocal member.

(The animosity, if such a strong word can be used, didn’t flow one-way, either, as

Madani’s push for Shabbir Ahmad’s ouster in 1928/1347 appears to demonstrate). Such

“differences,” it seems, proved too much, and the resultant Usmani-Madani split would

seem to define both men’s political careers (not to mention that of the JUH and the

future Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, or JUI) from that period forward. Over the five to seven

years after Shabbir Ahmad’s departure from Deoband, his difference with Madani did,

however, “lessen” to an extent, allowing him to return and take up the post of vice-

chancellor and, a year later, chancellor.205 (The real impetus behind his return to

Deoband, however, might have been the “pressure from his supporters within the

executive of the School,” supporters who rallied in his behalf and ultimately opened up a

way for his 1934 reinstatement and official elevation.)206 But even this rapprochement

wasn’t to last.

In the meantime, Shabbir Ahmad remained an active and high-ranking member of

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the JUH, fought politically for the rights of Muslims as he understood them, and

maintained a reputation for religiously inspired ardor throughout. “But when [he]

realized,” writes one of his biographers, “that the Jamiat Ulema-e Hind had become the

Jamiat Ulema-e Congress”—a reference, of course, to the “Hindu-dominated” INC—he

broke away from the organization and formed his own.207 The biographer’s

characterization of the JUH-INC relationship as one of domination on the INC’s part,

and humble obedience on the JUH’s, is inherently unfair. But for those ‘alәma, like

Shabbir Ahmad, who had opposed the union from the beginning, such a characterization

was to become more and more compelling. The Hindus were dominating the Deobandi

‘alәma, they argued; the brightest Muslim scholars on the subcontinent were being

taken for fools. This had to stop.

But whatever Shabbir Ahmad’s personal ruminations, between 1942/1361 and

1943/1362 another major schism occurred among the faculty and students of the

university at Deoband, a divide that was not so much theological as political—

inherently tied to the tumultuous events then rocking India and the world. The British

Empire, of course, was engaged at the time in a fight for its life against Hitler’s forces at

home and against Tojo’s forces abroad, the latter of which were threatening to conquer

the entire Southeast Asian peninsula; by mid-year, the Japanese were knocking on the

doors of India and Burma. Meanwhile, on the subcontinent itself, millions of Indians

were outraged that the British Government had committed Indian forces to war

without so much as a consultation with Indian political representatives. The British

quickly dispatched Sir Stafford Cripps to try and assuage the affronted Indian parties—

particularly the Congress; Cripps and Jawaharlal Nehru were, after all, somewhat

close—but the “Cripps Mission” failed. It had, in fact, only served to further distance all

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major parties involved (the Congress and its allies, the League and its allies, and the

British Government) from one another. One historian put it thus: “1942 was the

moment of political and mental alienation on all sides.”208 Gandhi’s reaction, despite the

wartime situation, was to launch the “Quit India” movement, a massive civil

disobedience campaign whose stated aim was complete political separation from Britain.

But not everyone in the Congress greeted Quit India with enthusiasm (indeed, some

prominent Congress leaders even quit the party in protest); still, most Congressites

rallied behind their leader, reservations or no. Jinnah would famously refer to Gandhi’s

decision to launch Quit India as a “Himalayan blunder.”209

Naturally, then, Jinnah and the League called on the Muslims of the subcontinent

not to support Quit India. Instead, Jinnah took full advantage of the subsequent

imprisonment of many of the Congress leaders, quickly securing positions for Muslims

in India’s several provincial governments. What’s more, as the non-violence-supporting

wing of Congress, including Gandhi, found itself behind bars, a more violent set of

revolutionaries in the party quickly seized control. Within weeks of the mass arrest,

this more radical group had organized and carried out the destruction of an estimated

two hundred fifty railway stations, ripped up large sections of railroad, cut telegraph

lines, and devastated over two hundred police stations and post offices, mostly in Bengal

and Bihar. Indeed, supplies and communications to the British eastern front were for a

time obstructed completely. In the violence that accompanied the British attempt to

restore order, around sixty thousand Indians were arrested and an estimated one

thousand were killed, some by aircraft-borne machine gunners firing desperately into

crowds. Viceroy Linlithgow would describe the uprising as the most serious since

1857/1273.210 It was against this ferocious backdrop, then, that Shabbir Ahmad’s break

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with most of his fellow Deobandis occurred, with students and faculty often acting as

full participants in the struggle—and lining up behind the Congress or the League.

Not surprisingly, the number of students attending the university that year was

considerably smaller than usual. Some were involved in the Quit India movement and

had put off their studies for the time being. Others considered travel unsafe due to the

destruction of the railway lines; this was particularly true for many of the school’s

Bihari and Bengali students, many of whom opted not to make the journey. (A severe

famine in Bengal might also be added to this list of interferences). All of this disruption

to the university’s regular operations, combined with the overwrought mood then

pervading the country, made for a tense atmosphere at the dar ul’alwm. The official

history commissioned by the school several decades later would describe the rift as a

“difference of political ways” (siasi mәslәk ki yxtylaf) among the school’s administrators,

largely fracturing any unity that had previously existed between them—and leading to

a general state of aloofness (kәshidәgi) and serious confusion at the school. But the

official history fails to supply much in the way of details vis-à-vis these various factions,

stating simply that the infighting “finally ended in the resignation and separation of the

chancellor [Shabbir Ahmad] and five teachers.” An estimated sixty students also left

the university in response to this rupture.211

But what was Shabbir Ahmad’s contention? Why did he feel the need to tender his

resignation, even as he occupied the university’s top position? Why did five fellow

teachers—including mwlana Muhammad Ibrahim, mwlana mufti Muhammad Shafi, and

mwlana Zahoor Ahmed—leave, too?212 What could have been so compelling that a full

sixty students would follow them? The official history of the school is not especially

enlightening here, either. According to its version of events, Shabbir Ahmad simply felt

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that the university should have no political position, or at least no practical involvement

in the politics then rocking India and the world. What resulted, the official history

insists, was non-cooperation—causing Shabbir Ahmad ultimately (and prudently) to

sever himself from the institution. Thus ends the official version of events. But

considering the man’s later activities (not to mention those of Muhammad Shafi, one of

the teachers who left with him), it seems clear that this is a whitewashed story. Indeed,

far from advocating some sort of non-alignment for the university, Shabbir Ahmad and

his associates were actively involved themselves in a rival movement—one calling for the

creation of a separate state for Muslims. Thus while most Deobandis, including the

movement’s then-imprisoned leader, Husain Ahmad Madani, called for cooperation with

the Congress and preservation of a united (though independent) subcontinent (Madani

supported his idea of “united nationalism” by pointing to the “pact of Medina” [see

Chapter 1], in which Muhammad had included non-Muslim tribes of the oasis),213

Shabbir Ahmad, like Jinnah and the Muslim League, was striving for Partition. Shabbir

Ahmad felt that cooperation with India’s Hindus would inevitably lead to a “kind of

twisting of Islamic teachings or Islamic customs for the sake of Hindu-Muslim unity.”

Additionally, supporters of the “two-nation” theory argued that working with the

Congress (or even just within a united India) was tantamount to putting “the fate of the

Islamic community into the hands of the Hindu majority.”214 Thus the argument for

Pakistan (or, perhaps more accurately, the argument against working with the Congress

for a united India) possessed both religious and political aspects. This, and not some

nebulous call to be apolitical, was what actually led to the schism of 1942-1943/1361-

1362. Indeed, Muhammad Shafi’s son, himself a highly respected mufti, would write

later that his father had resigned from the dar ul’alwm at Deoband “due to his active

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involvement in the Pakistan movement” (italics added).215 Shabbir Ahmad had been no

apolitical observer. He had, instead, led the opposition, making an eventual break all but

inevitable.

By 1944/1363, Madani, freshly released from prison, was railing against the

oppression of the British and, characteristically, calling for “the independence of India

and the Islamic countries,” which “alone can satisfy our hearts; as long as it is not

achieved, our duty will remain and the struggle for independence will continue.”216 At

the same time, Madani’s erstwhile Deobandi rival was being welcomed with open arms

by the JUH’s fiercest political opponent: the Muslim League. Indeed, in time Shabbir

would been hailed as the latter organization’s “most eminent ‘alym.”217 Another scholar

described him as “foremost” among the pro-Pakistan ‘alәma.218 To politically secede

from his Deobandi brethren, however, Shabbir Ahmad had to separate politics from

religious discipleship. Just as one Deobandi scholar could say, “I am a political disciple

of Maulana Azad and a disciple of Hazrat Maulana Syed Hussain [Ahmad] Madani at

Deoband”219—clearly drawing a line between the temporal and the spiritual—Shabbir

Ahmad could claim to be a disciple of the Deobandi school despite his political

alignment with the League (or, more to the point, against the JUH). These seemed to

be separate and distinct, at least in his apparent worldview.

Long before this schism, however, the JUH had been expanding across the

subcontinent, including within what would become the Northwest Frontier Province of

Pakistan; here the JUH was represented (from 1924/1342) by the Jamiat Ulema-e-

Sarhad (“Assembly of Frontier Clergy,” hereafter JUS). The ‘alәma of the JUS, in

keeping with Deobandi “policy,” attempted to set themselves up as an alternative to the

state court system. As part of their aim to implement shәri’at, the JUS encouraged

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Muslims in the area to “come to the ulema of the JUS for settlements” instead of

“turning to the state‐run courts for justice.”220 Other localized organizations, while not

explicitly defined as branches of the JUH, nevertheless expounded a mostly Deobandi

philosophy vis-à-vis Islam, the mainstream Deobandi position vis-à-vis independence

(namely: pro-independence but anti‐Pakistan), and employed markedly Deobandi

methods (including mosque‐based activism and the garnering of voluntary support in

the name of Islam) in carrying out their objectives.221 For example, in the Punjab the

leadership (and membership) of the Majlis‐e‐Ahrar‐e‐Islam included several notable

Deobandi scholars, Habibur Rehman Ludhianvi and Ataullah Shah Bukhari among

them; the latter served as the party’s first president and was dubbed әmir-e-shәri’at by

Anwar Shah Kashmiri, who would himself serve as president of the JUH in 1926/1344.

Samina Awan, in her groundbreaking 2010/1431 in-depth treatment of the MAI,

described the party thus: “Many of those who joined the MAI were inclined towards the

Deobandi school of thought.” The organization’s ranks were swelled with erstwhile

Khilafatists, whose movement had, as previously mentioned, been fueled in large

measure by the Deobandi leadership. In addition, “some of the [party’s] leaders and

workers” had been “actively associated with the INC,” another Deobandi trademark.222

The MAI agitated for the rights of Muslims (especially in Kashmir, just to the north,

where Muslims lived under what was considered the repressive rule of a Hindu prince,

and in the former princely state of Kapurthala, now within the boundaries of Indian

Punjab). Like the JUS to the northwest, the Deobandi‐leaning MAI acted as a sort of

JUH on the local level in the Punjab, paving the way for increased Deobandi influence

in politics later on; “the protagonists of the Deobandi [school of] thought,” writes

Kamran, “owe a good deal to the Majlis‐i‐Ahrar” which “acted as an instrument of

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political articulation for them in the Punjab.”223 The party was headquartered in Lahore

(and was, as Kamran noted, by far most active in the Punjab), but also ran branches as

far afield as Peshawar, Delhi, Lucknow, as well as in the princely state of

Bahalwalpur.224 Other groups, some explicitly linked to the JUH, some not, did the

same within their respective spheres across the subcontinent. Certainly, the Deobandi

political machine was a force with which to be reckoned, much to the chagrin of the

Barelvis—and, of course, to the organization which they had selected as their “vehicle”

for Pakistan: the Muslim League.

What Jinnah and the League needed, then—perhaps desperately—was a religious

leader who could throw “theological weight” (in the words of one Pakistani historian)

behind the idea of Pakistan to counter the efforts of the anti-League Muslim parties like

the JUH.225 True, the Barelvi leadership provided this on a certain level, but their lack

of organization and unity was an issue, not to mention the fact that it was the highly

organized Deobandi opposition, aforementioned, that represented the League’s greatest

Muslim threat. Jinnah’s answer came in October 1945/Dh’ul Q’adah 1364, when

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani founded the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (“Assembly of Islamic

Clergy,” hereafter JUI) in Calcutta, over which he (Shabbir Ahmad) presided as the

group’s first president. According to some, it was the League itself that organized the

JUI—to be a “parallel organization” to the JUH; the League then “called upon” Shabbir

Ahmad Usmani to lead the new party. One historian goes so far as to claim that the

leaders of the League intentionally sought out Pakistan sympathizers among the

Deobandis, since it was the Deobandi JUH that was the standard-bearer when it came to

the political organization of Muslim religious leadership.226 Evidently mwlana Zafar

Ahmad Ansari (a future member of independent Pakistan’s national assembly) was

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tasked with the mission to “establish contact” with the Deobandi ‘alәma and organize

this opposition-from-within.227 Zafar Ahmad eventually found success with Shabbir

Ahmad. But whatever the circumstances of its coming into existence, the JUI was

clearly organized along the same lines as the JUH, but as a League-backing clerical

party to oppose its Congress-supporting rivals. Of course, the JUH was being led by

Shabbir Ahmad’s erstwhile friends and associates from the dar ul’alwm when he

organized the JUI to oppose them.

It wasn’t two months before Shabbir Ahmad had arranged his party’s first major

conference of Indian ‘alәma—in Meerut in December/Muharram. The next month,

January/Safar, saw Shabbir Ahmad, together with Ghulam Murshid, organize and lead

a similar conference, this time in Lahore, where a branch of the JUI had been set up the

month before. Though some variety of ‘alәma attended (along with a large group of

politicians), they mostly represented urban centers in the Punjab. A poster issued by

Shabbir Ahmad afterwards indicated the participation of around three hundred religious

leaders.228 In March/Rabi II, the Bombay Sentinel announced “the first Provincial

Conference” of the JUI, a three-day event to be convened “under the presidentship of

His Holiness Sheikul Islam Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Sahib Usmani” in Bombay; the

ardently anti-League, pro-Congress paper declined, however, to cover the actual

event.229 Despite his sixty years of age, Shabbir Ahmad had literally traveled “the

length and breadth of the country” for four months, campaigning for Pakistan at the

grass-roots level.230 His “passionate speeches” injected “zeal” into “the Muslim nation,”

one historian has written—and his “great renown spread across all of Hindustan.”231

The JUI had been created to carry out several purposes, chief among them (1) the

organization of the League’s supporters among the Muslim religious leadership and (2)

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the lending of religious credibility to a party (the League) that was often seen as secular

(and even, according to some Muslim detractors, un-Islamic). But whatever the talents

of the JUI leadership vis-à-vis organizing conferences, it seems that most of the

League’s religious support chose not to avail itself of this particular political vehicle,

opting instead for involvement at the local level. The JUI, according to Gilmartin, “was

in fact ill-suited for the organization of the rural religious leaders who formed the

backbone of the League’s religious support [mostly Barelvis], and whose influence

remained diffuse and centered on the shrines.”232 It was true—the JUI and the JUH,

though almost identical in terms of organization and modus operandi, were meant to

accommodate very different groups of ‘alәma and mәshaix. The JUH appealed to

Deobandi scholars and teachers as well as other educated, mostly urban Muslim

religious leaders. On the other hand, the JUI, though a carbon-copy Deobandi

organization led by a Deobandi, was, broadly speaking, expected to rally a largely

Barelvi corps of scholars and pirs drawn mostly from rural areas. It isn’t surprising,

then, that so many among the (often Barelvi) League-supporting religious leadership in

South Asia remained more or less aloof from the Muslim League’s political machine.

The fact that the JUI was led by a prominent Deobandi almost certainly played a major

role in dissuading the Barelvi religious leadership from flocking to its banner, too.

(These circumstances would have major consequences for this latter group after

Partition; see Chapter 4.) In any case, if Jinnah’s purpose had been to divide his most

formidable Muslim rivals, the JUI seems to have served this goal well, despite its

inability to act as the League’s chief political organ for most Pakistan-supporting

Muslim scholars and pirs.

As for lending religious credibility to the League and its cause, it would be difficult

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to argue that the JUI didn’t largely succeed; indeed, it was for Shabbir Ahmad’s vital

efforts in this regard that later historians, particularly in Pakistan, would characterize

him as “included among the highest order of the architects of Pakistan,”233 not light

language. In the words of Al-Mujahid, between December 1945/Muharram 1365 and

March 1946/Rabi II 1365, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani and his party “activized the religious

groups across the subcontinent,” mobilizing the ‘alәma and mәshayx for Pakistan “as

never before.” Arshad explains that Shabbir Ahmad “amassed support and power for

the Pakistan movement from the religious element,” his relentless campaigning creating

“a new enthusiasm among the Muslim masses” (italics added).234 The aged scholar’s

efforts were “extremely critical” among “the semiliterate” of the latter category,

previously swayed as they had been by the “Congressite” ‘alәma—a reference to the

Deobandi JUH—and the Deobandi-leaning MAI and other parties. Thus Shabbir

Ahmad’s JUI fanned out across Hindustan, categorizing its Muslim political opponents

as blatantly “un-Islamic.”235 And though the scholar’s rhetoric took aim at his fellow

Muslims, one Muslim League poster of the time, described by Gilmartin, attempted to

portray Shabbir Ahmad as a great proponent of unity. “For Muslims to be agreed and

unified on a true purpose is a magnificent gift,” the erstwhile Deobandi chancellor

declared, going on to explain that Harun (Aaron) had placed the danger of division

above even the suppression of idolatry when he had gone along with the children of

Israel as they worshipped the golden calf. “I worried that you would blame me if I

caused division without waiting for your word,” Harun is reported to have told Musa

(Moses). Those Muslims who attacked the League, the JUI, and others struggling for a

Muslim homeland were thus guilty of divisiveness, of attacking Pakistan “with narrow

sectarian arguments.” No—it was the Muslim’s duty to become “of one heart and one

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voice” and “raise the Pakistan slogan.”236 Of course, part of that duty entailed fighting

corruption within the Muslim community itself. As such, the approximately two years

between the founding of the JUI and the partition of India witnessed a furious exchange

of fәtwas between the Deobandi ‘alәma supporting the Congress and the Deobandi

‘alәma supporting the League—in essence, between the JUI, Shabbir Ahmad at the head,

and Madani’s JUH. For every fәtwa issued by the JUH, Shabbir Ahmad “answered…in

the light of the Qur’an and the Shariat,” as he saw it.237 Meanwhile, the Barelvis looked

on, not sure whether to be more agitated about the anti-Pakistani activities of the

Deobandi JUH or about the rising status of the Deobandi JUI within Jinnah’s pro-

Pakistan coalition.

The JUI was thus organized in the run-up to the 1945/1364 central and provincial

elections, described by one Pakistani scholar as “by far the most critical” elections “at all

levels in all the annals of subcontinental history.”238 The breakdown of the Simla

Conference in July/Sh’aban after Jinnah’s posturing as the Indian Muslims’ sole

spokesman provided “a shot in the arm” (to quote Hodson) for the League and set the

stage for his call for general elections, later seconded by Cripps and even Abul Kalam

Azad. On 21 August 1945/12 Ramadan 1364, elections were announced by Viceroy

Wavell, to be held over the winter of 1945-1946/1364-1365—and abruptly “election

fever gripped India,” with Nehru even announcing, “A revolution is inevitable.”239 But

what made these elections so potentially groundbreaking were the “two critical issues at

stake,” questions that the contest might finally and definitively answer: Was the All-India

Muslim League really subcontinental Islam’s “sole” political spokesparty? and Did Muslims

support the creation of a separate, “Muslim” state called Pakistan?240 In Jinnah’s efforts to

emerge victorious from the 1945-1946/1364-1365 elections, Shabbir Ahmad “played an

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extremely important role in the success of the Muslim League in the central and

provincial elections.” “Defined structurally as an arena of public competition,” writes

Gilmartin, “the electoral arena encouraged…the depiction of the League’s opponents as

enemies of the community in a great electoral battle”; Muslims were fighting a

constitutional war, Shabbir Ahmad insisted, “a war not of guns, ditches, and bullets but

of votes, a war in which the life and death of India’s Muslims” was on the line.241

Metcalf writes that, by now, the Muslim League “was supported by some of the

religious scholarship, some ‘ulama, and many of the pirs of the shrines”; these last

“brought the old ideal of Shah Waliyu’llah into play, for they wanted a Muslim state

with all that symbolized and devoutly hoped to establish the religious leadership as

advisers, even partners, to a ruling class whose political goals (as they perhaps failed to

see) were largely secular.”242 Metcalf’s assertion, as far as it pertains to the ‘alәma, is

certainly true (though her application of the Waliullahi program to the pirs seems less

so), and may have motivated many—including, perhaps, Shabbir Ahmad—to rally

behind Jinnah and the AIML. In the end, the League scored far better than its

detractors anticipated, winning big in the crucial Punjab and Bengal contests (as well as

sweeping the central assembly’s Muslim seats). Though the Congress walked away

with most of the non-Muslim seats in the elections, the Muslim League obtained almost

all of the Muslim ones (the only glaring League loss had come in the Muslim-majority

NWFP, where the Congress-supporting and Deobandi-leaning KKs won the contest for

the Congress—and while the League had won big in the Punjab, Bengal, and Sindh, it

yet failed to win absolute majorities in any of these provinces). Still, Jinnah celebrated

11 January 1946/7 Safar 1365 as a “Day of Victory”; after all, in 1937/1356 the League

had barely managed to win a third of Muslim seats, and now, less than a decade later,

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the party had captured nine out of every ten. Congress had won big, yes, but not where

it counted—i.e. among India’s Muslims. “Jinnah had campaigned to secure a mandate

for Pakistan,” wrote one historian, “and in this he was successful.”243 But it may not be

an exaggeration to say that the Muslim League, in the words of one historian, “should

interpret its historic success in the elections as the momentous result of the efforts of

’allamәħ Usmani.”244 The Barelvi scholars, pirs, and their supporters would meet a few

months later in Varanasi by the hundreds of thousands, but their importance by then

had been overshadowed by a Deobandi and his JUI.

Soon after Mountbatten’s arrival in India in March/Rabi II, the last Viceroy

proposed partition for India. But what this meant for the North-West Frontier, which

had voted majority-Congress despite its Muslim-majority population, was still

nebulous. The Moutbatten plan called for a referendum to be held in the NWFP to

determine whether the province would end up affixed to India or to Pakistan.

Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress, perhaps surprisingly, agreed to Mountabatten’s

partition scheme—arousing mixed feelings among the Pathans of the northwest,

particularly those who had been loyal Congress supporters. Had they not voted for the

Congress just one year previously? Had Jinnah’s Pakistan mandate not failed soundly in

the frontier province already? To many of the NWFP’s Congress-supporting Muslims,

Nehru’s accord smacked, at best, of abandonment—and, at worst, of betrayal. “We

Pakhtuns stood by you and [endured] great sacrifices for attaining freedom,” Abdul

Ghaffar Khan famously remarked afterwards, “but you have now deserted us and

thrown us to the wolves.”245

How had the Congress won so much influence in so Muslim a province as the

Northwest Frontier? The Deobandi layer of this history has already been mentioned.

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Based on his contact with local residents over several decades combined with his

experiences traveling through the region on horseback just months before Partition,

Englishman Malcolm Darling reported, too, that “all agree that it began with the Red

Shirt movement in the late twenties, when to challenge the established order was

automatically to be pro-Congress, Congress being then the only nationalist organization of any

importance. In Abdul Ghafar Khan, too, the movement had a born leader, who succeeded

in rallying round him the poorer and more discontented elements in the province. After

the fashion of those days he gave them red shirts to wear and a semi-military

organization. This, of course, led to violence, and the organization was drastically dealt

with. A legacy of bitterness is the result” (italics added).246 Darling’s supposition is

doubtless at least partly accurate, but fails to explain why, by the late 1930s and early

1940s, when the League was gaining ground among Muslims in, say, the U.P., it yet

failed to win a majority in mostly-Muslim provinces like the North-West Frontier. Of

course, a knowledge of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry’s history, including Deobandism’s

success in establishing itself among the Pathan, could have provided Darling with some

answers in this regard. Still, the League’s popularity in the region should not be

underestimated; “What we want is Pakistan—to be free of the Hindus, because of their

greater numbers,” one local told an English observer, just months prior to Partition.

“Here we are cent per cent for the League.”247 Especially after Nehru’s October

1946/Dh’ul Q’adah 1365 visit to the Northwest Frontier—when, according to Darling,

the “sight of a Hindu addressing them as the spokesman of the Government of India

made the tribesmen realize, as nothing before, the reality of the impending change and

convinced them that it meant Hindu Raj”—League ranks began to swell more

rapidly.248 By 1946, according to a British observer, Hindu domination was an

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“obsession” haunting the minds of most Muslims in the Punjab.249 Still, Khan Abdul

Ghaffar Khan and his KKs were the dominant party in the frontier regions, despite these

developments.

Muslims in general feared minority status within an independent but mostly Hindu

India. Now, and similarly, many Pathans were afraid that unification with the far more

numerous Punjabis, Muslim or not, would “destroy the Pashtun nation,” in the words of

Abdul Gaffar Khan. Thus the brawny Pathan and his Congress-supporting KKs

requested that, at the very least, the creation of an autonomous “Pashtunistan” be

included as an option for which the people might vote in Mountbatten’s referendum.

Exactly what such autonomy meant, much less where exactly “Pashtunistan” began and

ended, remained hazy; Schofield has described the request, however, as “a demand for

self-rule whilst maintaining relations with both India and Pakistan.”250 But the request

was denied (at Nehru’s personal appeal, according to Mountbatten—an interesting

tidbit),251 leaving Abdul Gaffar, his KKs, and other Congress supporters no choice, in

their eyes, but to boycott the referendum completely. As a result, only half of all

registered voters—just over seven percent of the population—participated, casting their

ballots between 6 and 17 July/17 and 28 Sh’aban. With no Pashtunistan on the ballot,

virtually no Congress supporters voting, and almost certainly significant election

fraud,252 the League managed, however scarcely, to emerge triumphant when the

referendum’s results were published on 20 July/2 Ramadan.

Most histories of the northwest, Partition, or Pakistan now leave the referendum

alone, moving along instead to the emergence of the Pakistani state and the gathering

of that polity’s constituent assembly in Islamabad. This version of the referendum

narrative paints the League as lucky to have squeezed out a victory, with “an absence of

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any real political creativity and pragmatism on the part of the Muslim League and

Congress towards the Tribal Areas” during the contest.253 Arguably there is some truth

to this idea, to be sure. But the situation was quite a bit more complicated. Among the

Pathans, in the run-up to the ballot casting, emotions ran high. For years, of course, the

League had been framing the India-or-Pakistan question in terms of loyalty to Islam.

With the coming referendum, however, the Muslim League “mobilized all their

resources,” sending for “leaders from every corner of India,” in the words of one KK

leader, “to foment hatred.”254 (Future Pakistani historians would paint things a little

differently, pointing to the “intense animosity from hard-line [mostly Deobandi]

Muslim clerics” of “the ultra right-wing,” and their “vile propaganda.”)255

The indefatigable Jamaat ‘Ali Shah was one Barelvi divine (of many) who heeded the

call; just one year before, the AISC leader had stood in Peshawar, in the old gardens of

Shahi Bagh—near the home of Abdul Ghaffar himself, not coincidentally—and issued a

fәtwa declaring that “no Congressman will be allowed to be buried in a Muslim

graveyard, as it is impermissible.”256 Another of these religious leaders was Shabbir

Ahmad Usmani. Shabbir Ahmad and his colleagues crisscrossed the province, declaring

resistance to Pakistan as opposition to an Islamic state (Jinnah had used similar

language when he toured the NWFP in 1945: “Every vote against the Muslim

League…means Hindu Raj”).257 Shabbir Ahmad’s “speeches and campaigning” produced

“a great enthusiasm” for Pakistan and the League among many of the province’s

Muslims.258 Such a spark was critical, as will be demonstrated. As a result of the

renewed contest, however, “tensions and violence” were “simmering in the Province,”

especially “among the would-be [jyhadis] in the Tribal Areas”—and by design. For ill

feeling and hostility had reached such an extent that a vote in favor of unification with

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India “would be tragically divisive and risk unleashing unbridled violence” in the

region.259 The result of such a contest would be, in the words of Wali Khan, a

“confrontation between anti- and pro-Pakistan elements at a time when the situation

was highly explosive.”260

Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his supporters hadn’t boycotted the referendum out of

pride or resentment, then; no, they feared what the contest itself (let alone a win for

their side) might do to the Pathan population. It was, in the words of Banerjee,

“Badshah” Khan’s “final great act of principle.”261 And the League, with the “especially

decisive” help of Shabbir Ahmad, had created the very state of affairs that had “forced”

Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his supporters—whose party, the year before, had won

provincial elections in landslide fashion; was this not a referendum?—to sit at home

during the crucial vote of 1947/1366.262 Perhaps the League should be credited with

some creativity after all, more than a little thanks to the energetic though aged former

chancellor. It was that organization’s strategy of “Islam in danger!”—with Shabbir

Ahmad as a lead spokesperson, “visiting the entire frontier province”263—that turned

the tide. (Perhaps, too, the Congress-supporters should be credited with a little

creativity as well; they did, after all, come up with the League-alluding tәppa, “The stick

that used to beat us now has a flag on it”).264 Speaking of flags, it has been written that

before Jinnah and Liaqat ‘Ali Khan arrived at the time of Partition, Shabbir Ahmad

Usmani “was the first to wave the Pakistani flag in western Pakistan.”265

In the end, the Muslim League won a mere 0.5% more than half of the vote; would

that crucial 0.5% have come but for the efforts of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, to say

nothing of Jinnah’s Barelvi supporters who arrived from across India? The result of the

dubious frontier referendum: the North-West Frontier Province became a part of

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Pakistan and the realization of the dream of an independent Pashtunistan vanished—

some might say, with more than a hint of irony, at the hands of a Deobandi cleric. To

this day the fiery cleric from Uttar Pradesh is considered by millions to have been the

real game-changer for the destiny of the League and Pakistan; perhaps the words of one

of the man’s scholarly biographers best illuminate this particular point-of-view: Shabbir

Ahmad Usmani “made the impossible possible.”266

There are several observations one might make via an examination of the four

individuals whose exploits were touched upon in this chapter: Naimuddin Moradabadi,

Husain Ahmad Madani, Amjad ‘Ali A’azmi, and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani. It should be

noted, for example, that while each was politically active in the independence politics of

pre-Partition India and/or Pakistan, none was chiefly so. In other words, both

Deobandi and Barelvi leaders were primarily scholars first—teaching Islam, running

schools, authoring juridical rulings, mentoring students one-on-one, writing tracts and

books on Islamic topics, and otherwise engaged in such religio-educational activities.

Others in their respective movements, too (like Abdul Hamid Badayuni, for example),

might have played a more crucial part in the politics of independence rocking the

subcontinent before 1947/1366, than some or all of the four selected here. Even so,

each played an important role within the context of pre-Partition independence politics

and in the development of a more overtly political Deobandism/Barelvism. True, the

‘alәma (or at least a powerful segment among them) had always been political creatures,

from the days of the Abbasid empire to the Indian Mughal period and beyond. But it

was during the period covered in this chapter that the foundation was laid for the

emergence of distinct ‘alәma parties, in the western political tradition. These parties—

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most notably the JUI (after the creation of Pakistan, most Deobandi JUH remnants in

the new “Muslim” state would gravitate towards the Shabbir Ahmad-founded

organization) and the Barelvi Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (or JUP), the latter built upon

the ashes of the AISC—would, with one or two others, dominate clerical politics in

Pakistan.

Divided as they were, however, might it be said, as Metcalf did, that the role of the

‘alәma in the pre-Partition politics of the twentieth/fourteenth century, “was in fact

modest”? She goes on: “Indeed, one can argue the very success of their inward-looking

strategy developed during the nineteenth century was a hindrance to them in the

twentieth.”267 Sanyal, in turn, would characterize the Barelvi impact as “small.” This

author contends that the words “modest” and “small” are probably far too feeble to

describe the impact of the ‘alәma and pirs during this period, of either sect, despite the

latter’s perhaps waning influence (just months before Partition, one English observer

traveling across the Northwest Frontier noted that “all along my route people agree

that the influence of the Pir is nothing like what it was twenty years ago”).268 Elitist

histories shine the spotlight on individuals like Nehru and Jinnah and their parties, but

it was grassroots elements that propelled Gandhi to power, and it was this unheralded

base that subsequently pushed Jinnah not only out of the Congress but also into the

arms of the League—where the one-time “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” went on

to craft that organization’s Pakistan agenda. The Deobandi ‘alәma played a critical role

here, fueling the Khilafat movement and populating the base responsible for the decisive

state of affairs described above. This alone represents, perhaps, a more than “modest”

role. Thousands of Islamic scholars, many of whom in turn greatly influenced hundreds

or thousands of other Muslims each, on a local level, were politically active—attending

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conferences, agitating for or against the League, delivering sermons in favor of the two-

nation theory or for composite nationalism, and writing, publishing, and distributing

juridical rulings “proving by the light of the Holy Qur’an and sunnәt that the Muslim

League was the representative party of the Muslims”—or that the opposite was true.269

Obviously, any claim to measure the practical effect of these diverse efforts, expended by

thousands and tens of thousands over the course of years across a large geographical

area, would be futile. But could Jinnah have mustered the support he needed, especially

after 1937/1356, without Barelvi backing? Thousands of influential scholars and pirs

stumped for the League all across India—is this a “small” thing, their efforts ultimately

trivial? On another note, could Pakistan have come about without the “consent” of the

NWFP in that province’s 1947/1366 referendum? Here, again, it was the ‘alәma—

mostly Barelvi, but including Deobandi dissident Shabbir Ahmad and his party—who

actually turned the tide. The League’s victory came by a mere half-percent, despite the

KK boycott! Does not this, too, represent a more-than-“modest” role for the religious

scholars? The Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry itslef, by the early 1920s/late 1330s, had

developed a strong political aspect, and this probably played a key role in dividing

Muslims and thereby protracting the pre-Partition political conflict. Throughout the

period, the Deobandi-Barelvi divide, in the form of his Deobandi opposition and

reluctant Barelvi support, helped push Jinnah into a corner, to a mountain over which

he simply could not climb alone—and, it could be argued, only the sudden emergence of

a League-supporting, dissident Deobandi faction led by Shabbir Ahmad finally saved the

day for the Pakistan dream, pushing the League leader over the stubborn mountain’s

summit. Had the Barelvis lined up behind the Deobandi position, it seems highly

unlikely Jinnah could have carried the day at all—and India might be a single, united

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political polity today, with all that that entails. (Indeed, Jinnah may never have become

an advocate of the “two-nation theory” at all.) Had the Deobandis joined forces with the

Barelvis behind Ahmad Riza’s position, on the other hand, Jinnah might have achieved

sole-spokesman status years earlier, or the Congress might have been forced to accede

to League demands in the 1920s-1930s/1340s-1350s, likely resulting in an independent

though united India operating under a highly federal system with separate electorates.

Instead, their rivalry ensured a protracted pre-independence battle among Muslims

over the meaning of Islam, nationhood, citizenship, heritage, and culture on the

subcontinent. Surely the weak “modest” is a descriptive that fails to apply when it

comes to the impact of the ‘alәma, the pirs, and the Deobandi-Barelvi religious

leadership in general in the context of pre-Partition politics.

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4 - DEFINING A NEW ISLAMIC STATE:

The Rivalry in Pakistani Politics, 1947-1977

To achieve a country is easy, but to run a country is very difficult. May Allah bless you

with the ability to run the country.

JAMMAT ‘ALI SHAH, IN A LETTER TO MUHAMMAD ‘ALI JINNAH1

The Ulema would like to reproduce a society which no longer exists and a polity which

was suited to the early days of Islam.

G. W. CHOUDHURY, 19552

With the creation of Pakistan, the religio-political Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry, while still

vigorous from a theological point-of-view among Deobandis and Barelvis in India,

shifted to the new “Muslim state” of Pakistan. (The political aspect of the rivalry in

India was there, too, of course, particularly as the Deobandi and Barelvi religious

leadership based in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar contested for power and place

within the various local, provincial, and central government bodies dealing with

minorities, religion, and culture; a statist system of government recognizition and

  

patronage thus exacerbated the conflict.) That the rivalry had more or less shifted to

Pakistan was underscored as early as India’s independence day: 15 August 1947. That

evening, the central Deobandi dar ul’alwm’s vice-chancellor, Muhammad Tayyib, told a

large assemblage of students and faculty that with the achievement of political freedom,

a new opportunity had presented itself (with respect to intra-Sunni sectarian strife,

foremost that of the Barelvis and the Deobandis) to “forget past events,” to “desist from

the cycle of reviling and mocking” and to “stop intending to lay blame [on one

another].” It was time now to rid the ummәt of sects and division and unite under a

single ymam and a single әmir. “In my opinion,” declared the mwlana, grandson of

Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi himself, “the chances of our being united are better now

than ever.” Why? According to Muhammad Tayyib, the winning of independence,

including the successful utilization of revolution, had “turned upside down” (munqәlyb)

the parties involved in petty disputes.3 Now that the political side of the schism had

been removed, Muhammad Tayyib reasoned, the two schools would surely be able to

work out their differences. This was one Deobandi position (and, as it turned out, not a

very accurate one, given the events that followed), but it signaled a slight wind change

in India alone. In Pakistan the story was much the same as it had been before

independence was won, only exacerbated now that an actual place at the seat of power

was at stake. Indeed, with the emergence of Pakistan in 1947, the Deobandi-Barelvi

dynamic added a new dimension to the sectarian rivalry. Within the context of pre-

Partition politics, the Barelvis had, by and large, fought for the establishment of an

Islamic state, complete with a constitution that they would have a hand in designing

(along the lines of Moradabadi’s “Eleven Points”) and a government that they would

help lead as the spiritual guides of the Sunni majority. On the other hand, except for

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dissidents like Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, the Deobandis’ goal had revolved around British

expulsion, not constitution-making for some Muslim “homeland,” nor position within a

subcontinental Islamic state. But now, in Pakistan, the Deobandis in the form of the

JUI—and thanks in large part to that organization’s willingness (unlike the Sunni

Conference’s) to be officially associated with the Muslim League—abruptly had a place

at the political table. The political game had not only shifted geographically; it had

shifted goal-wise, such that now the political wings of the Deobandi and Barelvi schools

were fighting over the same thing: that is, official (government) recognition, and the

power and patronage that comes with it. In a sense, the birth of Pakistan instantly

turned them into direct enemies in a contest that, in the end, could have only one victor.

One result of this new dynamic was that the clerical parties consistently failed to unite

in truly joint action, even when they appeared to be fighting for (or against) the same

thing (a phenomenon the author calls “separate unity”). A unified “Sunni” party,

populated by a unified base and led by a unified Deobandi-Barelvi leadership, might

have presented a serious force with which to be reckoned—but this never happened; the

rivalry was too strong, too deep-seeded. Over time, then, and even taking into account

the vacillations of power and prestige characteristic of politics, the dynamic generally

helped only to marginalize both the JUI and the JUP within Pakistan’s political

structure.

Constitution-Making: A Cold Alliance.

Four days before Muhammad Tayyib’s remarks at Deoband (and thus several days

before Pakistan had actually come into being), Jinnah addressed the new constituent

assembly of the future “Muslim” state in Karachi. He had just been elected that body’s

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first president during its 10-14 August inaugural session, and took occasion to elucidate

upon the assembly’s two-pronged purpose. “The constituent assembly has got two

main functions to perform,” he told the gathering of newly minted representatives.

“The first is the very onerous and responsible task of framing the future constitution of

Pakistan and the second of functioning as a full and complete sovereign body as the

Federal Legislature of Pakistan.” The assembly’s purposes, then, were (1) to formulate

a constitution and, in the meantime, (2) to act as the national legislature. (This had been

previously stipulated, too, in the India Independence Act of 1947). And though Muslim

Leaguers (now the Pakistan Muslim League, or PML) largely dominated the assembly,

the body would prove to be quite clearly split on the question of what Pakistan’s

“Islamic” character was to be. That religio-political battle—together with the suddenly

ever-present tug-of-war between eastern Pakistan and western Pakistan for recognition,

influence, and power—largely characterized the next nine years of the constituent

assembly’s existence. Since the debate more or less separated the secularists from the

Islamists, the Deobandis and the Barelvis abruptly found themselves on what appeared

to be the same side. A cold alliance, however reluctant and superficial (certainly in light

of what was brewing beneath the surface, on which more later), was implicitly struck.

Over the years 1947 to 1956 (when a constitution was finally adopted, however short-

lived), though disagreements were many and resentment ran high, the Barelvi and

Deobandi ‘alәma-politicians’ main targets were those seeking to implement a more

secularist form of government in the new country. For the first time on a general basis,

both groups were forced to work together, in the spirit of Jinnah’s call, during the same

address, to “[forget] the past,” and “bury the hatchet.” “I cannot emphasize it too

much,” he said. “We should begin to work in that spirit,

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and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority

communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community—

because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias,

Sunnis and so on, and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas,

Khatris, also Bengalees, Madrasis and so on—will vanish. Indeed if you

ask me, this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain

the freedom and independence, and but for this we would have been free

people long long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a

nation of 400 million souls, in subjection; nobody could have conquered

you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on

you for any length of time, but for this. Therefore, we must learn a lesson

from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to

go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of

Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has

nothing to do with the business of the State… We are starting in the

days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one

community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed

and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are

all citizens, and equal citizens, of one State. The people of England in

[the] course of time had to face the realities of the situation, and had to

discharge the responsibilities and burdens placed upon them by the

government of their country; and they went through that fire step by

step. Today, you might say with justice that Roman Catholics and

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Protestants do not exist; what exists now is that every man is a citizen,

an equal citizen of Great Britain, and they are all members of the Nation.

It seems clear from Jinnah’s words that his vision for Pakistan did not include the

implementation of an Islamic state like that proposed by Naimuddin Moradabadi in his

“Eleven Points.” While a constitution like that put forward by the All-India Sunni

Conference would have underscored the “angularities of the majority and minority

communities”—for the most part excluding Deobandis from the state’s highest seats of

power, for example, to say nothing of other Sunni sects like the Ahl-e-Hadis and the

Ahmadiyya, the Shi’a, nor the country’s twelve million non-Muslims—Jinnah seemed to

be pressing for a strongly secularist system, one in which “caste or creed” had “nothing

to do with the business of the State.” As one Pakistani scholar noted, Jinnah’s

presidential address seemed to strongly indicate that “Pakistan would not be a

theocratic state” and that “religion would be a citizen’s private and personal matter.”4

The Pakistani founder’s reference to England’s “Roman Catholics and Protestants” was

particularly apt, given the Deobandi-Barelvi rift then characterizing the vast majority of

the country’s Sunni Muslims. Whatever Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah’s vision for Pakistan,

whether for a secular modernist state after the Western model or a democratic-Islamic

amalgam harking back to more traditional “Muslim” regimes, his remarks set the stage

for a protracted battle over Pakistan’s Islamic character.5

At this early stage, the main religious “parties,” described by one Pakistani scholar

as the “persistent, vocal and durable protagonists” of the struggle for an Islamic state in

Pakistan, were five. There was the Deobandi JUI, of course, led by constituent

assembly member Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, well organized and working mostly within

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the Pakistan Muslim League party framework; this phenomenon would phase itself out

as differences with the League surfaced and eventually became irreconcilable. The JUI

“wielded great influence on the government immediately after independence,” in the

words of one Pakistani scholar. After the creation of Pakistan, the party was

reorganized (December 1947) with its new headquarters at the home of Deobandi

scholar Ihtisham al-Haq Thanawi (d. 1980; more on Thanawi later) in Karachi. The

JUI—whose post-Partition purpose now clearly evolved around the implementation of

an explicitly Islamic government, an “Islamic order,” in which the Deobandi religious

leadership might play a key role—would eventually be resuscitated and molded into a

political party in its own right rather than a religious wing of the Pakistan Muslim

League. For now, however, the Deobandi organization’s strategy lay more in gaining

influence over power-holders rather than directly weilding that power itself. The same

could be said for another influencial party, active especially in the Punjab: the heavily

Deobandi Majlis-e-Ahrar. Apart from these two, there was also the newly organized

JUP—a Barelvi party, borne of the now defunct All-India Sunni Conference, whose

strategy was similar to that of the JUI: to gain influence and sway over the overtly

political parties in order to bring about the implementation of an Islamic government in

which they might rightfully weild influence and power as the representatives of the

Sunni majority. The approach of the JUI and the JUP in this regard, which shaped their

separate policies “for a long time” (roughly over two decades) after Partition, was in

harmony, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, with their leaders’ historical role as ‘alәma—as

influencers rather than direct power-holders. Though the JUP enjoyed no official seat

within the constituent assembly, the party did have a representative present during the

assembly’s deliberations: a lawyer named Hakim Ahmad (d. 1976 AD) from Pilibhit, a

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town less than twenty-five miles northeast of Bareilly.6 In additional to the JUI and the

JUP, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), founded by Deobandi-trained Abul Ala Mawdudi, with its

program of Islamic revivalism not unlike that of the Deobandis, was also gaining

prominence in the country. While the JI’s official membership count was small,

numbering only a few hundred (due in part to very strict membership requirements), its

sympathizers and supporters reportedly numbered in the tens of thousands. Over the

first two decades of Pakistan’s existence, the JI would experience significant growth in

terms of both membership (especially among students and in the government sector)

and influence, eventually setting the stage for the party’s high point, during the Zia ul-

Haq years. Finally, a somewhat influential segment of the Pakistan Muslim League

itself possessed strong religious leanings—mostly Deobandi or Barelvi, but others,

too—and likewise played a role, often crucial, in supporting the clerical parties’

admonitions for an Islamic constitution and an Islamic government.7

And while the constituent assembly was supposed to be devoid of party conflict,

different from a typical legislative body made up of elected representatives, the truth

was that such divisions existed from the start and were evident throughout. “[I]n the

actual working of the constituent assembly,” wrote one Pakistani historian of the period,

“the presence of political parties was as conspicuous as in any other political field,”

despite the Pakistan Muslim League’s possession of forty-nine out of the original sixty-

nine seats (this would later increase to sixty out of a total of seventy-nine).8 Naturally,

the Deobandi and Barelvi parties sought out those individuals and parties within the

assembly with which they might be able to work—and, hopefully, institute Islamic

government at last. The religious political parties “vitally affected the process of

constitution-making,” wrote Afzal, “especially the Islamic character of the

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constitution.”9 This was to be the scholars’ great struggle.

Perhaps a quick note here on Mawdudi and the JI is appropriate. The Jamaat-e-

Islami was itself borne of the Deobandi movement—a distinctly Deobandi creation.

Over time, however, the organization would distance itself officially from a strictly

Deobandi stance (leading Deobandi ‘alәma would do the same vis-à-vis the JI). The JI

was founded by Abul Ala Mawdudi, who himself had been educated in the Deoband

tradition before working as editor of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind’s newspaper during the

1920s. By the thirties, however, Mawdudi found himself less concerned about ridding

India of the British colonial administration than of Western ideas in general; his

preoccupation centered around those ideas’ corroding influence, as he saw it, on Islam.

In 1941, Mawdudi founded the JI as a sort of vanguard party—to cleanse Islam of

Western influence in preparation for the establishment of a truly Islamic state. Though

he remained, like most Deobandis, a staunch opponent of the Muslim League, Mawdudi

migrated (or, as some claim, was forced to migrate)10 to Pakistan after Partition—where

the JI “soon turned to directly political concerns,” its aim toward an Islamic state

intensifying. Mawdudi focused on the rural population, dispatching JI preachers

carrying JI literature out into the countryside to fire up the bucolic masses.11 According

to one Indian scholar, writing in 2005, “many of the roots of Islamic terrorism sweeping

the world today lie buried in the partition of India.”12 Indeed, both the Taliban

administration of Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden were influenced by the ideas of the

Jamaat-e Islami founder, himself heavily influenced by the Deobandi movement.

Mawdudi’s ideas inspired Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, as well as its

intellectual guiding light, Sayyid Qutb (who would go on, of course, to encourage “more

militant Islamic groups” that grew out of the Brotherhood). The Ayatollah Ruhollah

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Khomeini, despite his belonging to the Shi’a sect of Islam, translated several of

Mawdudi’s works into Persian. Yusuf Azzam, the Palestinian scholar, was heavily

influenced by Mawdudi (and it was through Azzam that bin Laden, his young student,

would inculcate much of the Jamaat leader’s thought).13 In Pakistan, the JI would exist

as a “religious party” alternative to either the Deobandi or Barelvi parties.

While the Deobandi JUI’s transition from pre-Partition party to post-Partition

party had been accomplished smoothly, without even the need for a name-change, the

All-India Sunni Conference’s transition to Pakistani politics was not so seamless.

Indeed, on Thursday, 4 March 1948, mwlana Ahmad Saeed Kazimi—a well-known

Barelvi scholar born in Amroha (now in India) and an active Muslim Leaguer in the

southern Punjab—was upset. From his base in Multan, where he’d migrated as a young

twenty-something, Ahmad Saeed had watched as other religious sects—Islamic parties

representing small minorities—were honored with titles by the League or high posts in

the new government. The appointment of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani had particularly

bothered him. In League circles, that Deobandi mwlana was being addressed as shix ul-

yslam, and he had been appointed a member of the constituent assembly, to boot—the

body that would draft Pakistan’s new constitution (and few things were more important

to the Barelvi ‘alәma than seeing the installation of a truly Islamic constitution, as they

interpreted it). As a former member of the JUH, Shabbir Ahmad had been a

“Congressite” ‘alym, once (though not really, as previously explained), and others,

besides, were receiving similarly high posts. These men weren’t genuinely interested in

an Islamic constitution, Ahmad Saeed was sure. “In fact, they are working to usurp the

rights of the Ahl-e-Sunnat [Barelvis], and crush them forever”—and this he wrote in a

letter to mwlana “Abu’l Hasanat” sayyid Muhammad Ahmad Qadiri that very day. The

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duty—nay, the right—to protect and maintain the “rights of the Sunnis” was theirs, not

the Deobandis’ or the followers’ of Mawdudi (the latter cut from the same cloth as the

former, anyway). Ahmad Saeed stressed that he was not targeting any particular sect—

only claiming what was rightfully his, and that of all other Barelvi ‘alәma and religious

guiding lights. They were “the majority,” thus they should lead. All others were

pretenders and must not be allowed to grasp the reigns of power. The Muslim League

had ridden to victory on the false promise of an Islamic state; the League had betrayed

the Barelvis. And now it was time for the Barelvis to organize a party of their own—

and take back the country from its usurpers.14 Kazimi’s letter, and subsequent actions,

demonstrate that, whatever forced alliance the Deobandis and Barelvis were then

experiencing in their quasi-joint fight for an Islamic constitution, underneath the

surface the rivalry continued with vigor. The goal was still the supremacy of one sect

over the other within the framework of the (hopefully Islamic) Pakistani state.

In fact, mwlana Ahmad Saeed Kazimi had already begun. Before ending his letter to

Muhammad Ahmad, the ‘alym from Multan informed his friend that he and other

Barelvi ‘alәma in the city had formed what they called the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (or

JUP), the first religious party to be born in Pakistan after the country’s founding. As

far as Kazimi was concerned, the fledgling JUP he had inaugurated was only the

beginning, only temporary—until all of the Barelvi ‘alәma and pirs and other religious

leaders could gather together and form a countrywide party. Whether or not this

future mega-party was called the JUP mattered little to him (though the name would

stick); what mattered was that the party came into existence to stand for the Barelvis,

the Ahl-e-Sunnat. The great initiatory meeting was to be held at the end of the month,

from 26-28 March. Come to Multan, Ahmad Saeed insisted. The invitation was sent far

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and wide, to “all the leading Sunni ‘alәma and masha’ikh.”15

After the realization of its chief goal—the creation of an Islamic state in South Asia,

namely Pakistan—the All-India Sunni Conference had formally disbanded within the

hall of the әnwar ul-ul’alwm in Multan in 1948, but the dissolving of the Conference did

not rid the Deobandis of its politico-sectarian opposition. Thus, in place of the

Conference, and at the insistence of scholars like Ahmad Saeed, its (the Barelvis’) leaders

had now established a new organization, a new party: the JUP. “Abu’l al-Hasanat”

Muhammad Ahmad Qadiri, the man to whom Kazimi had addressed his 4 March letter,

was selected as the party’s first president, with Ahmad Saeed Kazimi himself as

secretary-general. A new era for Barelvi political involvement was thus born with the

passing of the All-India Sunni Conference. Over the next 22 years, the JUP would act

as a sort of religious influencer of (and legitimator for) political elites; perhaps it is not

inaccurate to say that it played a similar role to that of the AISC during the heydey of

pre-Partition independence politics. During this period it acted less as a traditional

political party than as a loosely-organized interest group, often used by politicians and

other power-seekers to lend an Islamic veneer to their otherwise secular pursuits.

When religio-cultural issues of alleged import found their way into the national

spotlight, the JUP would weigh in, often vociferously, supporting or rejecting this or

that position, according to its interpretation of Islamic law. (The JUP wouldn’t break

out of this mold and emerge as a serious political contender until the 1970s, when it

commanded considerable support in the towns and cities of Sindh as well as the rural

Punjab, made up an important part of the opposition, and played a major role at the

provincial level in Sindh.)16

The party’s objectives were very similar, of course, to those of the AISC. It sought

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to convert Pakistan into a “true Islamic state,” one in which the political framework was

designed specifically to eradicate “social and moral evils.” This was the culmination of

shәri’at—its destiny and purpose. The JUP would not only strive to spread the “true”

message of Islam throughout the country (“by initiating the spirit of religious-cum-

political awakening and the spirit of jihad among [Muslims]” and thus “divert[ing]

their attention from Western culture and civilization towards Islamic culture and

civilization”), but also fight for actual assembly seats at both the national and provincial

levels for the ‘alәma. The party would help maintain and improve mosques, shrines, and

xanәqaħs, yes, but also demand that the country’s centralized education system make

hәdis, Qur’anic commentary, fyqħ, and the history of Islam mandatory subjects in

schools for all students, regardless of religion. The JUP was to be an active

organization—actively striving, for example, for “pan-Islamism” (the fulfillment of

which promised “peace in the world”) as well as “the spirit of jihad” via the organization

of “Muslim militia.” The JUP resolved to organize branches of the Barelvi party across

Pakistan. Interestingly, given the party leaders’ anti-Deobandi motivations for

establishing the organization, one of the JUP goals specified a resolve “not to indulge in

any activity against other religious and political organizations.” Still, membership in

the party was, like its predecessor, restricted only to “Sunni” ‘alәma and other

“religious-minded” Barelvis.17

One of the party’s first acts was to send a delegation, headed by none other than

mwlana Ahmad Saeed Kazimi, to East Bengal to participate in the deliberations of a

committee of “Sunni elite.” Their purpose: to draft an Islamic constitution, to be sent to

government leaders and legislators as a guide in their constitution-formulating task.

Such a draft constitution was indeed produced by the gathering—and was subsequently

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presented to Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah by the “Sunni” committee head, mwlana

Muhammad Abdul ‘Alim Siddiqui. Muhammad Abdul was a highly educated (both in

traditional Muslim disiplines as well as the Western tradition) disciple of Ahmad Riza

Khan from Meerut who had traveled the world as a preacher of Islam. According to

Barelvi sources, the learned Muhammad Abdul spoke with Jinnah for a full three hours,

and in the end obtained a promise from the qayd-e-ә‘ažәm that the draft would indeed be

adopted by the constituent assembly. Considering Jinnah’s secularist sentiments, this

seems unlikely—but likewise considering the Pakistan founder’s apparent penchant (like

most any politician) for making contradictory promises based on the audience at hand,

the account might indeed be based in truth. Some Barelvis continue to believe that, had

Jinnah not suddenly passed away, the constitution that their religious leaders had drawn

up in East Bengal would have been implemented.18

Pakistan’s first decade of independence was an uncertain one. After the death of

Jinnah in 1948, the apparent cohesion of the Pakistan Muslim League gave way to

reveal a party divided, even as provincial leaders battled for power with the central

authorities. The constituent assembly was marked by “varied interests and conflicting

views,” as described by Afzal.19 These schisms actually granted the ‘alәma parties, both

Deobandi and Barelvi, even greater power, since the various political factions attempted

to co-opt them and thereby gain the confidence of the masses, just as the League had

done with the JUI (and, to a lesser extent, the AISC) in pre-Partition days. With the

support of the ‘alәma on the line, the country’s opening years were marked especially by

the debate over the role of Islam within the new political structure.

Thus the conflict over the constitution—to be Islamic or secular?—really picked up

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steam on the moment of the qayd-e-ә‘ažәm’s death. With the great man gone, a new

period in the young state’s history opened up, characterized by one Pakistani

constitutional historian as “a fierce competition for influence, wealth, power, and

prestige” between the various parties then engaged in constitution-making. Of course,

the constituent assembly (and those lobbying its members) were constantly dealing

with the tug-of-war between East Bengal and West Pakistan, the former home to the

majority of the country’s population and the latter to the vast majority of its territory as

well as its capital city. But two other issues likewise loomed large throughout the

decade from 1947 to 1956 as a constitution was being formulated: (1) the question of

implementing an Islamic state versus a secular one, and (2) the struggle by, among

others, religious leaders for “recognition of their claim to power and influence.”20 The

Deobandi and Barelvi religious leadership were at the forefront of the struggle over

these two issues, sometimes at odds (as in the latter issue) but often fighting side by side

as reluctant partners. The Barelvis tended to be particularly reluctant to work with

their Deobandi counterparts, whom they felt were being granted undue position despite

their (Barelvi) position as “representatives” of the “majority,” but circumstances

demanded joint action—and so their erstwhile nemeses were tolerated for the time

being. In any case, the death of Jinnah marked the beginning of this new phase, this

period of more conspicuously jostling for position and influence, of fighting over the

definition of “Pakistan.” Ironically, Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah, who might have held such a

power struggle in check, had laid the foundation of the now out-in-the-open political

contest—through his various (and often conflicting) pre-Partition promises to a wide

variety of (often conflicting) groups.

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In the beginning, both the secularists and the ‘alәma won separate battles,

maintaining a haze of uncertainty over the nature of the future Pakistani government.

Despite Jinnah’s personal and then lingering influence (he died on 11 September 1948),

at first the ‘alәma seemed to seize the upper hand. For starters, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani,

at the time probably the most powerful Deobandi ‘alym in the country, and to the ire of

many Barelvis a prominent member of the constituent assembly (on the Pakistan

Muslim League ticket), more or less personally drafted the “Objectives Resolution”—a

declaration meant to outline the “aims and objectives” of the consitution and thereby

formally lay its foundations. But since debate over the resolution was heated, both

Deobandi and Barelvi, however reluctantly, were forced to side one with the other. On

7 March 1949, Liaquat ‘Ali Khan introduced Shabbir Ahmad’s Objectives Resolution

before the constituent assembly. Interestingly, given the contents of the resolution, the

Prime Minister’s speech pointed out explicitly that the proposed system was designed

to eliminate “any danger of the establishment of a theocracy.” This assurance was likely

provided as comfort for the non-Muslim members of the constituent assembly, for next

Liaquat ‘Ali explained that, in Pakistan—and in part through government—“Muslims

shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in

accordance with the tachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Qur’an

and the sunnәt.

It is quite obvious that no non-Muslim should have any objection if the

Muslims are enabled to order their lives in accordance with the dictates

of their religion. You would also notice, Sir, that the state would be the

very negation of the ideals which prompted the demand of Pakistan, and

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it is these ideals which should be the corner-stone of the state which we

want to build. The state will create such conditions as are conducive to

the building up of a truly Islamic society, which means that the state will

have to play a positive part in this effort.21

To the ears of the Deobandi and Barelvi ‘alәma involved in the constitution-making

process (or following said progress), the Prime Minister’s words likely sounded like

sweet music—a fulfillment of Jinnah’s perceived promises to them and a culmination of

their efforts (and those of their forbears) to establish an Islamic state on the

subcontinent. Surely, when Liaquat ‘Ali Khan declared that “the state will have to play

a positive part in [the] effort” to build up “a truly Islamic society,” he meant the

institution of Islamic law and, thus, the elevation of the ‘alәma to their proper religio-

political role. This was the spirit of the resolution, and it seemed Liaquat ‘Ali Khan

understood this.

According to the Objectives Resolution, sovereignty “over the entire universe”

belonged to “God Almighty alone”; insofar as the state of Pakistan possessed authority,

that authority was merely “delegated” from God “through [Pakistan’s] people for being

exercised within the limits prescribed by Him.” The “principles of democracy, freedom,

equality, tolerance, and social justice” were to be “fully observed”—but, importantly, “as

enunciated by Islam.” The resolution stressed that Muslims should be able to lead their

lives “in accordance with the teaching and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy

Quran and the sunnәt,” thereby implicitly hinting at a positive (i.e. actionary) role, as

Liaquat ‘Ali Khan had stated, for the state to play in this regard. Minority (i.e. non-

Muslim) rights were to be protected and equality maintained “subject to law and public

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morality.” The Objectives Resolution made it clear that the guiding spirit of Pakistan—

its essence and core—was to be the spirit of Islam. Such concepts as “freedom” or

“justice” were to be affected through an “Islamic” medium. In this, both Deobandi and

Barelvi ‘alәma hoped for a restoration of their traditional role as influencial advisors to

the state, chief propagators of religion in the country, and interpreters of the law. The

resolution seemed to embody that original “promise of Pakistan,” enunciated by one

high-profile Deobandi leader as “a promise that on this land…a brotherhood would

rule[, believing] in ‘Allah’s rule on Allah’s land’[, considering] it a great honor…to

obey Allah and His Messenger… [We] would establish a society and a system of

government that would be based on the teachings of the Quran and the sunnәt.”22

But there were some who opposed the Objectives Resolution vehemently, holding

fast to promises they felt certain Jinnah had made to them regarding the state’s

secularism; “I certainly do not propose to hand over the field to Ulema,” he once

reportedly said—and yet the Objectives Resolution, at least in spirit, seemed to do just

that.23 Certain non-Muslim members of the consituent assembly wanted more debate

over the resolution, which they deemed too overtly Islamic. Its language must be toned

down, they argued, and proposed replacing specific words and phrases (those deemed

especially “Islamic” or exclusionary) with other, more broad-based terms—or excising

them altogether. A speech by one non-Muslim constituent assembly member, Birat

Chandra Mandal, made clear that no one was under any illusion as to the source of these

Islamocentric sections. “Sir, I hear that [the ‘alәma] are insisting on this principle of

Islam.” Jinnah, he reminded the assemblage, had “most unequivocally said that Pakistan

will be a secular state,” and had “never said that the principles of constitution will be

based on Islam.” Another non-Muslim assembly member, Bhupendra Kumar Datta,

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addressed his fellow lawmakers as well. “Sir, I feel—I have every reason to believe—

that were this Resolution to come before this House within the lifetime of the great

creator of Pakistan, [qayd-e-ә‘ažәm], it would not have come in its present shape.”

(Datta worried, too, that “justification” for a usurpation of power by a power-hungry

executive might be found “in this Preamble.”)24 What of Jinnah’s secular state, one in

which “religion would be a citizen’s private and personal matter”? Just as the religious

parties contended that the qayd-e-ә‘ažәm had made promises to them regarding the

establishment of Islamic government in Pakistan, these non-Muslim members—mostly

Hindus from East Bengal—had clung to what they had considered promises, from the

same source, of Pakistani state secularism. “We thought that religion and politics

would not be mixed up,” one member said in a speech before the assembly. “That was

the declaration of qayd-e-ә‘ažәm Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah in this House.” Several of the

assembly’s other non-Muslims made similar speeches from the house floor.

Meanwhile, Shabbir Ahmad and his supporters within the assembly held firm,

clamoring for adoption of the resolution.25 A large group of constituent assembly

members came out forcefully against all of the proposed amendments to the resolution

in its original form. Barelvi Hakim Ahmad of the JUP, though not an official

constituent assembly member, was on hand to lend support to the resolution, too.26

Pakistan was always going to be a Muslim state, the resolution’s supporters argued; this

was, after all, what millions of Muslims had fought for in the years leading up to

Partition. “Islam has never accepted the view that religion is a private affair between

man and his creator and as such has no bearing upon the social or political relations of

human beings,” said Shabbir Ahmad from the House floor.

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Some other religious systems may expound this theory and may,

incidentally, be too idealistic to possess a comprehensive and all-

embracing code of life. But Islam has no use for such false notions and its

teachings are in direct contradiction to them. The late qayd-e-ә‘ažәm

made the following observations in the letter he wrote to Gandhiji in

August 1944:

“The Qur’an is a complete code of life. It provides for all matters,

religious or social, civil or criminal, military or penal, economic or

commercial. It regulates every act, speech and movement from the

ceremonies of religion to those of daily life, from the salvation of the soul

to the health of the body; from the rights of all to those of such

individual, from the punishment here to that in the life to come.

Therefore, when I say that the Muslims are a nation, I have in my mind

all physical and metaphysical standards and values.”

Here, again, the idea of Islam as an all-encompassing politico-religious order, an idea

that undergirded the very founding of the dar ul’alwm at Deoband itself, is made further

evident. And by striving to incorporate that system into a national government (an

entity that, by its very nature, operated via monopoly, force, and blanket provision),

Shabbir Ahmad and his supporters were also advocating that such a comprehensive

system was to be enforced by the guns of government (i.e. not assume the form of, for

example, a voluntary association). Non-Muslims, Shabbir Ahmad argued on 9 March,

“cannot be trusted with the responsibility of framing the general policy of the state,

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[and of]…dealing with matters vital to its safeguard and integrity.”27 Such words

were, of course, a slap in the face of the Objectives Resolution’s non-Muslim opponents,

but this was Pakistan; this was what the Muslim freedom struggle had always been

about. Now that an Islamic state had been won, were the people to throw it all away?

What, then, had been the point of a political split with India at all?

In the end, under the leadership of Liaquat ‘Ali Khan (who had argued for a strong

state role in “establishing an Islamic order”),28 the motion to further review the

Objectives Resolution was defeated as each of the secularists’ proposed amendments was

voted down. Religion and politics were to be “mixed up” after all.29 The constituent

assembly passed the Deobandi-authored Objectives Resolution, outlining the

fundamental principles upon which the new constitution would be based, on 12 March.

All of the constituent assembly’s Muslim members (save one) “vociferously” supported

the resolution.30 The document’s presence would loom over the constituent assembly as

“the center-piece” of the constitutional debate, defining “both the state and idea of

Pakistan,” as one scholar has noted.31 As of the time of this writing, the resolution was

still in effect (see Article 2A of the current Pakistani constitution). Thus the first

constitutional battle between the secularists (or at least those wary of the

institutionalization of an “Islamic” system in government) and the ‘alәma-led theocrats

(under the leadership of Deobandi Shabbir Ahmad) ended in clear victory for the latter.

The situation was such that one modern Pakistani detractor of the clerical parties

lamented how “Jinnah’s secular Pakistan” had “drifted into the hands of his enemies.”32

In any case, as developments continued, things might have seemed, in the eyes of the

‘alәma (especially those of the Deobandi persuasion), to be going their way. The

constituent assembly appointed a Basic Principles Committee (which in turn organized

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several subcommittees) to formulate a report on “basic principles” undergirding the

future Pakistani constitution. Such an important task, the ‘alәma reasoned, should not

be undertaken without the advice and direction of the Islamic scholars; fresh off of their

Objectives Resolution victory, the ‘alәma took advantage of their powerful position to

press for increased influence. Some of the now-emboldened ‘alәma now demanded not

only that Pakistan withdraw from the British Commonwealth (after all, if Pakistan were

to be a true Islamic state, how could it owe any sort of fealty to a non-Muslim

sovereign?) but also that all non-Muslims be removed and henceforth banned from

important government posts. That the demands were taken seriously was evidenced by

the government’s taking “some steps” to at least partly meet the second demand. The

first, of course, was entirely in the hands of the constituent assembly and the

constitution they would create.33 Shabbir Ahmad Usmani in particular, and beginning

as early as February 1949,34 demanded the appointment of a committee of ‘alәma to

advise the constituent assembly as the new constitution was being crafted.35 Thus, at

the insistence of the Islamic scholars, the Basic Principles Committee created a

Teachings of Islam (talimat-e-yslamiәħ) board to advise the committee on matters from a

religious (Muslim) perspective (specifically, based on the Qur’an, the sunnәt, and the

principles of Islamic law).

Deobandi Shabbir Ahmad had gotten his way, yes—but the Barelvi leadership was

not so fortunate. When Abdul Hamid Badayuni demanded JUP representation on the

Basic Principles Committee, he was more or less ignored, never receiving an answer.36

In any case, five scholars were chosen to sit on the talimat-e-yslamiәħ’s board: Deobandi

mufti, relative (and right hand) of Shabbir Ahmad and fellow JUI stalwart Muhammad

Shafi; Muslim Leaguer and Islamic scholar Zafar Ahmad Ansari (whose leanings tended

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toward Deobandism); ‘Abdul Khaliq, a professor from East Bengal; Gunjranwali Shi’a

mufti Jafar Husain, who would later organize the Shi’a political party Tehrik-e-Nafaz-e-

Fiqah-e-Jafaria (tәhrik-e-nәfaź-e-fyqħ-e-j’afәriәħ or TNFJ, meaning “Movement for the

Implementation of Shi’a Law,” founded in 1979) and be recognized as the leader of

Pakistan’s considerable Shi’a community; and Muhammad Hamidullah, the Osmania

University-educated doctor of philosophy from the princely state of Hyderabad. The

board was to be chaired by the aged ‘alym and sәyyid Sulaiman Nadvi, who had replaced

the famous Azamgarhi mwlana Shibli at the (Deobandi-leaning) dar ul’alwm Nadwatul

Ulama in Lucknow after Shibli’s 1914 death. (To illustrate the relationship between the

nәdwәt scholars and their Deobandi brethren: perusing the wares of a nәdwәt ‘alәma

bookshop not far from the dar ul’alwm at Deoband in 2012, the author was informed by

the store owner that the nәdwәt were, for all intents and purposes, aligned with their

brethren at the great Islamic university at Deoband; indeed, he insisted they were

Deobandis in all but name. “They are the same,” he assured me. Then he said,

pointedly: “The ones who are different are the Barelvis.” Several moments later he

added: “And Shi’a.”) Nadvi had been part of the Deobandi majority who had opposed

the creation of Pakistan, supporting instead the idea of a united India; this had been

reflected in his desire to change the name of the Urdu language to “Hindustani,” a term

more suggestive of the tongue’s joint Hindu-Muslim genesis. After Partition, Nadvi

had opted to remain in India, probably in part due to his old age, and was only coaxed

into coming to Pakistan after being offered a princely sum as a salary; even then, he

didn’t arrive until late 1950. It is clear, then, that the Deobandi school of thought and

its scholar-leaders (especially in the form of Muhammad Shafi and the board’s chair,

Sulaiman Nadvi) dominated the board of talimat-e-yslamiәħ, a fact that did not go

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unnoticed by Barelvi leaders; indeed, the latter could boast not a single obvious place at

that particular table, whatever the leanings of men like Dr. Muhammad Hamidullah or

Professor ‘Abdul Khaliq. Basic Principles Committee sessions, as well as those of its

subcommittees and the talimat-e-yslamiәħ board, were held in “complete secrecy.”

For its part, the Shabbir Ahmad-organized and Deobandi-dominated talimat-e-

yslamiәħ board produced several recommendations for the Basic Principles Committee.

The president of Pakistan, the board insisted, should be “elected” by the “learned and

pious representatives of the people” (i.e. not directly by the people themselves). This

was important, since in this context “president” was a term virtually interchangeable

with әmir, the head of state. This one suggestion, if adopted, may have granted the

‘alәma—naturally the most “learned and pious”—a strong hand on the reigns of power,

though the directive referred to the state’s duly elected legislative assembly. The board

also suggested that the president be advised by a shәri’at committee; the committee

should likewise function as an advisory unit for both the federal and provincial

legislatures. This was in keeping with the ‘alәma’s more traditional role as on-hand

religious advisors to the state (see Chapter 1). Pakistan’s legislative system should be

unicameral, with three major powers invested in the house of representatives: that of

declaring war (or concluding peace), of passing a national budget, and of removing, if

necessary, the president from office. The talimat-e-yslamiәħ board thus envisioned a

unicameral, presidential system led by an indirectly elected president and advised at

every level by the ‘alәma.37 The board duly turned in their recommendations to the

Basic Principles Committee.

When the committee submitted its interim report on 7 September 1950, both

Deobandi and Barelvi ‘alәma involved in one way or another in the process were,

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generally speaking, very disappointed, both by its contents as well as the general

reaction to it. The talimat-e-yslamiәħ board members, in particular, were “shocked” at

the report, as it “did not reflect any trace of the [their] recommendations.”38 All

around, the response from the religious leadership seemed to be that the interim report

was simply far too weak in terms of its Islamic provisions. While the report did seem to

favor a powerful executive, the committee had opted for a parliamentary system (i.e.

with a Prime Minister as head of government and a president as head of state) and a

bicameral legislature. The powerful әmir (or әmir-equivalent)-led system espoused by

many of the ‘alәma, exemplified in Moradabadi’s “Eleven Points,” and proposed (in the

form of a powerful head of state who could issue ordinances and even abrogate the

constitution) by the interim report was rejected almost immediately. Though at the

time the Governor-General (to be a temporary office) did possess sweeping powers left

over from the office of (British) viceroy, the propositions within the Basic Principles

Committee interim report were deemed “undemocratic and unpopular”—particularly its

suggestion that the head of state should wield the power to suspend some or all of the

constitution should circumstances dictate such a course.39 At this stage, then, the idea

was not to be entertained that such dictatorial powers might be wielded by the

president (or, if the Moradabadis among the ‘alәma had their way, әmir) of Pakistan.

The ‘alәma were further snubbed by the setting up of a federal court and two high

courts, formulated almost entirely after the Western model. Far from requiring a

degree in fyqħ or experience administering Islamic law, the criteria for membership on

either court level rested mainly on one’s service as a barrister, pleader, or district judge

(the latter combined with experience in the civil service). Years of education at a dar

ul’alwm, then, would mean next to nothing within the new judicial order.40 The interim

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report did propose the setting up of a board of Islamic scholars appointed by the head of

state to ensure that legislation on both the federal and provincial levels was in line with

the teachings of the Qur’an and the sunnәt. Despite this last, however, the report

seemed to signal to the “‘alәma parties” that secular “democracy” was to be the name of

the game; both Deobandi and Barelvi religious leaders dug in, prepared for another

political battle. At the same time, many East Bengalis opposed the report, too, arguing

that the proposed system failed to grant their majority population position the weight it

deserved (more on this later).

The reaction to the report from Islamic scholars and the East Bengalis caused it to

be withdrawan. The Basic Principles Committee immediately appointed yet another

subcommittee—this time with the express purpose of considering “proposals on the

Islamic character of the constitution.”41

Earlier, Shabbir Ahmad had convened a conference of ‘alәma at his own residence to

work out a plan for a governmental Ministry of Religious Affairs. According to the

plan, the Religious Affairs Minister “would be under the Head of the State and not

subject to ordinary votes of confidence in the legislature.” The Ministry would act as a

censor of all government activities, supervise government officials, and control the

country’s mosques, religious institutions, religious endowments, and Islamic courts—a

role that more or less mirrored that of the ‘alәma in most other “Muslim” governments

since the medieval era (see Chapter 1; of course, within the structure a modern,

centralized “total” state, such a role would necessarily carry with it considerably more

power). All the while, the Barelvi ‘alәma remained, in the words of Binder, “practically

oblivious of the new changes and pressures in Islam,” interested in “recognition rather

than power.”42 This author would argue that there were, in fact, plenty of Barelvi

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‘alәma anything but oblivious to the new changes—and very interested in power.

Indeed, “recognition” and power were two sides of the same coin to these self-appointed

spokesmen of the “majority.” It wasn’t just their idea that their tradition represented a

“historical continuity” (one that, they felt, the Deobandis and others had vainly sought

to usurp) that drove the Barelvi scholar-leaders; it was also the very fact that their long-

time rivals, not representative of that tradition, were seizing the levers of state and

thereby threatening to displace them (the Barelvi ‘alәma) as the legitimate guardians of

South Asian Islam. Binder argues that as long as their place as the legitimate

successors within this “historical continuity” was recognized, the Barelvi ‘alәma seemed

far less interested in real politics than their Deobandi counterparts, but perhaps the

reality wasn’t that the Barelvis were less interested—just less organized and politically

experienced, and certainly less united. The Deobandis operated within the framework

of the JUI, an organization formulated after the JUH. Its leaders had been politically

active for decades and were far more experienced as political organizers. As such,

scholars and politicians of the Deobandi persuasion were able early to seize a

disproportionate degree of political power. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute

this to a Barelvi lack of interest in politics. For example, erstwhile AISC leader Jamaat

‘Ali Shah, together with the pir of Manki Sharif and mwlana Abdul Sattar Khan Niazi,

around this time spearheaded a new movement, the tәhrik-e-nyfaz-e-shәri’at (“The

Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law”).43 As its name suggests, the

organization was designed to promote the implementation of shәri’at (as the Barelvis

interpreted it) in Pakistan. For his part, Jamaat ‘Ali felt that he had been promised by

Jinnah himself that such an implementation would take place with the establishment of

the new “Islamic” state. When that didn’t happen—and, perhaps worse, when the

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Deobandis seemed to be granted official patronage instead of the majority Barelvi

parties—Sunni leaders like the very aged Jamaat ‘Ali resumed their political

agitations.44 But unfortunately for them and their Barelvi colleagues, the Deobandi

‘alәma always seemed a step ahead of them.

Efforts by the Deobandi and, less successfully, the Barelvi religious leadership

toward the establishment of “true” Islamic government in Pakistan were not limited to

the halls of the constituent assembly and that body’s endeavor to formulate a

constitution. No, the JUI, the JUP, the JI, the Ahrars, and elements within the PML

each (separately) organized in-the-streets demonstrations to rally the country behind

their (similar but separate) points-of-view. The JUI, the JUP, and the JI in particular

organized shәri’at Days and shәri’at Weeks, observed across Pakistan, in protest over

the secularist drive for a Western, non-Islamic state—and, more importantly, in

demonstration of their demands for the implementation of Islamic law into the

political/judicial system. For example, the JUP’s Day of shәri’at was set for 7 May

1948; the occasion was “successfully celebrated” in urban centers across West Pakistan,

from Karachi and Quetta to Rawalpindi, Dera Ismael Khan, and Peshawar.45 The JI

organized a “Constitution Week” (14-21 November 1952), demanding “early

promulgation of an Islamic constitution.” The JUI hosted a massive conference in

Dhaka (attended by around fifty thousand ‘alәma and one hundred thousand others); the

gathering’s overarching demand was for an Islamic constitution.46 Even the Pakistan

Muslim League got into the game, at one point attempting to form a “shәri’at Group”

pushing for much the same thing; the effort, however, was short-lived. From 9-10

February 1949, the JUI hosted a conference in Dhaka (the party was actually

significantly better organized in East Bengal than in the country’s western wing); the

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meeting was an admonishment to Pakistan’s political leaders to adopt an Islamic

system—and a warning that “attempts to introduce an un-Islamic order would be

resisted.” Meanwhile, the JUP continued to hold up Moradabadi’s “Eleven Points” as

the best model for a future Pakistani political system. The JI, too, pushed for

Mawdudi’s own “Four Points”; these were the acknowledgement of (1) God as

sovereign, (2) shәri’at as the constitutional bedrock, (3) “un-Islamic” legislation as in

need of amending, and (4) shәri’at as the boundary for the national government’s

activities. The JI, too, propagated Mawdudi’s call for Pakistanis not to take an oath of

allegiance to the state “unless it became Islamic.”47 Though some shәri’at-inspired laws

were passed at the provincial level, they were typically not enforced. Still, Barelvi pride

was somewhat assuaged when, in Punjab, the Department of yslamiәt was created. This

branch of the provincial government included a six-member board of Islamic scholars

and a cohort of department lecturers (sent to educational institutions and prisons to

preach Islam). Many of those lecturers were Barelvi (including JUP president

Muhammad Ahmad Qadiri), and the department’s deputy secretary was a noted Barelvi

‘alym, too.48 In addition, the Deobandi and Barelvi parties exerted influence through

their virtual monopoly over the country’s (Sunni) mosques and religious schools.

Friday sermons focused on the need for an Islamic constitution, and copies of these

speeches were often sent to Jinnah or Liaquat ‘Ali Khan.49 Such street-level agitations

and the provincial legislation that sometimes resulted provided high visibility for their

cause, yes, but eventually the religious parties realized that the key to the

accomplishment of their goals lay in the constitution—and ensuring it was an Islamic

one. This was where their efforts should be concentrated.50

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In January 1951, about four months after the Basic Principles Committee had

submitted and then hastily withdrawan its interim report, a Deobandi-led meeting of

‘alәma was convened in Karachi, organized by the aforementioned Ihtisham ul-Haq

Thanawi. Thanawi, educated at the dar ul’alwm at Deoband as well as Punjab

University (and who once claimed not to have “participated in the local politics of [the

dar ul’alwm] during the era of [his] education,” nor ever to have taken “interest in

domestic politics”), had been a reluctant immigrant to Pakistan, only opting to come

after witnessing the mass killing that went along with the mass migration to and from

both countries.51 The scholars present were by no means limited to the Deobandi

school of thought; several other sects (including the JI in the person of Abul Ala

Mawdudi himself) were represented, too—and indeed, their number even included five

Barelvi pirs and ‘alәma. Of the latter, two were official JUP delegates, including Abdul

Hamid Badayuni. Deobandi sәyyid Sulaiman Nadvi (the aged head of the Basic

Principles Committee-appointed talimat-e-yslamiәħ board, who had recently arrived in

Pakistan in order to reinvigorate the JUI after the December 1949 death of Shabbir

Ahmad Usmani) presided over the gathering. The interim report had greatly worried

the ‘alәma. It was obvious that the secularists needed a lesson in Islamic government,

and so the meeting had been called. The juridical scholars and mәshayx present

hammered out a document later referred to as the “Twenty-Two Principles”: a list of

twenty-two core “principles of an Islamic state.” The “Twenty-Two Principles”

included a requirement that the head of state (the “President”) be a Muslim male, that

no law contradict the Qur’an and sunnәt, and that the state be directly involved in the

propagation of Islamic education. Pakistan should be a welfare state, its non-Muslim

citizens should be protected from discrimination (except, evidently, when it came to

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holding the state’s highest office), and the president should have the authority to

suspend the consitution (but could only then administer in his office with the help of an

[‘alәma-led] shwra. Perhaps most importantly, any ideas deemed destrutive to the core

principles of an Islamic state should be prohibited. The twenty-two principles listed by

the mixed-sect gathering in Karachi were often vague, but the heart of the issue was

that Pakistan be an explicitly, unambiguously, unequivocally Islamic state. Islam, as a

political system, must be woven into the very fabric of the political system, must be

more than just a “guiding force”—must be the very bedrock of the country’s political

structure. The state was to be a highly interventionist one: intervening in the market

according to Islamic principles of money, banking, trade, interest, and finance,

intervening in matters of “public” morality and immorality according to Islamic values

(i.e. promoting the positive role of the state in promoting virtue and eradicating vice),

and intervening as a taxer and redistributor according to Islamic ideals of equity and

justice.52 The 1951 Karachi meeting and the consensus-driven document that it

produced was more than a little astonishing; the “gathering of so many [‘alәma] with

such a variety of viewpoints,” wrote one Pakistani scholar, “was in itself an historic

event and the consensus they arrived at lent an unprecedented force to their

proposals.”53 After their formulation, the “Twenty-Two Principles” were handed over

to the Basic Principles Committee and were “duly noticed in…government circles.”54 It

may be argued that the creation of this document represented the high-point of

Deobandi-Barelvi cooperation, however lacking Barelvi representation might have been,

considering their “majority” status.

In December 1952, the Basic Principles Committee’s re-write was finally submitted.

This draft, referred to as the “Nazimuddin Report” (since Prime Minister Khwaja

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Nazimuddin—a Bengali career politician who had served as Governor-General after

Jinnah, replaced Liaquat ‘Ali Khan after his assassination, and was known for “his

religiosity and close contact with the [‘alәma]”55—helped formulate it and then

presented it personally to the constituent assembly), drew heavily from the Basic

Principles Committee’s do-over. And fortunately for the ‘alәma, with whom Khwaja

Nazimuddin and other members of the Basic Principles subcommittees had negotiated,

this time the committee seemed to have taken their input seriously, incorporating

aspects of some of the “Twenty-Two Principles” into their report. The reaction of Zafar

Ahmad Usmani of the JUI captures, perhaps, the general feeling among the Islamic

scholars; the Nazimuddin Report was, he said, “seventy-eight percent Islamic.”56

Among other things, the new constitutional blueprint granted the ‘alәma and religious

(Islamic) leadership significant sway within the country’s political framework. The

Objectives Resolution was to be the constitution’s preamble. The state was to take an

active role in “helping” Muslims live their lives in accordance with Qur’anic principles

and the sunnәt (“with due safeguards for sectarian interests”); what that “help” might

look like was demonstrated in some of the report’s other provisions—for mandatory

teaching of the Qur’an, for example, or prohibitions on alcohol consumption, or the

organization of a proper zәkat system. Perhaps most significant were the draft’s

“repugnancy clauses,” outlining a constitutional process for ensuring that all laws

remained within the bounds set by the Qur’an and the sunnәt (by setting up a board of

Islamic scholars, operating under the head of state, which could vet all new

legislation).57 Though the report opted for a parliamentary bicameral system, the head

of state was required to be a Muslim.

Just weeks later, in mid-January 1953, another ‘alәma gathering—much like the one

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in Karachi two years previously that had produced the Twenty-Two Principles—

occurred, this time in Lahore. Just as the Karachi conference had been organized to

weigh in on the Basic Principles Committee interim report, the Lahore conference was

organized to critique the Nazimuddin Report. Though this second draft was met with

far less criticism than the first from the religious quarter, there were nevertheless parts

that, in the eyes of the assembled scholars, required amending. Perhaps most

important, the conference proposed that the Supreme Court include five ‘alәma, not just

“regular” judges after the Western model. For JUP members Muhammad Ahmad

Qadiri and Abdul Hamid Badayuni, even this was not enough; they wanted to replace

the Supreme Court entirely with an “‘alәma board” that they hoped the Barelvis would

dominate. (Khwaja Nazimuddin did, in fact, suggest this last—an ‘alәma board to “rule

upon the repugnancy of legislation”—to the constituent assembly, but after weeks of

debate it was decided that only the Supreme Court should be vested with such

authority.)58 Indeed, the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry was more than a little conspicuous at

the Lahore conference, as the Barelvi ‘alәma present sought to gain “official” status for

their position as the religious leadership over the “majority” Sunnis (i.e. Barelvis). That

status, they insisted, and “their organization” (the JUP) should be recognized in the

Pakistani constitution itself. Of course, the Deobandis resisted this Barelvi attempt to

assert an allegedly superior authority.59 The meeting underscored the fragility of any

sort of joint Deobandi-Barelvi political action, and, unlike those of the previous multi-

sect ‘alәma conference (which the Deobandis had organized and dominated), its

suggestions were mostly ignored. Besides, the January 1953 Lahore meeting of

scholars, in which the Deobandi-Barelvi rift was so evident, quickly degenerated less

into a discussion about the Nazimuddin Report and more into anti-Ahmadi agitation (on

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which more later).60 The meeting ended in failure. Once again, the Deobandi-Barelvi

dynamic had prevented the Islamic scholars and their supporters from mounting a

powerful lobby for the institution of an Islamic order. And despite the general support

of the ‘alәma for the Nazimuddin Report, the draft was received badly by many in the

Punjab, who felt that it gave undue power to the Bengalis at the expense of every other

unit in the country; “the country seemed to face a constitutional deadlock of great

magnitude,” wrote one Pakistani constitutional historian.61

On 21 September 1954, amidst continued opposition from both the non-Muslims in

the constituent assembly and the Pakistan National Congress (established in 1947 from

remnants of the Indian National Congress and made up almost entirely of East Bengali

Hindus), the re-submitted Basic Principles Committee report was adopted by the

constituent assembly—with all of its Islamic provisions. It was the latter to which the

assembly’s non-Muslims and Congress members had been opposed, after all; Hindu

members of the constituent assembly even boycotted the meeting at which the

constitution draft was adopted in protest of its overtly Islamic content.62 But the

religious parties had played a critical role in seeing this adoption occur—despite their

own disunity—as the constitution’s Islamic character was debated from October to

November 1953. Thus the ‘alәma politicians and their organizations had been pivotal in

not only shooting down the interim constitution (together with the East Bengali

opposition) but also in seeing the Nazimuddin Report become the official blueprint for

the law of the land.

Victory, however, was short-lived. Just days before the constitution report was

scheduled for consideration by the assembly as Pakistan’s new constitution, “tall, dapper

59-year-old” Malik Ghulam Muhammad—who’d been serving as Governor-General

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since Khwaja Nazimuddin had left the office in 1951 to take up the post of Prime

Minister—abruptly dissolved the constituent assembly, evidently unhappy at the

prospect of a new constitution that placed significant checks on the Governor-General’s

(i.e. his own) power.63 The move took place on 24 October 1954. Despite opposition to

the “constitutional coup” from some on the Supreme Court, the move stood when the

judiciary upheld the assembly’s dismissal in a split decision.

Most of the ‘alәma opposed Ghulam Muhammad’s action (which the Times in

London referred to as a “palace revolution”),64 and those close to the events tried to

prevent it when news of an impending dissolution leaked out just prior to its unfolding.

But their efforts were in vain. The JUI’s top leader described Ghulam Muhammad’s

move as “mischievous,” designed “to destroy the Islamic character of the constitution to

whatever extent it is.” Other Deobandi leaders, like Muhammad Shafi and Ihtisham ul-

Haq Thanawi, called the coup “a tragic deviation from the basic ideology of Pakistan.”

The JI general secretary similarly slammed the Governor-General, characterizing his

actions as “cheap and highly deceptive.”65 Perhaps it is not surprising, however, that

some Barelvi ‘alәma actually supported the assembly’s dissolution, given their

belligerence at the Lahore conference, their strong opposition to parts of the

Nazimuddin Report (particularly as it concerned the judiciary), and the failure of the

draft to recognize them in any way, shape, or form as the Sunni Muslims’ “official”

spiritual leadership. Indeed, Abdul Hamid Badayuni sent Ghulam Muhammad his

personal congratulations on the occasion of the constiuent assembly’s forced

disbanding.66 The most protest the JUP put up was at its annual conference on 9

October during which the party “expressed satisfaction over the progress in

constitution-making.” The Barelvi leadership wasn’t giving up on the idea of an Islamic

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state, of course; this was their goal, and their demand for a “totally Islamic constitution”

held firm. But it seems the Barelvi leadership hoped that, in beginning again, their

claim to represent the majority “Sunni” position stood more of a chance of being codified

into law than in it did in supporting any previous constitution report.67 As for the

military, Ghulam Muhammad had ensured its support when he offered key cabinet

positions to military leaders; Major-General Iskander Mirza became Minister of

Internal Affairs and General Ayub Khan, Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army,

was granted the office of Defense Minister. (Prime Minister Muhammad ‘Ali Bogra was

asked to stay on as head of the newly reconstituted cabinet, which he did.) Iskander

Mirza was particularly hostile to the Islamic scholars, warning the ‘alәma after the 1954

coup that there would be “trouble” if they continued to meddle around in politics.68 “We

can’t run wild on Islam,” he said. “It is Pakistan first and last.”69 For his part, Ghulam

Muhammad would justify the coup, marked by “troops pouring into the capital, armored

cars patrolling outside,” and a ban on public assemblies, by blaming the constituent

assembly itself.70 If not for its “internal strain, bickerings, and personal, sectional, and

provincial rivalries,” he insisted, he never would have been forced to such measures. A

new era in Pakistani politics had been born—one in which the country’s elected

representatives would play underdog to a bloated government bureaucracy and the

military.

Within a few days, Pakistan seemed to be on the verge of a full-scale military coup.

“Pakistan, the world’s fifth largest country, is in a bad way,” wrote newspaperman

Douglas Wilkie, at the time. “Its Government is in the melting pot, its Parliament

already dissolved and a state of emergency proclaimed, forbidding any assembly of more

than five persons.”71 Combined with a veritable revolt in East Bengal against federal

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authorities in Karachi, events seemed to be heating up. And though Wilkie’s

prognostication would ultimately come true, the real military coup wouldn’t come for

another four years. Indeed, by June 1955, five months after Ghulam Muhammad’s

dissolution of the first constituent assembly, a new one was elected led by a coalition

PML-United Front government. (The United Front was a Bengali party made up itself

of a coalition of parties determined to ensure that the eastern zone be allotted proper

representation in government.) The dominant United Front party was the Awami

League, but the organization also included a JUI-breakaway called the Nizam-e-Islam

Party (NIP), an independent political party created out of the East Bengali JUI during

that organization’s 1953-1954 falling out with the Pakistan Muslim League, and whose

name literally meant “The Implementation of an Islamic System Party.” The NIP had

been induced to join the Front when the NIP leadership became convinced that the

PML “had taken advantage” of their party “by misleading the people in the name of

Islam.”72 With the convening of a new assembly, the work of constitution-making

began again from August 1955.

The new assembly appointed a new committee to produce a draft constitution. After

years of effort, then, they were beginning all over again—the “work for an Islamic

constitution…to be done afresh.” Meanwhile, the ‘alәma continued to clamor for the

institution of an Islamic government. The mostly Deobandi NIP members of the

constituent assembly in particular pressed hard for the institution of an Islamic

constitution. Their demands became more vocal after the first draft of a constitution

formulated by the committee was presented in early November 1955—devoid of much

of the old drafts’ Islamic provisions (including the critical “repugnancy clause”). In

protest, NIP constituent assembly members boycotted the meeting in which the draft

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was presented. Both JUI and JI leaders met with Prime Minister Chaudhry Muhammad

‘Ali and Law Minister Ismail Ibrahim Chundrigar to lobby for their position and urge

the scrapping of the committee’s allegedly “un-Islamic” constitution.73 The Deobandi

JUI and Deobandi-leaning JI thus worked together in this regard, conspicuously absent

any (Barelvi) JUP assistance.

The (mostly Deobandi) ‘alәma demands resulted in the committee’s abandoning of

the constitution draft. Between November and December, that body worked on a new

draft—as the ‘alәma parties’ agitation for an Islamic constitution reached a new height.

“Hardly any day passed without a meeting being organized to voice the demand,” wrote

one Pakistani scholar. The JUI and JI, and separately the JUP, led the charge. From

19-25 December, the JUI observed “Constitution Week,” their demands enunciated in

public meetings and during sermons in thousands of mosques across the country. On

the occasion of the JI’s annual conference on 22 November in Karachi, the party

demanded specifically that not only should the Objectives Resolution and the Islamic

provisions from the old constitutional drafts be incorporated into the new one, but also

that the amendments formulated during the January 1953 ‘alәma conference be made

effective, too. The JI conference additionally warned the state’s leadership that a secular

constitution would tear Pakistan apart—that the only thing holding the eastern and

western zones together was Islam. To the Barelvis, the situation appeared as a second

chance to get the constitution of Pakistan right—meaning the document would

recognize them as the country’s Sunni majority and their leaders as the spiritual guides

of said majority. As such, a “Sunni” conference was held from 11-12 December in

Lahore, led by the JUP and dubbed the “All-Pakistani Sunni Conference,” a name

hailing back to the organization’s pre-Partition days as the All-India Sunni Conference.

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The Barelvi ‘alәma at the gathering produced a three-pointed resolution, demanding (1)

that the consitution be “Islamic” in “character,” (2) that the head of state “must be a

Muslim,” and (3) that Hanafi fyqħ be declared “state law.”74 Islamic state meant Islamic

state, not some pseudo-Islamic-Western fusion. The conference warned the

constitution-drafting committee that the Pakistani people would not accept a secular

constitution.75

The Barelvi conference ended about a month before a new draft of the proposed

constitution was presented (in January 1956) before the new constituent assembly for its

approval. As deliberations in that body were underway, yet another ‘alәma conference

took place in Dhaka—a mixed-sect affair like the previous assemblies in Karachi and

Lahore—on 8 February 1956. Participants included representatives from the Deobandi

JUI, the Barelvi JUP, the JI, and the NIP.76 The conference aimed to formulate

amendment proposals for the new constitution. Most of the proposals put forth by the

various parties assembled were adopted, and their resolutions presented to members of

the constituent assembly for consideration. When Prime Minister Choudhary

Muhammad ‘Ali finally introduced the draft constitution on 9 January 1956, several of

the provisions suggested by this conference had been incorporated into Pakistan’s

supreme governing document. Indeed, the new constitution draft (to the relief of many

of the ‘alәma) seemed to have met most of their long-fought-for demands, and was thus

“welcomed by the religious-political parties and their leaders.” Leaders of the JUI and

the JI generally praised the new constitution. The document fulfilled “the requirements

of Islam as well as democracy to a considerable extent,” said Mawdudi on the occasion,

while Ihtisham ul-Haq added that it was “commendable on the whole.” Such

sentiments, while mostly positive, obviously betrayed a sense that the constitution was

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far from perfect, however acceptable it might be. Still, it was “Islamic” enough. On the

other hand, the Barelvi leadership of the JUP demanded more; though the party sent a

twelve-man delegation to personally congratulate the Prime Minister on the draft, it

also sent a memorandum suggesting amendments, including a proposition that Arabic

be Pakistan’s official language, that a Religious Affairs Ministry be formed, and that an

‘alәma board to vet legislation according to its Islamic soundness be created.77 Once

again, the JUI and the JI seemed to be on the same page politically, while the Barelvi

JUP took a somewhat different approach.

Within days, however, the JUI and the JI, unwilling to be left out of amendment

negotiations, adopted the Barelvi call for still more constitutional alterations. Soon a

list of seventeen proposed amendments, formulated jointly by five different religious

parties (the JUI, the JI, the NIP, the JUP, and the West Pakistan Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadis),

was produced, reiterated, and backed by a resolution passed during a massive ‘alәma

(and pir) conference in Dhaka on 8 February. The conference added some additional

amendments to those seventeen already proposed, including a demand that Pakistan’s

head of state be a Muslim, Pakistan’s official name be “the Islamic Republic of Pakistan,”

and East Bengal be officially called “East Pakistan.” Apart from this resolution, the

conference organized a committee (called the All-Parties Islamic Constitution

Committee) with the purpose of spearheading the organization and observance of

“Constitution Days” throughout the month of February.78

The assembly formally adopted the constitution on 29 February, and the Governor-

General granted his official consent on 2 March. Generally speaking, the constitution

was “welcomed” by the ‘alәma, at least “as a first step.”79 The Objectives Resolution

served as the document’s preamble. The constitution included a provision requiring

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that the head of state be “a Muslim and at least 40 years of age” (and a “he,” if the

gendered pronoun was to be literally interpreted), and it officially bestowed upon the

state the name suggested by the ‘alәma conference: the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

The state’s “directive principles” included the strengthening of “bonds of unity among

Muslim countries”; the taking of “steps” to “enable the Muslims of Pakistan individually

and collectively to order their lives in accordance with” the Qur’an and the sunnәt; and

the prevention of gambling, prostitution, the use of “injurious drugs,” and the

recreational drinking of “alcoholic liquor.” The constitution’s “Islamic Provisions”

required that the President establish an “organization for Islamic research and

instruction” that would “assist in the reconstruction of a Muslim society on a truly

Islamic basis” (a revivalist sentiment if ever there was one, with clear Waliullahi

undertones). The provisions also called on the President to appoint a commission

whose purpose was to proffer advice on how best to implement “Islamic law.” Most

important of the “Islamic Provisions,” perhaps, was article 198—the “repugnancy

clause,” which stated that no law could be enacted “which is repugnant to the

Injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Quran and Sunnah...” Interestingly, this

last was to be applied to each sect according to its specific understanding of the term “Quran

and Sunnah.” The document tasked provincial government with the administration of

Islamic tax systems, including zәkat, as well as the overseeing of Islamic “charitable”

(i.e. mosque- and wәqf-centered) giving. The state, then, was to be an active, coercive

means of enforcing Islamic moral standards.

Exactly three weeks after the Governor-General granted his official consent, the

new constitution went into force—on 23 March, the same day, according to the

Gregorian calendar, upon which the pivotal Lahore Resolution had been passed sixteen

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years before.

Distractions from Constitution-Making.

Of course, the near-decade of Pakistan’s first go-around at constitution-making

didn’t occur in a vacuum; several events temporarily distracted the parties involved.

Often the Deobandi and Barelvi parties played an active role in the development of these

phenomena, at times seemingly united in purpose but virtually always separate in

organization and action. Besides the riots against Hindus and Sikhs in the Pakistani

Punjab (a reaction to similar riots targeting Muslims in Indian Punjab), there was the

fight over Kashmir (over which, though full-scale war was avoided, significant military

action on both sides did occur); the constant tug-of-war between Pakistan’s eastern and

western wings (including the Urdu-Bengali language controversy); the refugee problem

(twelve million people had, after all, migrated either to Pakistan or India at the time of

Partition, a phenomenon that some describe as “the largest transfer of population in

recorded history”);80 the death of the unifying figure of Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah; the

death of Pakistan’s official shix ul-yslam and Deobandi great Shabbir Ahmad Usmani;

violent anti-Ahmadi riots in Lahore and elswhere (resulting in the deaths of hundreds,

perhaps thousands, of Ahmadis and the ouster of a Prime Minister); and constitutionally

ambivalent changes in government (like the assassination of Liaquat ‘Ali Khan, the

removal of Khwaja Nazimuddin from office, and the “constitutional coup” of Ghulam

Muhammad) all combined to steal attention away from the process of formulating a

constitution.

Pakistan’s first war with India over Kashmir (1948) naturally “strained the internal

political situation,” as some of the country’s more militant generals argued with some of

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the country’s more pacifist politicians over what course of action should be pursued.81

With the British withdrawal, Jammu and Kashmir maharaja Hari Singh had failed to

declare his polity part of India or Pakistan, vainly hoping that the princely state might

remain independent. Since the majority of Kashmir’s population was Muslim (but

despite large Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist minorities), the Pakistani government began

(unofficially) organizing local fighters and volunteers—with regular Pakistani soldiers

mixed in—mostly from the NWFP. Their mission: to invade Kashmir and possess it for

Pakistan. The princely state’s local defense forces gave way rather quickly to these

assailants from the west. This development quite naturally led Hari Singh to hastily

opt for union with India—which abruptly gave the Indian government the green light

to send troops to defend the state from its Pakistani invaders; Indian troops were

immediately airlifted into Kashmir, soon thereafter halting the Pakistani advance. By

the end of 1947, the invasion had mostly subsided, and over the following months

Indian troops won back much of the temporarily conquered territory, until a cease-fire

was called on 31 December 1948. Each side lost around one thousand five hundred

killed; Pakistan ended up with a chunk of western Kashmiri territory (now Azad—or

“free”—Kashmir) while India secured the rest, including the Srinigar valley.

Throughout the conflict, marked at home by “a contest of abuse in the Press and on

the radio and in political speeches,” the religious parties in Pakistan weighed in, too.82

Some Muslim leaders were offended by Liaquat ‘Ali Khan’s seemingly non-violent

strategy, interpreting it as weakness on his part—a weakness that reflected badly on

Pakistan as a nation and Muslims as a people.83 The Barelvis were particularly militant

in this regard, and the 1948 Kashmir War proved to be a stimulant for the JUP to shore

up its organization across West Pakistan. Partly at the insistence of Naimuddin

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Moradabadi and Mustapha Riza Khan, who together visited Lahore in March 1948, new

branches of the party were inaugurated across the country (though especially in the

Punjab) as the organization was tested with its first large-scale challenge of organizing

for a cause. (One of these was the Sindh and Karachi branch of the party, opened in

January 1949 and headed by one Abdul Hamid Badayuni). Led by their ‘alәma, the

Barelvis collected food and distributed it to military and volunteer forces in Kashmir,

provided other relief for jyhadis and refugees in the high mountain region, and strove to

“invoke the spirit of jyhad” within Pakistan’s military units stationed there. The JUP

additionally organized and observed a countrywide “Day of Kashmir” (15 April 1949)

and a “Day of Pakistan” (14 August 1950) to force attention onto the issue and their

demand for “a free and fair plebiscite.” (A U.N. commission had called for a plebiscite

soon after the original cease-fire, a future measure ostensibly agreed upon by both the

Indian and Pakistani governments. But negotiations broke down after this initial

“agreement,” and the Nehru regime, not eager to have Kashmir’s eighty-percent-

Muslim population vote between India and Pakistan, “[did his] best to delay

negotiations.” Eventually India rejected a plebiscite altogether, as Nehru declared,

“Kashmir must form part of India.”)84 A fәtwa was released, too, authored by JUP

president Muhammad Ahmad Qadiri and other noted “Sunni” scholars, declaring jyhad

in Kashmir.

But some other religious scholars, notably Abul Ala Mawdudi, had condemned the

use of the term “jyhad” in the case of the Kashmir War (since the national government

had “hypocritically” characterized the fight as a jyhad to the paramilitary fighters it

unofficially supported while officially observing a cease-fire with India; jyhad, Mawdudi

and others argued, must be declared openly by the government for it to be justified and

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correct),85 but the Barelvi fәtwa denounced such points-of-view. The fight for Kashmir,

they insisted, was absolutely a holy war for Islam.86 For his part, Mawdudi was thrown

in prison by the Pakistani government for alleged “sedition.” Meanwhile, many

Deobandis, too, supported or were active participants in the “sacred jyhad” in Kashmir.

They generally saw the intervention of “the non-Muslim world powers” in the form of

the United Nations as a “cunning” move to prevent the imminent takeover of Kashmir

by the mujahydin. The Deobandis tended to possess a more universal jyhadi mentality,

too; for example, Muhammad Rafi remembers, as a boy, playing only those games

“which could be useful in jyhad”—like horseback riding, the long jump, and the high

jump. (He even avoided hot water, either for ablution or bathing, as it might

declimatize him from conditions at some future front.) The Deobandi penchant for

macro-jyhad (as opposed to regional or local conflict) would gain added significance

later, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.87 Still, this Deobandi proclivity was

illustrated around this same time when JUI officials met with the leaders of several

other Muslim states—including Egypt (whose ambassador described the liberation of

Kashmir as “as dear as the freedom of the Nile”), Syria, and Saudi Arabia—to obtain

support over Kashmir.88

The refugee issue loomed large as well. Most of the more than six million refugees

(some say eight million)89 who flooded into Pakistan wound up in the Punjab; indeed,

the state’s population numbered around 1.7 million more than it had before the great

schism, and this unprecedented increase had to be dealt with if it wasn’t to spiral into a

serious law-and-order situation. Meanwhile, Karachi had been flooded with refugees

from Delhi—hundreds of thousands of them—and tensions in the city between its

original inhabitants and the newcoming influx ran high.90 There would be serious

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ramifications for this phenomenon in the future, as the mostly Barelvi, Urdu-speaking

refugees from north-central India (and, later, their children) clashed with local Sindhis

and the mostly Deobandi Pathans, the latter pouring into the city from the 1970s. To

combat these forces and ostensibly to protect their own rights, the Urdu-speakers

organized politically (about which more later), with serious (and often bloody)

consequences for the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry.

The “sudden” 11 September 1948 death of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad ‘Ali

Jinnah (who’d long been keeping his debilitated condition—and terminal diagnosis—a

secret), opened a floodgate that naught but the qayd-e-ә‘ažәm’s towering personality

could have held strong (though historians can only speculate as to how long even that

might have lasted). As was touched upon previously, a furious jostling for power took

place almost immediately afterwards, as various parties and their leaders vied for

position. The religious parties were certainly not exempt from this power struggle.

Liaquat ‘Ali Khan, a close personal friend of Jinnah and one who had worked at the

qayd-e-ә‘ažәm’s side for years before Partition, commanded some respect as Prime

Minister (concurrent for years with other positions, including Minister of Defense, from

August 1947 to October 1951, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, from August 1947 to

December 1949). But on 16 October 1951, while addressing a meeting in a Rawalpindi

park, an Afghan assassin shot Liaqat ‘Ali twice in the chest. Though the killer’s motives

remain, many decades later, somewhat of a mystery, scholars speculate that it may have

had something to do with his “soft” solution to the Kashmir war—unpopular especially

among the religious parties—as well as his negotiations with Jawaharlal Nehru of India

over the resettlement and treatment of refugees and religious minorities in the two

countries. Evidently some of the ‘alәma even pointed to Liaqat ‘Ali Khan’s wife’s

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apparent reluctance to observe purdәħ.91 The assassin himself was reportedly a Pathan

“ultra-nationalist” and may have carried out the deed in the hope that a “united

Pakhtunistan” might result.92 The official report of the “Commission on the

Assassination of Mr. Liaquat ‘Ali Khan,” issued ten months after the killing, found only

that “it had not been possible definitely to decide whether the assassin…had acted as an

individual or as the agent of a conspiracy.”93 Whatever the true motive of the murderer,

the assassination of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister has been attributed—again, without

hard evidence—to such frustrations and differences in religious interpretation. If

nothing else, the tragic event may have shored up the position of the ‘alәma, whether or

not they were to blame at all—a sort of warning to those who would transgress the

order propagated by the Islamic scholars and their parties.

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani died in December 1949. The passing of the great ‘alym was

a blow for the Deobandi school’s position as the dominant one in government, as no

other Deobandi leader in Pakistan then commanded the sort of respect and adoration

that Shabbir Ahmad had. Of course, the Barelvi leadership naturally felt that one of

their own should assume the official mantle of shix ul-yslam; it was rumored that perhaps

xәwajәħ Muhammad Qamarruddin Sialvi (d. 1981 AD) would be given the nod in this

regard. JUP leaders were “confident,” in fact, that something like this would, in fact,

take place—that the “Sunni” ‘alәma might finally be given their due. Muhammad

Qamarruddin Sialvi, a Sufi of the Chishti order and descendent of the famous

nineteenth-century Sufi saint xәwajәħ Shamsuddin Sialvi (known as “Pir Sial,” of whose

xanәqaħ one admirer has written that “the number of those associated [with it]…is

countless and [they] are spread throughout the country of Pakistan”),94 had studied in

Ajmer at the Madrasa ‘Uthmaniyya Dar al-Khayr under mwlana Muinuddin Ajmeri (a

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scion of the Khairabadi family) and then in Sial Sharif under mwlana Muhammad Din

Budhwi, another Khairabadi luminary. (As previously mentioned, the Khairabadi

family, from whom xәwajәħ Qamaruddin Sialvi received his religious instruction and

training, possessed strong connections to the Barelvi movement.) During pre-Partition

days the xәwajәħ had defied British rule, and as a consequence had spent time in prison.

He had also served as a local Muslim League leader (in Sargodha) and been among

those Barelvi mәshayx who had traveled to the NWFP in 1947 to help win the province

for the League in the run-up to the critical Frontier Referendum. But unfortunately for

the JUP and Pakistan’s Barelvi ‘alәma, and perhaps out of the fear of sparking a low-

level sectarian war, the government opted not to bestow the coveted shix ul-yslam title

upon anyone; the name, at least as it was officially granted by the Pakistani state, would

die with Shabbir Ahmad Usmani.95 This did not, however, stop the Barelvis from later

addressing xәwajәħ Muhammad Qamaruddin Sialvi as “shix ul-yslam” anyway, a title he

would hold on to for the rest of his life. For the Deobandis’ part, Sulaiman Nadvi (about

whom more later) played the role of respected Deobandi ‘alym in an attempt to replace

Shabbir Ahmad, thereby restoring some of the party’s “country-wide influence.”96 But

Nadvi himself passed away in 1953 AD. At that point the mantle, though not nearly as

powerful as the one shouldered by Shabbir Ahmad, would be taken up by his erstwhile

right hand, Muhammad Shafi.

Muhammad Shafi was only the latest in a long line of scholars and teachers in his

family, stretching back on his father’s side at least to the late 1700s AD; and from his

mother he inherited a lineage allegedly going back to the Prophet himself. His great-

great grandfather Karimullah, who had completely memorized the Qur’an and was thus

afforded the title hafyž, had been the first to establish himself in Deoband, allegedly after

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being unjustly dealt with at his previous residence by his Hindu neighbors.

Karimullah’s son, Imam ‘Ali—known by all as mian ji, meaning “schoolmaster”—was a

scholar of much renown in Deoband, where, it has been written, “there was not a house

but he had a student therein.” Imam ‘Ali also increased the family’s land holdings,

subsequently dividing them up between his five sons, most of whom were able to secure

government posts. One son, Tahsin ‘Ali, was not so lucky, however; poor eyesight

negated any possibility that he would find the kind of employment enjoyed by his

brothers, and eventually he was forced to sell some of his land inheritance just to make

ends meet. Still, Tahsin ‘Ali loved to learn—and he loved to teach. He transformed his

home into a virtual schoolroom, instructing his two sons in the memorization of the

Qur’an, Urdu, Farsi, and mathematics. One of his sons, Muhammad Yasin—born a year

before the founding of the dar ul’alwm at Deoband—showed especially great promise,

and Tahsin ‘Ali decided that his home school wasn’t enough. He thus enrolled him in

the new Muhammad Qasim-inspired mәdrәsәħ, hoping that Muhammad Yasin might

gain a religious education in the Arabic language. At the dar ul’alwm, Muhammad

Yasin labored under some of the great founding Deobandi fathers, eventually learning

at the feet of the school’s first student and eventual leader, Mahmud Hasan himself.

Muhammad Yasin had three daughters and two sons; one of his sons died young,

leaving him one male heir: Muhammad Shafi, the future “Grand Mufti” of independent

Pakistan.97 As noted previously, Muhammad Shafi would join with his cousin, Shabbir

Ahmad Usmani, as a pro-Leaguer in the struggle for Pakistan. Now he was the man’s

political successor, opening up a new chapter in Deobandi politics.

On 18 May 1952, Pakistan Minister of Foreign Affairs and noted Ahmadi scholar

Muhammad Zafarullah Khan (d. 1985 AD) delivered a speech at Karachi’s Jahangir

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Park. The occasion, though public, had been organized by an association of Ahmadis—

members of perhaps the most generally deplored (and “heretical”) sect of Islam in South

Asia. Founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908 AD) of Qadiyan (and thus referred to

as the “Ahmadiyya” or “Qadiyyani” movement), the Ahmadis held that their version of

Islam was the one true variety, with Muhammad and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as true

prophets. The latter had claimed to be Muhammad reappeared—but also the Christian

savior, the Muslim mahdi, and even an incarnation of Krishna. (There is a split within

the Ahmadi community, dating back to 1914 AD and the post-Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

succession crisis, that revolves around the Ahmadi founder’s status—was he a prophet, a

messenger, or simply an inspired guide? A Lahore-based group, originally led by

Ahmad’s son, rejected Mirza Ghulam’s claims of prophethood, while the other group,

based at first in Qadian and then in Rabwah in the Punjab, continued to revere Ahmad

as a prophet). In any case, it was the Ahmadis’ alleged claim that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

was a post-Muhammad prophet (this despite the generally held Muslim belief that

Muhammad was the “Seal” or “End” of the prophets [xәtәm-e-nәbәwwәt], meaning none

would come after him) that stoked the most ire among other Muslims. (There was also

a widespread belief, however unfounded, that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had been a British

agent and the Ahmadi movement a British-designed creation “for fulfilling their own

political ends.”)98 Then-Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin had reportedly attempted

to dissuade Zafarullah Khan, as a member of his cabinet, from speaking at a “sectional”

meeting, but the Foreign Affairs Minister was adamant that he attend. Amidst efforts

by anti-Ahmadi demonstrators to disrupt the meeting, Zafarullah Khan declared that

“Ahmadiyyat was a plant implanted by God himself, that this plant had taken root to

provide a guarantee for the preservation of Islam in fulfillment of the promise contained

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in the Qur’an, that if this plant were removed, Islam would no longer be a live religion

but would be like a dried-up tree having no demonstrable superiority over other

religions.” According to the official report of the Court of Inquiry, set up after the

violence that would ensue, this meeting—and these sentiments—“provided occasion for

riots in Karachi.”99 Within the socio-political context of 1953 AD Pakistan—food

shortages going on several years that “created want and unrest among the impoverished

masses,” economic controls by government that stifled business, and, according to

Pakistan visitor and erstwhile U.S. presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, “extremist

mullahs…[who] have fanned discontent for political ends”—perhaps it was just a

matter of time before a spark ignited the lake of gasoline.100 Incidentally, Chaudhri

Zafarullah Khan was no stranger to persecution from fellow Muslims—and even,

specifically, the Deobandi-leaning Majlis-e-Ahrar. As far back as December 1931 AD,

when he served as president of that year’s All-India Muslim League conference in Delhi,

the Congress-supporting Ahrars had agitated against him, reportedly creating

“disorderly scenes” outside of the League conference. A procession was held, black flags

were waved, anti-Ahmadi speeches were delivered at the Jama Masjid, and a “mob

prevented the League from assembling in accordance with its program.” The AIML

blamed the demonstrations on the Congress, who had “engineered” the agitation

“among uneducated Moslems.”101 Now, twenty-two years later, the same outfit—the

Majlis-e-Ahrar—was agitating against the same man. This time, however, there would

be blood.

Immediately the ‘alәma of the usually feuding sects—including both Deobandi and

Barelvi scholars—banded together to stamp out the Ahmadi “menace” once and for all,

forming the Tehrik-e-Tahaffuz-e-Khatam-e-Nabawat (tehrik-e-tәhәffuž-e-xәtәm-e-

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nәbәwwәt, or “Movement for the Safeguarding of the End of the Prophets”). The

organization was created to defend Muhammad’s place as the last of the prophets—and

to strike down all notions that any other prophet, including the “heretic” Mirza Ghulam

Ahmad, could have come after him. The Tehrik-e-Tahaffuz-e-Khatam-e-Nabawat made

three official demands to the Pakistani government: (1) that Ahmadis be officially

declared a “non-Muslim minority,” (2) that Zafarullah Khan be removed from office

forthwith, and (3) that all other Ahmadis be fired from important government positions,

too. The three demands were officially presented at an All-Pakistan Muslim Parties

conference in Karachi in July. The conference appointed a committee, tasked to put

pressure on the government to meet their requests. With their demands formulated,

the mostly Barelvi and Deobandi Tehrik-e-Tahaffuz-e-Khatam-e-Nabawat leadership

stood divided on how best to agitate for those demands to be met. One section of the

organization favored a constitutional approach and the avoidance of “direct measures”

(rast yqdam); one of those favoring such a legal approach was JUP leader “Abul Hasanat”

Qadiri. But the Ahrars, who had long been engaged, under the leadership of Deobandi

clerics like Habibur Rehman Ludhianvi, in anti-Ahmadi campaigning, and now at the

urging of great Deobandi scholar-leaders like Ataullah Shah Bukhari, went into action

mode, stirring the rest of the Tehrik-e-Tahaffuz-e-Khatam-e-Nabawat to just such

“direct measures.” Mawdudi’s JI as well as the JUI did much the same. (Both the

Ahrars and the JUI had supported the Pakistan Muslim League in the 1951 AD

provincial elections in Punjab; the League won a majority of the available seats—and

some scholars speculate that perhaps it was this victory that emboldened the Ahrars and

others to now act on their long-held anti-Ahmadi sentiments.) Despite Qadiri’s

reservations, most of the JUP would come on board the Ahrar-, JUI-, and JI-inspired

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“direct measures” bandwagon, especially after numerous attempts to gain assurances

from Khwaja Nazimuddin, as well as provincial leaders, that their demands be met

ended in disappointment. The committee appointed by the All-Pakistan Muslim Parties

conference to “pressure” the government thus officially called for “direct measures,” and

furthermore threw down the gauntlet, so to speak, at the feet of the Prime Minister—in

the form of an ultimatum granting him one month to comply with the ‘alәma

demands.102 On 26 February 1953, nine months after Zafarullah Khan’s speech, at a

meeting over which Qadiri himself presided, the Tehrik-e-Tahaffuz-e-Khatam-e-

Nabawat adopted “direct measures” as the movement’s official policy. Upon receiving

the news of the ‘alәma group’s decision, and guessing its intentions, the government

descended upon its leadership in full force, arresting many of its guiding lights,

including (perhaps ironically) Qadiri, Abdul Hamid Badayuni, and JUP vice-president

Abdul Ghafoor Hazarvi. Perhaps more than anything else, the arrests sparked violent

riots across the Punjab (and especially in its urban centers) throughout the month of

March. Martial law was imposed on Lahore from 6 March. Much Ahmadi property and

some of the group’s mosques were destroyed, and anywhere from two hundred to two

thousand Ahmadis lost their lives as targets of the rioters.103 The chaos was so

widespread and its perpetrators so determined that martial law didn’t end in Lahore

until mid-May. The government blamed the ‘alәma for the riots, and Qadiri’s own son,

mwlana Khalil Ahmad Qadiri, was among those sentenced to death by hanging.104 In

all, five ‘alәma were sentenced to death by martial law courts for their involvement in

the violence. (These sentences would be commuted later to life in prison; all of the

‘alәma thus convicted were subsequently released in 1955 AD.) Mawdudi was

sentenced to death, too, for his “connexion with the anti-Ahmadiya agitation in Punjab,”

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sparking protest in Karachi, where “most” shops remained closed in a demonstration of

solidarity with the JI chief. Protests were also held across the city; proclaimed one press

notice issued by Karachi chief commissioner A. T. Naqui, “Demonstrators at certain

places indulged in acts of hooliganism.” On 13 May, the death sentence on Mawdudi

was commuted to “14 years rigorous imprisonment.”105 The rapid communting of

Mawdudi’s, Khalil Ahmad’s, and the others’ sentences illustrates the perceived political

power of the ‘alәma-supporting religious element in Pakistani society, at least at the

time. (One reporter, writing fifteen years later, described the religious clerics’ power

thus: “The daily prayer meetings in more than 10,000 mosques provide [the ‘alәma]

with a political platform that overshadows any party machine.”)106 The anti-Ahmadi

riots of 1953 stand out as a rare example of joint Deobandi-Barelvi action.

It should be noted, however, that the anti-Ahmadi agitation was not launched

without reservation on the part of some of the Islamic scholars (like that of “Abul

Hasanat” Qadiri)—and even outright opposition, especially among a segment of the

Barelvi spiritual leadership. For example, after Naimuddin Moradabadi disciple

Muhammad Hussain Naeemi participated “very actively” in the agitation, the

administrators of the (Barelvi) mәdrәsәh in which he taught actually asked him to leave.

“You are in politics,” they argued, complaining that his focus had fallen outside the

bounds of religion—and demonstrating disagreement among a segment of Barelvis over

the methods adopted by the xәtәm-i-nәbәwwәt movement. On the contrary, Muhammad

Hussain countered, “involvement in xәtәm-i-nәbәwwәt is not a political matter, it is a

religious matter.” (This original accusation leveled against Muhammad Hussain—that

he was “in politics”—turned out to be undeniably true, as he continued to actively

participate in and support the JUP.) In the end Muhammad Hussain Naeemi left the

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seminary, only to found one of the most prominent Barelvi schools in all of Pakistan:

Jamia Naeema in Lahore. But his experience illustrates the disunity amongst the

Barelvi religious leadership over the events of 1953.107

Almost immediately after the riots had diminished, the Pakistani government

launched a formal inquiry into their root causes (as well as the effectiveness, or lack

thereof, of the state’s response). The Court of Inquiry’s (nearly four-hundred-page)

report, presented in April 1954 and entitled “Report of the Court of Inquiry constituted

under Punjab Act II of 1954 to enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953” (but

popularly known as the “Munir Report” after the Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court

and president of the inquiry committee, Muhammad Munir), came down hard upon the

‘alәma, mincing no words in its condemnation of the clerics or of their varying and often

contradictory conceptions of an Islamic state. The report began by quoting Jinnah’s 11

August 1947 speech to the newly formed constituent assembly of Pakistan (“You may

belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the

State,” to cries of “Hear, hear!”). “We asked the ulama whether this conception of a State

was acceptable to them,” the report’s authors wrote, “and every one of them replied in

an unhesitating negative…” Since the passage of the Objectives Resolution, the Muslim

scholars contended, Jinnah’s “conception of a modern national State” had become

“obsolete.” But, the report asked bluntly, “[w]hat is then the Islamic State of which

everybody talks but nobody thinks?” The report lambasted the ‘alәma for being

“hopelessly disagreed among themselves” about even fundamental questions like “What

is a Muslim?” and “What is Islam?” Among other definitions, Deobandi mwlana Ahmad

‘Ali Lahori, head of the JUI in West Pakistan, defined a Muslim as “A person…[who]

believes (1) in the Qur’an and (2) what has been said by the prophet. Any person who

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possesses these two qualifications is entitled to be called a Muslim, without his being

required to believe in anything more or to do anything more.” The definition of Barelvi

and JUP head Muhammad Ahmad Qadiri differed in several respects: “He must believe

in the unity of God,” “He must believe in the prophet of Islam to be a true prophet, as

well as in all other prophets who have preceded him,” “He must believe in the Holy

Prophet of Islam as the last of the prophets,” “He must believe in the Qur’an as it was

revealed by God to the Holy Prophet of Islam,” and “He must believe in the resurrection

[qiamәt].” Interestingly, Qadiri failed to mention many of the criteria listed as

requirements for membership of both the JUP and the old AISC. Such demonstrations,

of course, implicitly underscored a complete incapacity on the scholars’ part to

formulate a workable framework for an Islamic state straddling the subcontinent and

composed of a diverse group of ethnicities, languages, and geographies; if a simple

definition of a “Muslim” could not be agreed upon, how could a constitution be

produced? “Keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulama,” the report’s

authors queried, “need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are

agreed on this fundamental?

If we attempt our own definition, as each learned divine has done, and

that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go

out of the fold is Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one

of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that [‘alym],

but kafirs according to the definition of everyone else.

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The report further criticized the ‘alәma for their positions vis-à-vis apostasy—or, more

particularly, their “practically unanimous” position that within an Islamic state apostasy

deserves the death penalty. But who was an apostate? The Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry

was brought into sharp relief by the report’s findings in this regard:

According to this doctrine, Chaudhri Zafrullah Khan, if he has not

inherited his present religious beliefs but has voluntarily elected to be an

Ahmadi, must be put to death. And the same fate should befall Deobandis

and Wahhabis, including Maulana Muhammad Shafi Deobandi, Member,

Board of Talimat-e-Islami attached to the constituent assembly of

Pakistan, and Maulana Daud Ghaznavi, if Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyad

Muhammad Ahmad Qadiri, or Mirza Raza Ahmad Khan Barelvi, or any

one of the numerous ulama who are shown perched on every leaf of a

beautiful tree in the fatwa, Exhibit D. E. 14, were the head of such Islamic

State.

And if Maulana Muhammad Shafi Deobandi were the head of the State,

he would exclude those who have pronounced Deobandis as kafirs from

the pale of Islam and inflict on them the death penalty if they come

within the definition of murtad, namely, if they have changed and not

inherited their religious views.

Clearly, the conclusion of the report’s authors was far from complimentary to the

‘alәma, whether Deobandi, Barelvi, or of any other stripe. “The net result of all this,”

the report concluded, “is that neither Shias nor Sunnis nor Deobandis nor Ahl-e-Hadis
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nor Barelvis are Muslims, and any change from one view to the other must be

accompanied in an Islamic State with the penalty of death, if the Government of the

State is in the hands of the party which considers the other party to be kafirs.” Then:

“And it does not require much imagination to judge of the consequences of this doctrine,

when it is remembered that no two ulama have agreed before us as to the definition of a

Muslim.”108

Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that, after issuance of the Munir Report

(ever thereafter “an intellectual weapon in the hands of those who wanted to deride the

concept of an Islamic state”),109 the power of the ‘alәma to influence politics was never

quite the same again. Indeed, one Pakistani scholar would conclude just that:

“Squabbling over the constitutional status of the Ahmadis, the religious parties frittered

away much of the advantage they had gained since November 1950.”110 From this point

on, the issue of Pakistan as an Islamic state faded into the background, at least for a

time.

One of the other side effects hemorrhaged by the anti-Ahmadi riots was the

“bureaucratic-military coup” that booted Khwaja Nazimuddin out of office. The action

took place on 17 April 1953, and was probably brought on by the Prime Minister’s

decision, amidst tight financial circumstances, to cut the defense budge by one-third, a

move Pakistan’s military leaders were loathe to embrace. The Governor-General could

cite any number of issues plaguing the state under Khwaja Nazimuddin’s leadership as

justification for his decision, including the growing schism within the Pakistan Muslim

League between the party’s East Bengal and West Pakistan branches, the related

intensification of the Urdu-Bengali language issue (and, subsequently, the death in

Bengal of demonstrators at the hands of police)—and the violent anti-Ahmadi unrest

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then rocking Punjab.111 Invoking section 10 of the Government of India Act, Ghulam

Muhammad removed Nazimuddin and his cabinet from office, despite their initial

resistance. (Nazimuddin’s replacement: Muhammad ‘Ali Bogra, a Bengali like his

predecessor and a former Pakistani ambassador to Burma, Canada, and the United

States.) Of course, as aforementioned, just one-and-a-half years later Ghulam

Muhammad would be at it again, dissolving the consitutuent assembly before it could

adopt a constitution restricting his powers and forming a new, military-heavy cabinet.

By inciting, in various degrees, the 1953 riots, the ‘alәma parties had thus played a

significant role not only in the violence that followed, and not only in getting Khwaja

Nazimuddin dismissed as Prime Minister, but also in ushering in what would become

Pakistan’s long cycle of coups by the bureaucracy-military establishment.

The Ahmadi riots also gave the opponents of an Islamic constitution a chance to

launch an anti-‘alәma backlash. High-powered politicians like former PML president

and governor of East Bengal Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman, new Punjab governor Piroz

Khan Noon, and NWFP chief minister Sardar Abdur Rashid launched a campaign for a

purely secular constitution. This was in line, they argued, with what Muhammad ‘Ali

Jinnah had envisioned for Pakistan in the first place. New Prime Minister Muhammad

‘Ali Bogra got into the game, too, almost immediately attempting to derail the passage

of any Islamic constitution by introducing an “interim constitution” devoid of the

Nazimuddin Report’s Islamic provisions. The JUI, in particular, came out strongly

against the Prime Minister’s move, and in a joint statement with the JI, the board of

talimat-e-yslamiәħ, and some constituent assembly members, characterized Bogra’s

efforts as a “clear deviation” from the legal path heretofore trod by the constituent

assembly. The JUI subsequently organized and hosted a conference, attended by a

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variety of religious parties; the gathering condemned the secular constitution in a joint

resolution on 28 September 1953, with support from a segment of PML members.

Under this intense pressure, then, Prime Minister Bogra’s “interim constitution” idea

was scrapped.112

The spirit of jyhad was inflamed again in 1953 during the Suez Canal crisis, when

Israel, Britain, and France squared off against Egypt for control over the great

waterway linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. According to one Deobandi

‘alym, “every child in Pakistan was eager to help the brotherly country of Egypt” as

events unfolded in the Middle East. The dar ul’alwm in Karachi actually chartered a

plane to transport students, “restless to take part in the jihad,” to Egypt. The school

additionally organized classes on “civil defense” and first aid with the jyhad in mind. But

Nasser quickly restricted Pakistanis’ travel to Egypt; Deobandis attributed this to the

Egyptian leader’s being stricken with “the Arab nationalism malady,” something with

which many Arab heads of state would be “afflicted.” The sad result of this spiritually

degraded leadership, reasoned Deobandi mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani, was the

subsequent Arab loss of control over the Gulf of Aqaba, much of the Sinai desert, the

Golan Heights, and Jerusalem.113

Right from the start, representatives of the majority Bengali population, whose

people might have seemed quietly tucked away thousands of miles across India (and far

from Karachi) in East Bengal, found cause to worry that, despite their constiuents’

numbers, they would ultimately be left holding the proverbial short end of the stick.

This anxiety was only exacerbated by the seemingly ever-present Urdu-Bengali

language controversy. The constitutional deadlock between East Bengal and West

Pakistan was finally, if temporarily, overcome with the introduction of the “Muhammad

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‘Ali Formula” (having been introduced by Muhammad ‘Ali Bogra after becoming Prime

Minister). The “Formula,” placed before the constituent assembly in October 1953,

granted equal representation to each unit in the House of Units—thereby placating

those units in the west (particularly Punjab) who were demanding equal representation

within a federal system—but population-proportioned representation to each unit in the

House of the People. This last made the deal acceptable to the Bengalis, whose

population outnumbered that of all the other units combined. Thus in the upper house,

both Punjab and East Bengal were to enjoy ten votes, but in the lower house the latter

would have one hundred sixty-five seats to the former’s seventy-five. Both houses were

to enjoy equal powers (this had been another bone of contention), and in joint sessions

(where the more controversial issues were likely to end up) both zones would have the

same number of seats (one hundred seventy-five). As for the language issue, in May

1954 the constituent assembly adopted a measure declaring that Pakistan’s official

languages should be both Urdu and Bengali—but also that “the state should take all

measures for the development and growth of a [i.e. one] common national language”

(italics added). This measure could only be a temporary fix, of course, since it still

foresaw the adoption of a single national language at some point in the future. “It was

clear,” wrote one legal commentator, “from the day of its adoption that the formula

could satisy no one.”114 The ‘alәma and their parties were affected by the East-West

quarrel, too. The JUP was always far more active as an organized party in West

Pakistan, though plenty of “Sunnis” lived and labored politically in the eastern zone. To

facilitate the different positions and perceived needs of the Bengalis, the JUI actually

spawned a new party: the aforementioned NIP. (Even the Pakistan Muslim League had

split based on zone, the PML in the west and the Awami Muslim League, also called the

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“Awami League,” in Bengal; the latter would eventually lead the charge against

Pakistan’s central government that would result in the emergence of an independent

Bangladesh). Both Deobandis and Barelvis used the divergence between Pakistan’s two

wings to emphasize the need for an Islamic political framework. After all, they

reasoned, striving to unite East Bengal and West Pakistan—two geographical entities

separated not only by thousands of miles but also by ethnicity, language, culture,

political philosophy, and history—would be all but impossible via some secular

constitution. Only Islam—the one thing binding east and west—could hold the country

together. It was thus incumbent upon those formulating a constitution and those

leading the country to make sure that this one, single uniting force be fused into the

very fabric of the state. Without it, an eventual east-west schism was inevitable. As for

the language issue, some of the Islamic scholars suggested making Arabic the country’s

official national tongue, in part to avoid official preference of either Urdu or Bengali.

“Secularist” Patron of pirs: the Ayub Khan Years.

The JUI reaction to the new (1956) constitution was perhaps predictable, given

what had become the ‘alәma parties’ typical response to constitution drafts and reports.

In December of 1956, this group produced a set of proposed amendments to the

document. The ‘alәma hoped that, given the apparent flexibility of the new constitution,

they would be able to transform it into the “Islamic constitution” that had been their

goal from the beginning. But it soon became obvious that what Islamic provisions were

there had only been included to placate the Islamic scholars and their followers; “those

in power were not serious about implementing…the Islamic provisions of the

Constitution.” Iskander Mirza, who had earlier warned the ‘alәma to stay out of politics

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or face “trouble,” was particularly reluctant to acknowledge—let alone enforce—any of

the ‘alәma demands.115

Absent from the 1956 constitution, too, was any provision stipulating either joint or

separate electorates. This had, of course, been one of the most contentious communal

issues plaguing the political scene during pre-Partition days. Evidently the matter was

to be left up to future provincial and federal legislatures; the decision not to specify one

or the other was probably calculated to get the constitution passed, as the issue of

electorates was so divisive that partisans of one or the other system might have stalled

the constitution’s adoption. Now a decision regarding electorates had to be made. Most

of the ‘alәma took the position of Mawdudi: that separate electorates were absolutely

necessary in order to protect Muslims from Hindu political usurpation. After all, the

call for joint electorates had originated with the Hindus, and after independence it was

the Hindu parties who had carried on the demand within Pakistan. Mawdudi estimated

that in a joint electorate system, Hindus could control, either directly or indirectly, up

to one hundred forty-two of the East Pakistan assembly’s three hundred nine seats, as

opposed to the seventy allotted to them there under a separate electorates system. The

politically active Deobandi and Barelvi religious leadership came down in strong favor

of separate electorates. (For their part, the advocates of a joint electorates system

argued that, among other things, separate electorates would only engender

communalism.) The final decision was to be made in sessions of the East and West

Pakistan provincial assemblies, and then in the National Assembly.

In West Pakistan, the vote came down (August 1956) in favor of separate

electorates. But in East Pakistan—despite the efforts of a joint “emergency committee”

including delegates from the JUI, the JI, the JUP, as well as the PML, all dispatched to

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Dhaka to lobby for separate electorates—joint electorates won the day (early October).

This presented a somewhat delicate situation for the National Assembly, which was

scheduled to meet in Dhaka, too. Finally, the assembly adopted an unweildy Iskander

Mirza-formulated system, one that attempted to please all parties. Under Mirza’s plan,

the West was granted separate electorates and the East was granted joint electorates.

The system failed, of course, to address the ‘alәma’s primary concern: that Hindus in

East Pakistan would be able to manipulate a joint electorates system to the disadvantage

of the Muslim population. But in the end, the Islamic scholars and their parties were

defeated; joint electorates were adopted in both wings of the country in August 1957.

Having lost the electorates debate, the ‘alәma parties turned their focus on the

upcoming general elections. If they could no longer influence the parties in power (as

had been recently demonstrated in Dhaka), then they would contest them for real votes.

They would aim for direct power. Thus the JUI, the JUP, and the NIP (the latter in

alliance with the JI) all put forward their own candidates in the general elections.116

But none of these parties—or any of the others—ever got a chance to try their luck

in the elections; on 7 October 1956, Iskander Mirza, ever an enemy of the ‘alәma-

politicians (and politicians in general!) and eager to retain his position of power despite

the growing popularity of his political enemies, instituted Martial Law under General

Ayub Khan, dissolving both the federal and the provincial legislatures, dismissing their

respective ministries, and banning all political parties. To the ‘alәma, and especially those

of the Barelvi persuasion, Iskander Mirza was a panderer to the West, unappreciative of

the rich Muslim heritage and legacy. (Indeed, as one eyewitness remarked, “Iskander

Mirza’s pro-Americanism often embarrassed the Americans.”)117 Mirza envisioned a

Pakistan closely tied to the West, a prosperous, modern, secular state. On 27 October,

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however—three weeks after Iskander Mirza’s virtual government takeover—General

Ayub Khan carried out a bloodless military coup, removing Mirza (he was sent into

exile in Britain) and assuming for himself the responsibility of the state’s political head.

Pakistan’s inaugural constitution, “prepared,” in the words of one South Asian scholar,

“after tortuous labours of a succession of Prime Ministers and Presidents” over a period

of almost a decade, had lasted a mere two-and-a-half years.118 This “new” role for the

military seemed to fly in the face of Jinnah’s original vision for Pakistan; once, on 14

August 1947, the frail qayd-e-ә‘ažәm had approached two young military officers at a

reception in Karachi and reportedly admonished, “Never forget that you are servants of

the state. You do not make policy. It is we, the people’s representatives, who decide

how the country is to be run. Your job is only to obey the decisions of your civilian

masters.” (Ironically, one of the two officers being addressed was leftist Akbar Khan,

who, against this advice of Pakistan’s founder, would later become infamous as the

mastermind of the ultimately unsuccessful Soviet-backed “Rawalpindi Conspiracy” of

1951 to overthrow the government of Liaquat ‘Ali Khan).119

In the succinct words of Afzal, “The Martial Law regime of October 1956 was not

enthusiastic about religion.”120 Indeed, Ayub Khan assaulted the “Islamic” aspects of the

old constitution from a variety of angles. First, on 10 October he scratched out the

word “Islamic” altogether—that is, from the country’s official name (changing it from

the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan” to the more succinct but far less religion-specific

“Republic of Pakistan”), then three days later disbanded the constitutionally mandated

commission that had been tasked with figuring out how to Islamize Pakistan’s current

legislation. The regime’s unfriendliness to the religious scholars was further

underscored when Muslim Leaguer and high-profile jurist Manzur Qadir (d. 1974 AD),

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Ayub Khan’s Foreign Minister from 1958-1962 (and a trusted advisor on domestic

affairs as well), embarked on a tour of the country to assess the reaction of the people to

the coup. Qadir identified Muslim sectarian division (“the existence of 72 sects among

the Muslims”) as the greatest hindrance to creating an “Islamic” constitution; he would

later head the committee to formulate the country’s new (1960) constitution himself.

(Qadir’s remark underscores the impact that the Deobandi-Barelvi dynamic played—

and continues to play—in Pakistani politics, preventing as it does the nation’s two

largest sects from any hope of strong, united action.) Much like his Foreign Minister,

Ayub Khan saw the ‘alәma parties as not only lacking in cohesiveness but also as

advocates of a medieval system, one that failed to take into account the realities of the

modern age. “[If] being a Muslim meant going back to the world of 1,300 years ago,”

he remarked brazenly in January 1960 , “then [I am] not for being a Muslim.”121 Given

his positions vis-à-vis Islam and politics, Ayub Khan was widely regarded as a

“modernist”; in the Field Marshal’s view, Islam was “subject to the conditions of

contemporary nationhood.”122 Khan criticized the (mostly Deobandi) ‘alәma who had

opposed Pakistan during pre-Partition days but now sought to impose their version of

an Islamic order on everyone via an Islamic constitution of their creation—and this in a

nation they had once denied a chance for existence! He (perhaps correctly) saw the

(mostly Deobandi) ‘alәma as the most vociferous critics of government (and his

government, in particular); without their insidious influence, he reasoned, the people

would be happy. “[T]hey succeeded in converting optimistic and enthusiastic people

into a cynical and frustrated community,” he once said of the Islamic scholars.123

Foreign policy-wise, too, Ayub Khan was, like Iskander Mirza, more or less pro-

Western, though he was less conspicuous (some would say less gushing) than his

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predecessor.124 In any case, Ayub Khan’s political positions reinvigorated many of the

‘alәma in their ire against the secular state (and even united them for a time, as the

reader shall see).

On 2 March 1961, the regime put into effect the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance,

legislation that promised more freedom to women. In this, Ayub Khan was part of a

trend affecting several modernizing states within the Muslim world characterized by

heavy government legislative intervention vis-à-vis women and the family. Indeed,

many aspects of the ordinance merely reflected the suggestions, offered to the Pakistani

government during the previous decade, by a commission set up specifically to consider

reform in this area. In any case, the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, in addition to

stipulating that a man could only take on a second wife with the permission of his first

(in the form of approval by an Arbitration Council), also required that, in the case of

divorce, the husband must first inform a local government representative, then wait

ninety days. In effect, the ordinance required ninety-day “notice” on divorces, during

which time an Arbitration Council would strive to reconcile the parties involved. Many

of the ‘alәma regarded this last—the “introduction of notice”—as contrary to the

procedure set forth in the Qur’an and sunnәt.125 Most of the country’s Islamic scholars

(but especially those of the Deobandi persuasion) opposed the ordinance vigorously; one

observer described the cleric-led campaign against Ayub as both “sustained” and strong

ever after.126 In response, the Ayub Khan regime confiscated publications promulgating

the opinions of the ‘alәma opposed to the ordinance and even imprisoned some of the

more vocal scholars involved in the debate.

Ayub Khan continued his opposition to an “Islamic” constitution by rejecting the

suggestions of the very Constitution Commission that he had created to formulate a

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new document. The commission (an eleven-person body from which, not surprisingly,

the ‘alәma had been conspicuously excluded) had interviewed almost six hundred

individuals and mailed close to twenty thousand questionnaires to people and

organizations of consequence across Pakistan. What the group discovered did not lend

support to Ayub Khan’s secularist, modernist aims. The vast majority of respondents

had indicated strongly that the overtly Islamic Objectives Resolution should be

incorporated into the new constitution. The same held true for the old constitution’s

Islamic provisions; these, too, should be included, according to most respondents. In its

presentation to the regime, and based on its findings, the commission even went one

step further, advising an active role for the state in regulating the training of Muslim

teachers and preachers “to enable them to present Islam to those of a Western way of

thinking.” The group also sided with the vast majority of the ‘alәma on the electorates

issue, supporting the call for a separate electorates system.127

On 8 June 1962, the new, Ayub Khan-created constitution of Pakistan (which had

been approved by the dictator in early May) came into effect. As previously mentioned,

the regime opted to ignore most of the recommendations of its own Constitution

Commission; the group’s suggestions were veritably absent within the new document.

Still, the constitution’s Islamic provisions were similar to those of the 1956 version.

The descriptive “Islamic” was not restored to Pakistan’s official name (“The State of

Pakistan shall be a Republic under the name of the Republic of Pakistan”), and Ayub

Khan had instituted a presidential (as opposed to parliamentary) system in which the

very powerful President (i.e. Ayub Khan) must be a Muslim. Indeed, one commentator

described Ayub Khan’s new constitution as leaving “almost impotent” his political

opposition, while making for “an impregnably strong executive.”128 The document’s

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preamble was indeed based on the Objectives Resolution, though it offered a

controversial watered-down version of the same. The government was charged with

the duty to assist Muslims in the day-to-day living of their faith, a repugnancy clause

was included, and teaching of the Qur’an and Islamic studies was made mandatory

(though only for Muslims). Furthermore, the government was to take an active (though

unspecified) role in eradicating (or at least “discouraging”) such un-Islamic evils as

gambling, prostitution, the consumption of alcohol, and usury, and the federal

government should be guided, on the foreign policy front, by a desire to strengthen ties

with and promote peace among the world’s Muslim nations. The document also

mandated the creation of two “Islamic” bodies: (1) the Advisory Council of Islamic

Ideology, meant to advise the government on both the Islamic soundness of legislation

as well as on how the state might more fully facilitate Muslims’ religious practice, and

whose members were to be directly appointed by the president; and (2) the Islamic

Research Institute. The latter, to become an object of much controversy, was tasked

with the undertaking of “Islamic research and instruction in Islam for the purpose of

assisting in the reconstruction of Muslim society on a truly Islamic basis.” The 1962

constitution would stand until the end of the Gregorian decade (specifically, March

1969, when martial law was again declared), then officially replaced by a new one in

1973.

The same day that Ayub Khan’s constitution went into effect (8 June), martial law

was lifted and Pakistan’s new National Assembly met for the first time. With the

Assembly’s adoption of the Political Parties Act in July, the JUI, JI, NIP, and others

(including the Khwaja Nazimuddin-led anti-Ayub Council Muslim League party, or

CML; after the lifting of Martial Law, the Pakistan Muslim League had split into two

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parties: the CML and the pro-Ayub Convention Muslim League) began agitating for

amendments to the 1962 constitution. Specifically, the aforementioned parties

demanded a restoration of the word “Islamic” to Pakistan’s official name, as well as a

restoration in full of the old constitution’s Islamic provisions. This pressure led Ayub

Khan to partially concede on some points; on 24 December 1963, the word “Islamic”

was finally restored. The old Islamic provisions were restored, too, however slightly

altered.129 But the religious parties, in particular those under Deobandi leadership or

influence, were not convinced that the Ayub Khan government was being genuine in its

concessions on the constitution’s Islamic nature. It was one thing to include Islamic

provisions, and quite another to actually enforce them. And the regime rejected most of

the suggestions proferred by the Advisory Council of Islamic Ideology—a body it had

created by mandate of its very own constitution. Indeed, the Ayub Khan government’s

true colors were seemingly revealed when it jailed several Muslim scholars for

contesting the regime-run committee in charge of announcing the sighting of the new

moon (for Eid; the new moon marks the beginning of the month of Shawwal and the

commencement of the Eid holiday, after the month-long Ramadan fast); evidently the

committee had altered the date in order to help the President avoid being the subject of

a bad omen. In addition, Ayub Khan, whose lack of respect for most of the ‘alәma was

by now well established, seemed to support more Western-leaning modernist Islamists

(like Dr. Fazlur Rahman, whose work—in particular his 1966 book Islam—was the

subject of much controversy). The Islamic Research Institute, which his own

constitution had established, seemed bent on interpreting Islam through a distinctly

modernist lens, to the deep resentment of the ‘alәma (though, perhaps predictably,

embraced by many in academia in the West).130 That perceived lack of respect could be

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applied to some of Islam’s most revered figures, too; once, Ayub Khan’s government

portrayed the “rightly guided” caliphs via actual illustrations on national tevelsion—a

shocking innovation for many Muslims (to whom religious images were forbidden). To

top it off, the President sought (ultimately unsuccessfully) to meddle in Friday

sermons.131 All of this seemed to indicate that, whatever might have been included in

Pakistan’s new constitution, the regime was not serious about establishing an Islamic

order, and it certainly wasn’t interested in obtaining the opinions of the ‘alәma in that

regard. The scholars were thus shut out of their traditional role as influencial advisers

to the state—a role many of them felt they had fought for during the years leading up to

independence. All the while, Ayub Khan continued to consolidate his own position by

temporarily neutralizing one of his most dangerous critics, the aged and highly vocal

Bengali mwlana Bhashani (who, just months previously, had been “thundering about

blood and liberty, fair shares or secession”), by making him leader of a Pakistan

delegation to China—a journey that evidently had a transformationary effect upon the

man.132 Concurrently, Ayub attacked the religious and political legitimacy of the JI.

The Deobandi and Barelvi spiritual leadership often took strikingly different

positions during the Ayub Khan decade. Many JUP leaders actually supported the

regime, like some of their Sufi predecessors who had upheld a monarch’s rule to the

chagrin of the realm’s ‘alәma. Indeed, Ayub Khan was known to be especially close to

two Barelvi divines: the pir of Deval Sharif (West Pakistan) xәwajәħ ‘Abdul Majid and

the pir of Sarsina (East Pakistan) mwlana Abu Jafar Muhammad Saleh. Once, the former

pir was reported to have publicly implied, during a meeting of Muslim League members

at Manki Sharif, that Ayub Khan’s leadership had been sanctioned by God, and that

dramatically; after all, in a vision the pir of Deval Sharif had seen a “divine light” on the

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dictator’s forehead.133 Ayub Khan was known to consult with the pir frequently, often

stopping for a visit while out hunting in the countryside.134 Perhaps this was not

surprising, as the pir was reported to have once told Ayub Khan, “Every word you utter

is put in your mouth by God. You are His servant, and whatever you do is done on

God’s instructions.”135 Meanwhile, the pir of Sarsina, who had been a part of the Barelvi

deputation led by JUP leader Abdul Hamid Badayuni sent to lobby Khwaja Nazimuddin

against the Ahmadis in the early 1950s,136 likewise supported Ayub Khan and was

sometimes even referred to as “President Ayub Khan’s pir.”137 In November 1963 the

President inaugurated the first sessions of the All-Pakistan mәshaix Conference “to

mobilize [the JUP and other Barelvi mәshaix] in favor of his regime.” During the 1964-

1965 elections, many of the Barelvi leadership supported Ayub Khan. (In this they were

joined by a small segment of JUI leaders, too, on account of the opposition’s undesirable

gender; Fatima Jinnah was, after all, a woman).138 Among the ‘alәma, Abdul Hamid

Badayuni was known to be especially supportive of the Ayub Khan government.

On the other hand, the Deobandis tended to gravitate towards a strong opposition

to the former Field Marshal’s regime. During the Ayub Khan years, the JUI was

veritably revived under mufti Mahmud. The catalyst? The regime’s attempts to

“modernize” Pakistan, elements of which the JUI found repugnant to Islam as they

interpreted it, mobilized support for the party against the Ayub Khan government. In

1962, both the NIP and the JI had come out strongly, and officially, in opposition to the

government in power. Indeed, these two Deobandi-leaning parties made up the leading

segment of the regime’s political opposition throughout the 1960s. In 1962, that

opposition came in the form of the National Democratic Front, in 1964 as the Combined

Opposition Parties, and in 1967 as the Pakistan Democratic Movement; in each of these

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alliances, the NIP and JI led the anti-Ayub charge. During the 1964-1965 (indirect)

elections, most of the Deobandi ‘alәma supported the seventy-one-year-old Fatima

Jinnah, sister of Pakistan’s deceased founder and considered by many to be the “Mother

of the Nation” (madәr-e-myllәt). Their support probably had less to do with Fatima

Jinnah’s specific platform (which revolved around a restoration of democracy and the

elimination of Ayub’s presidential system) than with her position as the chief opposition

figure contesting Ayub Khan for power. In their opposition to the regime, the Deobandi

scholars were joined by disenfranchised politicians (thousands of whom had been

disqualified by Ayub’s Elective Bodies Disqualification Order, or EBDO, from

participation in politics), East Pakistanis who felt ostracized by a “West Pakistani

soldier-President,” lawyers who opposed Ayub’s tight control over the judiciary,

Frontier Province inhabitants following Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in his quest for

Pathan autonomy (and thus his opposition to a single, West Pakistani unit), and

refugees who felt that their claims for property compensation had been ignored. Each of

these parties, in one way or another, resented Ayub Khan’s dictatorial position. He had,

after all, “EBDOed” around seven thousand of the country’s most influential (and

oppositional) politicians, had enacted the Press and Publications Ordinances to muzzle

the press, and had enacted the University Ordinance to keep students and faculty out of

politics (by threatening them with degree removal), among other actions.139

Even so, Ayub Khan won the election (which was widely believed to have been

rigged by the regime). Countrywide, 63.3% of the vote allegedly came down for Ayub

Khan, with 36.3% voting for Fatima Jinnah. The only Division won by Jinnah in the

western zone at all was Karachi, the stronghold of her base; much of Ayub’s success in

the rest of Sindh was attributed to the role of his loyalist Barelvi and landlord network.

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“Sind…was safe for Ayub as the pirs (spiritual guides) and mirs (landlords) could not

possibly defy the Government,” wrote one academic commentator a year later.140 In

East Pakistan, the “vote” was closer, but Ayub still eked out a victory. Some of his

supporters—including his son Gohar—stoked the flames of opposition by parading

through the more anti-Ayub neighborhoods of Karachi (again, Fatima’s Jinnah’s base of

support) with the alleged intention to “kill, burn, and loot”; at least thirty people died in

these post-election “Black Monday” clashes (and Gohar Ayub Khan himself was charged

with fatally shooting a man, though essentially nothing came of it as the “inquiry” was

“halted”).141 Still, the JUI didn’t openly oppose the regime until 1968, when the party

officially joined the opposition. One of the JUI’s leaders would later be seriously injured

in a police-instigated clash during a joint JUI-Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) gathering

in Lahore; government forces had charged attendees with batons, brutally beating

many. The JUI’s joint action with the socialist PPP vividly illustrates how overarching

the issue of the ruling government’s perceived hostility to a truly Islamic order was to

the Deobandi ‘alәma. To anyone who remembered the JUH’s joint struggle in concert

with the Hindus during pre-Partition days, however, against the British common

enemy, such action seemed to fall neatly within the Deobandi political tradition. In any

case, in response to the government’s harsh actions, the JUI carried out a protest

march—joined by several other, non-religious parties—demanding freedom from such

tyranny and the long-promised (at least in the eyes of many among the ‘alәma)

Islamization of Pakistan. During this period, leading Deobandi ‘alym mufti Mahmud

was particularly vocal in his criticism against the Ayub Khan regime.142 Mahmud was a

graduate of the dar ul’alwm at Deoband, and like most Deobandi ‘alәma had opposed the

call for Pakistan’s establishment, opting to cooperate instead with the JUH and the

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Indian National Congress. He had joined the JUI in 1956 on the occasion of a large

party conference, together with future NWFP JUI leader mwlana Ghulam Ghaus

Hazarvi, and (with Ghulam Ghaus) is generally considered the figure responsible for the

JUI’s transformation from a “purely religious movement” to a “political party.”143 (This

author would contend that the JUI was always political; what changed under the

leadership of Hazarvi and Mahmud was strategy. Whereas before the organization was

more of an influencer, it would now function as a political party in every sense of the

term, among other things directly fielding election cadidates. The Barelvi JUP would

undergo much the same transformation around the same time.) Both Hazarvi and

Mahmud served as JUI representatives within the National Assembly and the West

Pakistan provincial assembly during much of the Ayub Khan era. Such pronounced

differences, generally speaking, between the Barelvi and Deobandi spiritual leadership

in regards to politics during this period make statements like Qureshi’s, who wrote that

by the early 1960s “in the modern context sectarian differences have lost their

importance,” more than a little puzzling.144

Only once was Ayub Khan able to distract the oppositional (predominantly

Deobandi) ‘alәma enough to mostly suppress their dissent against his rule. This

distraction took the form, predictably, of a war—specifically, the September 1965

Kashmir War with India. Pakistanis and some Kashmiris had waited for more than a

decade for any sort of plebiscite (mandated, it will be remembered, after the first

Kashmir War by the United Nations) to settle the matter by popular vote. Throughout

that time, India had gradually but inexhorably tightened its grip on the region, more or

less “absorbing” it as a part of the Indian state, despite frequent bursts of militant

infiltration coming from the direction of Pakistan’s western zone. (Meanwhile, Indian

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government officials blamed just such infiltrations for the delay in solving the dispute.

“The threats of violence which have been [coming] from Pakistan must cease,” stated

the Indian representative to the UN Security Council in 1964. “Once better atmosphere

prevails, it would be possible—we are prepared to discuss with Pakistan all our

outstanding differences.”)145 The most flagrant Indian assault on Kashmir’s “disputed”

status, however, came in 1964 and early 1965, when India changed its constitution so as

to “make Kashmiri administration essentially the same” as other Indian units.146 The

move seemed to signal to many Pakistanis that India had decided to out-and-out ignore

the Pakistan government’s claim, throw out any UN mandates connected to it, and

simply seize Kashmir for itself once and for all.

As these events coincided with Pakistan’s elections and Ayub Khan’s campaign

against Fatima Jinnah, it makes sense that the President (with the help of his Foreign

Minister—one Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto) would throughout the contest stress Pakistan’s

struggle for Kashmir as a diversion from “democracy and Islamicity.”147 Along this

same tack, and in response to growing opposition at home (led to a considerable degree

by the JI and the NIP), Ayub Khan had launched a minor war with India over the Rann

of Kutch. (According to Ayub Khan’s son, Gohar Ayub Khan, speaking in 2005, his

father had purchased a “Secret Plan” to attack Pakistan from an Indian Army Brigadier

in 1965 for twenty thousand rupees; the purchase was later denied by an ex-Pakistan

Army chief).148 If the conflict was a power-consolidating ploy, it worked. Thousands of

Pakistanis, of both the Deobandi and Barelvi persuasion, were suddenly gripped with

Islamo-patriotic fervor. One recounting of events, from the pen of a well-known

Deobandi mufti, is illustrative in this regard:

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In 1964 or 1965, I had accompanied my father to Makkah to perform the

Hajj. One day, one Arab shopkeeper disclosed to me that war had begun

between Pakistan and India at [the] Rann of Kutch. I cannot describe

my feelings on hearing this news. When we returned home after Hajj,

the war was over. Every child recounted the brave feat of our

courageous armed forces and the faith-inspiring stories of Allah’s help.

The laughable episodes of the cowardice of the Indian forces were the

topic of every assembly. The Pakistan armed forces had routed the

enemy much before the volunteers [i.e. jyhadis] could participate.149

Absent from the memoir is any trace of enmity toward the Ayub Khan regime, or any

doubt about the Pakistani government’s righteousness. The writer, instead, is wrapped

up in the “faith-inspiring” struggle, and animosity is preserved for the unbelieving

“Indian forces.” The twenty-nine-year-old son of Muhammad Shafi even remembered

being “inspired” by the President’s 6 September speech to the nation—a speech that

included a recitation of the kәlymәħ and an admonition both to the military and “the

common man” to participate in jyhad. “Those who…heard his speech,” Shafi’s son

wrote, thirty years after Ayub Khan’s homily, “may be remembering its appeal even

today.” Though Pakistani volunteers were generally not permitted to fight at the front,

many received civil defense and first aid training. Deobandi mufti Muhammad Rafi

Usmani, who was teaching at the dar ul’alwm at Karachi at the time, remembers

watching the Pakistan Air Force planes zooming through the sky, “chasing the enemy

aircraft,” and described how spectators shed “tears of joy,” their “hearts full of prayers,”

caught up in the deep feelings of the moment.150 Briefly, then, Ayub Khan not only

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secured his own position but also brought Deobandi and Barelvi scholars and their

followers together, in a sense, against a common enemy.

Pakistan slightly outperformed India throughout the April and May fighting on the

Rann before a June cease-fire (and a promised arbitration between the two enemy states)

brought an end to armed combat. Meanwhile, however, an uprising had broken out in

Kashmir (almost certainly instigated by agents taking orders from the Ayub Khan

regime itself), prompting Indian troops to occupy strategic positions across the cease-fire

line (or CFL, later called the “Line of Control,” or LoC) in Pakistani territory. This was

in August. Ayub Khan’s response was to invade Jammu (1 September), which elicited a

counter-invasion of Pakistan by India. Some of the worst fighting took place on the

very outskirts of major cities like Lahore and Sialkot. The conflict was prevented from

escalating into an all-out war after a 23 September UN-proclaimed cease-fire made

possible by pressure from both Washington and Moscow. Throughout the conflict,

Ayub Khan worked hard to win the ‘alәma to his side. Verses of the Qur’an were

printed on the front page of newspapers, urging “believers” to fight.151 Long-time

nemesis Mawdudi even called for a jyhad in Kashmir (thus reverting his earlier position,

aforementioned), and after the 23 September cease-fire was invited onto Radio Pakistan

to “speak on jihad in peacetime.” The ‘alәma parties organized relief efforts for the

border areas most affected by the conflict, all the while hoping that now a plebscite

might be forthcoming.152 “There is a considerable reservoir of religious emotions,”

wrote one commentator shortly after the war, “that a Pakistan Government can draw

upon for purposes of national unity during a time of crisis.”153 In conducting the war,

Ayub was seen as possessing an “independent foreign policy” (however engineered by

Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto)—i.e. independent from the West. This sat well with most of the

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‘alәma. In addition, many ‘alәma looked on approvingly as other Muslim countries

(notably Turkey, Iran, and Indonesia) offered military and/or moral support for

Pakistan’s Kashmir fight (several Arab countries passed a joint resolution supporting

Pakistan, too).154 But with the war over and Ayub Khan’s status temporarily repaired

(he had fought the Indians despite pressure from the U.S. Government, and had won an

“election,” to boot), the government abruptly seemed less interested in placating the

religious scholars and their parties.

But after the January 1966 Tashkent Declaration, which officially ended the India-

Pakistan conflict (at least for the time-being), any renewed popularity that Ayub Khan

might have enjoyed began to wane. Many were greatly unsatisfied by the agreement’s

provisions; it seemed to some as a document of acquiescence on Pakistan’s part,

restoring as it did the 1949 cease-fire line combined with a comittment by both states

not to interfere in the internal affairs of one another. Was this not a surrender of the

original Kashmir claim? (One of Ayub Khan’s most powerful critics: Zulfiqar ‘Ali

Bhutto, his own very aggressive Foreign Minister; Bhutto would resign in June 1966.)

Disillusionment over the Declaration combined with a debilitating sickness that ailed

Ayub Khan from 1967 until the spring of 1968 (at one point the President was even

“unconscious for a time”); though he would continue to weild the powers of his office, he

was “never his old self again,” depending far more heavily on advisors of dubious ability

and qualifications. Allegations that the 1965 elections had been rigged by the

government, of widespread corruption within the regime and within Ayub Khan’s own

family (said to be worth tens of millions of dollars), and a perceived widening socio-

economic disparity between the super-rich and the poor likewise affected the President’s

popularity. Protests against the regime began to make noise again throughout the

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country, which the increasingly desperate Ayub Khan attempted to quash using brutal

force—resulting in the deaths of several students and an array of arrests amidst the

subsequent rioting.155 An (unsuccessful) attempt was made on the President’s life on a

foggy day in mid-November (on the same day, incidentally, that four Yemeni would-be

assassins tried to terminate the life of American President Richard Nixon, an early

example of “blowback” for U.S. government intervention in the Muslim world).156 Still,

Ayub had managed to consolidate his position so well that, even with this growing

surge of opposition, he remained more secure than not. By October 1967, the

President’s main opposition came in the form of the Pakistan Democratic Movement

(PDM), which included both the JI and the NIP; despite achieving “visible unity” after

five months of inter-party bickering, however, PDM leaders admitted they held “bleak

hope” of actually seizing the reigns of power from Ayub. The President “is entrenched

and secure,” the alliance conceded, with a wide base of support in the Army and across

sections of West Pakistan. The role of the opposition “under the present restrictions,”

said NIP head (and former Prime Minister) Chaudhri Muhammad ‘Ali, was to at least

“maintain the country’s conscience.”157 Despite the president’s perceived

“entrenchment,” however, it was clear that public opinion against the regime was

spreading.

By 1969, even the Barelvi spiritual and political leadership that had remained loyal

to the regime had ascertained the direction of the political winds. JUP leaders and their

supporters had spoken out strongly against the government’s interference in the “purely

religious matter” of the moon sighting for Eid (subsequently two Eids were celebrated

in 1967, one according to the regime’s schedule and the other according to that of the

‘alәma); when their criticism became too much to bear, the Ayub Khan government

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imprisoned five of the most vocal Islamic scholars, including the aforementioned Barelvi

acolyte of Naimuddin Moradabadi, Muhammad Hussain Naeemi. This, combined with a

general Barelvi sense that Ayub Khan had not delivered on the promises he had made to

them (regarding amendments to the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance and the

enforcement of shәri’at, for example), caused the JUP to unhitch its wagon from the

regime’s sputtering train. Indeed, sensing that continued support of the Ayub

government would injure their status, as well as their continued claim to represent the

Sunni majority, the JUP joined the oppoisition to Ayub Khan—but only after purging

Abdul Hamid Badayuni (whose aforementioned support for the government was

characterized as “continued and unconditional”) from party leadership. (Two breakaway

groups resulted from this move: one led by Badayuni and another led by Faizal Hasan,

both of which actually released statements supporting Ayub Khan.)158 The move to rid

the upper echelons of the JUP of Abdul Hamid Badayuni was led by sayyid Abul Barakat

Ahmad, and accomplished on 5 January 1969.159 Thus the Ayub Khan government’s

continued rejection of ‘alәma demands for an Islamic state, plus external political

pressure from both religious and non-religious quarters across the country, combined to

briefly unite the positions, again, of the Deobandi and Barelvi parties, at least in terms

of their rejection of Ayub Khan and his government.

In January 1969, an alliance of eight parties—including both the JUI and the JI—

was formed under the name Democratic Action Committee. The organization’s

overarching goal was to effect the restoration of “democracy” by coordinating a “mass

movement” against the Ayub Khan regime. Within the Committee, JUI leader mufti

Mahmud continued to urge his fellow anti-Ayub agitators that any amendments to a

future Pakistani constitution should be based on the aforementioned and ‘alәma-

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formulated “Twenty-Two Principles.”160 Whether motived by the Democratic Action

Committee or borne of local, “spontaneous” dissent, demonstrations sprung up all over

the country. In response, the flailing regime sent military units into Pakistan’s major

cities, including Lahore, Dhaka, Khulna, Karachi, and Peshawar, and imposed a curfew.

But these actions were largely ineffective, and especially in rural areas the people mostly

ignored the curfew. The next month (February), Ayub Khan, sensing a lack of

confidence in him even from some of his own generals, attempted the conciliatory route

aimed at the politicians, inviting the Democratic Action Committee to a round table

conference in Rawalpindi. There he agreed not only to the introduction of a new

constitution in the foreseeable future, but also not to stand for reelection in 1970. But

Ayub’s gamble didn’t pay off; on 25 March 1969, Martial Law was once again declared,

its chief administrator Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistani Army General Agha

Muhammad Yahya Khan, and the 1962 constitution was officially abrogated. After the

subsequent resignation of Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan became President of Pakistan,

vowing National Assembly elections (not of the indirect, Ayub Khan variety, but based

on adult franchise) and a new, Assembly-formualted constitution.

After the 1965 Kashmir War, opposition to the Ayub Khan regime seemed to be

colored less and less by Islamist tones and more and more by socialist ones. This, of

course, greatly concerned the ‘alәma on both sides of the Deobandi-Barelvi aisle, who

began to sense that perhaps the greater threat to the establishment of an Islamic order

in Pakistan wasn’t the waning dictatorial regime of Ayub Khan at all, nor the

President’s modernism—but a growing wave of socialist ideology. Indeed, much of the

opposition to the Ayub Khan regime had far less to do with Islam than with socio-

economic factors like poverty and food shortages. The ‘alәma had long blamed such

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things on the failure of government to institute an Islamic order, which, they theorized,

would put an end to such misery by instituting a God-inspired politico-economic

system. But the socialists were offering an alternate plan, one that was attached to

grand promises of prosperity, equality, justice—and an end to hunger and suffering at

the hands of greedy power-seekers. In addition, while the religious parties stressed

Islam as a unifying force, thereby underscoring an overarching “nationalism” and the

unity of Pakistan, the left appeared far more sympathetic to “ethnic and linguistic

setiments” and “socioeconomic cleavages” that the ‘alәma, generally speaking, seemed to

ignore altogether.161 It was with such promises on his lips that Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto left

the government to form the Pakistan People’s Party, promoting the image of Ayub

Khan as a symbol of inequality; the failure of the old PDM, with all of its pessimism, to

garner widespread popular support in West Pakistan thus set the stage for the PPP’s

rise, with its far more positive outlook and fantastic assurances based on “democratic

socialism.”162 By the time the round table conference in Rawalpindi between the

Democratic Action Committee and Ayub Khan had ended, the relevance of the former

had been eclipsed by the rising—and now clearly more powerful—(moderately socialist)

Awami League, based in the eastern zone, and the heavily socialist (even quasi-

communist) Pakistan People’s Party, based in the western zone. Bhutto was, proclaimed

a somewhat adoring Western media, “Asia’s new champion of socialism.”

As such, the invective of the ‘alәma parties, while still aimed at the crumbling Ayub

Khan regime, turned against the leadership of the Awami League and the PPP—and the

socialist ideology that they espoused. Mawdudi was particularly irritated by the

aforementioned parties’ attempts at “mix[ing] Islam with leftist ideas.” On 27

February 1969, the ‘alәma of West Pakistan, representing both Deobandis and Barelvis,

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launched a campaign “to condemn socialism and communism.” The campaign’s

microphone was the mosque: indeed, “almost every mosque in the western province.”

This effort, not coincidentally, coincided with ‘aid ul-әżha (the lesser of the two Eid

holidays, celebrated in remembrance of the willingness of both Ibrahim and Ismail

[Abraham and Isaac] to submit to the will of God)—meaning that tens of millions of

Muslims would be attending the mәsjyd as part of the festival’s observance. Pakistan

had been established on the foundation of Islam, warned the ‘alәma of Rawalpindi

(where, just 24 hours before, Bhutto himself “received a rousing welcome”), but the

“socialists…would undo the fabric of Islamic law.”163 By 1969, the anti-Ayub campaign

of the ‘alәma had been overshadowed almost completely by the new conflict between the

religious scholar-jurists and the “militant leftists” and their “champion,” Bhutto. The

situation reached a breaking point in March, when even the Ayub Khan regime

“threatened firm action to suppress lawlessness” in reference to the newly emerged

rivalry. On the 14th, Mawdudi had reportedly admonished his followers to “silence the

tongue that utters the word socialism.” This was succeeded the next day by a failed

attempt to kidnap and murder aforementioned pro-Mao and pro-Bhutto NAP leader

mwlana Bhashani while the eighty-six-year-old was traveling by train from Lahore to

Karachi (though the old man was slightly injured, the attempt failed). The agitation

against Ayub Khan had resulted in at least one hundred fifty deaths between November

1968 and March 1969, and it was clear now that the regime’s days were numbered; the

‘alәma parties now vied with Bhutto and the leftists for political supremacy.164

When Ayub Khan resigned, ‘alәma party leaders called on the Awami League and

the PPP to “demobilize” now that their chief target—Ayub—had been defeated, an

admonition that Bhutto and Mujib failed to heed, of course. No longer cooperatively

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opposed to the now-defunct regime of Ayub Khan, parties like the JI on one side and the

Awami League and the PPP on the other hit the streets to campaign against one

another.165

Yahya Khan, the 1970 Elections, and the Birth of Bangladesh.

After the fall of the Ayub Khan administration in March of 1969, political activity

more or less ceased in Pakistan for about ten months. Martial law had been established.

This would last until early January 1970. It was during this short apolitical

interregnum that the Barelvi luminaries guiding the JUP, mwlana Abu’l Barakat sәyyid

Ahmad Qadiri at the helm, decided to focus on that party’s most pressing problem:

unity. For it was quite obvious to even the most unobservant party insider that, since

years—even decades—before Partition, the great ‘alәma and pirs who claimed to

represent the vast majority of Sunni Muslims had lacked not only the support of the

people, but also of one another. After the resumption of political activities (from 1

January 1970, with general elections secheduled for 5 October), the JUP made several

efforts to bring the party’s many apparently disparate parts together. This was

necessary in order to restore a government of the people—the majority of whom, they

insisted, certainly looked to them, their spiritual guides, for direction and leadership.

Just as the Deobandi JUI had done in the days leading up to Partition, and just as the

Deobandi-leaning JI was doing now, rival religious parties—better organized, more

determined, and far more unified—were hijacking the political process and threatening

to institute their apostate versions of Islam via the guns of government. For the sake of

the “eighty percent,” whose religious guardians they were, the “Sunnis” must demand the

representation they deserved. “Secularism” and “Socialism” and “Capitalism”—these

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were significant menaces, certainly. But always present, too, was the threat posed by

“rival religious sects” (especially if their political wings seemed to experience more

electoral success than that of the Barelvis). It was time to fix the problem and stand as

one.

All of this served as the backdrop to mwlana Abu’l Barakat sәyyid Ahmad Qadiri’s

call for a meeting in Lahore. The day was to be 25 January 1969. After some

discussion, the assembled religious scholars and dignitaries decided to form a thirteen-

member committee to act as a sort of central coordinating organ for the various

scattered and disjointed JUP groups across the country. The committee met again ten

months later in Gujranwala (November) and then again in Lyallpur (December). Try as

they might, however, the Barelvis simply could not unite under a single, cohesive

platform, despite the recognized fact that such unity would be necessary “in order to

check the activities of Secularists, Socialists and rival religious sects” (italics added).

Barelvi leaders condemned the fragmentation that seemed to plague their party—but

this was typically followed by placing blame on one or another of their own members,

leading to further division. Perhaps another committee, another board, another “high

command,” composed of the “Presidents and [general secretaries] of every group” was

the answer. But such suggestions were never brought to fruition, and the original

committee remained the only one. Such a proposal was agreed upon at one January

1970 meeting of JUP officials at Sangla Hill, presided over by xәwajәħ Qamaruddin

Sialvi, only to be rejected by a faction led by mwlana Abdul Ghafoor Hazarvi. To make

matters worse, sahybzada qazi Muhammad Fazl-e-Rasul, president of the Hazarvi

faction of the West Pakistan JUP (the provincial branch of the JUP), who had been

appointed to that office a year before, stepped down from office; the reason he provided

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at the time of his resignation: the “other groups [within the JUP]” were “working for

their own interests and had damaged the unity among the Ahl-e-Sunnat.” The next

month Hazarvi himself resigned, too, though he was later “forced” to withdraw his

resignation. Meanwhile, yet another JUP faction, this one led by Mahmud Shah

Gujrati, functioned more or less on its own, only nominally tied to the greater party.

Despite all of the JUP leadership’s efforts, the party’s disunity appeared quite

insurmountable.166

Yahya’s regime superceded the civilian government bureaucracy more than any of

its predecessors, severely straining the unspoken bureaucracy-military partnership that

had marked previous administrations. But even with the military assuming such a

dominating role, in the words of one standard history, “Yahya Khan and his military

advisors proved no more capable of overcoming the nation’s problems than their

predecessors.”167 At least part of this lay in Yahya Khan’s dictatorial nature, one that

conflicted with the seemingly “democratic” demands of the opposition. All this did not

mean that the new state head wouldn’t try to solve Pakistan’s woes, however. On 28

November 1969, he announced his plan to see the country return to constitutional

government, a bone thrown to those who feared he might be a military dictator.

National Assembly general elections were fixed for 5 October 1970, later pushed back to

December; this would have major political consequences, as the “Bhola Cyclone”—the

deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded—would strike East Pakistan in November,

killing as many as half a million people. (The Yahya regime’s handling of relief efforts

in East Pakistan was harshly criticized by Bengalis and likely contributed much to the

Awami League’s overwhelming electoral victory the next month.) Yahya’s announced

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plan was for the National Assembly, once elected, to have one hundred twenty days to

formulate a constitution; there would be no undue delay, no years-long squabbling over

the state’s ruling document. In addition, Yahya Khan promised the eventual institution

of a truly federal system, characterized by “maximum provincial autonomy,” almost

certainly an attempt to assuage nationalist Bengalis (and, specifically, the Awami

League), who had been pressing for their “Six Points” (see endnote) for several years

already.168 On the issue of taxation, however—one of the “Six Points” demanded that

the power to tax be vested only in the provinces, with the federal government then

entitled to a certain share—Yahya Khan put his foot down, claiming for the central

government the all-important taxation power. Not surprisingly, given his authoritarian

tendencies, Yahya vested in himself final authority to approve, or disapprove, the future

constitution as formulated by the National Assembly. This, in a nutshell, was the

Yahya plan for fulfilling the promises of Pakistan’s founding.

The JI, however tacitly at first, supported the Yahya Khan regime. Yahya had

vowed, after all, to destroy any party opposed to the “ideology of Pakistan”—a

politician’s phrase that allowed various parties to interpret its meaning through their

own particular lenses. For the JI, the “ideology of Pakistan” clearly meant an espousal

of the country’s Islamic identity. Just as importantly, though, the “ideology of Pakistan”

was interpreted as a hostile statement aimed at the leftist parties like the PPP and the

Awami League. The JI, then, essentially threw in with Yahya in order to cleanse

Pakistan of the greater evil of socialism/communism. To a lesser extent, the JI’s

support for the regime was also based on the “ideology of Pakistan” as an ideology of

unity—meaning that the policy demands of such traitors as provincial nationalists,

especially Bengali nationalists or, worse, would-be secessionists, should be stamped out.

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Thus, in the words of Nasr, “Political exigency had led Islamic constitutionalism into an

unholy alliance with the very regime it had fought against.”169 In this, the JI had

adopted the unified-state stance of the majority of Barelvi leaders, as opposed to the

more province-level outlook of the Deobandis. For their part, the JUI distanced itself

quickly from the JI, a rift that continues to the time of this writing. (Part and parcel to

this distance was the behavior of many among younger-generation JI members and

supporters, particularly those of university age; on the University of Karachi campus,

for example, those belonging to this latter category were mockingly referred to by some

students as “Disco mwlvis”—“modernly attired and beardless” members of the JI’s

student wing who liked pop music and had girlfriends, to boot, but who nonetheless

proscribed to the Jamaat’s religio-political philosophy.)170 Indeed, the schism would

play a major role in the development of the “Taliban” (about which more later).

But the JUI itself, like the JUP (though not quite to the same extent), was during

this period afflicted with division, and that division centered around the issue of

socialism. Some Deobandi leaders saw socialism as a potential vehicle for arriving at

the Islamic egalitarian ideal—though only a vehicle; Islam was, after all, a “complete way

of life” that needed no substitution, either by socialism or any other ideology. Those

calling for the Islamic parties to divert their attention to the destruction of socialism,

this faction argued, were merely “imperialist agents” working, whether knowingly or

not, for the Anglo-American establishment. Those arguing in this vein included JUI

leaders mufti Mahmud and mufti Hazarvi, who were instrumental in forging alliances

between their faction (the All-Pakistan JUI, the bigger faction of the two; hereafter, for

the sake of continuity, the author will continue to refer to this faction as the JUI) and

several left-leaning political parties. Other Deobandi scholars viewed socialism as a

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western philosophy that would only serve to steer Pakistan further from becoming an

Islamic state. The faction espousing this latter philosophy (the Markazi JUI [MJUI],

along with elements of the NIP) was perhaps led most prominently by Muhammad

Shafi and Zafar Ahmad Usmani, who in February 1970 both signed a juridical ruling

(along with one hundred eleven other ‘alәma, mostly Barelvis but including several Shi’a

clerics, too) flatly declaring socialism “apostasy” and its proponents unbelievers. The

MJUI at times worked with the JI in condemnation of both socialism and those

Deobandi clerics who had thrown in their lot with it. An August 1969 attempt to

reconcile the two factions succeeded only in getting each to agree not to malign the

other. The main party, led by mufti Mahmud, campaigned on a platform that included

both Islamic and welfarist/socialist thrusts. The former included a call for the

institution of the old “Twenty-Two Points” for an Islamic constitution, the exclusion

from the definition of “Muslim” of any who did not believe in the finality of the Prophet,

the requirement for the head of state to be a Sunni, the banning of non-Muslim

missionary efforts in Pakistan, and the institution of mandatory congregational

prayers.171 True to the traditional Deobandi opposition to imperialism—which, by now,

included the American variety (and mufti Mahmud, as aforementioned, was strongly

anti-American for this reason, condemning the U.S. Government’s interventions in the

Middle East)—the JUI’s manifesto called for an independent foreign policy, devoid of

alliances with western powers.172

Eight months after the announcement of his plan for elections and a new Pakistani

constitution, Yahya dissolved the “One Unit Plan” then in place for West Pakistan,

restoring its four original provinces to their former status. At the same time, the parity

system (under which East and West had enjoyed equal representation at the federal

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level) was discontinued in favor of a population-based system; under the latter

arrangement, former West Pakistan was allotted a total of one hundred thirty-eight

seats in the National Assembly, compared to the more populous East Pakistan’s one

hundred sixty-two.

The religious parties threw themselves forcefully into the elections of 1970—the

first “one person, one vote” elections in Pakistani history. The Muslim scholars of both

schools were convinced that, given the choice, the vast majority of Pakistanis would

elect candidates from the religious parties, pious and committed to Islam. Some of the

repressive laws that had been put in place under the Martial Law administration were

lifted or softened for the sake of the election; the press was mostly de-muzzled and a

relaxing of free speech and assembly restrictions occurred, too. As such, National

Assembly seat contestants and their parties campaigned hard to win voters—and

lambast their opponents. In this, the JUI and JUP (as well as the JI) were not nearly as

effective as their left-leaning opponents. In recognizably communist fashion, Zulfiqar

‘Ali Bhutto promised “bread, clothes, and a house” (rwti, kәpra, awr mәkan) for all

(simultaneously—and, some economists might say, contradictingly, pledging Pakistan

to a “thousand year war with India,” a point he tried to backtrack from a few months

later). His campaign and those of other PPP National Assembly hopefuls was focused

almost entirely on Pakistan’s western wing, with strong support in Punjab and Sindh.173

Meanwhile, the Awami League, based and focused almost exclusively in the eastern

zone, continued to dominate Bengali politics, riding the “Six Points” program with help

from the general Bengali perception that West Pakistan was indifferent to them. As

mentioned previously, this feeling was greatly exacerbated after the apparent failure of

the federal government, led mostly be West Pakistanis, to send sufficient aid to cyclone

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ravaged areas of Bengal. Even the National Awami Party (a “successor” to the old KK

movement of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan),174 with which the JUI would later form

coalition governments in the NWFP and Baluchistan (again, siding with a lesser evil in

the name of defeating the greater), ran on a platform of “socialism, democracy,

nationalization of industries, [and] a welfare state.”175 The campaigns of both the PPP

and the Awami League, as well as that of the smaller NAP, underscored both parties’

strategy of appealing first and foremost to the public’s socio-economic grievances (in the

West focusing on poverty and government corruption, in the East on poverty, East-

West financial disparities, and government negligence).

The ‘alәma parties (including the JI) failed to tap into such grievances, focusing

instead throughout the 1970 election campaign season (and as always) on the

Islamization of Pakistan as the panacea for the country’s many problems. Indeed, the

main thrust of the Barelvi and Deobandi religio-political organizations tended strongly,

as ever, towards the establishment of an Islamic order. Apart from Islamization, most

of the ‘alәma stressed opposition to provincial nationalist (and secessionist) movements,

as well as a resoration, in time, of “democracy” (by means of this last maintaining a

veneer of opposition to the regime). (It should be noted that a large faction of the JUI

supported greater autonomy—and even outright independence—for the Pathan

northwest, or “Pakhtunistan.”) The PPP’s economic “solutions,” insisted the JI, were

based on false premises; only “Islam” could serve as a “rememdy,” to Pakistan’s so-called

social justic issues. In East Pakistan, JI activists literally clashed with Awami League

workers and sympathizers; one member of the JI’s male student wing was killed in a

confrontation at Dhaka University, prompting Mawdudi to demand “that the [student

group] cleanse Pakistani universities of the left.” More died—on both sides—in other

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clashes across the country’s far eastern province. Indeed, the JI’s activities, and in

particular the party’s observation of what it dubbed “Glory of Islam Day” (ywm-e-

shwkәt-e-yslam) on 30 May, brought the Deobandis and Barelvis, in the shape of their

respective political parties, together in another show of “separate unity.” JI members,

workers, and sympathizers celebrated “Glory of Islam Day” via demonstrations, parades

and marches, speeches, and protest rallies; their goal was to throw the spotlight onto

Islam as the most important political issue (as opposed to the left’s emphasis on

economics-related promises).

But to the JUI under mufti Mahmud (who by now had consolidated his power at the

top of the party structure by taking over the “Pashtun faction” of the JUI), the

celebration smacked of opportunism, and represented an attempt on Mawdudi’s part to

set himself up as a sort of religious head. In this the JI chief was usurping the

traditional role of the ‘alәma and thereby “monopolizing religious thought.” The JUI

thus opposed ywm-e-shwkәt-e-yslam and a schism ensued. The JUP, too, demonstrated

its opposition to the JI when it contested the party directly in forty-two National

Assembly seat races—effectively splitting the religious vote and more or less ensuring

PPP victory in those particular races.176 Meanwhile, the JUI put forward its own

candidates as well. It is interesting to note that while both the Deobandi JUI and the

Barelvi JUP opposed the JI, and for the same reason, no alliance between the two—even

in the name of advancing the cause of an Islamic constitution—ever took place. Rather,

they contested each other, especially in Punjab and Sindh. This only accomplished in

watering down the religious vote. The Deobandi-Barelvi dynamic had weakened the

religious parties’ political chances yet again.

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Perhaps it is not surprising that no united Deobandi-Barelvi effort took place during

the 1970 elections. Apart from their long-standing religious rivalry, the JUP in

particular could scarcely unite within itself. One segment of the Barelvi leadership even

sided with Bhutto’s PPP, remaining seemingly unmoved in their decision despite calls

(and even juridical rulings) condemning their position. After all of the failed attempts

over the previous months to bring the various factions within the party together, a

“grand meeting” of Barelvi ‘alәma was convened on 4 April in Lahore. Only one major

JUP faction—that of Mahmud Shah Gujrati—failed to attend. One of the key

stumbling blocks to achieving intra-party harmony was the seemingly perpetual state of

disagreement and mutual mistrust displayed by its several leaders. The Lahore meeting

took drastic steps to combat this, accepting or forcing the resignation of five key

officials (including party president Abdul Hamid Badayuni, who, though not personally

present, had wired his approbation both of the meeting and its decisions) within the

JUP. “After all these resignations,” wrote one JUP historian, “the differences of the

Sunni Ulama were bridged…” A twenty-five-person committee was appointed to act as

the party’s “executive supreme council.” Another committee, this one composed of six

members, was also appointed—with the task of composing an official JUP manifesto.

Combined with the JUP’s direct contestation of the elections later that year, this marked

the completion of the transformation of the JUP from quasi-politico-religious movement

to full-fledged religio-political party.

The JUP platform would highlight the “cause of Islam,” blaming the Ayub Khan

regime as well as the newly ascendant socialist parties for twisting the faith, at the same

time condemning “Regionalism” and those “threatening guerilla war” (these last two

referred especially to the separatism brewing in Pakistan’s eastern wing). One JUP

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leader, Mahmud Ahmad Rizvi (the convener of the newly formed party central

committee) even suggested that the party form its own army to stamp out the threat of

would-be secessionists and/or advocates of guerilla war, though nothing official appears

to have come of it. JUP candidates demanded not only that shәri’at be strictly and

immediately instituted in Pakistan, but that ninety percent of the armed forces should

be comprised of “Sunnis.” The JUP promise: “As long as a single Sunni is alive, no

other ‘ism’ can establish its roots in Pakistan.” Like the JI and the JUI, the JUP focused

on placing Islam and the establishment of a truly Islamc government in Pakistan atop

the political pedestal, ahead of the PPP’s socio-economic emphases. As to the latter, the

long-overdue institution of an “Islamic” economic system, the JUP insisted, was the

answer to such problems.177 A mostly united front had been created behind the Barelvi

religious leadership, though it wouldn’t take more than a few months for some major

cracks in its foundation to appear.

Calls for Islam to remain the front-and-center issue on the political stage, emanating

from the JUI, the JI, and the JUP, went mostly unheeded. The religious parties’ own

divisions, not to mention their rivalries one with another, further eroded their ability to

contest the elections as major players. Indeed, during the election period there were

some who even proclaimed the “consummation” of the “process of political

secularization” trail-blazed by Sir sayyid Ahmad Khan; from now on, these

commentators asserted, “economic issues will determine the dynamics of politics”—not

questions of theology.178 And as aforementioned, cconomic issues certainly did

dominate the 1970 elections, pushing the issue of an Islamic state into the background,

despite JUI, JI, and JUP efforts to wrest it back into the spotlight. Another factor that

seemed to be contributing to the eventual seeming irrelevance of the ‘alәma parties may

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have been the couching, by virtually every party, of political terms in Islamic ones.

Party propaganda—and not just that of the ‘alәma parties, anymore—was marked by a

vaneer of “Muslimness,” of “the ideology of Pakistan.” This was perhaps most famously

demonstrated in Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto’s slogan for the PPP, first uttered in a political

speech four months after his resignation as Ayub Khan’s Foreign Minister: “Islam our

Faith, Democracy our Policy, Socialism our Economy.”179 In this vein, Bhutto called his

economic program “Islamic socialism.” “We [the PPP] would lay down our lives for

Islam,” Bhutto told a crowd in Rawalpindi in February 1969, at the same time

condemning “the rule of capitalists” and the super-rich.180 (Perhaps another, far more

consequential example of Bhutto’s political maneuverings vis-à-vis the “Islamic”

element of Pakistani society came in 1974, when his government declared Ahmadis to

be non-Muslims.) The ‘alәma thus no longer held a corner on the political market in

this regard. For many, the PPP’s allusions to Islam were genuine—simply the natural

result of their operating in Pakistan, a state borne of Muslim dreams. “The significance

of an Islamic state in Pakistan’s political culture,” wrote Pakistani scholar Sayyid A. S.

Pirzada, “is so dominating that even parties committed to a socialist way of life mention

an Islamic system of government in their manifestos.”181 To many among the ‘alәma,

however, the PPP and other socialist parties were merely cloaking their own genuinely

godless ideology in Islamic terms to fool the masses.

Even though the major rivalries evident during the 1970 general election season

revolved around socialism and its opponents, and East Pakistani autonomy and its

opponents, animosity between the Deobandi and Barelvi camps flared up considerably,

too. At a major JUP conference at Toba Tek Singh in June (a location selected to

counter the effect of another Toba Tek Singh conference, held earlier in March and led

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by erstwhile JUP head Mahmud Shah Gujrati; the earlier gathering, dubbing itself a

Farmer’s Conference, had been pro-PPP, condemning those who condemned socialism

and using hәdis to demonstrate support for communist China), the Deobandi JUI was

lambasted right along with “Socialism and Capitalism.” More than three thousand

‘alәma and mәshaix attended the Toba Tek conference, during which, M. Ahmad tells us,

“almost every speaker” opened his remarks with a scouring of both “Socialism and the

Congressite Ulama.” The Deobandis, maintained mwlana Arifullah Qadiri, were out to

destroy Pakistan once more—a country born desite their (the Deobandis’) best efforts to

prevent the Muslim state from coming into being in the first place. During the

conference’s final session, mwlana Muhammad Sharif Noori, after condemning Mawdudi

and the JI, took aim at two Deobandi heroes: sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli and his disciple

and friend Muhammad Ismail. sәyyid Ahmad and Muhammad Ismail, Noori said, were

British agents. JUP leader Mahmud Ahmad Riza blasted the JUI during his Friday

sermon at the same location, similarly lambasting mwlana Bhashani (head of the Awami

League)—seen as a socialist and a regionalist—and Bhutto. JUI ‘alәma were, Rizvi

argued, “the followers of Gandhi and Nehru” and thus did not truly have the best

interests of the ummәt in mind.182 Some of the Barelvi pirs used their significant social

and religious influence to sway—indeed, almost compel—disciples and murids to vote

according to their (the pirs’) dictates; xәwajәħ Qarauddin Sialvi, for example, threatened

with expulsion from the dәrgaħ any of his followers who failed to heed his political

counsel.183 During the election, Barelvi cadidates in the Punjab regularly spoke out

against other Islamic parties; in Sindh, though, candidates tended to avoid such

contention, focusing on the PPP instead. Thus Barelvi leaders were divided as to how

to confront socialism vis-a-vis the Deobandis, some opting to work “together” (or at

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least not to directly oppose one another, concentrating instead on Bhutto), others

directing their opposition towards the JUI, in the tradition of Ahmad Riza Khan—who

had been quite clear in regard to working with “bad” Muslims. Electoral opposition to

the JI would perhaps have been understandable, given that the JI was not, strictly

speaking, an ‘alәma party, but even the overarching joint goals of the JUI and the JUP

(specifically, for an unambiguously Islamic state, complete with an Islamic constitution

and a shәri’at-based judiciary) were not enough to cause the two groups to forge ahead

on a united platform. This was, perhaps, the greatest weakness of the ‘alәma parties in

pursuance of their electoral aims, and certainly the most significant political result of

the dynamic between the two schools of thought.

National Assembly elections were held on 7 December, with provincial elections

following closely on the tenth. The results spelled a staggering victory for the Awami

League in the eastern zone, where it won all but two seats in the National Assembly

(compared to none in the western zone). Still, this gave the party an actual majority in

Pakistan’s federal legislature, meaning it could legitimately form a government.

Meanwhile, the PPP dominated the results for Punjab and Sindh. For the Islamic

parties, the election represented an overwhelming dissapointment—even a disaster.

“The results of the 1970 National and Provincial Assembly elections,” wrote one

Pakistani scholar, “highlighted the inadequacy of Islam as the sole basis for political

legitimacy and support.”184 The only victory for the ‘alәma parties came in the NWFP

and Baluchistan, where the Deobandis through the JUI, in a coalition with the NAP,

were able to win pluralities. (Perhaps one JUI victory meant the most, however; in the

National Assembly’s Dera Ismail Khan constituency, mufti Mahmud beat out Zulfikar

‘Ali Bhutto himself.) All told, the JUI (operating in former West Pakistan only) won

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almost four percent of the total vote (3.98%), translating to seven National Assembly

seats. (This doesn’t include one seat won in East Pakistan by combined MJUI-NIP

efforts.)185 The JI (operating in both wings) won 6.03% of the total vote but just four

seats in the National Assembly. The JUP (campaigning mostly in the western wing)

obtained 3.94% of the vote total, plus seven National Assembly seats. The election

results, besides illustrating the relative weakness of the ‘alәma parties (failing as they

did to unite within a coalition), reveal, to an extent, the geography of the Deobandi-

Barelvi rivalry. In the NWFP and in Baluchistan, for example, the JUI won twenty-five

percent and twenty percent of the vote total, respectively, while the JUP scored zero

percent in both provinces. But in Sindh and Punjab, the JUP took home seven percent

and ten percent, respectively, almost double the JUI count in both provinces. Sindh and

Punjab were Barelvi areas, with a significant Deobandi minority mixed in, but in the

NWFP and Baluchistan, Deobandism clearly dominated. On the provincial level,

results were similarly proportioned; the JUI won four seats in the NWFP assembly and

three in the Baluchistan assembly, but only two in Punjab and none in Sindh, while the

JUP walked away with four seats in Punjab and seven in Sindh, but none in the NWFP

or Baluchistan.186

Things began to break down politically after the release of the 1970 election results.

Possessing a majority all on its own in the National Assembly, the Awami League under

shix Mujibur Rahman did indeed demand the right to form a government. Predictably,

Bhutto rejected this outright, and self-appointed mediator Yahya Khan was helpless to

bring the two to an accommodation. Bhutto further assured the impossibility of any

attempt at establishing civilian government when, in protest of the Awami League’s

perceived power grab, he announced that the PPP would not attend the National

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Assembly’s inaugural session. Of course, this would have effectively voided anything

the National Assembly might have attempted to do, prompting Yahya Khan—now in a

very delicate position—to dissolve his cabinet and postpone the sitting of the National

Assembly indefinitely. The move garnered an unsurprisingly hostile reception in

Pakistan’s eastern zone, where riots, demonstrations, and strikes combined with an

Awami League-led refusal by Bengalis either to pay their taxes or abide by Martial Law

restrictions. Their party had won fair and square—and now it was being pushed out of

power by petulant West Pakistanis. The JI, formerly a supporter of the regime,

temporarily broke with Yahya over the Awami League government issue,

understanding that Yahya’s non-compliance with the Bengalis likely meant more power

for Bhutto and the PPP—the greater enemy.187

Deobandi leaders tended to blame the gaping schism between East and West

Pakistanis on the “weakening of Islamic ties.” “The two wings,” wrote Muhammad Rafi,

“…became distant because the strong Islamic ties became weaker.” The subsequent

state of affairs made it easy for Pakistan’s—and Islam’s—“enemies” to take full

advantage of the situation. Bengali Hindu teachers, for example, were among those

blamed, as well as the ever-meddling Indian and and American governments. Of

course, provincial and linguistic differences played their parts, too, but these were mere

symptoms. What had brought on the “weaking of Islamic ties” in the first place?

Muhammad Rafi blamed the systematic emptying from “the Muslim mind” of “the spirit

of Muslim Nationhood.” Such Islam-centered nationhood had been fundamental to the

creation of Pakistan in the first place, but it had been corroded as the younger

generation confronted western culture and fashion, laziness, immorality, “nudeness,”

and “wasteful expenditure.” All took their toll, and politicans had predictably exploited

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the growing divisiness that naturally resulted in order to cultivate party spirit. This,

Muhammad Shafi’s son warned, would split the nation. (It was also why, as the reader

shall see, universities were among the first institutions targeted by the anti-

secessionists.) Like the JI, Deobandis in the Western zone were disappointed in the

“luxury-loving” Yahya Khan and his clumsy efforts at arbitration.188

Yahya Khan and Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto flew to Dhaka to attempt a negotiation with

Mujibur Rahman before things could get any worse. But this eleventh-hour move to fix

the situation quickly broke down, in part because West Pakistani troops were at the

same time being flown into Bengal complete with a contingency plan for militarily

taking over the province to enforce order by the barrel of the gun. (As early as March

1969, Ayub Khan had sent West Pakistani troops and tanks to East Pakistan “to deal

with internal unrest…”)189 In such an atmosphere, negotiations were useless, and on 25

March both Bhutto and Yahya flew back to the western zone. The next day, the

President banned the Awami League, made political activity illegal, and put back into

effect the old press, free speech, and assembly restrictions. Worst of all for the Bengalis,

the West Pakistani contingency plan went into immediate effect, targeting East

Pakistani universities, throwing up checkpoints, erecting roadblocks—and shooting

resisters. Mujibur Rahman himself was arrested and flown to Pakistan’s western wing

to stand trial for treason. Within days, a full-scale war of secession was underway; one

Major Ziaur Rahman proclaimed Bangladeshi independence from Chittagong, and a

government-in-exile was set up in Calcutta.190 To many of the ‘alәma, Yahya had

crossed an uncrossable line in pitting his Muslim army against fellow Muslims. It

seemed that that non-violent, diplomatic approach had been abandoned far too

abruptly—and that the suppression of the “rebellion” had been far too brutal. Whatever

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happened to seeking a political solution? Suddenly some among the religious leadership

were even missing Ayub Khan; he’d had his flaws, yes, but at least he’d been a

“powerful” and strong personality. Perhaps, they reasoned, old Ayub would have been

able to avoid armed conflict against fellow citizens through sheer force of character.191

Whatever Ayub Khan’s reaction might have been had he been in command, it was

Yahya Khan who was now calling the shots—and his crackdown was shockingly brutal,

producing something in the range of ten million refugees fleeing to India. Reports of

rape and mass murder proliferated. Images surfaced of dead bodies—civilians—

scattered along riverbanks or half-buried in the mud, of female corpses with their necks

tied to metal posts as if they’d been tortured to death. As the scale of the fighting

increased, local Bangladeshi forces (including some former Pakistani military units)

battled their erstwhile co-citizens from the western zone. “Islamic” imagery was used

by the Pakistani military both to justify its actions and to rally Pakistani soldiers;

passages from the Qur’an and admonitions from the sunnәt were “quoted copiously”

before the troops, while the memory of the great battles of the past—from Badr and

Uhud to the more recent mostly Deobandi stand against the British at Khyber—served

as a rallying cry.192 While the JUI played no role in support of the Yahya regime in

East Pakistan, the JI (which had broken with the JUI earlier over the “Glory of Islam

Day” scenario) and the JUP were granted “semiofficial role[s]” within the military-

imposed regime in Bengal, as was the Deobandi-leaning NIP. It should be remembered

that while the JUI had not really contested the 1970 elections in East Pakistan, the NIP,

JI, and JUP had lost big to the Awami League. Members of the aforementioned parties,

in the words of Haqqani, “formed peace committees throughout Pakistan’s eastern wing,

at district and even village levels. These parties functioned as the intelligence network

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of the Pakistan army…”193 The JI was an active supporter of the Pakistani army in its

mission to suppress the nationalist-secessionist ambitions of the Bengalis, the Mawdudi-

led party even calling the rebel Bengalis “the enemies of Islam.” (Supporters of the JI

and others whom the Western media derided as “right-wing religious fanatics” claimed

that it was the “socialist leaders” who were the real fanatics, inciting “urban upheaval”

and “partisanship” and causing “economic damage.” “It was Bhashani, the Maoist

leader,” five Muslim students reminded a British newspaper in late April 1969, “who

said that they were prepared to burn down the homes of those who would take part in

any elections. His supporters even broke into some Jamaat Islami [JI] offices and

desecrated the Qur’an. Is this not being fanatical?”)194 The JI sent delegations overseas

to lobby on Pakistan’s behalf in Europe and the across the Middle East. More

ominously, from March 1971 educated JI members along with members of the party’s

male student wing participated significantly as the core of al-badәri (“The Moon”), more

or less a paramilitary unit (some even say “death squad”) masquerading as a “volunteer

[rәzәkar] force,” put together by Pakistani military intelligence and responsible for the

murder and/or humiliation of an unknown number of Bengali “intellectuals, journalists,

student leaders and politicians” on regime-formulated hit lists.195 This was the first

example in Pakistan’s history of the government exploiting religion by creating militant

groups out of clerical parties in support of its agenda (though its activities vis-à-vis

Kashmir had come close); it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but it marked the beginning

of a new era in Pakistani government-Islamic party relationships. Another Pakistan

military-organized volunteer force, al-shәms (“The Sun”), though made up of a mish-

mash of individuals and groups, also included a number of Deobandi-leaning NIP

activists.196 According to one Deobandi source, the motivation behind their

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participation in the suppression of the “rebellion” was the entrance in the war of the

Indian state. Once India had picked sides, the conflict took on the color of jyhad.

Muhammad Rafi describes how the students and teachers at the Deobandi dar ul’alwm

Karachi were given rifle training; “the spirit of jyhad motivated every child and adult to

obtain training in warfare” in order to serve at the front. But before this “service” was

really possible on a mass scale, Yahya ordered “the shameful surrender.”197

December was the deciding month. In retaliation for Indian assistance to the

“rebels,” including Indian military movements along (and even across) the East

Pakistani border, Pakistan (on 3 December) attacked a number of military targets in

northern India. The next day India invaded East Pakistan by land, sea, and air. With

the fall of Dhaka to Indian might seemingly imminent, Pakistani forces surrendered to

India on the sixteenth (instantly transforming approximately one hundred thousand

soldiers into prisoners of war), and within twenty-four hours Indira Gandhi proclaimed

a (unilateral) cease-fire. Amidst the humiliating cry of angry demonstrators, Yahya

Khan stepped down on 20 December.198 Those ‘alәma who took part in the attempt to

suppress East Pakistani secessionist efforts remember this time as one in which “the

‘alәma and the students of [mәdrәsәħs] and volunteers of East Pakistan who had fought

with their lives for Pakistan were subjected to untold torture which outdid [Genghis]

Khan.” Meanwhile, Pakistan had been seemingly abandoned by its fellow Muslim

nations, which Deobandis, at least in part, blamed on the worldwide-ummәt-weakening

phenomenon of Arab nationalism.199 Both sides in the Bangladeshi War of

Independence had felt entirely justified in their separate struggles, and completely

victimized by the other. But it was the West Pakistanis who had to now live with

humiliation.

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Bhutto took the reigns of government in Yahya’s stead. The JI marked the PPP’s

assumption of power by observing a “Black Day” in Lahore (December 1971).200 This

Islam-focused opposition to the Bhutto regime was to be characteristic of the years to

come. “The loss of the eastern wing in 1971,” wrote Jalal, “was a watershed with a

transformative effect on the Pakistani psyche[,]…subverting the ‘two-nation’ theory”

and taking “a hefty toll on national pride” after “a humiliating military defeat by India.”

Jalal’s explanation for what happened next: “Unaccustomed to learning from history and

more comfortable with myths of an imagined past, Pakistanis were susceptible to the

Islamist charge that the ruling elite’s lack of religiosity had caused the country’s

disintegration.”201

Prelude to “Islamization”: 1971-1977.

With the 1970 elections, the departure of Bangladesh from the Pakistani polity, and

the takeover of Zulfikar ‘Ali Bhutto, the trend towards secularization—toward a marked

de-emphasis on Islam as the guiding force in Pakistani politics—appeared to be in full

swing, despite the best efforts of the Muslim scholars and divines. Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto,

who, unlike Ayub or Yahya, had barely reached adulthood when Pakistan was born,

represented a new generation of Pakistani leadership. The influence of the “old

guard”—those who had served for years in the civil service or army under the British

Raj—was waning, partly by attrition, while young forty-somethings like Bhutto, whose

worldviews were shaped less by the pre-Partition dream of a “Muslim homeland” in

South Asia and more by postcolonial nationalism, were increasingly taking center stage.

Bhutto himself had visions of a grand alliance of Asian and African nations, a

transcontinental zone he considered “a world of the proletariat.”202 He and others of his

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ilk thus fit into the secularist, left-leaning, and highly statist mould of many of the post-

colonial world’s new leaders. It was a mould that neither the Deobandi nor Barelvi

religious leadership were willing to tolerate steering the Pakistani ship of state. And

like so many who have ridden to power on a wave of “democratic” promises, Bhutto

would ultimately depend on the guns of government to assure his ascendancy (utilizing

personal ties with the Army), not to mention his rule, where, like many “socialist”

leaders before him, he exhibited a “near-monopoly of decision-making power.”203 In

reference to the latter, one contemporary described Bhutto as a “populist-authoritarian

type of leader and a cosmetic democrat.”204 This was not the sort of political head that

the ‘alәma could trust to further along their goal of Islamic government—nor even of a

democratic restoration.

But the prognostications of the pundits predicting the supremacy of economic issues

(over religious ones) did not pan out, though Bhutto’s domestic program for Pakistan

did indeed stress the socio-political situation. In 1972 and again in 1976, the PPP

government took over all of the country’s banks and lending institutions, all of its

insurance companies, and scores of its industrial enterprises, effectively nationalizing

them. Despite all of this, and perhaps as a result of Pakistan’s geopolitical and self-

identifying reorientation after the traumatic 1971 loss of Bangladesh, Islam over the

next half-decade regained its dominant position within the framework of Pakistani

politics, culminating in the highly politicized Islam of the 1977 general elections; even

Bhutto (a wily politician who understood how to employ religion for political ends)

pushed forward a number of shәri’at-conforming laws (including the replacement of

Sunday with Friday as the weekly day off and bans on alcohol consumption, gambling,

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night clubs, pornography, and horse racing, though these were all last-ditch efforts

instituted in 1977 to win over the opposition).

It was during this period, too (1973), that Pakistan adopted a new Constitution (still

current, as of the time of this writing) pervaded with religious provisions. Martial Law

had been lifted in April 1972, after which the National Assembly had been restored.

Within that body, after the PPP, the most powerful political parties were the NAP and

the JUI. Once again, the National Assembly’s main task was to hammer out a

constitution; this represented Pakistan’s third major go-around in this regard, and like

previous attempts it was marked with tension and disagreement, especially between the

PPP on one side and the NAP-JUI on the other. But with previous constitution-making

efforts having laid the groundwork, a new document eventually emerged. On 31

December Pakistan’s third constitution was submitted in the National Assembly; it was

approved in April and went into effect on Independence Day: 14 August 1973.

Throughout the deliberations, political parties like the JUI, the JI, and the JUP stressed

their Islamic orthodoxy, while economic issues tended “to be manifested in the search

for a truly Islamic economy as well as for an Islamic polity…”205 Islam was again

recognized as the core of the nation’s identity, the single abiding force holding a polity

of disparate ethnicities, languages, and backgrounds together.

Part IX of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan contains the

document’s specifically Islamic provisions. With the exception of a brief preamble

confirming the “Holy Quran and the Sunnah” as the standard by which “all existing

laws” must be measured (“no law shall be enacted which is repugnant” to the injunctions

therein), Part IX pertains entirely to an official body within the Pakistani polity

identified as the Council of Islamic Ideology, though otherwise referred to simply as the

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Islamic Council (IC). Qualifications for appointment to the Council, made up of between

eight and twenty members, are broad; one member must be a woman, at least four must

have at least fifteen years of “Islamic research or instruction” under their belts, and at

least two must have been (or currently be) Supreme Court or High Court judges. Apart

from these specifics, the President may appoint anyone “having knowledge of the

principles and philosophy of Islam as enunciated in the Holy Quran and Sunnah, or

understanding of the economic, political, legal or administrative problems of Pakistan.”

One other requirement: “so far as practicable various schools of thought” must be

represented within the IC, an obvious reference to the theological divisions plaguing the

ummәt in Pakistan, foremost among them the Deobandi-Barelvi split. A member could

serve on the Council for three years, barring resignation or eviction from the body by a

majority of the total membership.

The principal function of the IC has been to act as an advisory body on proposed law

(i.e. its adherence to Islamic injunctions), mainly to the Majlis-e-Shoora (mәjlys-e-shwra,

or Parliament) but also to the President, provincial assemblies, and provincial

governors. However, the IC is also charged with two additional functions. First, the IC

presents recommendations (to each of the bodies and offices aforementioned) “as to the

ways and means of enabling and encouraging Muslims of Pakistan to order their lives

individually and collectively in all respects in accordance with the principles and

concepts of Islam as enunciated in the Holy Quran and sunnәt.” Second, the IC must

prepare regular reports, to be discussed annually within both Houses and each

provincial assembly, recommending various Islamic injunctions that might be turned

into future legislation. The IC thus provides a high-level state role specifically for the

‘alәma. The competition between the various schools of Islam (primarily those of the

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Barelvi and Deobandi variety) was now on for control of this and other bodies within

the state apparatus.

During the 1970 elections, it had been generally assumed that the National Awami

Party—which performed well in the NWFP and Baluchistan—would hammer out some

sort of joint program with the PPP (which dominated Punjab and Sindh) after 1971;

they were both, after all, explicitly socialist parties. As it turned out, however, the

PPP’s Bhutto and NAP chief Wali Khan (son of aforementioned Khan Abdul Ghaffar

Khan) butted heads to such an extent that any sort of joint agreement quickly

transformed into more or less an impossibility. Indeed, the NAP joined the opposition,

and Wali Khan himself was elected Opposition Leader in the National Assembly. In

keeping with its long-held policy of siding with a lesser opponent in order to focus on a

greater one, the Deobandi JUI formed a coalition government in the NWFP and in

Baluchistan with the NAP in early April 1972.206 Addressing a crowd in Peshawar,

Wali Khan announced the formation of the NAP-JUI coalition and named JUI chief

mufti Mahmud the province’s Chief Minister. Any decision made by the PPP-controlled

central government-appointed provincial administration would, Wali Khan said, “not be

acceptable.”207 That same year, mufti Mahmud announced the official launch of alcohol

prohibition in the NWFP. The setting he chose was significant in that it hailed back—

much to the disapproval of the Barelvis—to the movement of sәyyid Ahmad of Raebareli

(see Chapter 1), student of the Walliullahi tradition and renowned jyhadi of the early

nineteenth century. After the forces of sәyyid Ahmad had captured Peshawar in 1830,

his loyal companion Muhammad Ismail (whom the Barelvis would loathe as an out-and-

out “Wahhabi”) had stood before a crowd in the city. The date, on the Gregorian

calendar, was Sunday, 1 May. Facing the multitude, sәyyid Ahmad’s acolyte publicly

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declared alcohol a forbidden substance in the newly established Islamic state. Now, one

hundred forty-two years since that act, mufti Mahmud—likewise on Sunday, 1 May—

was making the very same declaration (even standing in the exact spot, as far as could

be ascertained).208 Here in the NWFP, at least, if not in the rest of the country, Islamic

law (as seen through a Deobandi lens) would be respected and established—a step

towards fulfilling sәyyid Ahmad’s original, and unrealized, dream. That mufti Mahmud’s

symbolism harked back to such a controversial figure—indeed, possibly the most

controversial figure—of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry could not have been missed by the

province’s (and Pakistan’s) Barelvi religious leadership.

But the Bhutto government remained strongly opposed to the NAP-JUI provincial

administrations. In late September 1973, an unidentified shooter attempted to

assassinate Abdul Wali Khan. The latter blamed the incident on the “[central]

Government and members of the Pakistan People’s Party.” The Bhutto regime,

through their ambassador in London (one Mumtaz Daultana) claimed “shock and

horror” at the alleged assassination attempt and blamed it instead on the peasants’

discontent with the NAP-JUI government’s seeming preference for “the local

entrenched landlord interests.”209 Each side thus took advantage of the murder attempt

to try to politically cripple the other. The PPP government was more successful later,

when it utilized the apparent discovery of “a massive cache of Soviet-made arms,”

ostensibly meant for Baluchistan, within the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad as a pretext for

completely dismantling the NAP-JUI government in that province.210 (Since 1973,

Pakistan’s Baluchistan province had been the scene of a hard-fought Baluchi war of

independence. The war would last for four years—and flare up from time to time

afterwards—until the independence movement was finally and brutally surpressed by

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the mostly Punjabi Pakistan Army.) In protest of Bhutto’s dramatic action, the NAP-

JUI government in the NWFP resigned, too. This move only strengthened Bhutto’s

immediate position, however, as the wily PPP head quickly replaced both province’s

governors with his own picks.211 Thus ended the JUI’s brief stint as co-ruling party in

Pakistan’s westernmost provinces, once more revealing Bhutto’s autocratic style of rule;

opposition was not to be tolerated, and power was to be strong in the center—despite

the state’s alleged federal structure (with residual powers left to the provinces)

mandated by the constitution. After the dissolution of the NAP-JUI governments in the

NWFP and Baluchistan, the Bhutto regime continued to harass opposition parties using

the state’s law enforcement agencies (together with enthusiastic PPP supporters). At

one NAP event in Rawalpindi several NAP members were killed by such action. The

response from the opposition, both to the Bhutto regime’s harassment as well as its

specific role in toppling the Baluchistan and NWFP governments (where the PPP had

lost badly), was to form an eight-party alliance: the United Democratic Front, which

included the JUI, the JI, and the JUP, as well as the Deobandi-leaning Khaksars.212 The

alliance’s goals were to “restore democracy, check dictatorship, and work for an Islamic

and parliamentary constitution, [as well as] the release of political prisoners.” For the

Barelvis and the Deobandis, the alliance represented another temporary partnership

with one another, once again borne of political expediency and characterized by

“separate unity.”

Despite the formation of the new alliance (indeed, perhaps because of it), the

harassment continued, forcing the Deobandi and Barelvi leadership, generally speaking,

to band together (though, as always, as separately as possible) against what was

perceived as a hostile, repressive, and anti-Islam regime. Meanwhile, the Bhutto

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government consolidated its power both from within and without. From within,

consolidation was achieved by purging the party of “the more leftist elements” in its

midst (most notably in 1974, when Bhutto “cleansed” his cabinet of such individuals), as

well as by the purging of almost fifteen hundred military officers whose loyalty was

deemed less than desirable. (One of the generals he did advance, over several more

senior personnel: Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who became Army chief-of-staff in 1976,

replacing erstwhile director of the brutal 1971 West Pakistani crackdown in Bengal

General Tikka Khan.) In addition, Bhutto organized the Federal Security Force, a

militant entity that functioned outside of the military and ofttimes acted as a sort of

Praetorian Guard for Bhutto himself. From without, the PPP government secured its

position through media censorship, aggressive “policing,” and the harassment and

imprisonment (and even murder) of political enemies.213 Perhaps characteristic of his

transition from “democrat” to despot, Bhutto had campaigned throughout the 1970

elections for a parliamentary system of government—only to change his mind later

(conveninently when he himself was in power) in favor of a presidential one (with

Bhutto as president, of course). When he eventually lost the presidential system battle

after the National Assembly adopted a parliamentary order instead, Bhutto ensured via

provision that, even so, it would be near impossible for the legislature to remove the

Prime Minister (himself).214

When PPP co-founder and leading propagator of socialism Hayat Khan Sherpao was

assassinated in a bomb blast at Peshawar University (8 February 1975), the Bhutto

government’s action was swift; the NAP, immediately blamed for the incident, was

banned and its leaders arrested (including party head Wali Khan, as well as his son

Asfandyar Wali Khan—the latter accused of masterminding the murder). Though the

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accused were later acquitted, they remained in prison until Zia ul-Haq released them

three years later. Any other political party that the administration deemed a recipient of

aid from a foreign quarter was likewise banned.215 Several JI leaders were also harassed,

arrested, and imprisoned; one of the party chiefs, Nazir Ahmad—a National Assembly

member described by one scholar as the JI’s “most vociferous” representative in the

federal legislative body—was shot dead by government forces. “Never before,” wrote

Nasr, “had any Pakistani government gone so far to silence its opposition,” and this

under a supposedly democratic, civilian regime. Nasr goes on to mark the assassination

of Nazir Ahmad as “the beginning of the rapid radicalization” of the JI’s male student

wing, an indication of the role of government in the radicalization of religious parties.216

Indeed, together with the regime’s role in the formation and arming of so-called “death

squads” out of religious parties during the Bangladeshi war of independence, Bhutto’s

harassment and targeting of the religious parties during his presidential tenure initiated

a process of militant transformation among the religious parties, or at least among a

segment therein.

March 1977: “Zenith” of Islam’s “Politicization.”

The year 1977 was one of major significance in the history of Pakistan. “The

politicization of Islam,” wrote Esposito in the early 1980s, “reached its zenith in the

general [Pakistani] elections of March 1977.” When elections were first announced by

Bhutto in January, the anti-PPP parties leapt into action mode; this was their chance to

finally and democratically oust the strongman regime. Standing in opposition to the

ruling PPP government of Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto was a newly formed nine-party coalition

of political parties: the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA). Though the union included

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parties representating a variety of positions across the left-right political spectrum, its

platform seemed to revolve distinctly around the watchword “Islam.” Mosques and

religious seminaries—thousands of them—doubled as hubs of political activity. The

alliance advocated for the institution of the “System of the Prophet” (nyzam-e-mustafa),

meaning the establishment of a truly Islamic order after that founded by God through

Muhammad in the opening days of the Muslim era. This was the very reason Pakistan

had been created—and Islam was the only answer, as a unifying force, to the ethnic and

linguistic schisms plaguing the country. Bhutto was cast as anti-Islam, the ‘alәma and

other PNA members pointing to both his regime’s policies as well as his own personal

way of life as proof. The PPP government was corrupt and sick to the core, and the

remedy lay not in the political philosophies of the world (whether socialism or

capitalism) but in the just and egalitarian system God had instituted in Medina and

spelled out in the Qur’an and sunnәt. And like the old, pre-Partition Muslim League, the

PNA warned of “Islam in Danger!” Despite the philosophical differences between the

various parties constituting the PNA, then—economic, political, even religious—the

politically eclectic alliance’s “direction and leadership” undoubtably emanated from the

Islamic parties, namely the JUI, the JUP, and the JI.217 This was a rare testament to the

power the religious parties could have had acting jointly for some political purpose.

That same year the Barelvi JUP was instrumental in forming the Tehrik-e-Nizam-e-

Mustafa (tәhrik-e-nyzam-e-mustafa, or “Movement of the System of the Prophet”), an

anti-Bhutto outfit. The organization would become a JUP front group after Zia ul-Haq

banned political parties in October 1979.

Meanwhile, the Deobandi JUI under mufti Mahmud campaigned passionately

against the Bhutto regime, especially in the western provinces, combating the PPP’s

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socialism with the publication of Mahmud’s own socialism kufәr he. This phrase—

meaning “Socialism is Disbelief”—had been the anti-Bhutto slogan of the JUI, the JI,

and the JUP years before, during the 1970 elections, when the rising star that was

Bhutto first appeared to threaten the religious parties’ success in West Pakistan. Now,

seven years later, the issue of atheistic socialism’s alleged takeover of the Pakistani

polity (including the widespread belief that the PPP represented a Marxist front party

with aims of instituting one-party Communist rule) remained a central one. mufti

Mahmud played a leading role within the PNA as an anti-Bhutto agitator and later was

appointed a member of the PNA delegation that met with Bhutto to attempt a

negotiation.218 The opposition parties pointed out that Bhutto’s promises of bread,

clothing, and shelter for all had failed miserably in their fulfillment; Bhutto had fallen

especially short when it came to land redistribution—another broken PPP promise.

Indeed, after India had successfully tested its first nuclear device (1974), Bhutto had

sworn that Pakistan would catch up with neighboring India even if Pakistanis were

forced to “eat grass” in the process.219 So much for bread!

But Bhutto refused to be sidelined either by the opposition’s defaming of his

economic record (he pointed to rising GDP and falling inflation rates) or by the PNA’s

appeals to Islam. Indeed, the opposition coalition’s pressure on the PPP forced the

ruling party to take a more “Islamic” stance in order to garner electoral support;

Bhutto’s party, previously an explicitly socialist entity, replaced the word “socialism”

with the more Islamic-sounding phrase musәwәt-e-muhәmmәd (“equality of

Muhammad”) in its literature. Meanwhile, the PPP’s opposition, most visibly in the

form of the PNA, asserted its own service to the Islam. Both sides promised that their

proposed version of government was the one most suited to ultimately bring about the

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realization of a truly Islamic order. Thus the heated elections of 1977 helped foment a

competition between the major political parties of Pakistan, both secular and religious,

over dedication to the religion of Allah. To offset the PNA’s number one platform

item—the institution of Islamic government in Pakistan—the PPP, too, vowed to work

for increased Islamization; it promised, for example, to make Friday the weekly holiday

in place of Sunday. It should be noted that while the JUP did form part of the PNA, this

was in no way representative of the vast majority of Barelvis, whose individual loyalties

fell on both sides of the political divide. Meanwhile, the Deobandis leaned heavily

against the PPP.

With the support of the upper class and the poorer classes (who, as always, rallied

behind Bhutto’s promises of bread, clothing, and shelter for all), however, and combined

with the PPP’s now well-established ability to politically co-opt religious symbolism,

Bhutto won an “impressive victory” in the March 1977 general elections. All told, the

ruling PPP had won an overwhelming one hundred fifty-five seats in the National

Assembly, compared to only thirty-six for the PNA. Sensing that the lopsided win was

likely to spark protest, Bhutto immediately banned political assemblies throughout the

country. He was right, of course; the PPP win did spark outrage among the regime’s

opposition. The government was charged with election fraud, and the PNA launched a

campaign of agitation, using the mosques as venues for anti-Bhutto political speeches as

well as staging grounds for rallies and marches. Specifically, the PNA demanded

another election. When Bhutto refused to hold such a do-over, demonstrations against

the government only increased in number and severity. Bhutto tried to assuage the

opposition by instituting a shәri’at-inspired ban on gambling, prostitution, and alcohol

(as was promised as part of his Islamic makeover during the campaign), but this only

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succeeded in throwing the spotlight on Islam and thereby strengthening the position of

the ‘alәma-directed PNA. Wrote Esposito, “Islam and Pakistan’s Islamic identity had

reemerged as the dominant theme in Pakistani politics in a manner and to a degree that

had not been seen since Pakistan’s establishment.”220 The situation deteriorated to such

an extent that in July Bhutto declared Martial Law. Then, on 5 July 1977, the Army

took over, proclaimed Martial Law itself, and forcefully placed all political leaders—

including the Prime Minister—in military custody.

Deobandis and Barelvis stood divided on the change in management. Zulfiqar ‘Ali

Bhutto would not come out of the regime-change situation alive.

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5 - ISLAMIZATION AND WAR:

Militarization of the Rivalry, 1977-2001

Even though he tried his best to steer it toward a secular democracy, Jinnah did not live long

enough to see it become one. Over the coming years, Pakistan took a very troubling turn. In a

matter of nine years, it became an “Islamic Republic,” and in a little over two decades, it had

essentially become a theocracy... The same extremist clerics who had opposed Jinnah and his

struggle for Pakistan gradually claimed ownership of the State. They formed political groups

that used religion to amass public support. Their demonstrations of street power, frequently

violent, meant that sectarian hatred and intolerance was the order of the day.

KASHIF CHAUDHRY, THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, 19 SEPTEMBER 20111

ON PAGE 141 of Husain Haqqani’s Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (2005), the

author addresses Pakistan’s “sectarian issues” vis-à-vis the creation and political

evolution of the state.

Sectarian issues had played little part in the campaign for Pakistan’s creation

and Pakistan’s official census figures did not report sectarian identities of

Muslims in an effort to keep the lid on sectarian differences among

Muslims. The demand by Shiites, in the aftermath of the [1980] Zakat

controversy, for effective representation at higher levels of the state and

recognition of their sectarian interests laid the foundations of bitter

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Shiite-Sunni conflict, which later led to the creation of terrorist militias

within both sects. (Italics added)2

Here Haqqani lays out the generally accepted narrative of sectarianism in Pakistan,

defined within the context of the Shi’a-Sunni rivalry—and, importantly, denying any

significant role “sectarian issues” might have played in the struggles leading up to

Partition (an assertion at least partially debunked, it is hoped, earlier in this work). (If

“sectarian issues” were so insignificant, too, then why—pointed out in Haqqani’s very

next sentence—would the Pakistani state go to so much trouble to “keep a lid” on

them?) Developments that occurred during the rule of General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq,

in particular, insists Haqqani, laid the groundwork for future Shi’a-Sunni conflict. This

is certainly true, but equally important (and perhaps more so) were similar

developments within the Sunni community itself, mostly between the minority

Deobandi and majority Barelvi sub-sects, each of which separately (and considerably)

outnumbered Pakistan’s Shi’a population. This Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry would erupt

into steady violence in the 1990s, 2000s, and into the 2010s—violence that would

sometimes mistakenly be attributed to the more publicized (at least internationally)

Shi’a-Sunni conflict. Indeed, it was in the period between 1979 and 1988—the years of

Zia ul-Haq’s regime—that Pakistan underwent a major socio-political “Islamization,” of

which the Deobandis, though significantly smaller in number, were able take advantage

far more efficiently than their Barelvi counterparts. Of course, this was no new

phenomenon to the politically minded Barelvi ‘alәma, who had often felt ignored by the

Pakistani state they and their theological forebears had helped create, in comparison to

their Deobandi rivals. And it was within the political framework of the Pakistani state

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that the formerly civil, if bitter, rivalry between Deobandis and Barelvis—once fought

via juridical rulings, public debates, and books, then via “all-India” Muslim

organizations within the context of pre-Partition independence politics, and now

represented by political parties vying for real money and real power—evolved into

something far more brutal in character.

Consolidating Power: Zia, Democracy, and the ‘alәma

Shortly after carrying out his coup, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq described his

actions as those of a concerned citizen, nothing more. Bhutto had been on the verge of

unleashing the Army on the opposition and executing or imprisoning its (the

opposition’s) leaders; this had to be stopped. (The Army’s name for Zia’s July 1977

military coup: Operation Fair Play.) Zia vowed that the 1973 constitution, currently

suspended, would be restored, and that free and fair elections would be held within

ninety days; political parties would be free both to file nominations and to carry out

their campaigns. The promise of elections was to the PNA’s liking, as the alliance fully

expected to assume the reigns of government now that the PPP flame had been

extinguished. But Zia’s promises quickly evaporated. The reason, insisted Pakistan’s

new dicatator, was the unexpected discovery by the regime of a wide range of abuses

perpetrated on the Pakistani people by the Bhutto government. There must be

accountability, Zia argued, before the state could move on. A flurry of “white papers”

was produced by the government, on topics ranging from Bhutto’s illegal utilization of

his Federal Security Force to the previous regime’s muzzling of the press. All of this

was used as a pretext for postponing elections. The fawning and multitudinous

reception that Bhutto received in Lahore (during a brief stint of freedom) convinced

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many within the PNA that perhaps Zia was right after all—perhaps the PPP was still a

threat, a force with which to be reckoned yet. Suddenly, too, the PNA was far less sure

about its own electoral prospects.3 But Deobandi and PNA president mufti Mahmud

discounted the alleged “resurgence of support” for Bhutto and his erstwhile party; the

pro-PPP demonstrations, he said, were “all propaganda. Once you get to the top and

fall down you never come back. That’s the history of Pakistan.” The mufti further

asserted that rumors that the PNA was united “only in opposition to Mr Bhutto” (and

thus devoid of any coherent platform) were untrue—and being spread by “the Western

press and broadcasting media.” Still, the promised elections were pushed back again,

with the possibility of a PPP resurgence (and, subsequently, another East Pakistan

situation—in Baluchistan, for example) cited as Zia’s chief justification. Zia’s pushing

back of the elections, even if it was ostensibly to “clean up” the mess left by the previous

administration, was not greeted with favor by mufti Mahmud. Indeed, the Deobandi

mwlana delivered to the General a public ultimatum of sorts in early November,

declaring that unless elections were held “next March” (1978)—at this point Zia was

saying that even next November appeared unlikely—Pakistan “could be plunged into

chaos again.” Despite Zia’s assurances that the election postponements were justified,

mufti Mahmud did not understand why this should be so. At one point Zia told the

press that the PNA itself had requested the election delays, but mufti Mahmud

vehemently denied this allegation.4

Eventually elections were postponed indefinitely. Bhutto himself was sentenced to

death for his alleged role in the murder of a political opponent. In early March 1978,

Zia banned political activity (though not political parties, yet), promising elections the

next year. Ironically, given his white paper concerning Bhutto’s illegal manipulation of

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the press, the regime shut down several papers itself that same month, simultaneously

arresting around two hundred journalists. In April, despite pleas from international

leaders for the commuting of his sentence (but with the strong support of the JI), the

Zia government hanged Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto. In the meantime, Zia organized a quasi-

civilian government (two-thirds of which would be made up of PNA people, with the

remaining third direct Zia appointees); of the religious parties, the JI benefitted most

from this arrangement, scoring several cabinet positions. But this government was

dissolved in April 1979 as the PNA parties prepared for the upcoming elections.

Perhaps predictably, however, the promised 1979 national and provincial elections,

scheduled for November, never took place, though the regime did carry out non-party

local elections (during which PPP candidates ran under the pseudonym “Friends of the

People” [awami dwst]; the religious parties did much the same—the JUP continuing to

operate, for example, under the name of the anti-Bhutto organization it had created, the

tәhrik-e-nyzam-e-mustafa).5

Eventually (October 1979) Zia banned political parties altogether.

Both the Barelvi and Deobandi religious leadership were caught off guard by Zia’s

sudden takeover, and the continued breakdown of “democracy” that followed. On the

one hand, the General seemed little interested in restoring the old constitutional, party

system, a goal for which they had ostensibly been struggling when Zulfiqar ‘Ali had

been in charge. On the other, Zia had gotten rid of Bhutto, and also boasted a

reputation as a practicing, observant Muslim, one who retained the humility demanded

by his faith even in his own exalted politico-military position.6 Their confusion as to

how best to react characterized the ‘alәma parties’ relationship with the new regime in

general, as they strove to come to terms with a ruler seemingly far more amenable to

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the establishment of an Islamic state but also even more authoritatrian than his

predecessor—indeed, than any previous head of the Pakistani polity. Journalists and

some historians would later characterize the Zia regime, in black-and-white fashion, as

one that favored the religious parties, but this is only partly true, as shall be

demonstrated. In the end, Zia’s actions seemed indicative of a man in power who sought

to retain that power, however personally devoted he might have been to Islam.

mufti Mahmud died in 1980. His son, Fazlur Rehman, was subsequently elected JUI

general secretary, thus illustrating the dynastic, “family fiefdom” character of parties in

Pakistan—what Lodhi called “the primacy of personalism over organization” (and while

this phenomenon is more pronounced in organizations like the Bhutto-dominated PPP

or the Sharif-led Muslim League, the religious parties have also developed this attribute;

in another example, Fazlur Rehman would later nominate his own brother, mwlana

Attaur Rehman—already the JUI’s vice-president—to join the Gilani cabinet as

Minister of Tourism).7 In any case, it didn’t take long for the new party chief to find

himself behind bars for his opposition to the Zia regime. Early in February 1981, a

student dispute with bus drivers in Multan quickly ballooned into a countrywide anti-

government protest. For five days, students across Pakistan (but especially in Multan,

Lahore, Quetta, and Malakand) demonstrated—often violently—against the regime.

On 16 February the government arrested Fazlur Rehman, along with three other

political party heads, all of whom were partly blamed for the unrest. (The other

arrested leaders: Masrullah Khan of the Pakistan Democratic Party, former NAP head

Mehmud ‘Ali Kasuri of the surging Tehrik-e-Istiqlal Party, and M. A. Gohir of the

PPP). It seems that the student violence had presented Zia with a plausible chance to

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rid himself of opposition—a chance he readily seized. Only ten days earlier, after all,

Fazlur Rehman and the JUI, plus almost a dozen other parties, had formed an

opposition alliance (what would become the Movement for the Restoration of

Democracy, or MRD) demanding “an end to military rule and the holding of

parliamentary elections within three months.”8 Prominent among the MRD parties was

the PPP. The imprisoning of the opposition helped Zia stem any sudden MRD tide, but

the real event to cripple the latter’s efforts (at least for a couple years) was the hijacking

of a Pakistan International Airlines flight by the militant group Al-Zulfiqar—an outfit

led by Bhutto’s sons (Murtaza Bhutto and Shahnawaz Bhutto). Despite the indirect

nature of the “link” between Al-Zulfiqar and the MRD (and daughter Benazir Bhutto’s

own condemnation, while under house arrest, of the hijacking operation), the alliance

took a hit as mass declamation of the event forced the MRD to back down, at least for

the time being.

By 1983, though, the opposition was able to reassert itself. This was especially true

in Sindh (from the beginning the PPP’s base of support; the Bhuttos were, after all, an

aristocratic Sindhi family). The MRD sent people onto the streets to “court arrest,

Gandhi-style.” Among the organizers were the Barelvi pir of Hala (in Sindh) and his

sons, whose illustrious ancestor, Makhdoom Lutuf Allah (known as Makhdoom Nuh), a

Sufi saint of the Suhrawardy order and a “great scholar in Islamic traditions and laws,”

is remembered for courageously standing up to several tyrants of his own day.9 But the

demonstrations involved more than simply daring the police to make arrests. In a clash

with government forces near Moro (in west-central Sindh), the MRD claimed twelve

dead at the hands of Zia’s troops (“local reporters” would say five: two soldiers and three

civilians). Agitators burst the retaining wall holding the Indus River back from a

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national highway passing through Sindh, flooding the road with water and making it

virtually impassable. Government troops fired into a crowd of demonstrators in the

village of Khano Bula Khan (less than forty miles west of Hyderabad, in Sindh), killing

at least one.10

But by late August, the “revolt” against Zia’s Martial Law regime had stagnated

enough that the General felt secure in leaving the country altogether on a state visit to

Turkey. Still, the fires hadn’t been entirely squelched. Limited protests in Sindh

continued. Police broke up a march from the shrine of Z. A. Bhutto, only to be stoned

by demonstrators before the latter were scattered by rifle shot. In Hyderabad, several

hundred students burned Zia ul-Haq in effigy on a university soccer field. In Quetta, a

general strike was announced in which many of the city’s shops took part. During this

period, the JUI and the JUP were united insofar as their opposition to the regime was

concerned, though the latter’s opposition seems to have been less outright. By the end

of September, the MRD agitation had been ongoing for six weeks—most fervently in

Sindh, but with notable moments in Punjab and Baluchistan, too. But there were clear

signs that enthusiasm was beginning to wane. New support was needed, a fresh

infusion of passion and numbers. At this critical juncture, the Barelvi JUP promised to

“join in.” Meanwhile, Zia remained adamant that he would not negotiate with the MRD

until the agitation ceased completely. One headline of the time read: “Pakistan:

stalemate or fateful spark?”11 Had the regime and the MRD reached gridlock—or was

something about to catch fire?

Whatever their differences with the Zia government, it seemed that perceived

Indian aggression was often enough to ensure both Barelvi and Deobandi loyalty to the

regime, however temporary, just as it had in 1965 over Kashmir. After Indira Gandhi

  415 
  

and her Foreign Minister Narasimha Rao voiced controversial statements regarding the

Sindh unrest, for example, JUP head mwlana Shah Ahmad Noorani—rather than

making a statement himself against India—urged the Zia regime to “lodge a strong

protest” against Pakistan’s eastern neighbor.12 This turning to Zia came despite Shah

Noorani’s general opposition to Zia ul-Haq. Indeed, the JUP under Noorani, as

aforementioned, supported the MRD, though—unlike the Deobandi JUI—that support

stopped just short of the JUP’s officially joining the alliance. (In typical Barelvi fashion,

the JUP organized its own civil disobediance campaign in another show of “separate

unity.”) After the broohaha over the Indian leaders’ Sindh-related comments had

passed, Shah Ahmad was back to publicly opposing the military government. Indeed,

Noorani held a press conference in late September 1983 to protest against the regime’s

“continuing censorship of the Pakistani press.” One of the items addressed at the

meeting, too, was the alleged cover-up by the government of the police massacre of

forty-five villagers who had been mourning the death of an anti-Zia demonstrator. The

allegation was made by PPP head (and widow of Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto) Nusrat Bhutto,

then dying of cancer in France, and was distributed in written form by Noorani

himself.13 Thus both the Deobandi JUI and the Barelvi JUP cooperated with the PPP

during this period, the JUI overtly via political alliance and the latter less directly, as in

settings such as the September 1983 Noorani press conference.

Amidst the MRD-piloted agitation, non-party elections to Pakistan’s local councils

in all four provinces took place (October). Zia had abolished the local government

system put in place by the Bhutto regime in 1979, replacing it with his own “local

bodies” scheme focusing on rural development. It was for these bodies that the elections

were organized.14 In Sindh, one observer dubbed these local contests “the bloodstained

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elections” as violence continued to rock the country. Another commentator described

the “[v]iolent agitation in Sind over the past two months” as resulting “in heavy loss of

life and damage to government and private property.”15 But the fact that Zia had held

local elections across Pakistan at all gave him “room to manoevre,” at least—a lifeline

amidst the storm of protest in which he found himself. Despite the agitation, Pakistan’s

news media (“under Government instructions,” of course) the day after the local

elections proclaimed, “Elections were held in [a] completely peaceful and disciplined

atmosphere. Turnout of the voters at the polling stations was quite satisfactory and up

to the mark.” This low-level chance for the masses to vote had bought Zia some time.

He would use it in an attempt to shore up his position—by trying to win over the

Barelvis.

After all, the Deobandi JUI was too far gone, officially allied as it was with the other

MRD parties. But the JUP had remained more ambivalent; perhaps it could be wooed.

(Zia’s enthusiasm for the JI, strong when he first came to power, had by now cooled

somewhat; perhaps he saw in the Deobandi-Barelvi dynamic an opportunity to “divide

and conquer” by co-opting the less vociferous Ahl-e-Sunnat religious leadership.) The

same month that Zia allowed for local elections across Pakistan, then, he summoned the

JUP leadership to Rawalpindi for talks. Shah Ahmad Noorani led the party’s

delegation. The Barelvi party’s invitation appears to have been facilitated by a

sympathizer in the military, former NWFP governor (and future JUP general secretary,

then president) Lieutenant-General K. M. Azhar (d. 2006 AD), an Aligarh-educated

former Leaguer, present at the passing of the Lahore Resolution and veteran of both the

1948 Kashmir war with India and the Rann of Kuch operation against India in 1964 (as

well as the British campaign in Burma during World War II).16 Shah Ahmad arrived in

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Islamabad, from where he would travel to Rawalpindi, on 10 October.17 No one was

quite sure what the “talks” would entail, but the move proved to be a wry one on Zia’s

part; the JUP promptly withdrew its pledge to join the agitating MRD and called off its

own civil disobedience program.18 Indeed, Shah Ahmad had apparently met with the pir

of Hala in late September (probably after the “talks” with Zia were put on the table), and

observers wondered if the JUP had tried to dissuade the pir and his sons from their

political activities, further buoying up the wisdom of Zia’s move to reach out to the

Barelvi politico-religious leadership.19

The impact of the JUP-Zia meeting seems to have gone both ways, at least initially,

for it was in the very midst of the talks that the President abruptly informed a group of

Pakistani editors that he was “willing to advance the date of general elections by a year

if political conditions were favorable.” Of course, unfavorable “political conditions” was

a reference to the MRD-led agitation. Still, Zia’s announcement opened up the

possibility of general elections as early as March 1984. Meanwhile, the attempt at

conciliation with the JUP signaled Zia’s unwillingness to meet with the PPP leadership.

He hoped, it seems, that by reaching out to the “right-wing” Barelvi party he might

consolidate a base of support among the Sunni “majority,” especially against his PPP

rivals and their Deobandi allies in the JUI. Essentially, the JUP was to be used as a

pawn in the President’s constant battle with the late Z. A. Bhutto’s party. In just a few

days, then, Zia had allowed local elections, reached out to the Barelvi religio-political

leadership, and offered a more palatable timeline for elections. The President’s game

may have eventually dawned on Shah Ahmad, too, as the cleric later accused Zia and his

government of “misleading” the public “by circulating its own version of the [JUP-Zia]

meeting.”20 Indeed, in the end, Zia’s attempt to win over the Barelvis was only

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temporarily successful; within a year-and-a-half, the President, long an imprisoner of

political opponents, would be putting JUP leaders behind bars, too.

Elections for state head wouldn’t come until Zia was dead; to push such an election

back, in December 1984 the Pakistani dictator organized a “referendum”—one,

however, that never specifically asked the people whether or not they “wanted” Zia to

remain in charge. Zia used the results of the poll as a legitimizing tool to prop up his

own personal position “for another five years.”21 The long-promised general elections,

then, would only be for national and provincial legislative bodies. Even so, when those

elections finally came (late February 1985)—for the national and provincial

assemblies—the various leaders of the MRD parties were confined to house arrest by

the government. Shah Ahmad Noorani (though the JUP was still not officially part of

the Movement) was placed under house arrest, too. In protest, Barelvis across the

country wore black armbands as they attended Friday prayers. JUP vice-president

Shafi Abdullah admonished Barelvis to boycott the upcoming elections entirely, and his

call was “broadcast to the street through the mosque’s loudspeaker” despite Zia’s ban,

via martial law order, on all “political activity in a mosque.” Meanwhile, police waited

around the corner in vans, together with hordes of plainclothes officers—just in case the

agitation escalated into something more than loudspeakers and armbands. “This is not

an Islamic regime,” complained one Pakistani at the time. “A purposeless election is not

allowed in Islam. If the people are not taken into confidence, then it is anti-Islamic.”22

To further control the election, Zia banned not only all political parties but also

“loudhailers, processions and outdoor meetings,” translating into one of the quietest

contests in recent memory. The results of the 1985 “partyless” elections were summed

up succinctly by one reporter on the scene: “Despite the ban on political parties

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contesting the election, the successful candidates include a large number of members or

former members of parties wholly opposed to the Zia regime.” Meanwhile, the JI—the

“one party that had sided with General Zia in the past”—experienced a series of major

electoral losses. The contest’s big winners were the PPP and the Barelvi pir-led Muslim

League (headed by sayyid Shah Mardan Shah II, or “pir Pagaro,” head of the Hurs of

Sindh, who had previously been viewed as a Zia “lackey” and whose own pir father had

been hanged by the British for his opposition to their regime).23

In May 1988, Zia ul-Haq pulled off another “constitutional coup,” restoring his

former powers as Pakistan’s Chief Martial Law Administrator after dismissing the

government of Muhammad Khan Junejo and the national assembly. Zia cited

corruption within the Junejo government, as well as its failure to secure law and order

in Pakistan, as justification for his action. The CMLA promised a “caretaker cabinet”

within twenty-four hours; it took ten days, and was headed not by a Prime Minister but

by Zia himself. As per Zia’s own 1985 Constitution, upon dismissing the national

assembly an announcement of elections must be made within ninety days (though

whether this meant that elections must be held within ninety days, or merely an

announcement, was unclear). In any case, the situation did not present a rosy picture to

those who had been agitating for the restoration of “democracy.” As one observer noted

wryly, “The last time President Zia promised elections within 90 days was in 1977. He

held them 90 months later, but banned political parties from participating.” (The

acronym for Zia’s position as Chief Martial Law Administrator, too, was sarcastically

referred to by many as meaning “Cancel My Last Announcement.”) If Zia’s election

announcement was to be trusted, it would mean that he would need to reformulate a

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party for himself—a new Muslim League. (Some speculated that the dictator would

select rising star Nawaz Sharif as the re-tooled party head; Nawaz was Chief Minister of

the Punjab and popularly regarded as “a fixer,” controlling as he did Punjab’s police

force, its powerful landlords, and its beauracratic machine.) Meanwhile, the MRD

continued to lead the opposition (the alliance itself led, however weakly, by the PPP

under Benazir Bhutto) as it attempted to use the recent turn of events to its favor by

wooing “disgruntled” Muslim Leaguers, the JI, and even Junejo himself.24

Elections were set for 16 November, though they were to be “partyless” once more.

But whatever might have happened—whether Zia would have pushed elections back

indefinitely, as he was wont to do, or not—fate stepped in on 17 August 1988 (or

perhaps, as many speculate—like the subsequently organized official inquiry

committee—some other more sinister, and very human, force) when the CMLA’s C-

130B Hercules aircraft took a nosedive not long after taking off from little Bahawalpur

headed for Islamabad. The crash killed over thirty people, including Zia himself, as well

as the US Ambassador to Pakistan. Pakistan’s long-serving dictator was buried in

Islamabad two days later, with a million mourners crowding the city’s streets.

Though there were calls to push elections back, the provisional government under

interim president Ishaq Khan decided to hold them on the date previously set. In

addition, Zia’s requirement that they be “partyless” was dropped; political parties would

be permitted to organize and put forward their various candidates.

Zia’s “Islamization” Push.

Zia was determined to win over the ‘alәma and religious parties. As such, he

adopted the old PNA slogan, “System of the Prophet” (nyzam-e-mustafa), as his own.

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But this was easier said than done; after all, one need only remember the findings of the

Munir Report, which had underscored the virtual impossibility of instituting such a

system in Pakistan, divided as its Muslim community was between various sects (the

most prominent among them the Deobandis and the Barelvis, not to mention the Shi’a).

Which sect’s “System” would be adopted? Whose intepretation of the Prophet’s nyzam

would be implemented? From the very beginning (1977), one of Zia’s own cabinet

ministers, mwlana Kausar Niazi (d. 1994 AD), warned him of the dangers of such a

policy. A political opportunist, Niazi (known by many as “mwlana Whiskey” due to his

alleged habit of being either “drunk or surrounded by dancing girls”) was a former JI

member who in 1969 had quit the Jamaat to join the PPP (and eventually Bhutto’s

cabinet), before quitting that, too (in 1977) to unite with the ‘alәma-led opposition to his

erstwhile political master.25 While nyzam-e-mustafa might function as a highly effective

campaign slogan, the shrewd mwlana warned, its actual implementation would only

result in sectarianism.26 Should a Deobandi interpretation be implemented, this would

be unacceptable to the Barelvis, and vice-versa. Meanwhile, the Ahl-e-Hadis would

likely find fault with either, as would, certainly, Pakistan’s Shi’a population.

Whatever its future implications, the immediate opportunity for religious parties

and the ‘alәma to play a more significant role within the political structure of the

Pakistani state did appear to have increased considerably with the July ascension of

General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Zia utilized the state to initiate a program of

“Islamization” throughout the country. “If one can bring back Islam in its purity, it

would be a good thing,” he told the BBC in April 1978.27 Pakistan’s new military

dictator seemed to view Islam in Pakistan as having been corrupted and in need of

purification, of restoration to its original form; this was an implicitly revivalist—and

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Deobandi—point of view. Zia introduced a wide variety of “Islamic” laws, governing

everything from business hours to television censorship to the wording of government

documents.28 But underneath the surface, perceptive observers might notice that the

Islamic frills of the new regime may have been just that—mere frills, veiling just

another run-of-the-mill military dictatorship. He remained, after all, Chief Martial Law

Administrator from July 1977 until December 1984 (retaining the position even after

assuming the office of President after the September 1978 departure of Fazal Elahi

Chaudhry). From December 1984, the General ruled as simply “President” of Pakistan,

but even this was accomplished via a questionable referendum (in which a negligible

percentage of the Pakistani population participated, with an overwhelming majority

voting in Zia’s favor). His presidential leadership would last from 1984 until his

mysterious death by plane crash in 1988.

A core facet of Zia’s Islamization program was his adorning of Pakistan’s judiciary

with the trappings of an Islamic system, one through which “the supremacy of Islamic

law” could be “established over the law of the land”—his words. To many among both

the Barelvi and Deobandi ‘alәma, of course, such a pronouncement was music to the

ears. The religious scholars, however, had learned to be skeptical when it came to the

promises of political leaders; Zia would have to prove himself by transforming his words

into action. Such doubts turned out to be prophetic—though many at the time failed to

realize this. Zia’s judiciary promise (and the “reforms” he enacted connected to it) was

merely for show, an attempt to placate his ‘alәma foes and reassure ‘alәma allies. These

trappings took the form, in 1978, of the “Shariat Appellat Bench,” one of which was

attached to each of the state’s four High Courts. Citizens were now free to appeal to

these shәri’at courts regarding the verdicts reached in the secular ones. In 1980, a

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“Federal Shariat Court” was established, too, with original jurisdiction to hear shәri’at

petitions (and to include up to three ‘alәma “having at least fifteen years experience in

Islamic law, research or instruction”). Even the Supreme Court was supplemented by a

five-person Shariat Appellate Bench, made up of three Supreme Court judges and two

others—the latter, significantly, selected from among the ‘alәma or the Federal Shariat

Court. All of this seemed transformational indeed, a major step towards the

establishment of a long-overdue Islamic state in South Asia. But even with Zia’s Shariat

Appellate Benches and his Federal Shariat Court, the Martial Law Administrator’s

incorporation of a shәri’at-based structure into Pakistan’s judiciary was a veneer,

nothing more. According to Article 203B of the Constitution, the Federal Shariat

Court’s jurisdiction did not include “the Constitution, Muslim Personal Law, any law

relating to the procedure of any Court or tribunal or…any fiscal law or any law relating

to the levy and collection of taxes and fees or banking or insurance practice and

procedure…” Islam’s all-encompassing nature, prominent in the Qur’an’s concern with

the seemingly mundance (to say nothing of the thematic scope of the sunnәt and

centuries of Islamic juridical tradition) has already been discussed; obviously this

constitutional provision significantly curtailed the jurisdiction of Zia’s so-called shәri’at

courts. In addition, the secular Supreme Court maintained its position as the highest

and “final court of appeal for all criminal cases,” and shәri’at court judges were made up

mostly of regular judges of the secular system anyway—i.e. not of the ‘alәma (the

constitution still mandated that Supreme Court and High Court judges possess

credentials and experience within the Western, British legal tradition). At the District

level, too, these new trappings were more or less a moot point, since district judges

could already try someone either according to civil or shәri’at law. Finally, the existence

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of a shәri’at system side-by-side the secular one was illusory in that “laws were decreed

as conforming to Islamic Shari’a, but no attempt was made to derive the legal system

directly from the Shari’a.” In other words, the shәri’at system was still an afterthought

that in no way either replaced the secular system or formed a new basis for a reformed

system; only when a law or decision was deemed anti-Islamic could a Shariat Bench

intervene. The Benches thus functioned only when a challenge to a law’s “Islamicness”

was raised. And perhaps most telling of all, Zia ensured that the decisions of his

regime’s military tribunals as well as his own “Regulation[s] and Order[s]” remained

above both the shәri’at and secular courts. The regime acted outside of, or at best above,

the law. Zia’s supposed “Islamic” judiciary reforms were thus mostly cosmetic, doing

little to functionally change the previous system.29

The same held true for many of his other “reforms.” For example, another major

part of the regime’s Islamization program was its institution, in October 1984, of a

“new” Law of Evidence (qanwn-e-shәhadәt). Through this law, Zia claimed to have

replaced the “un-Islamic” 1872 Law of Evidence (obviously on the books since the early

British Raj period) with “an Islamic law.” But the reality was that both laws were

functionally more or less identical; “[t]he only change,” wrote Kennedy, “was that the

1872 Law of Evidence had been declared to be Islamic” after all. The promulgation, in

February 1979, of the so-called hudwd ordinances, stand out as another example. There

were four such ordinances: a Prohibition Ordinance (chalking out punishments for

alcohol consumption and the use and/or possession of illegal drugs), a zyna Ordinance

(zyna means “adultery” and/or “fornication”; the ordinance established punishments for

sex-related offenses like adultery, rape, prostitution, sodomy, and kidnapping), a qәźәf

Ordinance (“for the wrongful imputation of zyna”; the ordinance laid out the punishment

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for those who wrongfully accused an innocent man or woman of adultery), and a

Property Ordinance (spelling out punishments for theft). Punishments ranged from

fines and imprisonment to whipping, “sourging” with “stripes,” and death-by-stoning.

But the hudwd ordinances, too, appear to have been implemented mainly for show, as

most every “crime” in the hudwd laws was already listed in Pakistan’s existant criminal

code (and many of the punishments were exact matches, too). Additionally, the more

severe punishments were rarely or never employed during Zia’s tenure, and the only two

“major sin” convictions passed during the entire period were ultimately overturned by

the Supreme Court anyway.30

Given the superficial nature of Zia’s reforms (however difficult it might have been to

initially perceive this), and keeping in mind the sectarian divisions extant among

Pakistan’s ‘alәma (remember the Munir Report), it is not surprising that reaction to

Zia’s reforms was mixed. The ‘alәma “interpreted each law in the light of their own

school of thought.” Some did not agree, for example, with the punishments the regime

had attached to various “crimes” in the hudwd ordinances.31 Others felt that the

government had usurped the role of the ‘alәma, while still others derided the continued

central position of the western judicial model.

Ostensibly for inspiration, spiritual guidance, and to aid in his implementation of

Islamization (but probably also to shore up a base of support), Zia ul-Haq seemed to

favor the JI. This organization, previously hailed as a mainstream Islamic party whose

principle platforms had included a respect for constitutional law, was actually

represented on Zia’s cabinet (as ministers of information and broadcasting, water,

power, and natural resources, and production). To spearhead the country’s Planning

Commission, Zia appointed the JI’s Khurshid Ahmad—with the express purpose of

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“Islamizing the economy.”32 JI representatives on Zia’s cabinet would resign in 1979,

but the party continued to mostly support the regime. (There were some within the

party, it should be noted—like Abdul Ghafoor Ahmad—who were vocal critics of the

Zia government.)33 Meanwhile, the government’s patronage allowed the JI’s student

wing, the Jamaat-e-Taliba, to virtually take over many of Pakistan’s universities,

intimidating professors and students alike—sometimes at gunpoint in classrooms.34

Later, government patronage was extended to both the Barelvi JUP as well as, later, the

Deobandi JUI. Some within the JUI approved of Zia for his Islamization efforts, while

others disapproved entirely. As a result, a split within the JUI developed that continues

to the time of this writing. Those who supported Zia were led by Sami ul-Haq (the JUI-

S), while those opposed to the regime followed Fazlur Rehman (JUI-F). The latter

might be considered the “original” party and Sami ul-Haq’s faction a “breakaway.” After

the schism, the JUI-F continued to enjoy its dominance in Pakistan’s western provinces,

while JUI-S influence was more or less restricted to a handful of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s

districts.35

But where Zia enjoyed perhaps the most success in terms of Islamization was in

creating a culture of jyhad in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the

arrival of large amounts of American and Saudi cash that followed (of which more later).

He gradually replaced more “liberal” military officers with “conservative” ones of a more

traditionally Islamic background (mostly Deobandi-leaning), and changed the Army’s

motto from the more neutral, Jinnah-inspired “Unity, Faith and Discipline” to the

religious-sounding “Faith, Piety and Jihad.”36

But before delving into the Soviet invasion, a look toward Iran is in order.

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“Islamic Revolution”: Deobandi-Barelvi Response.

The arrival (on 1 February 1979), after a decade-and-a-half-long exile, of the aged

Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran, to the welcoming shouts of hundreds of thousands of

Iranians celebrating in the streets, signaled the culmination of the Iranian revolution—

and the beginning of the Ayatollah’s “Islamic Revolution.” Over the next ten years,

Khomeini (as Supreme Leader) would establish a new government in Iran allegedly

based on the Shi’a version of Islam. But it was the revolution’s ability to topple a

Western-backed (indeed, Western-installed) regime—that of the Shah—that inspired

Muslims everywhere, and especially Shi’i, both to shake off the chains of neo-

imperialism and of Sunni oppression. The Shi’a and Sunni in Pakistan, too, would be

profoundly affected by these developments in neighboring Iran.

The “Islamic Revolution” to the west seemed to infuse a new sort of political energy

into Pakistan’s Shi’a population. When the Zia regime attempted to introduce an

ordinance dealing with zәkat and ‘ushәr (June 1980), for example, the Shi’i organized and

protested vigorously. The new scheme attempted to institute a state-run system for the

regulation and collection of zәkat and ‘ushәr. But unlike the Sunni, the Shi’a are not

required to pay ‘ushәr at all; they thus naturally rejected this ordinance. In addition, the

Shi’a objected to the zәkat law, as their version of Islam rejected the notion of a state-

run zәkat system. Under pressure from this abruptly mobilized minority, Zia eventually

agreed to exempt Shi’i from the payment of both zәkat and ‘ushәr.37 Of course, such an

exemption only angered some of the ‘alәma and their followers among the various Sunni

sects, who watched with some trepidation as the political status of the Shi’a seemed to

be on the rise. Just the year before, after the introduction of the hudwd ordinances, the

Shi’a under aforementioned mufti Ja’far Husain had, in April 1979, established the tәhrik-

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e-nyfaz-e-fyqh-e-j’afaria (“Movement for the Implementation of J’afari Law,” hereafter

TNFJ) in protest; the crimes and punishments as laid out in the ordinances did not line

up squarely with those prescribed by the Shi’a interpretation of Islamic law. Though

Ja’far Husain, appointed by Zia as the Shi’a representative on the constitutionally

mandated Council of Islamic Ideology, was himself more or less a moderate interested

in safeguarding Shi’a rights during the era of (Sunni-dominated) Islamization, the TNFJ

quickly took on a life of its own. In particular, it adopted the goal of the JUI, the JUP,

and the JI: the formulation of an Islamic constitution—but one, of course, that would be

distinctly Shi’a in character, “as expounded by Ayatollah Khomeini.” (This was ironic,

given that the organization had been founded in protest of Zia’s attempt to implement a

Sunni system upon them; now the TNFJ would struggle for the implementation of a

Shi’a system upon Pakistani Sunnis!)38 Many TNFJ members were trained directly by

Shi’a activists sent from Tehran for this purpose. By the early 1980s, too, the “most

militant force on Pakistan’s campuses” was the Iran-connected Shi’a student outfit

Imamia Students Organization (ISO), with its green-and-red flag and branches in every

province of Pakistan.39 (It was about this time that, it is alleged, Zia “threw the

resources of the state” behind the mostly Deobandi scholars and their organizations in a

bid to contain the newly invigorated Shi’a minority; significantly for the Deobandi-

Barelvi rivalry, it was not only the Shi’i who were forced to “mobilize” against the

growth of Deobandi power—including militant outfits—that followed, but the Barelvis

as well.)40 After the 1983 death of Ja’far Husain , the TNFJ’s leadership fell upon the

shoulders of the young NWFP-born ‘Arif Husayn al-Husayni (d. 1988 AD), an Iran-

trained disciple of the Ayatollah far more confrontational in his political approach than

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his predecessor had been. Such developments, inspired by the successful Iranian

Revolution, worried the Deobandi and Barelvi reigious leadership.

There were other happenings related to events in Iran that were likewise troubling

to the Sunni ‘alәma. Iranian literature friendly to Shi’a Islam seemed suddenly to be

flooding into Pakistan, and the success of the revolution seemed to inspire Muslims of

even the Sunni persuasion. If Sunnis were convinced to look upon a Shi’a revolution

with approbation and even admiration, could full-on conversion be far behind? The

Ayatollah Khomeini’s use of the term “Islamic Revolution” (rather than, say, “Shi’a

Revolution” or “Iranian Revolution”) irked many Deobandi and Barelvi scholars.

“Neither Oriental nor Occidental—Islamic and only Islamic,” went the Iranian slogan.

“Neither Shi’a nor Sunni—Islamic and only Islamic.” But how could a movement be an

“Islamic Revolution” if it wasn’t endorsed and led by the Sunni (i.e. the majority)?

Surely this was a Shi’a attempt at usurpation. The term drove deeper the wedge

between many Sunni ‘alәma and their Shi’a counterparts, the former resenting as they

did such a pan-Islamic interpretation of the Iranian Shah’s overthrow and the

establishment of a government under Khomeini. One of these resentful scholars, from

the Punjabi district of Sufi-founded Jhang, at the confluence of the Jhelum and Chenab

rivers, was named mwlana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi.41

Militant wings of Deobandi or Barelvi organizations, or of those parties which the

Deobandi or Barelvi religious leadership tended to support, were nothing new. Even

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s quasi-spiritualist KK movement, which leaned Deobandi,

had sprouted a militant outfit, organized by the “Frontier Gandhi’s” sons, Pashto poet

Abdul Ghani and his younger brother, Abdul Wali.42 Its name was the Zalmai Pakhtun,

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and it was ostensibly established for the “defence of the non-violent people.”

Meanwhile, the provincial Muslim League, supported by many Barelvis, organized an

armed wing of its own: the Ghazi Pakhtun.43 But these groups had been short-lived and

the actual violence they meted out had been negligible. It took the Iranian Revolution,

the politicization of the Shi’a, and the Sunni backlash (and, perhaps, a taste for blood

garnered in Kashmir and Bangladesh) to militarize the Pakistani ‘alәma. This would be

exacerbated later by Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan (and the Saudi

inroads into Pakistan that resulted), but that will come later. Perhaps it was just such

militarization that led JUI party workers and supporters in Jacobabad (home to several

thousand of Pakistan’s one million Hindus) to ransack and deface nine Hindu temples

there. The demonstration-turned-riot was a response to an Indian court’s decision to

authorize the operation of a Hindu temple in Uttar Pradesh on the site of a Muslim

mosque, a decision that had subsequently resulted in communal clashes in India—and

over a dozen dead, eliciting “great emotion” among the Muslims of Paksitan. Still, the

incident represented the first time such violence against a non-Muslim minority had

been exhibited in Pakistan since 1948.44 Perhaps something had changed.

In 1985, four members of the Deobandi JUI—Zia-ur-Rahman Faruqi, Eesar-ul-Haq

Qasmi, Azam Tariq, and, most importantly, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi—established what

would become a militant offshoot: the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP; originally the

group was called the Anjuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba). Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, the Sipah-e-

Sahaba’s first leader, had been educated at the Jamia Khair-ul-Madaris in Multan, a

Deobandi institution founded under the patronage of JUI guiding light Ashraf ‘Ali

Thanawi. By his early twenties, when he worked as ymam and xәtib of a Deobandi

mәsjyd, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi had gained somewhat of a reputation in his native Jhang for

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his passionate speeches, both against the Ahmadis as well as the Barelvis. As a JUI

member and a Deobandi, he had been an opponent of Ayub Khan (1969), active in the

xәtәm-e-nәbәwwәt movement (1974), and a staunch advocate of the “System of the

Prophet.” Later (after the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Shi’a “threat”), his pro-

Sәhabah (a term referring to the Companions of the Prophet) speeches likewise gained

notoriety. This was significant, since some Shi’a used the mockery of the Sәhabah as a

means to demean the Sunni version of Islam (it had been some of the Sәhabah, after all,

who, according to the Shi’a version of Islamic history, had usurped the caliphate from its

rightful heir, ‘Ali). With Jhang’s powerful and controlling landlords prescribing mostly

to Shi’ia Islam and its populace mostly to either the Deobandi or Barelvi Sunni version

of the faith, the sermons of Haq Nawaz in fervent praise of the Sәhabah took on special

meaning.45 Within the politically charged context of the Iranian Revolution and its

spillover effects in Pakistan, Jhangvi’s animosity towards the Shi’i took on even greater

connotations. Concerned that the Shi’a, prodded by the new regime in Iran, were

making excessive inroads in Pakistan, Haq Nawaz formed a committee, comprised of

two ‘alәma representatives from each major Sunni sect in the country (Deobandi,

Barelvi, and Ahl-e-Hadis ), with the express purpose of combating Shi’a Islam. This is

significant; far from being a militant Deobandi organ targeting Barelvi gatherings and

shrines, the SSP was originally formed as a joint effort between Deobandis and Barelvis

(plus the Ahl-e-Hadis ) in and around Jhang. Indeed, Haq Nawaz argued that

differences arising from the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry should, for the time being, be

buried—in order to fight a “great and most dangerous challenge”: the surging Shi’a.46

Jhangvi’s anti-Shi’a rhetoric, formerly couched in pro-Sәhabah terminology, now

became much more explicit. To his followers, Haq Nawaz had become a near-

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redemptive figure. “Every Firaun [Pharaoh] will meet his Moosa [Moses],” wrote one

of Jhangvi’s disciples later, in an obituary. “Allah Ta’ala created a Moosa in this very

town [Jhang], to defeat the Shiite Firauns.” His following was passionate in their

faith—and in their certainty that not only were the Shi’i kufar (“unbelievers”), but “the

worst brand” of kafyr.47 For his open anti-Shi’a speeches, Haq Nawaz was arrested by

the local assistant superintendant of police, a man named Tariq Khosa. Khosa would

later testify (in September 2012) before a Senate Committee that he was called soon

after making the arrest by Zia ul-Haq himself concerning the matter; according to

Khosa, the President allegedly ordered that Jhangvi be released.48 Tariq Khosa’s

testimony demonstrates the Pakistani state’s continued use of religious elements,

including (perhaps in particular) those of a more militant nature, to patronize

sectarianism. Barelvis (and the Shi’i, for that matter) have long asserted that that

patronage has more often than not flowed the Deobandis’ way, a charge supported,

however circumstantially, by Zia’s actions following Jhangvi’s arrest. In any case, the

SSP was officially launched in 1985 with its original goals revolving around halting the

perceived Shi’a doctrinal (and political) onslaught. Its aims included (1) the revival of

the caliphate as instituted during the era of the rashydwn; (2) the declaration of Pakistan

as a Sunni state; (3) the observance by the state of holidays in commemoration of the

first four caliphs (marked on their respective death anniversaries); (4) action to curtail

Shi’a mourning processions commemorating Husain’s brutal murder at Karbala; (5)

restrictions on the Iranian Council Centres in Pakistan, claimed by the SSP to be front

organizations for the arming and training of Shi’a “agents” and preachers; (6) the death

penalty, or at least flogging and imprisonment, for “maligning verbally” the “revered

elders of Islam”; and (7) legislation declaring all Shi’i kufar.49 The SSP’s initial victories

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came not in any militant fashion but in the form of promises by Shi’a Muslims not to

mock the Prophet’s Companions. And though the group had begun ostensibly as a joint

Sunni effort, comprised of both Deobandis and Barelvis, among others, such intra-Sunni

unity was impossible to maintain. By 1987, it was shattered completely. In that year, in

Jhang, a brawl erupted between Barelvis and Deobandis that resulted in two Barelvi

deaths. The SSP, including Haq Nawaz himself, was implicated in the murders.

Jhangvi and most of his arrested associates were subsequently released; two spent three

years behind bars before being set free, too. During the interim, it appeared that the

Deobandis and Barelvis of the region had settled their differences.50 But this was to be

an illusory peace only.

On 22 February 1990, Jhangvi fell to an assassin’s bullet (actually six, to the chest)

in front of his house as he was leaving to attend the final daily prayer (‘ysha). Several

attempts had been made on his life before (the SSP blamed unspecified Shi’i on each

occasion), but all previous efforts had failed—until now. He would be succeeded as SSP

chief by his biographer and SSP co-founder Zia-ur Rehman Farooqi. The Ayatollah’s

“Islamic Revolution” had politicized the Shi’a and militarized the (mostly Deobandi)

Sunnis—with major consequences for the future of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry. Thus,

while the SSP was originally borne of the strongly anti-Shi’a sentiment of its founders

(particularly after the Iranian Revolution and “increasing Shia militancy in Pakistan”),51

its attacks (or at least those attributed to the group) were subsequently aimed just as

often (and, in the last two decades immiedately previous to this writing, perhaps more)

at Barelvi Sunnis. As of 2010, the violence had not abated, as gunmen from the SSP and

affiliated groups attacked Barelvis celebrating mwlyd in Faisalabad and Dera Ismail

Khan, prompting a retaliatory attack by the crowd on a Deobandi mәdrәsәħ;52 in July,

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scores of Barelvis were killed when an SSP bomb detonated in the Data Durbar shrine

in Lahore;53 and these are merely two incidents among many.

But even the SSP wasn’t militant enough for some within its ranks. As sectarian

tensions within Pakistan mounted (especially after Jhangvi’s own 1990 assassination),

three SSP members (Akram Lahori, Riaz Basra, and Malik Ishaquel), claiming to be

acting in fulfillment of the martyred Jhangvi’s original wishes, organized what would

become one of the country’s most deadly outfits. This was the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi—

“Jhangvi’s Army.” Meanwhile, the machinations of the state continued to play a role in

intensifying the Deobandi-Barelvi dynamic; according to B. Rahman of the South Asia

Analysis Group (in a report issued by SAAG in July 2002), the Inter-Services

Intelligence Directorate had been “inciting the [Deobandi] SSP and the [LeJ] to

counter [the] activities” of several Barelvi groups opposed to its (the ISID’s) strategic

objectives.54 How did the state, especially under the aegis of the ISID, become so

involved in patronizing these mostly Deobandi outfits? To answer this question, it may

be necessary to turn west, again—not to Iran, though, but to Afghanistan.

Soviet Invasion, US-Saudi Response, Deobandi-Barelvi Fallout.

Since its 1947 birth, Pakistan had always had somewhat strained relations with

Afghanistan. This is typically explained away as either a strategic issue or an ethnic

one. Strategically speaking, the partition of the subcontinent left Afghanistan caught in

the Cold War game, with India independent and leaning pro-Moscow and the very anti-

Soviet United States Government allied with Pakistan. Afghanistan had previously

enjoyed a mixed relationship with the USSR, but since 1946 had established “good

relations” with the Soviet Union; within the new context of the Washington-Moscow

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tug-of-war, however, would such relations pose a problem to the country’s security?

What about the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship? On the ethnic front, it is pointed

out that, with Pakistani independence, Afghanistan naturally repudiated the legally

ambiguous Durand Line—and demanded that the Pathan-dominated region of

Pakistan’s west and northwest be given the opportunity either to become part of

Afghanistan (thereby uniting the heretofore Durand-divided Pathan people) or to

become independent itself (as a free “Pakhtunistan,” as aforementioned). After all,

almost half of Afghanistan’s population was Pathan, for centuries the country’s largest

and most dominant ethnic group. Such explanations for the rocky Afghanistan-

Pakistan relationship, while certainly important, fail to acknowledge a third aspect: the

Deobandi position. For it was the Deobandi position, speaking generally, that

dominated Pathan Afghanistan. Most Deobandis in India had been opposed to

Pakistan’s creation; is it not natural, then, that the same position might be taken by

Afghanistan’s leaders? The Deobandis had, by and large, supported the Pathan call for

autonomy or independence (something the Barelvis, generally speaking, would ardently

oppose for decades afterward); is it surprising that Afghan leaders would feel the same

way, too? Perhaps the “Deobandi position” should not be disregarded on this question.

(This is not, of course, meant to disregard the complexity of Afghanistan’s ethno-

linguistic as well as religious makeup, which includes a strong contingency of Dari-

speaking Tajiks, Turkic-speaking Uzbeks, and Hazaras, not to mention Hanafi Sunnis of

many stripes, plus Jafari Shi’i, Ismaili Shi’i, and more.) In any case, the Afghanistan-

Pakistan relationship was to experience significant developments in the decade after

1979: the year the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan.

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Ever since Partition, and especially after the United States Government began

cultivating ties with regimes (like Pakistan’s) ostensibly opposed to the expansion of the

Soviet Union’s circle of influence, Afghanistan, though officially neutral in

Washington’s and Moscow’s feud, had turned more and more to the Soviets for

support—a perhaps natural phenomenon, given the USSR’s proximity compared to the

USA’s geographical position on the far side of the globe. The Afghan and Soviet

governments signed trade agreements and peace treaties, and Moscow loaned large

sums of money to Kabul for a variety of projects. From 1965, the two states were

connected via regular flights from Kabul to Tashkent (later extended to Moscow). In

the mid-1950s, the Afghan government asked the U.S. Government for military

equipment; when it was turned down, it turned to the Soviet Union instead, and

Moscow was happy to comply. Along with these supplies, however, the Soviets sent

military and technical advisers by the thousands to the central Asian state, and

thousands of Afghans subsequently left for Russia to be trained, too. This all allowed

Afghanistan’s Prime Minister, Muhammad Daud, to stage a coup in 1973—made

possibly by Daud’s left-wing, mostly pro-Soviet supporters. As a result, the (unpopular)

monarchy was toppled and a republic established. But Afghanistan’s communists

weren’t satisfied. Just five years later, in April 1978, Daud himself was toppled (and

murdered) by the People’s Democratic Party—a Marxist outfit—and a new Afghan

government under Nur Muhammad Taraki was established. The country was renamed

the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Crucially (and unsurprising, given the new

regime’s political ideology), Nur Muhammad invited Soviet advisors to come to

Afghanistan and “assist” the new government “in all branches of government.” Just as

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crucially, the regime concluded a treaty with Moscow that December providing for

military and economic assistance.55

The coming of the Nur Muhammad regime brought with it particular challenges to

the country’s traditional Islamic religious leadership. Zaeef describes how, from the late

1970s, many students from Afghan mәdrәsәħs left to continue their studies in Pakistan

(especially after some of their teachers became vocal supporters of the Communists).

After the coup, though, many religious leaders and teachers (including, Zaeef writes,

“my instructor, and all the other scholars”) fled to Pakistan as well. “Sayyeds, Khans,

Maliks, and Mullahs were all being persecuted by the government.” Some were

imprisoned, others taken and never heard from again.56 Opposition to the regime grew.

The ethnic Tajiks and Hazaras were especially opposed to Nur Muhammad. The

situation was so unstable by March 1979 that the Soviets refused to send more military

aid to the Marxist regime in Kabul, despite the latter’s direct request, for fear of the

general Afghan reaction (that same month, citizens of the Soviet Union living in Herat

were slaughtered by mutinying Afghan troops, and the month before, the U.S.

Ambassador to Kabul, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped by militants and killed during a

controversial rescue attempt).

But after Nur Muhammad Taraki was overthrown (and executed) in September

1979, replaced by his erstwhile Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin, Moscow

reconsidered—and the Soviets, fearing the fall of a communist regime to the forces of

Islam (an “Islamic Revolution” was underway in next-door Iran, after all), not to

mention their wariness at Amin’s meetings with representatives in Kabul of the United

States Government, sent in a “Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan”

(LCSFA). The USSR’s troops (specifically, the Soviet Fortieth Army) crossed the

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Afghan border on 27 December 1979. In a week, around fifty thousand Soviet troops

were stationed in Afghanistan, from Kabul to Herat, from Mazar-e-Sharif to Kandahar

and Jalalabad. (At the war’s height, that number would skyrocket to around one

hundred forty thousand.)57 Before the year was out, Hafizullah Amin himself had been

killed (by Soviet commandos, no less), and Babrak Kamal, backed by Moscow, was

installed as head of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Over the course of 1980,

meanwhile, the anti-communist insurgency only grew. By now the governments of

Saudi Arabia and the United States—and, of course, Pakistan—were all involved in the

conflict, funneling cash and arms to the mujahydin. Despite Washington’s concerns

about Pakistan—its continued development of nuclear weapons, its involvement in the

drug trade, the ISID’s sponsorship of “Islamic fundamentalists,” and Zia’s own apparent

reluctance to re-institute representative government—the United States Government

gave billions in military and economic aid directly to Pakistan, too. In 1980,

Washington spearheaded a boycott of the Olympic Games, held in Moscow. One of the

Cold War’s most significant (and costly, in terms of human life) proxy wars was in full

swing, despite the fact that the details on the ground were more than a little blurry for

the major powers involved—and perhaps even insignificant in view of the conlict’s “big

picture.”

By mid-decade, the war in Afghanistan had displaced over five million Afghans.

Many fled to Iran. Most fled to Pakistan. Mikhail Gorbachev, newly minted head of

the USSR, increased troop levels in Afghanistan in order to bring about a quick end to

the war (a “surge” that the American government would mimic later in wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan)—but this merely resulted in the bloodiest year of the conflict up to that

time (1985). By that year, journalist Edward Mortimer was asking the question, “Can

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the Afghans find their Arafat?” The answer seemed far from certain. Hizb-e-Islami

leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar had lost credibility both in the west (where he was

generally viewed as “ferociously uncompromising”) as well as among fellow Afghans;

the reason for this latter phenomenon stemmed from the engineer’s apparent tendency

to direct his wrath “more against rival resistance groups than against the Russians.”

Erstwhile Kabul University philosophy professor Buhanuddin Rabbani, head of the

Jamiat Islami, failed to garner any real support among the Pathans, and the Jamiat’s

“rising star” of the resistance, the Persian-speaking Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud,

likewise failed to command a Pathan following. The head of the Harakat-e-Inqilab-e-

Islami, mwlana Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi, had the support of a broad coalition of

Pathan ‘alәma, mullahs, and students in southern and parts of eastern Afghanistan and

along Pakistan’s western border, but could not meaningfully reach out to the country’s

non-Pathan (not to mention non-Sunni) population.58 Afghanistan’s “mujahydin”

resistance was thus fractured along strongly ethnic and sectarian lines, with the Jamiat

Islami dominant in the north and west (among the non-Pathans), the Harakat-e-Inqilab-

e-Islami in the south and east, and the Hizb-e-Islami commanding pockets of support in

the north, east, and south. Meanwhile, in the center, some of the most dominant groups

were actually Shi’a.59 (It is perhaps interesting to note that Mortimer’s question is still

being posed by foreign interventionists today, years after the mysterious mullah Omar

probably came closest to establishing himself as an “Afghan Arafat” and the unpopular

Hamid Karzai was propped up by the U.S. Government as its own version of an Afghan

uniter.)

The Pathans formed “the core of the anti-Soviet struggle,” in the words of one

veteran journalist who covered the war from Afghanistan and Pakistan.60 The

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dominating position of the Deobandi school of thought among the Pathan (especially in

Pakistan but in Afghanistan, too) has already been discussed. In this, they were assisted

to a large extent by volunteers from Pakistan, mostly students, teachers, and

administrators from religious (and mostly Deobandi) seminaries. Indeed, the Deobandi

contribution to the Afghan war effort should not be overlooked. Not only did these

Deobandi fighters help turn the tide against the Russian occupiers, but it was here, too,

that the seeds of the future “Taliban” movement would be planted. The word țalyban

means, simply, “students” (the plural of țalyb, or “student”); by the thousands, then, these

religiously trained students were referred to by their less religious-minded brothers-in-

arms as țalyban. It was common, too, for the țalyban to fight side-by-side with their

mentors and teachers, the ‘alәma. For many of the Deobandi Pathans in northwestern

Pakistan, the contribution of Pakistani Pathans with the help of American and Saudi

financial and other support in the fight against communism in Afghanistan was a

phenomenon worthy of celebration, a noble act in the face of foreign tyranny.61 To

some Pakistani scholars in the west, however, the “blending of Saudi Wahabism with

the neo-Deobandi ideology…made for a witch’s brew of religious bigotry and sectarian

hatred.”62 A more accurate picture probably lies somewhere in between these two

extremes, as many ordinary Pathans of all ages sacrificed much to drive out a brutal

invading force in their own land—but were armed and militarized in the process,

setting the stage for more violent sectarian clashes (in which a minority participated) in

the future.

Many of the țalyban at the Deobandi dar ul’alwm in Karachi (probably the most

worthy Pakistani successor to the dar ul’alwm at Deoband, and the largest dar ul’alwm

in the country—far bigger than the “original,” in fact) would journey to Afghanistan

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during their school vacations to “participate in the jihad.” Many never returned, injured

or killed in battle. Many who did return did so wounded. mufti Muhammad Rafi

Usmani, the son of Muhammad Shafi, demonstrated this on again, off again

participation (not unlike seasonal volunteer work) in his own memoirs. In April 1988,

Muhammad Rafi left Karachi for Afghanistan’s Paktika province, where he took part in

a skirmish at Urghun. After that, he returned home—only to go again three-and-a-half

years later in August 1991, participating in a battle at Gardez. For these Deobandi

fighers, jyhad was a religious experience, a “faith reviving” phenomenon, bringing “back

to our minds the stories of the first generation of Islam.” Many of the mujahydin would

bathe (and even apply perfume) before going into battle, mindful of Sahih Muslim’s hәdis

in which the Prophet enjoins those preparing martyrs for burial not to wash either the

fallens’ clothes or their bodies. On the Day of Judgment, Muhammad promised, the

wounds “will be the color of blood but have the fragrance of musk.” In this same vein,

these Deobandi țalyban and ‘alәma saw the fight against the Soviets as more than a

struggle to evict Afghanistan of its Russian invaders; the jyhad (which one of the most

prominent Deobandi muftis in Pakistan has defined as “war against the infidels for the

sake of Allah”) was to be the “beginning point” of a more “universal jihad,” with fronts

in Tajikistan, Kashmir, Palestine, Bosnia, East Turkestan (or “Xinjiang”), Chechnya,

and elsewhere. Afghanistan was to be the great training ground where the mujahydin

could learn courage, could learn to overcome “fear of the battlefield,” in preparation for

the larger jyhad to come. This was all very revivalist in spirit, of course—very pan-

Islamic in nature—and very Deobandi.63

Barelvis, on the other hand, generally did not actively involve themselves in the

Afghan conflict. Unlike its stance on Kashmir, where it had proclaimed jyhad and

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organized relief and preaching missions, the JUP did not support the jyhad in

Afghanistan. The Pathans (especially in Pakistan) were, after all, mostly Deobandis,

and the jyhad itself had been launched by Zia ul-Haq, a Deobandi-leaning dictator (or, at

worst, an out-and-out “Wahhabi”). Ahmad Riza Khan’s rules of conduct vis-à-vis “bad”

Muslims were thus followed and the war in Afghanistan failed to mobilize either the

Barelvi religious leadership or their base.

The vision of the Afghan țalyban for themselves was distinctly Deobandi, too, both

in its emphasis on reform and on its own importance vis-à-vis society at large. When

one prominent Afghan commander saw the dead bodies of young țalyban fighters laid

out before him, he addressed a țalyban commander, reportedly lamenting, “Fear God!

You should not sacrifice our young Taliban to the Russians.” We have no choice, came

the answer from the other, for the Russians cannot be allowed to stay—to which the

original speaker replied, “I don’t mean that we should not fight the jihad, but I am

concerned about the Taliban and the Ulema, for they are the spiritual heart of our

country….” His own fighters knew little of Islam, smoked hashish, and shaved their

beards; let them fight and die. “The Taliban have a greater role in society.”64

The memoirs of one Deobandi ‘alym demonstrate the broad, personal participation of

the Deobandi ‘alәma in the anti-communist jyhad. Listing the seventeen members of his

“caravan” traveling from Karachi to Multan to Dera Ismail Khan to Afghanistan’s

Paktika province, he identified three school administrators (from the dar ul’alwm in

Karachi), three principals or assistant principals (of the Jami Farooqiya in Karachi, the

mәdrәsәħ Ashrafiyah in Sukkur, and the Jamiat-ul Uloom al-Islamiya in Karachi), six

teachers (from the dar ul’alwm Karachi and the Jami Farooqiya), a chief administrator

for Pakistan’s official organization overseeing the country’s thousands of Deobandi

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mәdarys, a religious newspaper editor, one ymam and xәtib from a mosque in Karachi,

two administrators of the Harkat al-Jihad al-Islami in Karachi, and only one student. Of

course, students organized their own “caravans” to the front (often immediately upon

earning their degrees), but the ‘alym’s memoirs paint quite a different picture from that

delivered by many in the western media of evil “mullahs” conniving their students into

harm’s way while they themselves plot further mischief tucked safely away in their

mәdrәsәħs. Of the seventeen travelers, a full eleven were degree-holding mwlanas.

Their zeal, and that of their students, was inspired not only by fellow teachers and

administrators but also by veteran mujahydin who would visit the dar ul’alwm in Karachi

regularly to share their spiritual experiences as jyhadis.65

One famous Deobandi mujahyd was named Irshad Ahmed. In his early twenties he

had formed the Harkat ul-Jihad ul-Islami to facilitate the recruitment, transportation,

and supplying of Pakistani fighters on the Afghan front against the Russians. Irshad

Ahmed was killed several years later (1985) in battle. Among the other mujahydin killed

that night were six students from the dar ul’alwm in Karachi. It is interesting to note

that not one of these students was actually from Karachi; three were from Gilgit, one

from Iran, one from Afghanistan itself, and one from Burma. (The author experienced

this diversity firsthand at the Karachi seminary, where he met a Kashmiri refugee a

thousand miles from Kashmir, born and raised on the plains; a Karachi businessman

whose grandparents had fled far-away Uttar Pradesh in 1947; and the son of a Burmese

Indian run out of Southeast Asia by General Ne Win’s 1962 expulsion of all those of

Indian descent from that southeast Asian state—to name a few.) Thus the Deobandi

fighters who participated in the anti-communist jyhad in Afghanistan hailed from all

over the South Asian subcontinent and its fringes. Significantly, Irshad Ahmed’s

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Harkat ul-Jihad ul-Islami would later play a part in the militarization of the Deobandi-

Barelvi rivalry.66

The development prompted the U.S. Government to initiate its now-famous Stinger

missile program in 1986. The mujahydin now possessed the means to shoot down and

destroy the dreaded Soviet helicopter gunship. This was the turning point of the war;

Karmal was sacked and Muhammad Najibullah installed in his stead. But now the

violence was spilling over into Pakistan. In February 1987, for example, the mostly

non-Pathan Jamiat-e-Islami became the target of a bomb blast, set off in front of the

group’s Pakistan-based office south of Peshawar. A bus parked in front of the

recruitment center had exploded, killing eleven people (including several young

schoolchildren), injuring fifty more, and collapsing a nearby primary school and several

houses. After the bombing, dubbed “one of the worst bomb blasts in Pakistan,” locals

repeatedly fired at the Jamiat office—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the Taliban-Northern

Alliance battles to come.67

For the “Islamists,” even in the midst of this violent scene, the goal was the

institution of Islamic law and the establishment of a truly Islamic state. Warlords

fought for territory—and the money and power that came with it—yes, but thousands

of mujahydin fought simply for the institution of an Islamic system after so many years

of atheistic communist regimes. One eyewitness to Afghan resistance to the Russians in

the south and southeast regions of the country (the heart of Pathan territory) described

how the first order of business in an area cleared of Soviet forces (even if the latter

continued to attack from afar) was the extension of an Islamic judicial system. Indeed,

even with continued Russian heavy artillery and assaults by air threatening a newly

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liberated region, “the courts were working well and started to settle disputes among the

communities.”68 The establishment of an Islamic state was underway.

The conceptualization of a “brotherhood” is one that resounds within Islam, of

course—but especially within Deobandism, a phenomenon hailing from the school’s

beginnings to the present day. One future high-ranking Taliban fighter, who claimed to

have stood not twenty feet from Muhammad Omar when the latter’s eye was ripped out

by “a shard of metal shrapnel” during a fight with the Russians, described the events

that followed the incident thus:

On that same night we held a marvelous party. The late Mullah Marjan

sang and we accompanied his sweet voice with percussion on whatever

we had to hand. I can remember the ghazal that Mullah Muhammad

Omar Akhund sang:

My illness is untreatable, oh, my flower-like friend

My life is difficult without you, my flower-like friend.

…May God be praised! What a brotherhood we had among the

mujahedeen! We weren’t concerned with the world or with our lives; our

intentions were pure and every one of us was ready to die as a martyr.

When I look back on the love and respect that we had for each other, it

sometimes seems like a dream.”69

For many of these fighters, the struggle against the Soviets and their allies, or the

“Jihad…against communism,” was one of the most elevated spirituality, with an

ultimate goal of unquestionable sanctity. “Many great battles were fought against the

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Russians and government forces,” remembered one Muslim fighter.70 Many would die,

and they would be forever hailed as martyrs. For the living, the only redemptive

political system was that of Islam. This was how peace could be won, however hard-

fought it might be. Over time, the mujahydin’s war of attrition wore away at the Soviet

occupiers, demoralizing the Russian troops and contributing significantly to virtual

Soviet bankruptcy. By 1988, peace accords had been signed between the governments

of Afghanistan, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan.

On 15 February 1989, Moscow announced that the last Soviet soldier had left

Afghanistan. One million Afghans (some say two million),71 as well as some thirteen

thousand Soviet troops, had been killed in the decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Proselytizing Deobandism: the Rise and Spread of the Tablighi Jama’at.

Muhammad Ilyas (d. 1944 AD), the founder of the Tablighi Jama’at, was trained in

the Deobandi tradition; indeed, he had been born into it. His father, Muhammad Ismail

(d. 1898 AD), was from the qәSbәħ of Jhanjana, and his mother from the qәSbәħ of

Kandhala, both “‘alәma towns” in which Deobandism had taken firm root. One of his

most influential teachers was his own older brother, Muhammad Yahya, a student of

Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (as a teenager, Ilyas himself reportedly developed a strong

bond with Rashid Ahmad, too). He had additionally studied, beginning in 1908, under

the direction of Mahmud Hasan (to whom he would later swear an oath of jyhad against

the British), and would become a disciple, too, of the eminent Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi while

completing his education at the dar ul’alwm at Deoband. After completing his studies

there, Muhammad Ilyas continued to train and teach at another Deobandi dar ul’alwm,

in nearby Saharanpur (from 1910 to 1917).

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But it was in the 1930s that Muhammad Ilyas really began his now-famous tablighi

efforts. The setting was Mewat, a region that straddles the modern-day Indian units of

Rajasthan and Haryana. Here he organized jәma’ats (or “assemblies”) assigned to

specific villages in the area with the explicit mission to preach Islam to Muslims viewed

as either weak in the faith or victims of Hindu or some other influence; this included, of

course, the Barelvis. The goal was revival (and numbers, as the British began during

this period to open up junior government posts to Indians apportioned by religion, and

Hindu groups like the Arya Samaj were reacting with “reconversion” campaigns

claiming success by the hundreds of thousands). Muhammad Ilyas’s gift was in

organization. Each jәma’at was tasked with reporting to the movement’s center in

Delhi (where its world headquarters remained even after Partition—and to the time of

this writing), and members were to differentiate themselves in deed, belief, and even

look from their Hindu neighbors. The accretion must stop, and the jәma’ats would use

the power of persuasion combined with strict discipline and a commitment to “motion”

(i.e. movement, as in from house to house and from place to place, preaching Islam) to

make sure that it did. It didn’t take long for enthusiasm for Muhammad Ilyas’s

organization to spread, especially to Delhi, where the proselytizing group became

popular among the city’s Muslim merchants. The organization was called the Tablighi

Jama’at (hereafter TJ).

After the 1944 death of Muhammad Ilyas, his son, Yusuf (d. 1965) took the reigns in

his stead. Unlike the JUH or, later, the JUI, both of which played an overtly political

role within the context of the pre-Partition struggle for independence and Pakistan, the

TJ began presenting itself during this period as a completely apolitical entity, especially

after 1947. (Within Islam this is, of course, arguably impossible, at least on a certain

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level; Yusuf here was simply keeping his organization at a distance from the specific

political webs of India and Pakistan, despite its overtly political end game.) The group

especially distanced itself from the JI (Muhammad Ilyas’s nephew, Muhammad

Zakariyya Kandhlawi, who had taught at the same Saharanpur dar ul’alwm and was

Yusuf’s father-in-law, wrote a fiery and influential diatribe against the JI in the early

1950s, for example).72 In any case, the TJ’s policy became one of political non-

alignment, a position it ostensibly holds to the time of this writing (but which, as earlier

demonstrated, is practically impossible within the framework of Islam, and especially

Deobandi Islam; in the words of Sikand, despite the group’s “immediate focus” on

“reform of the individual,” the TJ “can hardly be said to be apolitical”).73 Under Yusuf,

the TJ completely transformed, from a local phenomenon with little influence beyond

north-central India to a worldwide organization. TJ jәma’ats were organized

throughout the subcontinent, in the Middle East, and in Western Europe, spreading as

well to the United States, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Throughout Yusuf’s tenure as TJ

head, the organization held major—and highly attended—conventions in India,

Pakistan, and Bangladesh, often counting a million or more attendees. Significantly,

too, the TJ under Yusuf expanded its mission to include preaching to non-Muslims, and

like the Christian missionaries of previous centuries the TJ proselytizers traveled far

and wide by whatever means they could manage. Muhammad Ilyas would perhaps have

preferred a comparison not to early Christians but to the first generations of Muslims,

who “traveled all the time, both on land and in the water…traveling and reciting the

Qur’an, traveling and offering salat, traveling and doing zykr” (again emphasizing the

necessity of “motion”).74 Yusuf died in 1965 in Lahore, having led the movement for

over twenty years.

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His successor, the quiet and reserved In’amul Hasan (d. 1995), had known Yusuf

since childhood (when they had been classmates) and had personally studied under both

Muhammad Zakariya Kandhlawi and Muhammad Ilyas himself. The expansion of the

organization that had taken place under Yusuf continued under In’amul—especially,

and significantly, within the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military, and the

Pakistani intelligence agencies. In 1990, prominent TJ member Javed Nasir became

head of the ISID, and during the Prime Ministership of Nawaz Sharif (whose own father

was an active member and generous financier of the TJ) the Pakistani government

patronized TJ members with significant government positions.75 TJ inroads in the

Army, which surged under Zia as the dictator tended to appoint Deobandi-leaning

officers into the armed forces, allowed members to preach to soldiers in the barracks.

Meanwhile, the organization’s worldwide spread gained a renewed vigor, especially

given Muslim grievances in Afghanistan, the central Asian states (including East

Turkestan), Russia, and the Middle East over foreign interventionism and domination.

After In’amul Hasan’s June 1995 death, the organization underwent some media

scrutiny when, in September, a large group of mostly Deobandi Army officers

(including a major-general, some brigadiers, and several colonels) attempted to oust

Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. By 31 October, up to seven hundred officers were under

investigation “for possible complicity” in the failed coup attempt.76 All of the plot’s

participants were later linked to the TJ, raising fears that the organization had indeed

turned a political corner and now sought to take over governments in order to institute

an Islamic order. (Some were also shown to be members of the aforementioned

Deobandi militant group Harakat ul-Mujahidin, of which more later.)77 After In’amul

Hasan’s tenure as TJ head, the group was led by a shwra that was itself headed by two

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leaders: Zubair ul-Hasan and Saad Kandhlawi. By now the TJ had grown especially

strong roots in the UK, where the group supported almost half (some six hundred or

more) of Britain’s mosques—and where the debate has become particularly heated;

Muslims in the UK are mostly of South Asian descent and are overwhelmingly divided

between the Deobandi and Barelvi sects. The situation of one twenty-one-year-old

Deobandi man may be indicative of the general situation, and illustrates the manner in

which the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry plays out amongst regular Muslims on a personal

level. The role of tabliG is also evident. Addressed to the muftis of the dar ul’alwm in

Deoband, the young man wrote the following:

i am very strong…follower of [the ‘alәma of Deoband] i am very much

influenced by them… but where i live here is large sect of brelvis [sic]

who follows ahmad rida khan [Ahmad Riza Khan] bidati...i know all the

brelvis are bidati. all ulemas of brelvis use dirty languages of our

respected ulema's they call em to be kafirs… one of my friend is also

brelvi he tells me not to follow deobandis they are kafirs, i ignore him

every time, he gives me proofs of kitaabs writen by ulema e deoband, like

our respected ulema, [mwlana Qasim Nanautawi], Rashid Ahmad

Gangohi… Last Time i Met Him Was When i was going to perform

jummah prayer… he was telling me not to go for prayer behind

deobandis, come here, with me in our [masjid], you will not have your

salah behind them, i ignored him…

In answer to the query (which went on to describe his proselytizing efforts vis-à-vis the

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Barelvi individual in question, and ask if such proselytizing was appropriate), the

Deobandi mufti advised the young man to “try [his] best to take [the Barelvi] to the

right path,” despite the Barelvis’ “abusing and blaspheming the elders of Deoband”—

which, it was explained, was done “out of ignorance” only. The mufti’s advice falls in

line with the behavior of the early scholars, who chose to carry out the struggle by

means of persuasion, not compulsion.78

By 2003, around one in twelve Muslims worldwide was a member or direct

supporter of the TJ, and the Deobandi group represented “the largest group of religious

proselytizers of any faith” on the planet,79 as well as “the largest Islamic movement in

the world today.”80 In 1998, thanks again to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (who, in

April, had engineered the removal of the President’s ability to sack a government,

thereby consolidating his own power), a prominent TJ member (but otherwise virtually

unknown figure, apart from his stint as an associate judge on the Supreme Court),

Muhammad Rafique Tarar, was appointed to the office of state head as Pakistan’s ninth

President.81 On the one hand, scholars have pointed to such appointments as evidence

of the TJ’s successful efforts to infiltrate governments like Pakistan’s. On the other, it

may be useful to remember that, with so many millions of TJ members and supporters,

the appointment or nomination of a TJer to some important government office did not

necessarily signal some secret tabliGi plan to take over the state.

One 2010 sociological study out of the University of Johannesburg found that the

TJ system was able to tap into Muslims’ “shared experiences and interrelations,” despite

cultural differences or geographical distance, thereby “inform[ing] identity” and

deriving “legitimate meaning”; the study’s prognostication concerning the group’s

future: “the success of the Tabligh Jamaat is not likely to wane.”82 The TJ’s explosive

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growth and success (including the conversion of many Barelvis to the Deobandi school

of thought) caused Barelvi scholars more than a little trepidation for the welfare of the

“Sunni majority.” (The same anxiety—though not for the Barelvi masses—might be

displayed by U.S. foreign policy “experts” like Washington, D.C.-based Center for

Security Policy vice president Alex Alexiev, who described the TJ’s

“15,000…missionaries reportedly active in the United States” as “a serious national

security problem.”)83 Barelvi ‘alәma and Western neo-conservatives alike found it

difficult to “attack” the TJ since Muhammad Ilyas’s organization eschewed any sort of

transparency; it published no financial reports, seemed to keep no official (or at least

public) membership records, appeared devoid of any formal structure, and even shied

away from the Internet.84 (This “shying away from the Internet” is a reference to the

TJ as an organization; individual members seemed to employ the World Wide Web

prolifically, uploading Islamic books, talks, videos, and blog posts.) Indeed, trying to

find any “official” information about the TJ proved a somewhat elusive endeavor, and as

a result scholars and other researchers were forced to rely on formal or informal

interviews directly with TJ “members.”

One major donor to the TJ: Saudi Arabia (and other Gulf states), adding fuel to the

Barelvi premise that Deobandism is nothing more than another strain of Wahhabism.

When Barelvi leaders in Uttar Pradesh complained to the Indian government about the

alleged Deobandi usurpation of tens of thousands of religious sites and institutions, they

explained that the steady, gradual seizure of Barelvi properties (as well as the

infiltration by Deobandi clerics of Indian government minority bodies) had been fueled

by Wahhabi “petro-dollars.”85 Meanwhile, the Deobandis cultivated links with Saudi

Arabia in Britain through the UK Islamic Mission, dubbed “the embodiment of the

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Riyadh-Islamabad axis.” The TJ also played a role in procuring Saudi cash for tabliGi

efforts in the United States, as the group worked through organizations like the Jama’at

ul-Fuqra, founded by the New York-based Deobandi shix Mubarek Gilani and funded by

both the TJ and wealthy Saudi contributors. The Barelvis attempted to counter these

highly bankrolled Deobandi efforts through their own World Islamic Mission (presided

over by none other than JUP head Shah Ahmad Noorani). In between these groups

stood men like Hyderabad-born Dr. Syed Pasha, whose Union of Muslim Organizations

was set up, at least in part, in an effort to “see [Deobandi and Barelvi] reconciled.”86

ISID Patronage: Growth of mәdarys Networks, Militant Outfits.

The autobiography of Taliban leader Abdul Salam Zaeef is seething with hatred for

the ISID, and though the focus of his work doesn’t lend itself to details in this regard, it

clearly fingers the Pakistani intelligence agency as a backer and manipulator of the

Taliban.87 In the early 1980s, for example, the ISID ran a special weapons training

program for Afghan mujahydin targeting Russian tanks and helicopters. In the end,

according to this Taliban source, the ISID betrayed their Afghan brothers in deference

to the Americans and their money. In any case, it was through the mechanism of the

state, especially that of its intelligence wing, that stimulus for the (mostly Deobandi)

mәdarys networks along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border was distributed. In the words

of Jalal, “State sponsorship of the Deobandis for strategic purposes upset the sectarian

balance in predominantly Barelvi Pakistan.”88 Not only did money collected via Zia’s

new zәkat bureaucracy find its way into the hands of mostly Deobandi groups and

parties, but some two billion dollars of U.S. Government covert “assistance” (combined

with an even larger sum from Saudi Arabia and various Gulf states) was funneled—

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through the Pakistani state intelligence wing—in large part to these same groups.89

This enormous inflow of mostly American and Saudi cash triggered a massive upsurge

in the construction and spread of new mәdarys. The Deobandi school, already old hat at

organizing large (even transnational) education networks, was thus provided the means

to spread its revivalist ideology across the country. Zia did little to prevent the

financial disparity between the Deobandi and Barelvi schools from growing, favoring as

he did (by this time, anyway) the Deobandis; after all, the General himself would

personally receive Muhammad Tayyib, head of the dar ul’alwm at Deoband, at the

airport every time the latter paid a visit to Pakistan.90 (As mentioned previously, the

Barelvis, under the JUP, had had their chance to curry favor with the Zia regime, but

had opted to form part of the opposition; had the party taken advantage of Zia’s offer—

and the state patronage that would have naturally flowed from it—might things have

been radically different vis-à-vis the subsequent mushrooming of Deobandi mәdarys and

militant outfits?) In any case, the ISID’s collaboration with Saudi intelligence, plus

Zia’s liberalizing of visa requirements for Islamic activists and missionaries, opened the

door for the introduction of a more austere version of Islam into Pakistan—one that

favored a Deobandi approach rather than a Barelvi one. Saudi Wahhabi preachers and

activists by the thousands entered Pakistan from the 1980s, operating up and down the

western border areas and in every major city.

The now-famous dar ul’alwm Haqqania in Akora Khattack (where almost all of the

Taliban’s senior leadership, including Mullah Omar, were educated) provides a general

example of how state patronage worked to promote incredible (and incredibly rapid)

growth within one Deobandi educational network. A former teacher from the dar

ul’alwm at Deoband founded the school in 1947.91 With the invasion of Afghanistan by

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the Russians, students from Haqqania (many of them Afghan) were caught up in the

jyhad against the USSR; indeed, one of the original fatawa calling for holy war in

Afghanistan originated from Haqqania. Soon money from the combined zәkat-U.S.

intelligence-Saudi intelligence pot was liberally dumped into the school, and hundreds

of sister schools were quickly constructed, mostly within the tribal regions bordering

Afghanistan—each school autonomous within its own local sphere but run as part of a

larger network from Haqqania. Since Zia’s time, the school’s network has continued to

mushroom, and today its funding still originates primarily from Saudi Arabia and the

Gulf states. The dramatic increase in the number of mәdarys, exemplified by the rise and

spread of the Haqqania network of schools, represented yet another victory of the

minority Deobandis over the majority Barelvis; by 1988—Zia’s final year as head of

state—Deobandi mәdarys outnumbered Barelvi mәdarys approximately 2.6 to 1, with

especially significant numerical advantages in the NWFP, Sindh, Baluchistan, Kashmir,

and the Northern Areas.92 Over the years, scholars of the Deobandi persuasion

continued to find positions in influential mosques (some formerly Barelvi) and religious

posts in government, out of proportion to the two groups’ relative populations. Barelvis

resented this and responded with organizations of their own, dedicated to “protecting”

Barelvi “articles of faith” (aqaid), “mosques,” money, and “rights.”93 These were the

express goals of perhaps the most important Barelvi reactionary political organization,

the Sunni Tehrik, founded in the early 1990s.

But ISID patronage didn’t end with the (mostly Deobandi) seminaries (and, it is

alleged, mosques; Sunni Tehrik head Sarwat Aijaz Qadiri, for example, claimed in 2010

that “thousands of mosques and madressahs across the country which belonged to

Barelvis were forcibly taken over by the Deobandis” during the Zia years—a

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phenomenon that would have bloody repurcussions from the 1990s when Barelvis

attempted to win them back).94 The intelligence organization adopted a number of

(mostly Deobandi) militant groups, too, which were subsequently used by the agency as

proxy armies, mostly in Kashmir but also against rival sects. Previously in this work,

Deobandi mujahyd Irshad Ahmed and his Harkat ul-Jihad ul-Islami were mentioned.

After Irshad’s 1985 death, his organization splintered into two groups. Fazlul Rehman

Khalil and mwlana Masood Kashmiri led one group, which they called Harkat ul-

Mujahideen. But differences between Khalil and Kashmiri resulted in a further fracture,

dividing Harkat ul-Mujahideen into the Fazlul Rehman Khalil-led Harkat ul-

Mujahideen (hereafter HuM) and the Masood Kashmiri-led Jamiat ul-Mujahideen

(hereafter JuM). Meanwhile, the second group to coalesce after Irshad Ahmed’s death,

organized by several Deobandi ‘alәma (including Muhammad Shafi’s son Muhammad

Rafi Usmani) from old Harkat-ul Mujahideen remnants in 1993, was renamed Harkat

ul-Ansar. The jyhad against the Soviets was largely transferred to the jyhad against the

Indians over Kashmir. The conflict intensified beginning in the late eighties and

throughout much of the nineties as Indian and Pakistani leaders hurled insults and

challenges at one another. In August 1994, for example, Pakistani Prime Minister

Benazir Bhutto pledged her country’s support “always” to those “Kashmiris fighting

Indian rule.” The next day Indian Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao demanded that

Pakistan relinquish its hold on “Azad Kashmir” and turn it over to India immediately.

On Kashmir, Bhutto insisted, Pakistan had an “unfinished agenda,” which Rao threw

back by agreeing—“the one unfinished task,” he said, was for Pakistan to terminate its

“occupation” of western Kashmir and give it to India. Meanwhile, for years soldiers

from both countries continued to shoot at one another across the Line of Control on

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almost a daily basis, while “Islamic mercenaries” (members of mostly Deobandi and JI

groups—plus some Barelvi outfits, too—with backing from the ISID) constantly made

incursions into Indian-controlled Kashmir. “With you, without you, in spite of you,

Kashmir will remain an integral part of India,” Rao promised, even while the conflict

continued to sap India’s resources as the government’s troops were supplied by

helicopter high in the Himalayas (Pakistani soldiers and paramilitants, on the other

hand, made the trip to the front “by lorry and mule”).95 Rao’s use of the term “integral,”

echoing similar (and even more dubious) claims on Tibet by the Beijing regime,

demonstrated the Indian government’s intractability; gone were the days of possibility,

of hopes for a meaningful plebiscite, in the years immediately after Partition. Of course,

Rao’s comments were made just a year-and-a-half after the deadliest and most

destruction bomb blasts in the history of India (12 March 1993), when coordinated

attacks in Mumbai—that the Indian government alleged were linked both to the

Pakistani ISID as well as “Islamic groups” backed by the intelligence agency, among

others—left more than two hundred fifty dead and over seven hundred wounded. (The

blasts were evidently motivated, at least in large part, by the Hindu-led destruction of

Babri mәsjyd in Ayodhya.)

Meanwhile, Deobandism spread with the growth of its educational network—and

the help of Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia. Barelvi animosity towards “Saudi” Arabia

goes back as far as that kingdom’s founding (1932)—and even further, when the Saudis

were fighting for control of the peninsula against fellow Muslims. In his presidential

address on the occasion of the All-India Sunni Conference’s founding in Moradabad in

1925, for example, Jamaat ‘Ali Shah had commented on the political situation in Arabia

before condemning “the massacre of innocent Muslims” there “carried out by the

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descendents of King Saud.” He also took the opportunity to slam the major tenets of

Wahhabism, “fast spreading in India,” and the emergence of “other minor sects” within

the subcontinental Muslim community. (One of these “minor sects” was Deobandism.)

The house of Saud, of course, had long embraced Wahhabism—that school of Islam

with which the Barelvis had been bitterly opposed from the beginning, and which they

(the Barelvis) commonly associated (however erroneously) with their Deobandi

counterparts. A decade later (in 1935), at another AISC gathering in Badayun, Jamaat

‘Ali Shah again condemned Ibn Saud’s “policies in Arabia.”96 Since the early 1980s,

Barelvis had watched on, too, as the Saudis funded the proliferation of Deobandi and

Ahl-e-Sunnat mәdarys, concurrently bankrolling Deobandi militant outfits in Pakistan—

outfits that targeted Barelvis, among others. One 2003 study found that the JUI alone

ran more than sixty-five percent of all of Pakistan’s mәdarys.97

Thus, while the Deobandis “enjoyed increasing influence and state patronage during

the Afghan [jyhad],” as well as the seemingly endless beneficence of hopeful Wahhabis

from the Gulf, the Barelvis “remained sidelined during this period.”98 Such “sidelining,”

however, would garner a response.

Barelvi Response: Sunni Tehrik, Dawat-e-Islami, et alia.

The Sunni Tehreek, “an aggressive version of the Barelvi faith” mentioned

previously as a “Sunni” response to Deobandi dominance in government as well as the

perceived Deobandi capture of traditionally Barelvi mosques, was born in Karachi. The

organization would strive to amass a network of Barelvi groups throughout the country

to combat what it saw as “the armed madrassa followers”—the Deobandis.99 Founded

by one Muhammad Saleem Qadiri in 1990, the Sunni Tehrik is generally considered an

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“offshoot” of the JUP, and was (and is) funded by both foreign and in-country

contributors. At first, Karachi’s business-savvy Memon community helped finance the

outfit as it was initially getting off the ground; throughout the 1990s, too, money from

Baghdad helped buoy the Barelvi cause—an Iraqi attempt to counter the influence of

Saudi cash in Pakistan.100 (Thus we see the Deobandi-Barelvi conflict being co-opted by

foreign governments in their own rivalries.) As of this writing, the Sunni Tehrik enjoys

the general support of Barelvis across Pakistan.

The Sunni Tehrik’s initial mission was to win back the mosques it claimed had been

usurped by Deobandi clerics and their followers—“the battle over houses of God,” as

journalist Salman Siddiqui described it. (Interestingly, the Deobandis make the same

claim about the Barelvis. For example, prominent Karachi cleric mufti Naeem, head of

major Deobandi mәdrәsәħ Jamia Binoria, claimed to have “a list of 27 mosques such as

Jamia Noor where we [the Deobandis] can prove that it belongs to our people

belonging to the Deoband school of thought.” Meanwhile, Sunni Tehrik (hereafter ST)

chief Sarwat Aijaz Qadiri claimed that “thousands” of [Barelvi] mosques across

Pakistan had been taken over by the Deobandis during the Zia years.)101 The takeover,

the ST asserted, had been accomplished with the help of two Deobandi militant

organizations: the Lashkar-e-Taiba and, especially, the SSP.102 For its first twelve years

of existence (until the end of 2001), the Sunni Tehrik’s operations revolved around this

very specific goal, focused almost entirely on mosques in Sindh (mostly Karachi) and the

Punjab. The first Sunni Tehrik-Deobandi clash occurred in 1992 in Karachi, when

members of the Barelvi group attempted to take over the Noor mәsjyd (located off M. A.

Jinnah Road at Ranchor Lines). Deobandis insisted the mosque had always been

Deobandi—that it had been built, after all, by Shabbir Ahmad Usmani himself. But the

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Sunni Tehrik were adamant, and on 18 December—in its “first show of strength”—the

ST organized a massaive rally along M. A. Jinnah Road in protest of Deobandi

possession of the mosque.103 The rally turned ugly, and by the time it was over, dozens

had been injured, a number of vehicles burnt, and several killed. A few months later,

another ST attack occurred, this time targeting the Ibrahim Raza mosque in Karachi’s

Burmi Colony, resulting in more deaths and the mәsjyd ‘s sealing off by police. Between

1992 and 2002, a purported sixty-two mosques from all over Pakistan were wrested

from Deobandi possession by the Barelvi Sunni Tehrik.104

In May of 2001, ST founder Muhammad Saleem Qadiri was gunned down—along

with five others—in his car outside of his Saeedabad, Karachi home as he was leaving

for Friday prayers. The Deobandi SSP was blamed for the assassination, and a new

chapter in the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry was opened: that of targeted assassinations.

After the attack, the streets of the city were rocked with “murderous sectarian riots”—a

literal battle between Barelvis and Deobandis.105 Saleem Qadiri’s successor, Abbas

Qadiri, accused the Musharraf regime of “patronizing terrorists” and, significantly,

“standing between us and the murderers.” The ST’s new leader was, in effect, charging

the government of patronizing and protecting the Deobandis at the expense of the

Barelvi majority. “After Abbas Qadiri’s death, one thing is clear,” wrote Indian

journalist Praveen Swami, who covered the 2006 Nishtar Park blast mentioned at the

beginning of this work. “Someone, sooner or later, will seek to settle the Sunni

Tehreek’s unfinished business with his [Saleem Qadiri’s] murderers.”106 Once the

Deobandi-Barelvi back-and-forth had been one of juridical rulings and religious books;

now it was bullets, bombs, and ball bearings.

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Even the state’s 1992-1994 Army-led operation against the MQM possessed a

Deobandi-Barelvi layer of significance. The MQM, as previously mentioned, was

predominantly made up of Urdu-speaking Barelvis (originally immigrants from north-

central India who had arrived around the time of Partition) who not only lined up

against the local Sindhis but also against the perceived encroachment of mostly

Deobandi Pathans. The latter had been flooding into Karachi, and other cities, for years

on account of the unstable situation in Afghanistan. Wrote one observer in 1995, “War

has allowed a drugs and gun culture to spread across the [Afghanistan-Pakistan]

border, which is behind the virtual collapse of Karachi, the commercial capital.”

Meanwhile, Operation Clean-up was led by the Deobandi-leaning, Taliban-supporting

(and Pathan) Naseerullah Babar.107 In June the Army launched the operation, seizing

the MQM’s Azizabad headquarters within twenty-four hours and prompting the party

to quit the government a week later. Over the course of the next two years, thousands

died, disappeared, were kidnapped, or were injured in the Army action (and the MQM

response) in Karachi alone. By mid-1994, MQM leader Altaf Hussain (and others) had

been sentenced to almost thirty years in prison for the 1991 kidnapping and torture of

an Army major (this was the famous “Major Kaleem Case”); in 1998, however, the High

Court of Sindh found all of the accused not guilty, and the exhultant MQM described

the whole affair as “politically motivated.”108 The contest highlighted, too, the role of

the Afghan war in the militarization of the Deobandi and Barelvi outfits pitted against

one another.

The Barelvi religious leadership responded to the proselytizing success of the

Deobandi Tablighi Jama’at, too—and in no more obvious fashion than in the formation

of the Dawat-e-Islami. Founded in 1980 in Karachi by Muhammad Ilyas Qadiri, the

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Dawat-e-Islami billed itself as “a global non-political movement for the propagation of

Quran and Sunnah.”109 Perhaps as a reaction to the Tablighi Jama’at’s success at

organizing mega-conventions (including the Bangladeshi meeting referred to at the

beginning of this work, largely considered the largest Muslim gathering in the world

outside of the hәj), the Dawat-e-Islami organized its own conferences. These had to be

bigger than the Deobandi meetings, especially since the Barelvis’ foundational claim to

legitimacy was that they represented the majority, or “Sunni,” sect. As such, the Dawat-

e-Islami’s Multan conference (as of this writing) claims that it—not the Tablighi

meeting outside of Dhaka—is the “world’s largest congregation of Muslims after the

hajj.”110 In the beginning, at least, the Tablighis were instructed to differentiate

themselves from their neighbors not only by means of their pious behavior but also in

dress; Dawat-e-Islami members do much the same, most characteristically (at least for

the men) by wearing a green turban, green being associated with the Prophet—and it is,

again, the Barelvi devotion to the Prophet that primarily drives the movement. In 2006,

the Dawat-e-Islami came under some fire after a stampede took place in one of its

women’s congregations; several women were critically injured—but the organizations

leaders refused to allow male medical workers to help them. According to at least one

report, “several women died because of the delay in providing medical assistance.”111 As

of the time of this writing, the Dawat-e-Islami world headquarters are situated adjacent

to a fairly well manicured plaza called Askari Park. Even so, most of the building’s

surroundings are marked not by greenery but by the narrow gullies and cramped

housing of lower-class Karachi. Spray-painted generously onto the walls and shop-

fronts of this and surrounding neighborhoods are the initials “ST”—the acronym for the

Sunni Tehrik; one shop declares, in thick black paint, “DOWN WITH USA.” To enter the

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Dawat-e-Islami’s central building one must walk down a side street that is little more

than an alley, green-turbaned pedestrians walking up and down its length, before

reaching the main gate. The gate is manned by four gun-toting guards and sports

cement road barriers, barbed wire, and a metal detector; the compound’s walls are high

and barbed, too. The whole presentation betrays the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry’s

relatively recent descent into militarism.

Even as regards the formation of overtly militant groups—as opposed to the ST,

which was more of a (sometimes thuggish) defense league—the Deobandis were not to

enjoy a monopoly over the Barelvis. The Ansar-ul Islam (AuI), for example, founded by

the Afghan pir Saifur Rehman (about whom more later), was formed in Khyber Agency

(in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas) in 2004, primarily to fight against a

Deobandi group in the area led by mufti Munir Shakir called Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI).112

The Sunni Jihad Council (SJC) was active (as of this writing) in Kashmir (and a

supporter of another Barelvi group, Al-Barq) in response to Deobandi activities there.

“It is regrettable,” said SJC Supreme Commander Said ‘Ali Reza in 1999, “that some

people have tried to spread their false beliefs on the pretext of jihad in Kashmir.” That

Said ‘Ali was talking about Deobandis was made clear when he added, “They have even

torched shrines and tried to occupy mosques. This is a conspiracy against Muslims.

We know how to defend territorial as well as religious borders. God willing, Kashmir

will be freed by Sunni Jihad Council, because it is a representative platform for the majority of

Muslims.”113 This last was plainly a reiteration of the Barelvi claim to speak for South

Asia’s “Sunni majority.” Perhaps the point is that the oft-uttered Barelvi claim that

religious militancy (including the targeting of fellow Muslims) is solely a Deobandi

game should be taken with a grain of salt. It is undoubtably true that in the Deobandi-

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Barelvi war in Pakistan from the 1980s to the present, the Deobandi outfits appear to

have far more blood on their collective hands—but the Barelvis have entered the game,

too. The oftentime violent methods of the Sunni Tehrik, the militancy of pir Saifur

Rehman’s outfit, and the Barelvi fighters in Kashmir (and, later, the religiously

motivated assassination of Salman Taseer by one of his Barelvi bodyguards, of which

more later) demonstrate that the contest is not by any means completely one-sided.

Other Barelvi organizations that might be considered responses to the perceived

Deobandi onslaught include the Nizam-e-Mustapha Party, founded by Hanif Tayyab

(former general secretary of the JUP’s Karachi branch, three-time National Assembly

member, and federal Minister with several different portfolios)114; the Jamaat Ahle

Sunnat, a religious organization of Barelvi leaders founded in Karachi in 1956—the very

one, in fact, that organizaed the mwlyd celebration at Nishtar Park in April 2006—that

sometimes dabbles in politics (as, in 2011, when it admonished its members not to offer

funeral prayers for murdered governor Salman Taseer);115 the Riza Academy, based in

Mumbai, a major propagator of Barelvi books and pamphlets and the organizer of the

August 2012 protest rally in Mumbai that ended with several dead and scores

wounded;116 the UK-based World Islamic Mission, founded in the early 1970s by

Mustapha Riza Khan’s xәlifәħ Qamaruzzaman Azmi (among others), and credited with

being the first international Barelvi missionary organization;117 and student groups like

the Hanif Tayyab-founded Anjuman Talaba-e-Islam, created in 1968.118

After Zia: Deobandi-Barelvi Politics, 1988-2001.

As aforementioned, Ishaq Khan opted to respect the 16 November 1988 date for

general elections set by Zia ul-Haq before the latter’s sudden death. By early October,

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then, four main groups had emerged as major electoral players: (1) the “hard-left” Left

and Democratic Front, a six-party alliance that was by far the weakest of the four; (2)

the PPP-led MRD (which included the Deobandi JUI); (3) the Muslim League (Fida

group)-led nine-party Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (yslami jәmhwri yttyhad, meaning “Islamic

Democratic Alliance,” hereafter IJI); and (4) the Muslim League (Junejo faction), allied

with the Tehrik-e-Istaqlal and the Barelvi JUP.119 Over the proceeding month, much

political jockeying and rearranging occurred, and with just a week to go before election

day two main rivals had emerged from this mileau as the contest’s frontrunners. First,

there was the Benazir Bhutto-led PPP (which had split with the MRD, including the

JUI, making the formerly imposing alliance largely insignificant, despite the fact that

the remaining parties had agreed to work together “loosely” in the elections); now the

PPP would stand on its own. Second, there was the Muslim League-led IJI, which

included the up-and-coming Punjabi Nawaz Sharif. The IJI reportedly made generous

use of “state patronage” to win over voters, forming, as it did, the caretaker

governments in Pakistan’s provinces (indeed, its very creation had been facilitated by

the head of the ISID itself, Hamid Gul, who later admitted to having arranged the

funneling of state money to the failing Mehran Bank in order to procure millions in

loans from the institution for the IJI—a revelation dubbed “Mehrangate”).120 One

member of the IJI: the JI, which had joined only on the condition that the Qur’an and

sunnәt be granted supremacy within the political order, among other demands.121

Meanwhile, a distant third contender was the Pakistan People’s Alliance (PPA), of

which the JUP was a part. Once again, the JUP had opted to “go it alone” rather than

join forces with other like-minded (in terms of constitutional hopes and dreams) parties.

Even the JI had sided with an alliance apart from either the JUI or the JUP. One other

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party that had emerged over the previous three years and was now contesting the

elections on its own as “potentially the most important of the smaller parties”: the

Sindh-based Mohajir Qaumi Movement, as aforementioned created to protect the

interests of the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs, or immigrants from India.122 The emergence

of the MQM is significant in the context of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry, as the largely

Barelvi MQM was created in the first place in order to protect the Mohajirs from the

largely Deobandi Pathan influx into Sindh’s cities (and especially Karachi). The first

decade-and-a-half of the twenty-first century would see much bloodshed in clashes

between these two groups.

When the elections were over, the PPP had won a total of ninety-two seats in the

national assembly, far outdistancing anyone else (the IJI came in second with fifty-four).

And though results for the national assembly elections spelled a clear victory for the

PPP (and a “historic step for women,” according to the headlines, as Benazir Bhutto—

who was expected to claim her place as Prime Minister—would become not only the

first female leader of Pakistan but also of any other Muslim state), they also failed to

give Bhutto’s party an absolute majority in the nation’s highest legislative body. (This

set the stage for the decade-long tug-of-war between Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif that

would define Pakistani politics until the 1999 military coup of Pervez Musharraf.) In

Baluchistan, the JUI emerged as that province’s most dominant party, while in the

NWFP the IJI took eights seats, the PPP seven, the Pathan nationalist Awami National

Party three, and the JUI three. In Sindh, of course, the PPP dominated, with smaller

victories, too, for the three-year-old MQM in Karachi and Hyderabad. Even in the

Punjab, Bhutto’s party beat out the IJI, winning fifty-two to the latter’s forty-four

seats.123 The elections confirmed the Deobandi JUI’s continued significance in

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Pakistan’s western provinces (where it had obtained seven national assembly seats), and

additionally signaled the arrival of a strong, mostly Barelvi force with which to be

reckoned in the MQM. The latter party’s newfound political clout (after its winning

thirteen national assembly seats) even prompted President Ishaq Khan to meet with

party head Altaf Hussain to discuss issues relating to Pakistan’s future government.124

Meanwhile, the JUP won no seats at all.

The PPP’s dominance at the national elections was somewhat dimmed soon

thereafter by the IJI’s own dominance in Pakistan’s provincial elections, with Nawaz

Sharif’s alliance winning three out of four provinces (the JUI won eleven provincial

seats overall). Still, the People’s Party had won the national polls, and Bhutto fully

expected to be given the go-ahead to form a government. But JUI leaders, representing

what had now grown to become “the largest religious party” in Pakistan (as well as “the

fourth largest national party” overall), who suddenly found themselves facing the

possibility of a woman as Pakistan’s leader, opposed the idea. As previously mentioned,

the demand that the state’s head be a Muslim male had been a staple within the

constitutional blueprints created and proffered by both Deobandi and Barelvi scholars

for Pakistan, from pre-Partition onward. It should be noted, however, that this demand

seemed to refer to the head of state—i.e. the President—as opposed to the head of

government—i.e. the Prime Minister. But the Deobandi leadership vowed that, despite a

history of on-and-off cooperation with the PPP (especially during the Zia years), they

could not accept a female head of government (interesting, considering their

overwhelming support years before for Fatima Jinnah; might the issue have revolved

more around politics—or, at best, preference for a certain political system—than

religious doctrine?).125 When asked by journalist Karan Thapar about the JUI’s refusal

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to accept a woman-led administration, Benazir Bhutto underlined the ‘alәma’s

aforementioned lack of clarity, historically speaking, on the issue. “At times they have

said that they will not accept a woman as head of state,” she said, “but that they will

accept her as head of government. Now they are saying something different. But we

will…find out exactly what they mean.”126 Despite the JUI’s refusal, Bhutto’s most

pressing obstacle at the time was not the scholars’ repugnance to the idea of a female

Prime Minsiter, but President Ishaq Khan’s apparent reluctance to allow her to form a

government at all, especially amidst the protest of her rival Nawaz Sharif. Still, the

opposition of the ‘alәma was serious. By 26 November, the JUI had officially declared

that it was “ready to sit in opposition” to Bhutto and the PPP. Significantly, the MQM

made a similar pledge. Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador Robert Oakley met with Bhutto in

late November, a clear indication that she enjoyed Washington’s support (a detail that

could not have been lost on the Deobandi ‘alәma in particular).127 Bhutto finally became

Prime Minister on 2 December.

Less than three months later, in late February 1989, a major gathering of ‘alәma—

reported as including more than two thousand scholars—took place in Rawalpindi. The

Barelvis and the Deobandis had once again come together in opposition to what was

perceived as an obvious and imminent threat to Pakistan’s Islamic character; wrote one

observer, “It is significant that all these sectarian groups which had been at loggerheads

on important religious issues have found a single platform against Miss Bhutto.” The

conference criticized Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (demanding the author’s

immediate extradition and execution, by hanging, in Pakistan), and accused the Bhutto

government of not taking proper measures to prevent the book’s publication. The

government was also berated for “encouraging obscenity” on state-funded television via

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“musical and dancing programmes.” Most importantly, though, the two thousand

‘alәma declared that Bhutto’s position as government head flew in the face of the Qur’an

and the sunnәt. They would, conference participants promised, “launch countrywide

agitation” in response to this state of affairs. The scholar-jurists also warned Bhutto not

to repeal any of the constitution’s Islamic provisions, particularly the eighth amendment

(dealing with, among other things, Islamic laws affecting the status of women). The

most vocal groups present: the Deobandi JUI (led by two senators: new dar ul’alwm

Haqqania head Sami ul-Haq and Qazi Abdul Latif), the Barelvi JUP (led by national

assembly member Abdul Sattar Niazi, the same who had been arrested in 1953 in

connection with the anti-Ahmadi riots in Lahore), and the JI. Each accused “Western

countries” of actively “patronizing” the newly organized Bhutto regime. (One

opposition leader, national assembly member Syeda Abida Hussain, perhaps said it best

when in August she wrote: “It has been her singular achievement that in the past eight

months Benazir Bhutto, while confirming her support abroad, has steadily lost good will

at home.”)128 In this context, Benazir represented the encroachment of a “Western”

value system on the “Islamic” one, a fear harbored by the ‘alәma since the days of the

British Raj and now, seemingly, coming to fruition. PPP leaders’ reaction to the ‘alәma

conference was to label the scholars and their parties “obscurantist elements” and

underscore their electoral mandate from “the people.”129

By June, at last some of those “obscurantist elements”—specifically, the JUI—had

allied with several former MRD members (including the ANP), plus a number of other

parties and the entire IJI to form a united opposition to the Bhutto government. But by

1990 President Ishaq Khan—described as “a cold, dispassionate bureaucrat with an

austere lifestyle”—fired Benazir Bhutto from the prime ministership anyway, amidst

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allegations of corruption (among other state woes), and as a result the PPP boycotted

the October general elections. This paved the way for the victory of Nawaz Sharif’s IJI.

The JUI, though it had been part of the opposition, ran separately, as did the JUP. The

Deobandi party won six National Assembly seats, the Barelvi party three. But the JUP

was at this point experiencing serious internal divisions, ultimately resulting in the

splitting of the party into multiple factions. One was led by mwlana Ahmad Shah

Noorani (called the JUP-N), another by Fazal Karim (the JUP-F); after the 2003 death

of Ahmad Shah, the JUI-N faded somewhat in the wake of a power vacuum and the

JUP-F emerged as the more powerful group. The effect of this split was to more or less

guarantee, at least as of the time of this writing, the future insignificance—on a national

level within the realm of electoral politics—of the Barelvi party from the early 1990s

onward. (For example, Fazal Karim, the very head of the JUP-F, would serve as a

National Assembly member—but on the PML-N ticket). The political pendulum swung

again in 1993, when national elections (characterized by heightened security and low

voter turnout) garnered Nawaz Sharif’s party more votes—but Benazir Bhutto’s more

seats. Just before the elections, too, the JI had lefft the IJI, winning a handful of

National Assembly seats as well as a couple NWFP provincial assembly seats on its

own; in order to maintain its purity, the JI had pledged from that year forward never

again to officially join any political alliance. The party had vociferously opposed

Benazir Bhutto, often protesting her policies in the streets; at one demonstration, police

shot and killed several JI members. Such oppressive measures, aimed at the political

opposition, contributed to Benazir’s waning popularity and eventual dismissal. But this

wasn’t enough for the JI, which demanded accountability—and, specifically, an

investigation into the corruption charges that had been leveled at her. Crucially, the JI

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demanded the investigation take place before new elections could be held, but this

demand was not met and elections were held anyway. The JI tried to stop them,

however; the party’s modus operandi was to stage sit-ins at voting sites—and perhaps the

low voter turnout that year was a direct result of JI efforts in this regard, combined

with an MQM elections boycott.130 Even so, the PPP eked out a win, and, having won

more National Assembly seats than Nawaz Sharif and his allies, formed a government

under Benazir Bhutto.

Perhaps as a means of currying favor with the Deobandi ‘alәma and their followers

(to the chagrin of the Barelvis, who tended to vote for Nawaz Sharif’s PML or for the

MQM), Benazir Bhutto’s government appointed Deobandi leader Fazlur Rehman as

Chairman of the foreign affairs committee in parliament—interesting and perhaps

enlightening, given the JUI chief’s anti-Western, pro-Taliban position. In any case,

Bhutto wouldn’t conclude this second term regularly, either; beset on all sides with

charges of corruption, as well as a host of other issues (including the use of brutal force

by the police under her administration, with no apparent effort to curb such official

violence), President Farooq Leghari dismissed the PPP government in early November

1996. In early February 1997, Nawaz Sharif’s PML won a landslide victory over the

PPP (the former obtaining an astounding one hundred fifty-five of the National

Assembly’s two hundred seven seats, compared to the PPP’s meager eighteen). The

Deobandi JUI won only two seats (both JUI-F victories; the JUI-S won zero) and its

Barelvi counterpart none. The latter, especially, seemed to have fallen far after its 1970

peak, when it had won more seats in Sindh than any other party except the PPP.

Post-Soviet Afghanistan and the Establishment of Taliban Rule.

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Though the Russians were gone, the Communist regime in Kabul lived on. But with

the USSR out of the way—the chief goal of American involvement in the war—U.S.

government cash began to dry up. This was a serious issue for many Afghan

commanders, whose funding depended on the U.S. taxpayer, as well as for thousands of

mujahydin foot soldiers, many of whom actually drew salaries, however irregular, as

members of one fighting force or another. Najibullah therefore developed a new

strategy: he would fill the void caused by disappearing dollars by buying off the various

commanders himself. Of course, he would need help. Where else to turn but the

Kremlin? Kabul’s venture was enthusiastically funded by the Soviet Union, and within

a short period of time—and to the dismay of the țalyban fighters and others—the very

commanders and their mujahydin who had kicked the Russians out had abruptly landed,

one degree removed, on the Russian payroll! The stratagem eroded alliances between

one-time allied commanders and turned entire armies previously engaged against

Najibullah into defenders of the Kabul regime. The ‘alәma and țalyban’s goal of an

Islamic government—and peace, in their eyes—seemed further away than ever. “The

Taliban had carried out many military operations against the Russians and had been one

of the most important pillars of the jihad,” one Taliban leader said of the period,

“sacrificing their lives and sustaining thousands of casualties, but we had been

betrayed.” In the end, “most” of the țalyban at this time returned home to continue with

their religious studies, resigned to their fate. Mullah Omar’s conversion of the țalyban’s

original Sangisar base into a mәdrәsәħ aptly embodies the movement’s retreat, however

reluctant, from the battlefield back to the seminary.131

Meanwhile, the chaotic scenario playing itself out in Afghanistan was too much for

the governments and intelligence agencies of the world to resist. Each saw an

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opportunity to pursue its own regional interests—and seized it. The USSR’s continued

meddling, vis-à-vis the Najibullah regime, has already been mentioned. Pakistan’s

government (and, more particularly, the ISID) backed Hekmatyar and his Hizb-e-Islami

(directly contributing, in the words of one commentator, to the destruction of “half of

Kabul”).132 As early as July 1989—just five months after the Soviet withdrawal—

Hekmatyar’s outfit (mostly Pathan) had slaughtered a group of Jamiat Islami

commanders (almost entirely non-Pathan), casting an ugly light on the shrinking

possibility of cooperation between Afghanistan’s various “mujahydin” parties.133

Meanwhile, Iran’s government, in a bid to out-influence the Saudis in the region,

supported Abdul ‘Ali Mazari’s Hazara Hizb-e-Wahdat (a Shi’a outfit), while the regime

in Riyadh backed the Ittihad-e-Islami of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (a Wahhabi group).

Through the eyes of the Pathan religious scholars and țalyban, traitorous commanders

raped the country from within while equally traitorous foreign regimes raped the

country from without. “[T]he idea of being ruled by westernized technocrats produces

a gut reaction among many Mujahidin,” wrote journalist Lieven from Peshawar.

“Revolt against this class has, after all, been an underlying theme of their holy war.

This has been in part a struggle of all those traditionalist forces—tribesmen and Islamic

clergy—excluded and impoverished over the past half century by the modernizing and

westernizing state.”134 The role of foreign governments in the Afghanistan mess was

especially underscored in 1992, when Kabul was captured from the Russia-backed

communist regime only to see the various warring factions turn on one another; one

observer reported, “As darkness fell yesterday [26 April], superpower weapons given in

another era thundered over Kabul.” The situation conjured up the “prospect of

permanent civil war.”135

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Seeing all of this destruction, this petty tug-of-war between great powers and

power-hungry warlords, what did the țalyban have to show for their years-long anti-

communist jyhad that had costs thousands of lives and ravaged their homelands? Of a

truth, the situation could scarcely have appeared bleaker. The streets of Kabul were a

warzone, the government was plagued by infighting, and the entire country (especially

the southern half) was crawling with gangs: some mere bandits, others mujahydin-

turned-robbers-and-rapists. Travel meant risking one’s life, not to mention the

monetary cost involved. It is ironic that many of the țalyban who had returned from

Pakistani exile to fight Russians in Afghanistan now opted, long after the Russians had

been ousted, to leave Afghanistan—despite the risks of long-distance movement—for

refugee status in Pakistan once more. Meanwhile, for those who remained, the fighting

between the various mujahydin parties “became so intense that it was impossible to live a

normal life,” according to one Afghan commentator who experienced the commotion

firsthand. The period became known as twpәkiyan: “the time of the men with guns”—a

poignant title given that it describes circumstances after a war. One ymam at a small

mosque not far from Kandahar remembered, “Many of the people who went to the city

would come back with tales of anarchy and chaos, and often I heard artillery fire in the

distance. The stories made me feel uneasy; I remembered the jyhad and the sacrifices we

had made. It seemed that it had been for nothing, but I still remained patient and gave

the same advice to my congregation.” But the situation continued to deteriorate, until

regular Afghans were holding demonstrations against the mujahydin they had once so

esteemed; such protests often ended with the local commander firing into the crowds

with machine guns—or even with tanks. These demonstrations of public outrage often

took place, perhaps significantly, after Friday prayers.136 To the țalyban (many of whom

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were now full-fledged ‘alәma), these acts of defiance were nothing less than calls for the

establishment, finally, of Islamic government and the order, security, and peace that

such a regime would, God-willing, surely provide. The Russians, the Afghan

Communists, and now the traitorous “mujahydin” government had all failed; all ignored

the injunctions of God and the people had reaped the whirlwind as a result. Holy war

had been waged against the unbelievers—but this had not been enough. “The events

after victory [against the Soviets],” wrote one Deobandi ‘alym, “[teach] us that it is not

the known disbelieving enemy alone against whom we must wage jihad. Rather, we

must wage jihad against our own base soul…” It was this failure—failure to continue

from the lesser to the greater jyhad, from the physical fight against communist atheism

to the spiritual struggle for personal purity—that had deprived the ummәt of the “fruits”

of the anti-communist struggle.137 Just as spiritual corruption on the part of the

Muslims had led to their political downfall and misery in India from the later eighteenth

through the nineteenth centuries, sin and impiety now prevented Afghanistan from

taking its place as a proud and prosperous Islamic state. The road was thus paved for an

Islamic revivalist movement to offer a popular solution to Afghanistan’s political and

social ills.

When many of the țalyban regrouped in mid-1994, then, it was in response to the

law-and-order situation in the country. American-born writer Eric Margolis, an

eyewitness to post-war, pre-Taliban Afghanistan, described the scene. Along with the

deaths of between one and two million Afghans, villages “were razed in reprisals,

livestock slaughtered, ancient irrigation systems destroyed, and millions of mines, some

in the form of exploding toys, were scattered across Afghanistan.” Some of the worst

perpetrators were the leaders of the Northern Alliance, including Mohammed Fahim

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(erstwhile Afghan Communist Secret Police chief) and Rashid Dostam (an Uzbek

warlord). Their crimes included the “frightful massacres and the most abominable

crimes against real and fancied opponents, including flaying, impalement, burning and

burial alive, acid baths, freezing to death in refrigerators, as well as more conventional

tortures of electrocution, beatings, drownings, and the ripping out of eyes, beards, and

fingernails.” (It should be noted that these very same communist war criminals would,

ironically, later become allies to the U.S. Government in its post-September 11th fight

against the Taliban.) In addition, the hated Russians were still backing the Northern

Alliance (with help from Iran and India; the meddling of the Saudi and Pakistani

governments, too, has already been mentioned), and the Alliance’s traitorous leaders

had become “the nation’s leading drug kingpins,” to boot.138 Meanwhile the illegal

checkposts, the rapes, murders, kidnappings, and looting continued unabated. The

perpetrators of these crimes had to be punished. This, along with (indeed, via) the

institution of an Islamic order, would finally bring both justice and peace to

Afghanistan.

Thus, in response to the security situation, several dozen erstwhile țalyban got

together at a mosque in little Pashmol to come up with a plan. Something had to be

done. Over the coming weeks, the small Pashmol group was able to gather many more

to its cause—including mullah Muhammad Omar, though he was evidently reluctant at

first to take the reigns of leadership (it was only after he had conferred with “some of

the [Deobandi] Ulema” that the one-eyed cleric agreed to take command). Finally, in

late autumn, four to five dozen men gathered at the old Sangisar base-turned-mosque to

officially launch the rebooted movement. Significantly, the țalyban this time around

were to be organized the traditional Islamic way, just as Deobandi precursor sәyyid

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Ahmad of Rae Bareilly had done it, and just as the “Hindustani Fanatics” of Patna and

Sittana. There must be a spiritual leader, or ymam (in this case a scholar named Abdul

Samad) as well as a commander, or әmir; Muhammad Omar was sustained in the latter

position. All present swore on the Qur’an to stand by their әmir, “and to fight against

corruption and criminals.” “The shari’a would be our guiding law,” according to one

who was present at the gathering, “and would be implanted by us. We would prosecute

vice and foster virtue, and would stop those who were bleeding the land.”139

One of the first actions of these țalyban, so the story goes, involved a local

“governor” who had kidnapped and facilitated the rape of two teenage girls; some

commanders in the area had also kidnapped a boy, with the intent to sodomize him.

The țalyban apparently freed the girls and the boy, and the governor was hanged from

the barrel of a tank. In April 1996, Mullah Omar famously donned the Prophet’s mantle

in Kandahar and proclaimed himself “Commander of the Faithful.” All present swore

allegiance to him. The meeting bypassed the customary Pathan tribal structure (i.e. this

was no loya jirga), instead being organized along traditional Arab lines as a shwra, or

religious council, made up of ‘alәma. In this way, mullah Omar and his țalyban (hereafter

designated as Taliban, denoting their official and organized group status) could bypass

the tribal chiefs. This was significant, for, as Ahmed Rashid pointed out, “The Deobandi

tradition is opposed to tribal and feudal structure and the clan chiefs.”140 Thus even

here at the beginning—or, more accurately, especially here—the Taliban’s politico-

religious foundation in Deobandism is evident. Within weeks it would be even more

pronounced, as the Taliban’s manpower, initially numbering in the hundreds, was

augmented by the arrival of thousands upon thousands of students from Pakistani

(mostly Deobandi) mәdrәsәħs and dar ul’alwms. Indeed, the vast majority of these

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students’ erstwhile schools were operated by the Deobandi JUI (run separately by either

the Fazlur Rehman faction or Sami ul-Haq faction), their construction made possible by

Saudi and American cash during the days of the anti-Soviet jyhad and facilitated by the

Pakistani government through the military and the ISID.

The success of the Taliban was to fuel the increasing militancy and jyhadi zeal of at

least one strain of Deobandism, once again making Afghanistan a training ground for

future operations (often anti-Barelvi) in Pakistan. The Barelvis, meanwhile, had no

parallel theater in which to develop similar elements apart from its relatively minor

activities in Kashmir. But to the Deobandis following the events in Afghanistan, the

rise and initial successes of the Taliban, driven as they were by their faith in Islam and

the transformational effect it could have on Afghan affairs, was a phenomenon worth

celebrating. Here, perhaps, was the promise of true Islamic revival—a revival that

could subsequently spread throughout the Muslim world. “[T]he power that has

emerged as the Taliban,” wrote one high-level Deobandi cleric in Pakistan, “gives us

hope that the sacrifices offered in the [anti-communist] jyhad against disbelief would

bring their result. May Allah preserve the Taliban from every mischief of self and the

devil and from the conspiracies of the enemies of Islam, and may He make them worthy

of [the] renaissance of Islam.”141 It is interesting that this particular mufti, who had

himself taken part in the anti-Soviet jyhad, invoked God’s blessing first and foremost

that the Taliban would be preserved “from every mischief of self.” This had been the

mistake of the earlier mujahydin. Perhaps the Taliban would remember.

Not long after the Pashmol and Sangisar meetings, the Taliban won Kandahar

(1994). Immediately a new government was installed in the city and surrounding areas.

“The city was at peace,” one Taliban member remembers. “The old habits of keeping

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boys, adultery, looting, illegal checkpoints and the government of the gun were over.

An ordinary life was given back to the people, and they were satisfied for the first time

in years.” Of course, one of the first institutions established by the movement was an

Islamic judicial system.142 One American journalist, who was intimately aware of the

goings-on in Afghanistan at the time and whose warnings and prognostications about

Afghanistan had gone mostly unheeded (despite their uncanny accuracy) by his mostly

Western audience, described the peace the Taliban brought to a war-torn country thus:

“It was frontier justice at its harshest and most medieval, but Mullah Omar’s cure

worked, bringing peace and security to southern Afghanistan.”143 Indeed, it was the

Taliban’s very “strict Islamic agenda,” among other things, that gained the group

widespread popular support in the first place. One of the Taliban’s first acts to gain

recognition outside of Afghanistan was its freeing (in November 1994) of a Pakistani

trade convoy that had been hijacked by warlords near Kandahar. Deobandi-leaning

Pakistani Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar (d. 2011 AD), a retired two-star general

and Pathan member of the PPP who had experience dating back to the 1970s training

Afghan mujahydin (and who had led the aforementioned two-year anti-MQM operation

in Karachi called Operation Clean-up), expressed support for the Taliban, admitting “a

closeness” between the group’s goals and “our [Pakistani] perceptions.”144

By early 1996, the “student warriors” had “cut [a] swath through [its] Afghan

opposition” and sat perched on the edge of the country’s chief city. “Taleban, the

Islamic students’ army, is sitting on the outskirts of Kabul,” wrote one London Times

reporter in Islamabad, “with enough artillery, tanks, rockets and heavily armed men to

blow the Afghan capital to pieces, after sweeping across the country, defeating its

enemies and astounding neutral observers.”145 By late September the Taliban had won

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Kabul, too, driving out Ahmad Shah Massoud and establishing the Islamic Emirate of

Afghanistan.

The government that the Taliban set up in Kabul was “a bizarre combination of

ninth-century Islamic political and legal thought mixed up with the most backwards

and primitive customs of isolated Pashtun mountain tribesmen.” It was this

combination that differentiated the system that, say, the ‘alәma of the dar ul’alwm

Deoband or the dar ul’alwm Karachi might have instituted from that of the Taliban.

The latter was infused with local Pathan custom—most apparent, perhaps, in the

regime’s quick and often brutal forms of punishment, as well as its apparent aversion to

the education of women. Both of these—the Taliban’s harsh punishments and its lack of

“women’s rights”—could be explained, if not justified (in the context of twenty-first-

century Western sensibilities, that is), as a reaction to Afghanistan’s recent war

experiences. Hadn’t the country been torn asunder by crime—robbery, looting, rapine,

murder—and hadn’t the Taliban, via admittedly severe “frontier justice,” mostly

eradicated these problems? Even the growth of the poppy seed had been mostly wiped

out, something at which later regimes (under the protection of the mighty U.S.

Government, no less) failed miserably. Surely an element of the Taliban’s harsh idea of

justice can be traced, too, to the exalted place enjoyed by both protection and revenge in

the Pathan tribal code—again, not a part of Islam itself, despite the faith’s shades of the

old Arab tribal code.146 And as for women’s rights, hadn’t it been the evil communists

who had attempted to destroy the fabric of Afghan society by striving to blur the

distinctions between the sexes, primarily through the education (or propagandizing) of

women? The Taliban’s reaction on both counts was to send no mixed messages. These

were sub-issues, anyway; the most important thing was that a truly Islamic government

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finally take the reigns of state in Afghanistan, and the Taliban, for all its provincial

“boorishness” and lack of urban grace, had at least accomplished this overarching goal

that had so long eluded the war-torn Central Asian country.

True to its Deobandi roots, the Taliban saw itself as merely the vanguard of a grand

Muslim liberation movement, with its sights set, crucially, by and large on communism

(i.e. not “Western” values, unless one includes communism itself in that category). This

was not a nationalist movement, neither Pathan nor Afghan per se, but the springboard

for Muslim repossession of all of Islam’s lands and peoples languishing under

foreign/infidel subjugation. Muslims had watched as one great Central Asian Muslim

city after another—from Samarkand to Bukhara—had fallen to the Soviets, only to be

“liberated” and placed under the thumb of yet another communist or socialist

government. For a while, it appeared that even Afghanistan had fallen, with Pakistan

next on the list. But the Taliban had ensured that the wave of oppression had stopped

at Afghanistan—and had pushed the communists out almost entirely, reversing the tide.

Outgunned, poorly armed Pathan tribesmen had defeated the world’s most powerful

land army. Couldn’t other Muslims do the same, in the spirit of the warriors of Badr?

Indeed, yes—and now it was time to reverse the wave and win back the Muslim world

for Muslims. (During the Afghan jyhad against the Soviets, Zia ul-Haq—perhaps

betraying Deobandi leanings—had reportedly planned to use the nascent Taliban

movement and its “foreign” helpers to liberate the Central Asian republics from their

communist regimes. He would not be the last foreign politician to entertain the idea of

using these “freedom fighters” as a proxy army, either.147)

As “a gesture of pan-Islamic solidarity,” then, the Taliban invited freedom fighters

from around the world to come to Afghanistan and train for just such an effort in

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specially designed camps set up for this purpose (as they were taught by the Pakistanis

and Americans during the anti-Soviet jyhad in Pakistan). Students and teachers alike

came from across the globe, but especially from the conquered “Muslim” states of

central Asia, both to experience Islamic solidarity and to prepare for their own freedom

struggles. Uighurs from East Turkestan (now “Xinjiang,” a Chinese term meaning,

tellingly, “New Frontier”) hoped to eventually rid their country of communist China’s

domination. Members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan sought to topple

“Central Asia’s most brutal and savage Communist dictatorship” (that of Islam

Karamov). Muslim Filipinos hoped to acquire the means necessary to defend Muslim

rights in their country, or at least establish a free Muslim base in the Phillipine south.

Chechens sought to wrest their homeland from Russian rule. Others—Thais, Bengalis,

Tajiks, Turkmens, and more—had similar, regional concerns. But the most populous

group were the Pakistanis, preparing to fight in Kashmir. Pakistan’s very government

(a U.S. Government ally) backed these last. For the most part, then, these volunteer

jydahis were not driven by some seething hatred for “the West”; their concerns were far

more local and/or regional, centered on the liberation of their own countries and

peoples, mostly from communist regimes. In early April 2001, a massive Deobandi

gathering at the village of Taro Jaba (near Peshawar) was organized by Fazlur Rehman

in celebration of the dar ul’alwm Deoband’s many achievements. According to some

sources, over a million people attended. Critically, the Deobandi assemblage declared

its support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as for all other Muslims fighting for

their identity or independence, anywhere else in the world. The two speeches (both

taped recordings) that reportedly garnered the most acclaim during the Taro Jaba

conference: one from Taliban head mullah Muhammad Omar, the other from mujahydin

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leader and financier Osama bin Laden.148

The mostly anti-communist aims of the aforementioned groups—from the Taliban

to the Uighurs to the Chechens—fit in so neatly with the U.S. Government’s

interventionist foreign policy that some American policy-makers before September 11th

2001 even considered “using” these various benighted groups for their own regional

interests, just as they had the Afghan mujahydin during the 1980s. The Taliban were,

after all, both ardently anti-communist and passionately anti-Iran/anti-China, positions

that some elements within the U.S. Government found highly appealing. (This at least

partly explains how, until just four months before the September 11th attacks,

Washington actually provided clandestine—and even some overt—financial support to

the Taliban regime.)149 Wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steve Coll: “In history’s

long inventory of surprise attacks, September 11th is distinguished in part by the role

played by intelligence agencies and informal secret networks in the preceding

events.”150 It was within the context of the Soviet fall, of the “cleansing” of Afghanistan,

of the rise of the Taliban, and of the preparation of a wide range of “Muslim freedom

movements” for the reclamation of Muslim lands, then, that many Deobandis celebrated

the collapse of the World Trade Center at the hands of bin Laden’s Al-Qaida.

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EPILOGUE

Be warned, you are not prepared for Afghanistan!

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF, 20091

To most Deobandis, the response of the Bush regime in Afghanistan to the Taliban’s

harboring of Osama bin Laden was repressive and brutal. Interestingly, for many

Barelvis—and many other Muslims, too, around the world—the initial US Government

response was a legitimate one, however frustrating—a justifiable reaction to a major

criminal act. The Barelvis, by and large, had neither supported the Afghan jyhad against

the Soviets in the 1980s nor the Taliban movement in the 1990s. As for the American

intrusion into Central Asia and Pakistan, the militant Deobandis had had it coming.

The Barelvis would actively campaign against the Taliban in Pakistan for years

afterward.

Meanwhile, Deobandis across the country protested Washington’s Afghan invasion.

After all, the Americans had teamed up with the Northern Alliance, many of whose

leaders had been pro-Soviet during the Russian occupation era. Indeed, men like

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General Muhammad Fahim and Rashid Dostum had been among that earlier conflicts’s

worst war criminals (not to mention their continued crimes against humanity after the

war had “ended”).2 These post-September 11th alliances with some of the most infamous

names connected to Afghanistan’s communist era fomented especial enmity among the

Deobandis of Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose blood had been spilt over the previous

decades against these very same individuals. To the Deobandis who had participated in

the 1980s jyhad, the American occupiers of Afghanistan were simply the Soviets

reincarnate. Perhaps Margolis’ description of the Soviet-American parallels clarifies

this attitude:

[The US Government-orchestrated] fixed elections [of 2004 and 2005]

underlined the unsettling similarities between the Soviet and American

occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979

citing internationalist duty and the need to fight Islamic terrorists.

Washington’s slogan was fighting terrorism and spreading democracy.

Both allied with the minority Tajiks and Uzbeks. Both were interested in

carving out a corridor to and from the Arabian Sea coast in Pakistan…

Both claimed they were fighting medievalist Islam, nation-building,

liberating women, and bringing the benefits of modern education and

democracy. Both claimed victory was just around the corner. …Suffice

it to say that once the US bested the USSR in the Cold War, and saw its

old enemy collapse, it lost little time in assuming the role and aggressive

behavior of the former Soviet Union…3

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It was clear to many Deobandis that the Americans—who had by now proven

themselves as interventionists and meddlers in the Muslim world for decades—were no

better than their Soviet predecessors in Afghan occupation. The Pathan/Deobandi

reaction to both invading forces had thus been consistent.

But as the war wore on, and it became evident that U.S. Government ambitions

extended beyond simply finding and punishing Osama bin Laden—as drone strikes

devastated villages in Pakistan, as American forces continued to occupy a Muslim

country, as a corrupt regime and its corrupt allies were propped up by Washington’s

guns, as Pakistan’s apparently weak-kneed leaders continued to bow to U.S. pressure,

and as the fruits of the invasion, including the militancy of the so-called “Pakistani

Taliban,” hit closer and closer to home—Barelvi opinion about the war changed. “By

2005,” wrote one journalist on the scene, “[the] consensus [was] that the US had taken

advantage of the 9/11 attacks to implement long-prepared plans to seize the Muslim

world’s energy wealth and establish new bases in its most strategic regions.”4 Whether

or not there was truth to this version of events, it was widely believed, and the Barelvi

religious leadership, while not supporting the Taliban, came to despise the United

States Government and its meddling ways.

In any case, the war would have a devastating effect on the Deobandi-Barelvi

rivalry, further militarizing the schism (and especially the Deobandi groups, who

happened to be the most operative along Pakistan’s border regions and within Pathan

Afghanistan). When jyhadis from Iraq came to Afghanistan to assist in the struggle

against perceived American neo-imperialism, they came armed with the knowledge

necessary to build roadside bombs, truck bombs, and suicide bomber vests—all devices

that were “previously unknown” in Afghanistan and Pakistan.5 Is it any wonder that

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Deobandi attacks on Barelvi processions or shrines from this period on were often

committed using just such devices? This was a new development in the rivalry, and it

had been brought on by the American war in Afghanistan. The rise of the “Pakistani

Taliban,” too, pitted what was considered a quasi-Deobandi force against the Pakistani

government, a conflict that the Barelvis utilized in order to demonstrate their own

reasonableness as compared to Deobandi “militarism” and “terrorism.” Here was an

opportunity to crush their long-time opponents—by branding them terrorists and using

the power of the state to finally bring them low. As such, Barelvi leaders railed against

“Pakistani Taliban” attacks on government forces as a Deobandi phenomenon, even as

many Deobandis wondered who, exactly, the “Pakistani Taliban” really were. “We

don’t know who they are,” one Deobandi Waziri physician told the author in 2012.

“They are foreigners.”6

In 2001, the focus of the Sunni Tehrik changed. The timing was not arbitrary, as it

was in that year that ST founder and director Muhammad Saleem Qadiri was

assassinated. Within months the organization became overtly political, organizing

itself as a full-fledged party and abruptly butting heads with Karachi’s heretofore most

dominant local party, the likewise Barelvi-dominated MQM. According to the ST itself,

between 2004 and 2006 alone some seventy-five of its members (one report calls them

“militants”) were killed in the politico-religious war that followed, the ST mostly

blaming the MQM and the Deobandis for its losses.7 These targeted killings soon

became mass killings—in particular with the execution of the deadly Nishtark Park

blast of April 2006. Now mass murder was the order of the day.

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This brings the reader, then, to the transformational event. Of course, it is perhaps

presumptuous of any historian to claim to have identified the “transformational” moment

in any years-long historical process, and there are, admittedly, many such

“transformational” points in time that one might justifiably point to as equally or more

important as regards the process at hand. In terms of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry and

the process of its militarization, one might point to the founding of the dar ul’alwm at

Deoband by Muhammad Qasim, or Ahmad Riza’s very specific 1902 juridical ruling

against Deobandism, or the formation of the JUH, or the organization of the AISC, or

the entrance of the JUI into Pakistani politics, or that of the JUP, or the phenomenon of

the Iranian Revolution, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or that of Washington, or

even the American invasion of Iraq—these could all vie as candidates for the

transformational moment within the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry’s evolution from

theological schism to violent contest. However, the Nishtar Park bombing was the first

mass killing of Barelvis by Deobandis, and it did seem to initiate a string of similar mass

killings over the years that followed it, suggesting that the rivalry had moved into a

new era in its development. Let us look closely, then, at the Nishtar Park bombing, and

see if it cannot shed additional light on the topic at hand.

The Suicide of Muhammad Siddiq: 11 April 2006.

On the evening of 11 April 2006, a nondescript man made his way through a

shoulder-to-shoulder mass of Barelvi celebrants in Nishtar Park, Karachi, and

approached the rickety wooden stage upon which the multitude’s spiritual leaders were

seated. Seconds later the C-4 strapped to the man’s chest exploded, propelling

thousands of ball bearings at bullet-like speed in every direction. Within moments the

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gruesome remains of almost sixty dead were scattered among the splintered vestiges of

the stage, the carnage underscored by the moaning of approximately one hundred and

fifty wounded. The bomber was publicly identified more than a year later by Pakistani

authorities; he was a village-born twenty-one-year-old named Muhammad Siddiq.

Most international news organizations would, in knee-jerk fashion, immediately

report the incident within the now-familiar Sunni-Shi’a framework. Even without

explicitly stating that the attack had likely been perpetrated by a Shi’i fanatic, this was

the implicit message; several paragraphs devoted strictly to the event narrative would

generally be followed by the statement of a Shi’a leader (like, for example, ’allamәħ

Hassan Turabi, who was subsequently assassinated himself by a Sunni Bangladeshi

three months later), placing the one in the context of the other.

Only a few scraps of information, loosed piecemeal by the government and police of

Pakistan (admittedly dubious sources at best), exist concerning Muhammad Siddiq.

Problematizing matters, a specific context to the man (and, particularly, his April 11th

actions) has been pre-constructed before the historian has had a chance to assemble one

of his own. It is within a similar vein that Guha, in that Subalternist classic “Chandra’s

Death,” notes that a critical condition of historiography is “contextuality”—a framework

that directs the historian in terms of the text at hand.8 Guha’s concern lay with

“fragmentation,” those anecdotes “with no known context [that have] come down to us

simply as the residuum of a dismembered past.” Might the scattered snippets about

Muhammad Siddiq be approached the same way? Though contextuality has already

been provided, it just may turn out that the “torn fabric” to which this event has been

linked is the wrong one. Contextuality must therefore be restored, as far as is possible,

to the fragments available, then work from this potentially new vantage point. In the

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process, it is hoped, the meaning behind the suicide of Muhammad Siddiq might be

revealed.

Perhaps the discourse of space-time provides an appropriate starting place. Of all

the places Muhammad Siddiq might have selected in which to end his life (not to

mention those of many others) he chose Karachi’s Nishtar Park, and of all the times he

might have selected, he chose 11 April 2006—or, perhaps more correctly, the 12th of

Rabi I 1427. According to Sunnis the world over, the 12th of Rabi I is the anniversary of

the birth of the Prophet (what South Asian Muslims call mwlyd, as aforementioned). As

previously noted, the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry revolves in large part around the two

school’s separate understanding of the “traditional” South Asian Islamic “rituals.”

Foremost among them is mwlyd, and the controversy of the holiday goes back to the

very beginning, to some of the first anti-Deobandi rulings of Ahmad Riza Khan and his

disciples.

From the initial emergence of debate between Barelvi and Deobandi adherents over

doctrine in the late nineteenth century, it has been the sects’ relative stance on the

attributes of the Prophet Muhammad that have most widened the divide, as noted. The

ritual of the Barelvis has compounded this doctrinal difference, particularly as they

celebrate the birth of the Prophet. Indeed, mwlyd is often marked as of the time of this

writing by processions in the streets, massive gatherings, the recitation of religious

poetry, prize-giving, sweets-giving, prayers, and feasting (in Pakistan the date is

marked as a public holiday, typically complete with speeches by high government

officials at both the national and provincial levels—and even the screening of films with

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“morale-building themes” in place of the “usual movies”),9 much of which is considered

“innovation” by Sunnis of the Deobandi persuasion. Several deadly clashes between

Deobandi and Barelvi groups have taken place on this significant date of the Islamic

calendar.

It is no wonder, then, that on this date Muhammad Siddiq carried out his deadly

attack.

II

According to the bomb disposal squad dispatched to the grisly scene at Nishtar

Park, the explosive used in the violence was of “the same type” used in earlier attacks—

in particular, on the ‘Ali Raza Mosque (31 May 2004; 23 killed, 37 injured) and on the

Haideri Mosque (7 May 2004; 26 killed, 98 injured).10 Both of these previous attacks

had likewise taken place in Karachi. But explosive type and location weren’t the only

elements tying these blasts together; by November 2004, Karachi authorities had

identified both the Haideri11 and ‘Ali Raza12 mosque attacks as having been perpetrated

by aforementioned Deobandi organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, by this time officially

banned in Pakistan. On 15 June 2007, the Sindh Home Department issued a statement

identifying Muhammad Siddiq as the Nishtar Park bomber and one “said to have had

links with the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.”13 This brings us back to the question of location.

Why did Muhammad Siddiq and his co-conspirators select Nishtar Park as the place to

carry out their attack? At first glace this seems obvious; a massive Barelvi gathering

was taking place there, one that would include much of the sect’s leadership. But

digging deeper, it seems clear that, in fact, the location’s significance goes beyond this.

The similar attack on ‘Ali Raza Mosque—the one that the bomb disposal team had

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identified as having employed “the same type” of explosive—had taken place less than

fifteen hundred feet away, just across Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah Road near the intersection

of Madina and Zainabla Roads. The Haideri Mosque is located not much further down

M. A. Jinnah Road, placing all three easily within the southwestern quadrant of Karachi,

between Saddar and Jamshed (parts of Karachi described as possessing many “sensitive

areas” revolving almost entirely around mosques).14 Thus Nishtar Park seems not only

convenient for Lashkar-e-Jhangvi elements on account of its being the venue of a major

Barelvi gathering, but possesses additional significance as falling within the radius of

what was apparently the killers’ “turf.”

The consequence of the perpetrators’ selection of Nishtar Park probably doesn’t go

beyond this—but it might. For Abdur Rab Nishtar (d. 1958 AD), after whom the park

was named, represented much that the Deobandi school had once abhorred: he was an

active and high-ranking Muslim Leaguer, a graduate of the modernist Muslim

University at Aligarh, and, some years after Partition, served as President of the

Pakistan Muslim League.15 Whether Muhammad Siddiq and his co-conspirators had

any of this in mind when Nishtar Park was named as the fateful site for their deadly plot

one will likely never know.

III

With apparent ties to the LeJ (described as “the most dreaded sectarian terrorist

outfit in Pakistan”),16 it behooves one to ask the question: what exactly is the LeJ—and

how might a young man allegedly hailing from an obscure village in the far

northeastern hill district of Mansehra have wound up in the southern port city of

Karachi connected to it? In an attempt to answer this double interrogative, it may be

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necessary to examine the beginnings of the Deobandi-Barelvi conflict, in full swing

many decades before Muhammad Siddiq was even born. Of course, that is one of the

main purposes of the present work; the reader has been introduced to the religious

thought of Shah Waliullah and the revivalism that it inspired, the founding of the dar

ul’alwm at Deoband, the Barelvi counter-reformation, the fәtwa wars of the early 1900s,

the early (pre-Partition) political battles between the two schools in the form of the

JUH-Congress alliance and the AISC call for Pakistan, the further politicization of the

JUI and the JUP within Pakistani politics, and the emergence of militant wings of the

two schools from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Already

discussed, too, has been the 1985 establishment of what would become the SSP by Haq

Nawaz Jhangvi and his companions and the emergence of its even more militant

offshoot, the LeJ. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, or “Jhangvi’s Army,” targeted both Shi’a

Muslims and Barelvis. In one of the group’s earlier operations, LeJ members attacked a

congregation of Shi’i in Lahore while the latter were in the act of prayer, slaughtering

thirty; the event sparked a violent response, a “Shi’a mob” numbering in the thousands

smashing cars, setting fire to buildings (including a provincial courthouse), and

attempting to storm the Pakistani parliament.17 It was to this “Deobandi” group—one

that the ISID had been using for years to push its own political agenda—that

Muhammad Siddiq allegedly attached himself sometime prior to April 2006.

Whatever the stimulus for the now-violent nature of the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry,

what had once been a schism among scholars had mutated over time into a bloody battle

between religious parties and their terrorist wings. The century-and-a-half

transformation of the Deobandi-Barelvi dynamic had seemingly swept up Muhammad

Siddiq in its current.

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IV

Four of Muhammad Siddiq’s alleged co-conspirators were arraigned on 4 May 2009:

Sultan Mahmood (also known as “Saifullah”), mufti Zakir Hussain Siddiqui,

Rehmatullah, and Muhammad Amin (also known as “Khalid Shaheen”); the last of these

was exonerated several months later “for want of evidence.”18 By early September 2009,

the other three—“Saifullah,” Zakir, and Rehmatullah—had been indicted (FIR 71/06)

by an anti-terrorism court. Such courts, known as “ATFs,” had been established in 1997

shortly after PML-N won its landslide (even historic) electoral victory. The idea was

that the ATFs would deter would-be terrorists since they represented the “promise” of

“speedy justice, unencumbered by the procedural niceties of the regular court system.”19

Three others, identified by police as Amanullah (also called “mufti Ilyas”), Qari Abid

Iqbal, and Khalid (also known as “Abrar”), are thought to have been involved in

masterminding the Nishtar Park attack but, as of the time of this writing, remain at

large.20 mufti Ilyas almost certainly acted as the leader of the group, with mufti Zakir as

a chief lieutenant.

Sultan’s 2007 testimony to police (if it is to be believed), combined with the latter’s

follow-up investigation, revealed several details about Muhammad Siddiq’s time in

Karachi, and especially the final hours leading up to his suicide. According to Siddiq’s

brothers (Shafi and Shafiq), Muhammad Siddiq had been “sent” to Karachi by his

“friends” (though these are left unidentified). He would have been about sixteeen years

old at the time of his arrival in the big city. His (Siddiq’s) goal, according to his

brothers, had been to get a job in Karachi, then to save up, “enabling him to marry

soon.”21 A tantalizing yet ultimately unanswerable question spurred by this

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information: did Muhammad Siddiq know who he was going to marry—or at least who

he would like to marry? Did he have plans for a specific life in place that did not include

suicide and murder? Whatever the answer, Siddiq moved to Karachi around 2002,

where he soon obtained employment at a religious bookstore in Saddar (south of

Nishtar Park). Later, he traded his job in Saddar for a similar one at a religious

bookstore near prominent Deobandi university Jamia Binoria (northwest of Nishtar

Park). It is highly possible that Muhammad Siddiq, up to this point, was engaged in the

very pursuits his brothers claimed for him: earning money in the city in order to

establish himself for marriage. Still, his choices of employment—both peddlars of

Islamic literature—suggest at least a leaning towards religion. Jamia Binoria, too,

besides being a sizable Deobandi university, had been the site of several Barelvi-

Deobandi clashes, including a 1999 incident involving a Sunni Tehrik procession that

engaged in stone-pelting against students of the university (though it is unclear who

“threw the first stone,” so to speak), escalating into the shooting deaths of at least two

individuals before police broke up the fight using batons and tear gas; perhaps not

incidentally, the clash took place during mwlyd celebrations.22

And then, for unknown reasons, Muhammad Siddiq abruptly left his place of

employment—and went to Afghanistan “to train in jihad.” Not surprisingly, this

decision would dramatically change the young man’s life, though just how dramatically

Siddiq may not have guessed. For it was in Afghanistan that Muhammad Siddiq met

Sultan. The two quickly became “close friends.” What Siddiq probably didn’t know, at

least at first, was that Sultan was a recruiter for Lashkar-e-Jhangvi whose task was to

“identify, prepare, and brainwash” suicide bomber prospects. When Muhammad Siddiq

returned to Karachi, he regained his job at the bookshop near Jamia Binoria, but Sultan

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returned with him. According to one of Siddiq’s friends (a co-worker at the bookshop),

Sultan would come to discuss “plans” with Muhammad Siddiq often. This continued

until that final fateful twenty-four hours, during which events passed, as far as the police

reports reveal, in the following sequence:

10 April [Evening] Sultan and Qari Abid Iqbal arrive at the

bookshop outside Jamia Binoria. After a “discussion” with

Muhammad Siddiq, all three drive away.

Sultan, Qari, and Muhammad Siddiq arrive at House No. 2,

Islamia Colony, Pahari Wali Gali, Qasba Colony, Orangi

(Karachi). This is the house of Rehmatullah. mufti Ilyas is

there as well, presumably along with mufti Zakir and Khalid

(“Abrar”).

11 April [Morning] The group eats at Rehmatullah’s house, after

which Muhammad Siddiq performs two voluntary prayers.

Muhammad Siddiq puts on an explosive jacket bearing

seven-eighths of a kilogram of explosives and three

thousand ball bearings.

[Late afternoon] Sultan and Khalid take Muhammad

Siddiq towards Nishtar Park via M. A. Jinnah Road. They

make the trip in a taxi, which stops on three separate

occasions at police checkpoints; each time it is allowed to

pass.

On or near Jinnah Road, the trio joins a rallying crowd on

its way to the mwlyd celebration.

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Sultan, Khalid, and Muhammad Siddiq remain at the gates

of the park (to avoid cameras), the former two “sheltering”

Muhammad Siddiq behind them.

mufti Zakir arrives at the park (on orders from mufti Ilyas)

to make sure his men are in position. Assured that all is in

place, mufti Zakir leaves.

The vehicle of Sunni Tehrik leader Abbas Qadiri enters the

park. Sultan and Khalid ask Muhammad Siddiq if he knows

who is in the car. Siddiq replies that he does.

[Just after sunset] Moments after Siddiq identifies Abbas

Qadiri’s vehicle, Sultan and Khalid leave Muhammad Siddiq

alone; their departure occurs just as the mәGryb prayer

begins.

The prayer ends. Muhammad Siddiq makes for the stage

and commits suicide.

IV

Mansehra is Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s easternmost district, bordering (Indian)

Kashmir on its eastern edges yet only one hundred miles or so, as the crow flies, from

Afghanistan to the west. The district has long been a venue for militant training camps

(including at least thirteen “major” facilities responsible for the training of “thousands” of

fighters), mostly connected to operations across the LoC into Kashmir. After

September 11th 2001, such activities were ostensibly curtailed by the Pakistani

government, but by 2005—the year before the Nishtar Park blast—the camps appeared

to be humming again, and this time they were alleged to be providing soldiers both for

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the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as the usual fight in Kashmir.23 It should be

remembered that such agitation, particularly in Kashmir, was nothing new; seventy

years before any planes struck the World Trade Center, the Deobandi-led Kashmir

Movement (1931) was launched not far from here. Deobandi activists (in particular

mwlana Ahmed ‘Ali) collected thousands of rupees during this period in order to carry

out jyhad in Kashmir (Ahmed ‘Ali would become president of the West Pakistan JUI in

1956). “Hence,” writes Tahir Kamran, the “Deobandi penchant for jihad in Kashmir has

a historical context.”24

But in the years leading up to the suicide of Muhammad Siddiq, this atmosphere of

aggression in Mansehra was compounded by the Barelvi-Deobandi contest. Not far to

the west, in Khyber Agency, the doctrinal disputes between two clerics—mufti Munir

Shakir (Deobandi) and pir Saifur Rahman (Barelvi)—had escalated into violence (mostly

perpetrated by the former). Both employed the use of illegal FM radio stations to

spread their rival theologies and denounce the other (not unlike their debating,

pamphlet- and book-producing forbears; it would seem, however, that in this case mufti

Munir Shakir spent less time discussing doctrine and more denigrating pir Saifur

Rahman). Such operations were widespread, as the growth of pirated FM stations

across the north attested as of late 2006 (when there were an estimated eighty-eight),

including two stations in Muhammad Siddiq’s own Mansehra District.25 In fact, just

two weeks prior to the attack on the Barelvis gathered at Nishtar Park, approximately

twenty-five people (mostly Barelvi) were killed and twenty-five injured in gun battles

after Deobandis (followers of mufti Munir Shakir) laid siege to a Barelvi (a follower of

pir Saifur Rahman) in the Khyber Agency.26 The event may have been the last major

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clash between Deobandi and Barelvi to be contemplated by Muhammad Siddiq before he

himself contributed to the conflict.

The violent struggle for Afghanistan and, especially, Indian Kashmir, combined

with the ever-present Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry, was thus almost certainly simply “part

of life” for Muhammad Siddiq from the time of his childhood—a state of affairs that

would, perhaps, have allowed for a level of desensitization to violent religious struggle,

whether against Indian or American soldiers or the followers of Barelvi clerics.

Muhammad Siddiq had at least three brothers. All were likewise named

Muhammad: Muhammad Shafi, Muhammad Shafiq (also identified as Shafiqur

Rahman),27 and Mohammed Rafiq. At least the first two (Shafi and Shafiq) maintained

their brother’s innocence and blamed the Sindh Home Department for falsely

implicating him in the Nishtar Park bombing case. A local paper, Mәhasyb (operating in

northeastern Pakistan), carried their appeal in mid-June 2007. The thrust of the

brothers’ petition, however, dealt not with Muhammad Siddiq but with their parents,

who had allegedly been taken by a “secret agency” to Karachi, where they were being

detained. “Our parents do not know anything about the Nishtar Park carnage,” Shafi

and Shafiq asserted, urging the president and Prime Minister of Pakistan to intervene

on their behalf.28

What is curious about the brothers’ appeal is the absence of the voice of Muhammad

Siddiq’s third brother, Rafiq. It was Rafiq, after all, who seems to have first gone

searching for his missing brother. On 25 May 2007, about a year and six weeks after

the Nishtar Park blast, Rafiq arrived in Karachi, according to his police statement.

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Rafiq went immediately to the small bookshop outside Jamia Binoria where his brother

had last been employed. Here he apparently met a man named Afzal—a friend of

Muhammad Siddiq’s. Rafiq asked Afzal where he might find his missing brother. Afzal

replied that he thought his brother might have been killed in the Nishtar Park blast.

Rafiq went straightway to the Soldier Bazaar police station, explained his situation, and

was shown a photo album of the carnage from 11 April; if his brother had been killed by

the blast, his remains would likely be visible inside. Sure enough, the album included a

photo of Muhammad Siddiq’s decapitated head, resting on a pillow; Rafiq recognized his

brother, despite the fact that a part of the latter’s face, blown off in the blast, was held in

place only by a piece of string.29 Rafiq’s DNA was subsequently tested at the Dr. A. Q.

Khan Lab in order to confirm his familial relationship to the alleged attacker. It appears

that Rafiq’s arrival at the Soldier Bazaar police station precipitated the Sindh Home

Department’s announcement, released just two weeks later, identifying Muhammad

Siddiq as the Nishtark Park bomber. Muhammad Siddiq’s head was handed over to

Rafiq. Rafiq opted not to carry the head home to Mansehra; “it would not be good for

the family,” he told police. He buried it instead at the Edhi graveyard “at Mochko”

(assumedly Mowach Goth).30 The graveyard, owned and operated by the Edhi

Foundation (a well-known non-profit social welfare program in Pakistan), had, as of

February 2010, acted as the final resting place for almost three thousand unidentified

bodies.31 The remains of Muhammad Siddiq are now numbered among them.

Muhammad Siddiq’s parents survived him, his father identified in June of 2007 as

one “Mr. Israel” and his mother as “Zewar Jan.” Both were taken into some sort of

government custody within days of Muhammad Siddiq’s identification as the Nishtar

Park assailant. The SAG’s allegation that the ISID had been inciting Deobandi groups

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to violence against Barelvi ones seems buoyed by the claim of Shafiq and Shafi that a

“secret agency” had taken their parents away—and further shored up by their claim that

they were being “threatened” over the phone. Evidently, too, an “anonymous caller” had

ordered them not to disclose the fact that their parents had been arrested from their

home village area.32

Muhammad Siddiq also had two sisters: Safia and Soba Jan.

VI

One newspaper headline succinctly summed up the likely target of Muhammad

Siddiq’s suicide attack: TOP LEADERSHIP OF THE SUNNI TEHRIK WIPED OUT. This was

no exaggeration; the dead included

- ST chief Muhammad Abbas Qadiri (whose car Muhammad Siddiq was

asked by his co-conspirators to identify when it entered the park, just

before the two left Siddiq on his own; Qadiri’s arrival was thus the signal

that the attack could move forward, implying that he was the primary

target);

- Iftikhar Ahmad Bhatti, a founding leader of the Sunni Tehrik;

- Ikram Qadiri, another Sunni Tehrik founder;

- Dr. Abdul Qadir Abbasi, a member of the Sunni Tehrik’s “legal aid

committee”;33

- and dozens of other Sunni Tehrik members.

Prominent figures from other Barelvi parties were likewise murdered in the incident,

including:

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- Muhammad Taqi, a former government official, former head of the JUP

in Karachi, and a member of the (Barelvi) Markazi Jamiat-e-Pakistan

party;

- Qari Mukhtar Qadiri, of the (Barelvi) dar ul’alwm Amjadia in Karachi;

- Muhammad Hanif Billo, a prominent businessman and president of the

Tehrik Awam Ahl-e-Sunnat, a Barelvi party;

- and Faridul Hasnain Kazmi of the Jama’at Ahl-e-Sunnat, a large Barelvi

religious organization; it was this group that had organized the Nishtar

Park mwlyd celebrations.

The statement released by the Sindh Home Department on 15 June 2007, however,

asserted that “the motive of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi behind committing this offence [the

Nishtar Park bombing] was to create unrest and a law and order situation in Sindh in

order to avenge the present government’s policy against religious extremism” (italics added).34

A brief glance at Muhammad Siddiq’s victim list makes it clear, however, that despite

what the Sindh Home Department might claim, this was almost certainly a clear-cut

case of Deobandi-Barelvi sectarianism, even if a side motive might have been served in

the process.

VII

Sometime between the old debating days of Ahmad Riza Khan and the carnage of

Nishtar Park, Deobandi-Barelvi articulations of power underwent a transformation.

Metcalf identifies an early Deobandi sense of әxlaq, or “civility characteristic of

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respectable people,” as a check on intolerance—preventing, for example, the Deobandis

in Muhammad Qasim’s day from denying others of being Muslim despite doctrinal and

ritual disagreements (though, admittedly, this did not seem to have applied to the

Shi’a).35 әxlaq was a foundational concept within Islam, and had been from the

beginning; according to one hәdis (narrated by Osama bin Sharik), the Prophet

explained that the “dearest” of all “Allah’s slaves” is the “One who has the best moral

character [әxlaq].” Another hәdis (narrated by Abdullah ibn Amr) presents the Prophet

explaining that “the most likeable person to me…who will be the nearest to me on the

Day of Judgment” is “he among you who has the best moral character [әxlaq].”36 For

those of the Sufi tradition, in particular, әxlaq was considered paramount; many Sufis

during the period of its genesis literally defined Sufism as әxlaq, including Abu al-

Husayn al-Nuri (d. 908) and Muhammad ibn ‘Ali al-Kattani (d. 838).37 An “English-

Hindustani” dictionary published in the 1880s (the formative period of both the Barelvi

and Deobandi movements) translated “morality” (defined as “the rule which teaches us

to live soberly and honestly”) as әxlaq.38 It is important to note that both the spiritual

masters of the Deobandi tradition and those recognized as the Barelvi guiding lights

were also practitioners of Sufism, though this is rarely acknowledged as far as the

Deobandis are concerned (certainly in comparison to their Barelvi counterparts).

Perhaps this buoys up Metcalf’s assertion that әxlaq may have played a significant role

in maintaining a semblance of tolerance (and preventing outright violence) between the

rival Sunni groups.

The formative periods of both the Barelvi and Deobandi movements took place

during the peak of British power on the subcontinent, thereby providing both sects with

some form of a common enemy. Neither group engaged in politics for itself but rather

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as subsumed parts of larger independence and/or nationalist efforts. Indeed, it wasn’t

until Deobandi and Barelvi groups entered politics within the framework of the

Pakistani state (and money and political power were on the line) that әxlaq appears to

have been knocked off of its pedestal. Concurrently with this development came the

dramatic increase, from the 1970s onwards, of a more Saudi version of Islam—one that

rejected Sufism and, perhaps along with it, the exalted place which that strain of the

faith reserved for әxlaq. Years of desensitization to war, fueled by Russian and

American (and Indian) incursions and funded by Pakistani, Saudi, and American (and

Indian) intelligence agencies, also doubtless played a role in removing the barrier to

certain social behaviors that had previously been thrown up by әxlaq.

The mushrooming of mәdarys in Pakistan brought about by government support

(“or exploitation,” in the words of Cohen, and it appears that the SAG would agree)—

from around two hundred fifty at the time of Partition to almost three thousand in 1987

to between ten and forty-five thousand by the mid-2000s—produced, perhaps not

surprisingly, a considerable surplus of Muslim scholars, clerics, and teachers, a

“religious lumpenproletariat” of mostly young men who may have found it difficult to

secure employment in the world outside the mәdrәsәħ.39 It isn’t unlikely that young

Muhammad Siddiq himself met this description—an erstwhile student in a Deobandi

mәdrәsәħ, a recent graduate perhaps, yet unable to secure meaningful employment

beyond a junior position at a bookshop. Devoid of a foreseeable future as a scholar and

well-versed in sectarian vitriol, Muhammad Siddiq may have been targeted as an ideal

recruit for the LeJ.

By the time Muhammad Siddiq approached Nishtar Park, minutes before his death,

әxlaq was likely the last thing on his mind.

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The Rivalry Continues.

The April 2006 Nishtar Park bombing—almost certainly a high-collateral

assassination effort targeting Abbas Qadiri—sparked outrage among Barelvis in

Karachi and across Pakistan. It also cast a negative light on Deobandism throughout

the country, buoyed up a year later by the Lal Masjid incident—during which

Deobandis seeking the enforcement of shәri’at in Islamabad refused to vacate a school

and mosque, resulting in the storming of the facility by government forces. Despite the

disavowal by Deobandi religious leaders of the Lal Masjid movement, the incident

exacerbated Barelvi fears of an increasingly militant Deobandism and seemed to

legitimize Barelvi claims of the same.

Barelvis had political cause to worry, too. Though the JUP had allied with other

Muslim political parties—finally; it had only taken half a century for such an alliance to

emerge—it had continued its decline in terms of national influence. The JUI, on the

other hand, had skyrocketed into prominence. Formed in the run-up to the 2002

general elections, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal Pakistan (or MMA) included both the

JUI and the JUP, as well as the JI, the Shi’a Tehrik-e-Jafaria Pakistan, and the Jamiat

Ahl-e-Hadith. With the religious parties finally forming a united front, the MMA won

a large portion of the vote—indeed, the greatest electoral victory for the ‘alәma parties

since Pakistan’s birth. All told, the MMA obtained a whopping sixty-three seats in the

National Assembly. (The Barelvi-dominated MQM managed seventeen.) But of the

five parties that formed the alliance, the JUI emerged as by far the most powerful,

especially since JUI (F) candidates alone had garnered forty-one of the MMA’s sixty-

three seats. This, coupled with the party’s twenty-nine provincial assembly seats in the

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NWFP (MMA seats in the province totaled forty-eight) propelled Fazlur Rehman to

the Leader of the Opposition position in 2004, a post he held until 2007.

But the MMA experienced a rapid drop in popularity after its declaration of “loyal

opposition” (as opposed to outright opposition) to the Musharraf regime, at a time when

Pervez Musharraf was losing supporters on all sides. The declaration was made despite

the MMA’s official stance against Pakistan’s participation in the U.S. Government-led

“War on Terror.” But by mid-2007, even the MMA could sense Musharraf’s impending

fall, issuing a call (together with the PPP and the PML-N) for the President’s

resignation. In November 2007, Musharraf declared a state of emergency, pushing

elections back “indefinitely.” For a time it seemed that the old pattern of military

dictators delaying elections, perfected by Zia ul-Haq, had returned to Pakistan. But a

few days later, and perhaps to Musharraf’s credit, elections were announced for January

2008 (later pushed back to February after the killing of Benazir Bhutto). Meanwhile,

the MMA broke up before the election took place (2008), and the JUI managed to win

only seven seats (compared to the JUP’s zero). The MQM garnered twenty-five seats.

The big players in the 2008 contest were the Pakistan People’s Party, now led by

Yousaf Raza Gillani (after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto earlier that year), and the

PML-N, led by Nisar Ali Khan—both outright opposition parties to the increasingly

unpopular Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf’s own Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-

Azam) had come in a distant third. The religious parties, it seemed, had thrown away

their chance to be politically dominant.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Government-led war in Afghanistan continued to aggravate

the Deobandi-Barelvi schism. The Barelvis used the conflict, and the “terrorism” brand,

to continue its attack on Deobandism’s image. In 2009, Pakistani Foreign Minister and

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Barelvi Shah Mehmood Qureshi (who also happened to be the spiritual custodian of one

of Pakistan’s most significant shrines—that of Shah Rukn-e-Alam, in Multan) told a

large crowd gathered at the tomb, “The Sunni Tehreek has decided to activate itself

against Talibanisation in the country. A national consensus against terrorism is

emerging across the country.”40 Just days later, the Sunni Tehrik—in league with

several other Barelvi organizations including the JUP, the Jama’at Ahl-e-Sunnat, the

A’almi Tanzim Ahl-e-Sunnat, the Karawan-e-Islam, the Markazi Jama’at Ahl-e-Sunnat,

the Markazi JUP, and the Nizam-e-Mustapha Party—launched the Sunni Ittehad

Council (SIC), an explicitly anti-Taliban alliance. The JUP spoke out, too, against the

peace agreement that the Pakistani government had chalked out with the Tehrik-e-

Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM)—a “Pakistani Taliban” group—that paved the

way for the implementation of the TNSM’s version of shәri’at over the Malakand region

of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.41 The Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry was to be played out in the

context of the Taliban and international “terrorism.” Opined one Pakistani newspaper

around the same time that the SIC was born: “The Taliban are not the distant upholders

of true Islam in Kabul being pulverised by the Americans after 2001. They are militants

who use terror to subjugate communities, kill innocent Muslims through suicide-

bombing, and want to replace democracy with a despotic order.” Whatever the initial

Barelvi reaction to the American invasion to the west, the school’s proponents now

protested vociferously against it—and, more importantly, against the Taliban, too.

Once they might have been described as mere spectators. Not so now. In addition, the

Barelvi-dominated MQM joined the fray against the Deobandi-dominated Taliban. “A

highly disciplined political entity, the MQM has resolved to stand up to them,” the same

newspaper reported. “It may come to regard the Barelvi school of thought as its

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ideological base because most of its cadres are old followers of the great Barelvi leader,

Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani of the Jamiat-e Ulema-e Pakistan.”42

Even with the formation of the SIC and the MQM’s anti-Taliban declaration,

Barelvis and Deobandis temporarily united (at least in the old form of “separate unity”)

from around November 2010 to mid-2011 to rally against anti-blasphemy law reform.

This was, of course, typical of both schools, in light of similar “alliances” against

perceived government intrusion into the ‘alәma’s purview that had occurred from the

time of Pakistan’s birth. Anti-Taliban rhetoric from the Barelvi camp (most

conspicuously in the form of the JUP and the SIC, of which the former was a part)

noticeably died down during this period. “We had seen the Barelvis getting ready to

organize a campaign against the Taliban,” observed analyst Nasim Zehra, “but they got

sidetracked by the blasphemy issue and this was forgotten.”43 Of course, the Barelvi-

instigated assassination of Salman Taseer, mentioned previously, was tied up in the

matter. The JUP’s Fazal Karim did not mince words, stating plainly that the proposed

change in the laws were meant merely to placate Westerners; “We will not allow it,” he

said.44 At the same time, JUI-F senator mwlana Sherani opposed legislation dealing

with domestic violence, claiming that it was “not a major issue in Pakistan until

women’s rights groups appeared.” Passage of the law would “promote Western culture

in the Islamic state,” Fazlur Rehman said, and the JUI would fight it “tooth and nail.”45

Both the Barelvis and the Deobandis, too, strongly opposed U.S. Government drone

strikes in Pakistan.

As of this writing, the direct violence between Deobandi and Barelvi had not abated

either. In February 2010, gunmen from the SSP and affiliated groups attacked Barelvis

celebrating mwlyd in Faisalabad and Dera Ismail Khan, prompting a retaliatory attack

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by the crowd on a Deobandi mәdrәsәħ.46 In July of that year, scores of Barelvis were

killed—and much of the country outraged—when an SSP bomb detonated in the Data

Durbar shrine in Lahore.47 But that same month, local Barelvi leader and Dawat-e-

Islami activist Abdus Sattar justified the “severe beating” of a local father of five (a

forty-five-year old named Faryad) on the grounds that the man had committed

blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad; “Due to this indecent and blasphemous

utterance and adamance of the accused,” Abdus Sattar explained, “we [the residents of

the town of Marzi Pura neighborhood of Khanewal, northeast of Multan] decided to

teach him a lesson and thrash him.”48 The same justifcation would be used by Barelvi

leaders in early 2011, when Punjab governor Salman Taseer (who wanted to tone down

Pakistan’s anti-blasphmeny laws) was murdered by one of his Barelvi bodyguards, as

aforementioned; clerics subsequently forbade their followers from uttering funeral

prayers for the slain politician and hailed his murderer as a national hero. In late June

2011, perhaps as a Deobandi reaction to the joint SIC-MQM resolution to resist

Pakistan’s “Talibanization,” a “kill list” began circulating in Karachi targeting Dawat-e-

Islami head Muhammad Ilyas Qadiri, the heavily Barelvi MQM leadership, at least one

Shi’a cleric, and several anti-SSP police officers; those named, the list explained, had

insincerely labeled honest jyhadis “terrorists” while ignoring real criminals like thieves

and murderers.49 Dawat-e-Islami leaders had been targeted before, of course; indeed,

just four months before the list began circulating, thousands of “angry activists” from

the Barelvi proselytizing group had marched along Karachi’s streets, firing guns into

the air, burning tires, and forcing shops to close down and people to remain “confined to

their homes”—all in protest of the killing of a Barelvi ymam (and Dawat-e-Islami

member) on 19 February.50

  510 
  

Barelvi mobilization had its consequences, too. The Pakistani government (in the

form, perhaps not surprisingly, of its largely Deobandi-leaning intelligence agencies)

began to publicly crack down on Barelvi activities in September of 2011 when military

authorities decided to “curtail the activities” of the Dawat-e-Islami (now claiming to be

active in almost seventy countries worldwide), particularly in reference to the Barelvi

organization’s missionary efforts within the ranks of the armed forces themselves. The

group was reported to have been so successful in gaining followers from within the

military that the Dawat-e-Islami’s “key source of funding,” by 2011, came from this

unique section of its membership (more than twenty million rupees were collected from

the Pakistan Air Force alone—and that just during the month of Ramadan/August).

Intelligence agencies warned the military that the Dawat’s “growing influence” would

have “serious implications,” despite the group’s official “apolitical” stance. Evidently,

some within the Pakistani government had been reassessing the influence of ostensibly

non-violent preaching groups like the Dawat-e-Islami ever since the assassination of

Salman Taseer. Indeed, the Barelvi bodyguard who had killed Taseer, a twenty-six-

year-old from Rawalpindi who had been working for the police since 2002, was himself

“believed to be a follower of Dawat-e-Islami.”51 During “interrogations,” the

bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadiri, even admitted that “Qadiri” was not actually his last

name—but that he had adopted it out of devotion to the Dawat-e-Islami founder,

Muhammad Ilyas Qadiri.52 He would later confess to having been inspired to carry out

the killing after listening to “the speeches of Hanif Qureshi,” a Barelvi cleric and Dawat-

e-Islami leader.53 To many Barelvis, however, the government’s move to scrutinize the

Dawat-e-Islami was just another example (in a long train of abuses) of official patronage

reserved for Deobandis over the Barelvi majority; even police officials connected to the

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case, after all, had admitted that “no suspected militant out of the 150 arrested from the

suburbs of the capital belongs to this religious party [the Dawat-e-Islami].”54

It should be noted here, towards the end of this work, that, outside of clerical and

political circles (or militant jyhadi ones), the typical Deobandi-Barelvi dynamic is more

subdued, and varies generally from place to place. In much of India, for example, the

rivalry is mostly a scholarly one, barely manifested in the everyday lives of lay Muslims

of either stripe (of course, it flares up from time to time as a political issue when matters

of government largesse are concerned). The general feeling of the “everyday”

Deobandi or Barelvi (at least in the experience of the author, having “mixed and

mingled” with Deobandis and Barelvis at various levels on three continents over seven

years as of this writing) might best be summed up in the words of a Kashmiri refugee in

Lahore named Anjum. Anjum’s father had fled the cool valley of Srinagar amidst the

“massacres” that accompanied Partition and the initiation of Indian Government rule

there; thus Anjum had been born on the sweltering Punjabi plains. Asked what his

feelings were about the Deobandi-Barelvi rivalry, he explained, “I just want to follow

the Qur’an and the sunnәt. There are no sects in the Qur’an—all are one.” Rather than

shine a light on the schism, he had laid emphasis on the faith’s original purity as well as

its ideal of a unified ummәt. Pressed further, however, Anjum admitted cautiously,

“Some ‘alәma have added a few things to the religion that were not there in the

Prophet’s time. This is not good.” This was, of course, a clear reference to the Barelvi

scholars and pirs.

“So you are a Deobandi, then?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered quietly, seemingly uncomfortable affirming that such a division

  512 
  

existed within the ummәt at all. Most Kashmiri Muslims lean Deobandi, he informed

me. Thus Anjum’s inclination was one of toleration, despite his feelings—even strong

feelings—against the alleged “accretions” espoused by the Barelvis of the subcontinent.

His initial answer to the question of Deobandi-Barelvi animosity had been conciliatory.

“I would pray behind a Deobandi or a Barelvi,” he had assured me.55

On a visit to Junagadh in Gujarat, hundreds of miles away from Anjum in Lahore,

two Muslim men in their twenties who had previously approached the author and

initiated a conversation admitted that they did not belong to the same sect. “I am

Deobandi, he is Barelvi,” one of them said, motioning to the other. “But we are both

Muslims.” And best friends, at that.

Anjum’s attitude, like that of the Gujarati pair, seems generally representative, in

the author’s experience, of the vast majority of Indian Sunnis vis-à-vis their “Others”—

whether that Other carries a Deobandi or Barelvi distinction. Perhaps it has been so

since the schism first materialized in the late nineteenth century.

From the days of Islam’s first generation, divisions have plagued the faith—schisms

that were serious enough to bring about the bloody murder of caliphs and the

fragmenting of nations. In this sense, the Deobandi-Barelvi divide is nothing new. The

differences between the great schism of today and the ones of ages past are in large

degree tied up in the development, from the late nineteenth century, of the modern

“total state” and its underpinning political philosophy: statism. Among Western states,

at least, this development was occurring rapidly from the first few decades of the British

Raj period (i.e. post-1857), and the nationalist and/or separatist movements that grew

up in India were nurtured by these Western ideas of political organization and

  513 
  

philosophy. Both Nehru’s INC and Jinnah’s AIML operated like formal British activist

organizations, and each sought to establish strong, “modern” states on the

subcontinent—the former advocating for a socialist system, the latter a republican one.

The JUH (born of a tradition that had already assumed the British educational model)

adopted these same forms, as did (to a lesser extent) the AISC. With the establishment

of Pakistan, both groups worked within the new, “modern” system fashioned after the

western model, first as “influencer” parties and later as full-fledged political parties.

Despite constitutions ostensibly meant to curb the activities of central and provincial

regimes (and despite Jinnah’s original dream of a truly federal system), the scope of the

(central) government (following the example of Western states) was assumed to be

virtually unbounded, and as such presidents and ministers and elected representatives

(and dictators) were free to craft legislation of broad scope, creating departments and

bureaucracies and agencies and offices touching upon almost all aspects of life. The

rulings of government were, of course, enforced by violence or the threat of violence.

At the same time, the government collected vast sums in taxes (of a wide variety),

borrowed more and more money to fund its activities (and expansion), and printed (from

the early 1970s, completely fiat) money when needed, increasing its scope (and ability

to, among other things, wage war) even more—and attracting thousands of partisans,

lobbyists, and activists.

This all-encompassing patronistic kind of system (i.e. the total state) engendered

competition between the Deobandi and Barelvi schools for money and power on a scale

never seen before on the subcontinent. True, religious scholars and pirs had been

granted salaries or land in the past by sultans and princes, but this had been a patron

relationship between a ruler and various individuals (indeed, a mere handful, relatively

  514 
  

speaking). But the modern, near-total state essentially transformed the Deobandi and

Barelvi schools into enormous, religio-political lobby groups, each vying for a piece of

the colossal government “pie”—and the guns and patronage that such benefaction

brought with it; this was no association between a patron and a scholar but rather one of

massive government and massive interest group. (Looming at the edge of possibility,

too, was the notion of one or the other school actually taking over the reigns of the state

as direct controllers.) This contest over the “pie” combined with both direct

government manipulation of religious parties for militant ends (as in Kashmir and

Bangladesh) and prolongued, brutal persecution of religious parties (as during the Z. A.

Bhutto years) to initiate a militarization of said groups that would culminate from the

1980s onward. Thus, with the entrance of both sides into the “modern” (i.e. total)

political structure of the Pakistani state (and the contests for power and money inherent

therein), a phenomenon that had once been simply a doctrinal division between religious

schools had transformed into a fierce political rivalry between powerful religious

parties. Indeed, as the struggle for political power became the central focus of the

‘alәma parties as seemingly the only means of implementing an Islamic order, their

leaders came to regard their respective co-religionists “as landlords do their

constituencies, as political jagirs [fiefdoms],” in turn resulting in an emphasis by said

leaders on the differences between the various Sunni schools.56

At the same time, the concept of an “Islamic state” was shoved roughshod into the

modern, total-state structure, transforming the shәri’at system into one of all-

encompassing coercion and compulsion. To the ‘alәma (if not for the pirs, for whom the

issue is far more complex), the totalitarian doctrine that lies at the heart of “modern”

state ideology (specifically, to quote Mises, “that the rulers are wiser and loftier than

  515 
  

their subjects and that they therefore know better what benefits those ruled than they

themselves”) seemed nicely suited to their own political philosophy. As an all-

encompassing social, political, and religious system, Islam (according to this ‘alәma-led

view) must be entrenched into the very bedrock of the state system, its injunctions

given the power of state legislation, and its enforcement backed up by the guns of

government. Past systems had allowed for such integration before, but the

decentralized nature of the old state, the traditional restrictions on its domain, and the

individual-to-individual character of ‘alәma-ruler patronage largely mitigated its effects.

The emergence of the modern “total state” presented a prize over which the ‘alәma

parties and their partisans would fight more intensely than before.

But the influence of the total state on the transformation of the Deobandi-Barelvi

rivalry didn’t end with the organization of the JUH or the JUI or the AISC, or with the

birth and development of Pakistan. Perhaps the most “total” total state yet seen in

human history, that of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, invaded and occupied

Afghanistan in the 1980s, while other near-total states intervened, too—including the

Iranian, Indian, Saudi, American, and Pakistani governments, each projecting power

through proxy fighters and funding their efforts via mostly fiat printed or borrowed

cash (made especially possible after Nixon’s 1971 closure of the gold window, though in

progress for years). The effect of these foreign interventions on the rivalry in question

was immeasurable. The interventions armed and trained thousands of mujahydin, thus

militarizing a segment of the Deobandis. They funded the mushrooming of (mostly

Deobandi) mәdarys, stimulating later, reactionary growth among Barelvis in this same

sphere. They allowed for the centrally planned influx of thousands of Wahhabi

preachers from the Gulf. They stimulated the illegal drug trade. They stimulated the

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illegal gun trade. They inadvertently led to the birth of Barelvi reactionary outfits like

the Sunni Tehrik, and even of the MQM. They buoyed up Pakistani dictators. They

patronized one school at the expense of the other. Their interventions in other parts of

the Muslim world galvanized members of one school or the other (or both). They led

directly to the arrival of foreigners—Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, others—trained in the

use of such weapons as the improvised explosive device and the suicide bomb jacket

(hitherto unheard of in Pakistan). In short they armed, funded, and provoked

Deobandis and Barelvis alike over the course of several decades.

Perhaps it is no wonder that the above-described, intervention-led transformation

came to characterize the Deobandis’ and Barelvis’ long-standing rivalry—already

politicized by the Pakistani state—with one another. Thus within the context of the

rise of total statism, to quote Eric Foner (writing about a different “tragic irony of

history”), “each side fought to defend a distinct vision of the good society, but each

vision was destroyed by the very struggle to preserve it.”57

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Glossary

әhl-e-sunnәt : denoting the “people [who follow] the sayings and deeds of Muhammad”

әmir : title of a military head or political leader, whose secular leadership was to be

augmented by the spiritual guidance of an ymam; often Romanized as “Amir” or

“Emir”

әmir ul-mwmynin : “Commander of the Faithful,” a title bestowed both upon proto-

Deobandi jyhadi Sayyid Ahmad of Raebareli and Deobandi-trained Taliban chief

mullah Muhammad Omar

‘alәma : pl.; see ‘alym

’allamәħ : one who is learned/educated

‘alym (plural: ‘alәma) : a religious scholar

bi’at : allegiance or fealty; a covenant between Sufi shix and disciple

but pәrәst : one who worships idols (but = “Buddha”)

but shykәn : one who destroys idols

byd’at : (forbidden) religious innovation

bynnwt : a South Asian martial art form

dәrgaħ : the burial site and shrine of a Sufi pir

dәrs-e-nyžami : the traditional curriculum featured in most South Asian Islamic

seminaries, developed after the decline of Muslim power by the scholars of Farangi

Mahall

dar ul’alwm : a “house of learning,” or a religious university, considered superior to a

mәdrәsәħ

  518 
  

dar ul-hәrb : “house of war,” denoting a geographical area in which Muslims are not free

to practice their religion

dar ul-yfta : department within a seminary that issues juridical rulings, or fәtawa

dar ul-yslam : “house of Islam,” denoting a geographical area in which Muslims are free

to practice their religion

fәqir : a holy man

fәtawa : pl.; see fәtwa

fәtwa (plural: fәtawa) : a juridical ruling, typically composed by a mufti

fyqħ : Islamic law tradition (not unlike the western term “case law”)

gwrdwara : a Sikh temple and place of worship

hәj : the journey to Mecca mandated to all Muslims

haji : one who has completed the hәj

hәżrәt : a title of respect for one who is especially learned and pious

hәdis : a tradition of the Prophet related by someone who witnessed it firsthand; each

hәdis possesses a chain of authority indicating its trustworthiness or lack thereof

hәram : denoting something that is forbidden by Islamic law

hafyž : one who has memorized the Qur’an in its entirety

hyjrәt : migration, denoting a migration from a “house of war” to a “house of Islam,” as

the first Muslims did in leaving Mecca for Yathrib (Medina)

hysba : “verification,” denoting the concept of regulating an Islamic order, including the

moral behavior of its members

jәm’aiәt : organization or party

  519 
  

jәm’aiәt ‘alәma-e-hynd : “Organization of Indian Islamic Scholars,” a Deobandi-

dominated party that mostly supported the Indian National Congress and

“composite nationalism”

jәm’aiәt ul-әnsar : “Organization of Helpers,” organized by Mahmud Hasan and run by

Obaidullah Sindhi as a network of Deobandi students and alumni who might be

called upon to politically or otherwise support the Deobandi leadership in times of

need

jyhad : struggle, or “holy war,” either denoting an internal struggle for personal purity

or an external struggle against a physical enemy

jyziәħ : a tax on non-Muslims, ostensibly to pay their exemption from military service

kәlymәħ : the basic Muslims statement of faith (“There is no God but God and

Muhammad is his Prophet”)

kafyr (plural: kuffar) : an unbeliever

kufәr : unbelief

kuffar : pl.; see kafyr

mәdarys : pl.; see mәdrәsәħ

mәdrәsәħ (plural: mәdarys) : a religious seminary, larger than a simple mәktәb but a step

below a full-fledged dar ul’alwm

mәGryb : denoting the fourth of five daily prayers, undertaken just after sunset

mәjlys-e-shwra : an advisory council; in Pakistan: Parliament

mәktәb : an elementary-level religious seminary or school

mәnqwlat : denoting the traditional Islamic disciplines, including commentaries (tәfsir)

on the Qur’an, the apostolic traditions (hәdis), and jurisprudence (fyqħ)

  520 
  

mәqwlat : denoting the rational disciplines, including instruction in grammar, logic,

philosophy, rhetoric, mathematics, and astronomy

mәsәlәħ ymkan-e-kәźb : the possibility that God can tell a lie

mәshayx : pl.; see shix

mәslәk : educational track

mәsjyd : mosque

mufti : one who is trained in fyqħ and fәtawa-writing

muhajyr : an immigrant; especially applied after 1947 AD to Urdu-speaking immigrants

from north-central India who settled in and around Karachi after Partition

muhajyrwn : “emigrants,” originally denoting those who emigrated from Mecca to

Medina with Muhammad, but today often applied to those who emigrated to

Pakistan (and particularly Karachi) from (mostly north-central) India during and

after Partition.

mujәddyd : a title conferred on one who is considered the “renewer” of the faith for a

given Hijri century

murid : the disciple of a shix

murshyd : a Sufi guide or teacher

musәwәt-e-muhәmmәd : “equality of Muhammad,” a term used by the PPP in place of the

word “socialism”

muttәhydәħ qwmiәt : “composite [or “united”] nationalism,” the idea that South Asian

Muslims could be (indeed, were) both “Indian” and “Muslim” at the same time

mwlyd : a term denoting the birthday of the Prophet

  521 
  

mysәl : in the context of this work, one of several sovereign states within the Sikh

Confederacy (early to late eighteenth century AD/early twelfth to early thirteenth

century AH).

n’at : poetic composition praising the Prophet Muhammad

nәdwәt : denoting a group of Muslim scholars who established a religious school in

Lucknow and who considered themselves heirs to the Shah Waliullahi tradition

nwr-e-muhәmmәdi : the concept of Muhammad as pure light, or a “being with his own

natural light”

nyzam-e-mustafa : “system of the Prophet,” denoting an Islamic socio-political order

according to the revelations, teachings, and personal example of Muhammad

piGәmbәr : “messenger,” denoting the Prophet as God’s Messenger

purdәħ : the covering of women before the eyes of men

qәSbәħ : a “Muslim city,” typically a small town connected by patronage or familial ties

(at least at some point) to the royal court at Delhi

qayd-i-ә‘ažәm : “Great Leader,” a title reserved for Pakistani founder Muhammad ‘Ali

Jinnah

qari (plural: qurra) : a reciter of the Qur’an

qazi : a judge

qazi-e-mәmalyk : Chief Judge

qiamәt : the resurrection (of the dead). CHECK

qurra : pl.; see qari

rashydin (or rashydwn) : denoting the first four (or “rightly-guided”) caliphs after

Muhammad; often Romanized as “Rashidun”

Sәdәr ul-Sudwr : a title for the head of the Department of Religion

  522 
  

sәtyagrәhә : “soul-force,”

sәyyid : a descendent of the Prophet

shәhid : a martyr

shәri’at : Islamic law

shaħәnshaħ : “king of kings”

shix (plural: mәshayx) : a Sufi saint, or pir; can also denote, simply, “great man”

shuddhikәrәn : an ancient rite that came to symbolize the early 1900s AD Arya Samajist

effort to “reconvert” Muslims and others back to Hinduism and to prevent the

conversion of Hindus to either Islam or Christianity

shwra : a council

sunnәt : the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad

swәraj : freedom or independence

swrәt : a chapter in the Qur’an, often Romanized as “Surah”

sylsәla : chain of succession or authority that links back to the Prophet Muhammad

tәbliG : missionary work or proselytization

tәfsir : commentary on the Qur’an

tәjdid : renewal (of faith)

tәppa : a traditional form of song originally born in the Punjab but popular (particularly

in the 1800s and early 1900s AD) across north and central India, especially in

Bengal

țalyban : students, often referring specifically to students of religious seminaries; applied

later to the religious students and scholars who took over much of Afghanistan in

the early 1990s AD and Romanized as “Taliban”

  523 
  

țybb : traditional (“Greek” or “Yunani”) medicine

twbәħ : repentance

ummәt : the worldwide Muslim community of the faithful

‘urs : death anniversary of a Sufi saint or pir

wәqf : a shәri’at-mandated religious endowment, typically in the form of money, land, or

infrastructure

wylayәt : spiritual (and sometimes temporal) authority of a pir over a specific

geographical area

xәlifәħ : “deputy,” often Romanized as “caliph”

xәtәm-i-nәbәwwәt : the finality of the Prophet—that Muhammad was the last, or “seal,”

of the prophets and there will be none to follow him

xanәqaħ : a pir- or shine-center

xuda-e-xydmәtgar : Deobandi-leaning quasi-spiritual political movement founded by

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan among the Pathans of India’s northwestern frontier that

generally supported the Indian National Congress; often referred to by the acronym

“KK”

xәwajәħ : an honorofic title meaning “Lord” or “Master”

xuțbәħ gaħ : a pulpit from which religious sermons are preached

xylafәt : “deputyship,” often Romanized as “caliphate”

ylm-e-Gaib : “knowledge of the unseen”

ymkan-e-nažir : “the possibility of an equal”

zәkat : a tax mandated by Islamic law

zәmindar : a landowner or landlord

  524 
  

zykr : typically, a ritual form of “remembrance” of God, often performed via the

recitation of the names of God

źymi : non-Muslims living within the geographical boundaries of an Islamic state; often

Romanized as “dhimmi”

zyndabad : “long live,” commonly used in combination with “Islam” or “Pakistan,” in the

sense of “Long live Islam!” or “Long live Pakistan!”

  525 
  

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Azizi, Alauddin. The Saga of a Freedom Fighter (Jaipur: Book Enclave, 2004)

Banerjee, Mukulika. The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West

Frontier (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Biswamoy, Pati, ed. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (Delhi: Primus Books, 2011)

Blood, Peter, ed. Pakistan: A Country Study (Washington: GPO for the Library of

Congress, 1994)

Boris, Eileen; Janssens, Angelique, ed. Complicating Categories: Gender, Class, Race and

Ethnicity (New York: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1999)

Brzoska, Michael. Arms and Warfare: Escalation, De-escalation, and Negotiation

(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994)

Burke III, Edmund; Lapidus, Ira M. Islam, Politics, and Social Movements (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1983)

Chatterji Manas; Gopal, Darvesh; and Singh, Savita, ed. Governance, Development and

Conflict (Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development,

Volume 18) (Bingley: Emerald Group, 2011)

  529 
  

Choudhury, G. W. “Constitution-Making Dilemmas in Pakistan.” The Western

Political Quarterly 8.4 (December 1955)

Choy, Lee Khoon. Diplomacy of a Tiny State (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing

Co., 1993)

Clements, Frank. Conflict in Afghanistan: a historical encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-

CLIO, 2003)

Cohen, Stephen. The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution,

2004)

Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from

the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004)

Cornell, Vincent, ed. Voices of Islam (Westport [CT]: Praeger Publishers, 2007)

Dallal, Ahmad. “The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist Thought, 1750-

1850.” Journal of the American Oriental Society Jul.-Sep. (1993)

Darling, Malcolm Lyall. At Freedom’s Door (Oxford University Press, 1949)

Digby, Simon. “The Sufi Shaykh and the Sultan: A Conflict of Claims to Authority in

Medieval India.” Iran 28 (1990)

Esposito, John L., Islam and Politics (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984)

— ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (Oxford University

Press, 1995)

Ewing, Katherine. “The Politics of Sufism: Redefining the Saints of Pakistan.” The

Journal of Asian Studies 42.2 (Feb. 1983)

Faruqi, Ejaz Ahmad. Pakistan: A Crisis in the Renaissance of Islam (Lahore: Sang-e-

Meel Publications, 1991)

  530 
  

Faruqi, Ziya-ul-Hasan. The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (Bombay: Asia

Publishing House, 1963)

Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin Books, 2003)

French, Patrick. Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London:

Flamingo, 1998)

Gallagher, John; Seal, Anil. The Decline, Revival, and Fall of the British Empire

(Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 1982)

Gilmartin, David. Gilmartin, David. “A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and

the Election Process in Colonial Punjab.” Comparative Studies in Society and

History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July, 1998)

— “Religious Leadership and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab.” Modern

Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1979)

Goyal, D. R. Maulana Husain Ahmad Madni: A Biographical Study (Calcutta: Maulana

Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, 2004)

Guha, Ranajit. “Chandra’s Death.” Subaltern Studies Vol. 5 (1987)

Gupta, Amit Kumar. Northwest Frontier Province: Legislation and Freedom Struggle,

1932-1947 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1976)

Gupta, Shishir. Indian Mujahideen (Hachette, 2011)

Habib, Irfan. “Civil Disobedience 1930-31.” Social Scientist 25.9/10

(September/October 1997)

Haq, Mushir. Muslim Politics in Modern India (Meerut: Manakshi Prakashan, 1970)

Haqqani, Husain. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.:

Brookings Institution Press, 2005)

  531 
  

Haroon, Sana. Frontier of Faith: A History of Religious Mobilization in the Pakhtun

Tribal Areas c. 1890-1950 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011)

— “The rise of Deobandi Islam in the North‐West Frontier Province and its

implications in Colonial India and Pakistan, 1914‐1996.” Journal of the Royal

Asiatic Society, Series 3, 18, 1 (2008)

Harrison, Selig S., Kreisberg, Paul H., and Kux, Dennis, ed. India and Pakistan: The

First Fifty Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Hasan, Mushirul. Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence

(London: C. Hurst & Co., 1997)

Hassanali, Muhammed. “Sufi Influence on Pakistani Politics and Culture.”

Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies 2.1 (2010)

Heller, Joseph. British Policy towards the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1914 (London: Frank

Cass and Company Limited, 1983)

Holt, P.M.; Lambton, Ann K. S.; Lewis, Bernard (ed.) The Cambridge History of Islam,

Vol. 1A: The Central Islamic Lands from Pre-Islamic Times to the First World

War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)

Husain, Mohammad Anwar. Ulema Freedom Struggle and Concept of Pakistan (Lahore:

Markazul Maarif, 2004)

Hussain, Rizwan. Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan

(Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005)

Hyder, Khurshid. “Pakistan Under Bhutto.” Current History, 63:375 (Nov. 1972)

Jackson, Roy. Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam: Authority and the Islamic State

(New York: Routledge, 2011)

  532 
  

Jalal, Ayesha. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since

1850 (London: Routledge, 2000)

— The Sole Spokesman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)

— “The Past as Present.” Maleeha Lodhi, ed. Pakistan: Beyond the Crisis State

(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Jalal, Ayesha and Seal, Anil. “Alternative to Partition: Muslim Politics between the

Wars.” Modern Asian Studies 15.3 (1981)

Jayapalan, N. Constitutional History of India (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1998)

Kamran, Tahir. “Evolution and Impact of ‘Deobandi’ Islam in the Punjab.” The

Historian (Lahore: GC University, 2010)

Kanda, K. C. Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,

2005)

Kapur, Ashok. Pakistan in Crisis (London: Routledge, 1991)

Kaul, Suvir. The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)

Keddie, Nikki R. and Matthee, Rudi, ed. Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in

Culture and Cultural Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002)

Khan, A. A. The Despot (Rawalpindi: Freedom Print Press, 1968)

Khan, Hamid. Constitutional and Political History of Pakistan, Second Edition (Karachi:

Oxford University Press, 2001)

Khan, M. Asghar. We’ve Learned Nothing from History: Pakistan: Politics and Military

Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Khan, Wali. Facts Are Facts: The Untold Story of India’s Partition (Fairfax, VA:

Academy of the Punjab in North America, 2004)

  533 
  

Krishan, Yuvraj. Understanding Partition: India Sundered, Muslims Fragmented (Delhi:

Alpha Publications, 2002)

Limaye, Satu; Malik, Mohan; Wirsing, Robert, ed. Religion Radicalism and Security in

South Asia (Honolulu: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2004)

Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (New Delhi: Millat

Book Center, 1983)

Lodhi, Maleeha, ed. Pakistan: Beyond the Crisis State (Karachi: Oxford University

Press, 2011)

Madsen, Stig Toft; Nielsen, Kenneth Bo; Skoda, Uwe, ed. Trysts with Democracy:

Political Practice in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2011)

Mahmud, Safdar. Pakistan: Political Roots and Development 1947-1999 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000)

Malik, Hafeez, ed. Pakistan: Founders’ Aspirations and Today’s Realities (Karachi:

Oxford University Press, 2001)

Malik, Jamal. Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror? (New York: Routledge, 2008)

Margolis, Eric S. American Raj: Liberation or Domination? (Toronto: Key Porter, 2008)

McDonald, Zahraa. “Legitimate practice constructs a contemporary Muslim identity

in South Africa: the case of the Tabligh Jamaat in Johannesburg.” African

Identities 8.3 (August 2010)

McPherson, Kenneth. “How Best Do We Survive?”: A Modern Political History of the

Tamil Muslims (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010)

Metcalf, Barbara. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1982)

  534 
  

— “The Madrassa at Deoband: A Model for Religious Education in Modern

India.” Modern Asian Studies (12.1)

Metcalf, Barbara; Metcalf, Thomas. A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Metcalf, Thomas R. The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Ideologies of the Raj

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Mitra, Asok. Towards Independence, 1940-1947 (Bombay: Jayati Datta Mitra, 1991)

Munir, Muhammad. Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under the Punjab Act II of

1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953. (Punjab: Government of

Pakistan, 1954)

Nair, M. Bhaskaran. Politics in Bangladesh: A Study of Awami League, 1949-58 (New

Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 1990)

Nasr, Seyed Vali Reza. Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1996)

— “The Rise of Sunni Militancy in Pakistan: The Changing Role of Islamism and

the Ulama in Society and Politics.” Modern Asian Studies, 34.1 (Feb. 2000)

— The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: the Jama’at-i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1994)

Niazi, Kausar. Imam Ahmad Raza: A Versatile Personality (Alahazrat Network, 1991)

Nojeim, Michael J. Gandhi and King: The Power of Nonviolent Resistance (Westport

[CT]: Praeger Publishers, 2004)

Noor, Fraish A.; Sikand, Yoginder; van Bruinessen, Martin, ed. The Madrassa in Asia:

Political Activism and Transnational Linkages, ed. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press, 2008)

  535 
  

Pal, Amitabh. Islam Means Peace: Understanding the Muslim Principle of Nonviolence

Today (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011)

Palmer-Fernandez, Gabriel. The Encyclopedia of Religion and War (New York:

Routledge, 2004)

Pearl, David. “Three Decades of Executive, Legislative and Judicial Amendments to

Islamic Family Law in Pakistan.” Mallat, Chibli and Connors, Jane Frances,

ed. Islamic Family Law (London: Centre of Islamic and Middle East Law,

1993)

Pirzada, Sayyid A. S. The Politics of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Pakistan 1971-1977

(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Powell, Avril. Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London: Curzon Press,

1993)

Pradhan, R. D. 1965 War: The Inside Story (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007)

Pratt, Kathryn, ed. Being and Belonging: Muslims in the United States since 9/11 (New

York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008)

President of Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Interviews to Foreign Media, Vol.

1, March-December 1978 (Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, 1980)

Pyarelal. Thrown to the Wolves (Calcutta: Eastlight Book House, 1966)

Qasmi, M. Burhanuddin. Recounting Untold History: Darul Uloom Deoband, a heroic

struggle against British tyranny (Mumbai: Markazil Ma’arif Education &

Research Center, 2001)

Qureshi, Ishtiaq Husain. The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent: 610-

1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962)

  536 
  

Qureshi, M. Naeem. Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat

Movement, 1918-1924 (Leiden: Brill, 1999)

Rafi Usmani, Muhammad. Jihad in Afghanistan against Communism (Karachi: Darul-

Ishat, 2003)

Rahnama, ‘Ali, ed. Pioneers of Islamic Revival (London: Zed Books, 1994)

Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale

University Press, 2000)

Rehman, Fazlur. “The Thinker of Crisis: Shah Waliy-Ullah.” Pakistan Quarterly 6.2

(1956)

Richards, D. S. The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil I’l-

Ta’rikh, Part 2: The Years 541-589/1146-1193: The Age of Nur al-Din and

Saladin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Richter, William L. “The Political Dynamics of Islamic Resurgence in Pakistan.”

Asian Survey, 19.6 (Jun. 1979)

Rizvi, S. A. A. History of Sufism, Vol. 2 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1983)

Robinson, Francis. “Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Islam and the Islamic

Revival.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 14.1 (April 2004)

— Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims,

1860-1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974),

— “Shah Wali-Allah and His Times: A Study of Eighteenth Century Islam,

Politics and Society in India by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi; Shah Abd al-Aziz:

Puritanism, Sectarian Polemics and Jihad by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi” (Book

Review). Modern Asian Studies 18.3 (1984)

  537 
  

— The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahal and Islamic Culture in South Asia (Delhi: Permanent

Black, 2001)

Sahai, Shashi B. South Asia: From Freedom to Terrorism (Delhi: Gyan Publishing

House, 1998)

Saikal, Amin. Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B.

Taurus & Co., 2006)

Sanyal, Usha. Ahmad Riza Khan: In the Path of the Prophet (Oxford: OneWorld

Publications, 2005)

— Devotional Islam and Politics in British India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1996)

— “Generational Changes in the Leadership of the Ahl-e-Sunnat Movement in

North India during the Twentieth Century.” Modern Asian Studies 32.3 (Jul.

1998)

Sareen, Sushant. The Jihad Factory (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2005)

Sayeed, Khalid B. “1965—An Epoch-Making Year in Pakistan—General Elections

and War with India.” Asian Survey 6.2 (February 1966)

— The Political System of Pakistan (New York: Houghton Miffline, 1967)

Schechtman, Joseph B. “Evacuee Property in India and Pakistan.” Pacific Affairs 24.4

(Dec. 1951)

Schofield, Victoria. Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Conflict (London: Tauris

Parke, 2003)

Sen, S. N. History: Modern India (Delhi: New Age International, 2006)

Sikand, Yoginder. “The Tablighi Jama’at and Politics.” ISIM Newsletter 13

(December 2003)

  538 
  

Singh, Jasjit, ed. India and Pakistan: Crisis of Relationship (New Delhi: Institute for

Defence Studies and Analyses, 1990)

Singh, Jaswant. Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence (New Delhi: Rupa Co., 2009)

Singh, R. S. N. “Pakistan’s Islamic Journey.” Indian Defence Review (June 2007)

Singh Sarila, Narendra. The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s

Partition (Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2005)

Stein, Burton. A History of India (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

Stokes, Eric. “Rural Revolt in the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: A Study of the

Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar Districts.” The Historical Journal 12.4 (Dec.

1969)

Syed, Muhammad Aslam, ed. Islam and Democracy in Pakistan (Islamabad: National

Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1995)

Tabassum, Farhat. Deoband Ulema’s Movement for the Freedom of India (New Delhi:

Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, 2006)

Talbot, Ian. Pakistan: A Modern History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998)

Taqi Usmani, Muhammad. The Authority of Sunnәt (New Delhi: Kitab Bhawan, 1991)

Thursby, Gene R. Hindu-Muslim Relations in British India (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975)

Troll Christian. “Two Conceptions of Da’wa in India: Jama’at-i Islami and Tablighi

Jama’at.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 39e Annee, No. 87 (Jul.-Sep.

1994)

Van Bruinessen, Martin; Howell, Julia Day, ed. Sufism and the “Modern” in Islam

(London: I. B. Taurus, 2007)

Von Tunzelmann, Alex. Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

(New York: Picador, 2007)

  539 
  

Wahid, Abdul. Creed of Islam (Lahore: Idara-e-Islamiat, 2011)

Weiss, Anita (ed.), Islamic Reassertion in Pakistan (Syracuse: Syracuse University

Press, 1986)

Wilder, Andrew. “Islam and Political Legitimacy in Pakistan.” Syed, Muhammad

Aslam, ed. Islam and Democracy in Pakistan (Islamabad: National Institute of

Historical and Cultural Research, 1995)

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Wood, Michael. The Story of India (London: BBC Books, 2008)

Yousaf, Nasim. Pakistan’s Freedom and Allama Mashriqi: Statements, Letters, Chronology

of Khaksar Tehrik (Liverpool [NY]: AMZ Publications, 2004)

Zaeef, Abdul Salam. My Life with the Taliban (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2010)

Zahari, Mahboob Hussain Ala. The Gnostic of Siyal: Shaykh al-Islam wa’l Muslimeen

Khwaja Muhammad Qamar al-Din (1324-1401 AH / 1906-1981 CE) (Zia-ul-

Ummat Shaykh, 2011)

Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. Custodians of Change: The Ulama in Contemporary Islam

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)

5. POST-PARTITION WORKS AND PERIODICAL ARTICLES: URDU

Adarvi, Asir. hażrәt shix ul-hynd: hiat aur karname (Deoband: Sheikh ul-Hind

Academy, 2012)

Agha Shorish Kashmiri. sәyyid ‘ața әlla shaħ buxari (Lahore: Matboat-e-Chataan, n.d.)

  540 
  

Ahmad, Badr ul-Din. sәvanyh a’ala hәżrәt ymam ahmәd rәża (Bareilly: Qadiri Kitab

Ghar, 1984)

Arshad, ‘Ali. ‘alama shabir aħmad ‘asmani ka taħrik-e pakәstan min kәrdar. (Lahore:

Punjab University, 2005)

Asir ud Ravi. tәhrik-e-әzadi aur musәlman (Deoband: Darul Moalafin, n.d.)

Derwi, Jalal ul-Din. tәhrik-e-pakystan min ‘alәma-e-kәram ka kyrdar (Lahore: Maktaba

Nabaviya, 2010)

Dindrolvi, Muhammad. tarix-e-hynd: mәslym ‘ahәd-e-hәkwmәt se qiam-e-jәmhwriәt tәk

(New Delhi: Farid Book Depot, 2007)

Ghaman, Ilyas. fәrqah-e-bәrilwiәt pak o hynd ka tәhqiqi jaәzah (Mumbra: Maktaba

Shaikhul Islam, 2012)

Gohar, Muhammad Hussein. waq’aat-e-yslam ka ynsaiklwpiDia (Lahore: Nazaria-e-

Pakistan Academy, 2012)

Kanda, K. C. Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,

2005)

Khalid, Saleem Mansur. dini mәdarys min talim: kafiyәt, masil, ymkanat (Islamabad:

Idara-e-Fiqr-e-Islami, 2004)

Khan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar. ap beTi (Jay Parkash Narain 1969)

Mian, Sayyid Ahmad. tәhrik-e-rishmi-e-rumal (Deoband: Maktaba Javed, 2002)

Mian, Sayyid Muhammad. әsiran-e-malTa (Deoband: Kitabkhana Naimia, 2002)

— ‘alәma-e-hynd ka shandar maZi [3 vol.] (Delhi: M. Brothers KytAbstAn, 1991)

Muhammad Mahmod KirAnvi Nadvi. bәrilviәt ki xanah tәlashi (Deoband: kytub

xAnah n’amiah, 2000)

Naeemi, Ahmad Yar Khan. ja ul-hәq (Delhi: Khwaja Book Depot, 2012)

  541 
  

Naimi, Ghulam Muinuddin. hiat-e-Sәdәr ul-әfażәl (Lahore: Idara Naimia, n.d.)

Naqshbandi, Zulfikar Ahmad. ‘alәma diwbәnd ka tarixi pәs mәnžәr (Deoband: K. K.

Fakhriya, n.d.)

Qadiri, Badr al-Din Ahmad. sәvanyh a’alihażrәt (Siddarth Nagar [UP]: Maktaba

Qadiria, post-2004)

Qasmi, Khurshid Hasan. dar ul’alwm әwr diobәnd ki tarixi shәxSiat (Deoband:

Maktaba Tafsir ul-Qur’an, 2003)

Rafi Usmai, Muhammad. hiat mufti-e-‘ažәm (Karachi: Ahmad Printing Press, 2005)

Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob. tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl (Deoband: ydArah-e

yhatymAm dArul ulu’m dioband, 1980)

— tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld dәvvәm (New Delhi: H. S. Afast Printers, 1993)

Taqi Usmani, Muhammad. әkabәr diobәnd kia the? (Deoband: Zamzam, 1995)

Usmani, Muhammad Rafi. hiat-e-mufti-e-‘ažәm (Karachi: Ahmad Printing Press,

2005)

6. WEBSITES

Ahrar India: http://ahrarindia.com/ (Deobandi)

Allama Azmi: http://allamaazmi.com (Barelvi)

Ameer-e-Millat: http://ameer-e-millat.com (Barelvi)

Anjuman Talaba-e-Islam: http://atipak.org (Barelvi)

Archaeology Online: http://archaeologyonline.net

Banglapedia: http://banglapedia.org

  542 
  

Basharath Siddiqui: http://basharathsiddiqui.webnode.in (Barelvi)

Baacha Khan Trust: http://baachakhantrust.org

Combating Terrorism Center: http://ctc.usma.edu

Columbia University’s Dr. Frances Pritchett:

http://columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/

Counter Currents: http://countercurrents.org

Darul Ifta: http://darulifta-deoband.org (Deobandi)

Darul Uloom Deoband: http://darululoom-deoband.com (Deobandi)

Darul Uloom Deoband Waqf: http://darululoomwaqf.com (Deobandi)

Dawat-e-Islami: http://dawateislami.net (Barelvi)

Deoband.org: http://deoband.org (Deobandi)

Hazrat.org: http://hazrat.org (Barelvi)

Inter-Islam: http://inter-islam.org (Deobandi)

International Islamic Web: http://alahazrat.net (Barelvi)

Islamic Academy: http://islamicacademy.org (Barelvi)

Islamic Encyclopedia: http://nooremadinah.net

Islamopedia: http://islamopediaonline.org

Jame Ashraf (Dargah Kichhoucha Sharif): http://ashrafjahangir.com (Barelvi)

Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind Mysore: http://jamiatulamaihindmysore.com (Deobandi)

Jane’s World Insurgency and Terrorism: http://janes.com

Keesing’s Record of World Events: http://keesings.com

Khanqah Qadiriya Razviya: http://sunnirazvi.net (Barelvi)

Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement: http://muslim.org (Ahmadi)

Library of Congress: http://loc.gov

  543 
  

Muttahida Qaumi Movement: http://mqm.org

Nadeem F. Paracha Work(s) Archive: http://nadeemfparacha.wordpress.com

Pakistan People’s Party: http://ppp.org.pk

Pakistan Post Office: http://pakpost.gov.pk

Shiite News: http://shiitenews.com (Shi’a)

South Asia Terrorism Portal: http://satp.org

Sunni Tehrik: http://sunnitehreek.net (Barelvi)

Thanawi Masjid: http://thanvimasjid.com

The Persecution: http://thepersecution.org (Ahmadi)

University of Edinburgh Centre for South Asian Studies: http://csas.ed.ac.uk/

University of the Punjab: http://pu.edu.pk

7. NEWSPAPERS (PRINT AND ONLINE)

Advocate (Australia)

Al Jazeera (Qatar)

Apna Karachi (Pakistan)

Bombay Sentinel (India)

BBC News (UK)

Bdnews24.com (Pakistan)

Cairns Post (Australia)

Daily Times (Pakistan)

Dawn (Pakistan)

Herald (Pakistan)
  544 
  

New York Times (USA)

Newsline (Pakistan)

Northern Times (Australia)

Oxford Analytical Daily Brief Service (UK)

Pakistan Herald (Pakistan)

Pakistan Times (Pakistan)

Reuters (USA)

Sri Lanka Guardian (Sri Lanka)

The Advertiser (Australia)

The Christian Science Monitor (USA)

The Express Tribune (Pakistan)

The Guardian (UK)

The Hindu (India)

The Indian Express (India)

The International Herald Tribune (USA)

The Mail (Australia)

The Mercury (Australia)

The Milli Gazette (India)

The New York Times (USA)

The News (Pakistan)

The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

The Times (UK)

The West Australian (Australia)

Times of India (India)

  545 
  

Western Argus (Australia)

Winnipeg Free Press (Canada)

  546 
   

Notes

                                                        
1 In “Ethnicity, Muslim Society, and the Pakistan Ideology.” Anita Weiss (ed.), Islamic

Reassertion in Pakistan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

2 Abu Dawud Sulayman in Sunnan Abu Dawud (Vol. 3), translated by Wahid-uz-Zaman,

as quoted in Ahmad, Mujeeb. Jam’iyyat ‘Ulama-e-Pakistan 1948-1979 (Islamabad:

National Istitute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1993), p. xiii.

3 “Biswa Ijtema ends with prayers of millions.” Bdnews24.com. 24 January 2010. Last

accessed 9 March 2013.

<http://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2010/01/24/biswa-ijtema-ends-with-

prayers-of-millions>
4 “Tablighi Jamaat Exposed.” Islamic Academy (Plano, TX), Official Website. n.d. Last

accessed 9 March 2013.

<http://islamicacademy.org/html/Articles/English/Tableeghee%20Jma%27at.

htm>
5 Mishra, Manjari. “Barelvis take on Deobandis over religious property.” Times of India

6 January 2010. Online edition. Last accessed 9 March 2013.

<http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-

06/india/28127094_1_sunni-waqf-board-barelvis-madrassas>
6 ‘Ali, Imtiaz. “Karachi Becoming a Taliban Safe Haven?” Combating Terrorism Center

at West Point. 13 January 2010. Web. Last accessed 9 March 2013.

<http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/karachi-becoming-a-taliban-safe-haven>
7 “Religious violence.” Dawn.com. 1 March 2010. Web. Last accessed 9 March 2013.

<http://archives.dawn.com/archives/32519>

  547 
  

                                                        
8 Brown, Andrew. “Here, everyone is a minority.” The Guardian 1 January 2010. Web.

Last accessed 13 March 2013.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/02/leicester-minority-

immigration-diversity-faith?INTCMP=SRCH>
9 Mazzetti, Mark and Filkins, Dexter. “Secret Raid Captures Taliban’s Top

Commander.” New York Times 15 February 2010. Web. Last accessed 9 March

2013.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/asia/16intel.html?pagewanted

=all&_r=0>
10 One could argue that the beginnings of political Islam should be traced to the very

first moment of Muhammad’s first vision, for with this manifestation there was,

suddenly, on the Arabian Peninsula an indigenous monotheistic religion that was

not Christianity (neither the Ethiopian, Byzantine, nor Nestorian versions), nor

the Zoroastrianism of Persia, nor Judaism. By adopting any of these other

monotheistic creeds, the Meccans would have placed in jeopardy their precarious

position as a merchant hub neutrally connecting the rival Byzantine (mostly

Christian) and Persian (mostly Zoroastrian) empires. Thus Islam, in a sense,

was “political” (or at least, in the words of Watt, possessed “external political

relevance”) from the outset. Another argument is that Muhammad’s very

approach—that is, his being a messenger and prophet of God—politically

transcended the tribal system in order to deal with the issues of the day.
11 Watt, W. Montgomery. “Muhammad.” The Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. 1A: The

Central Islamic Lands from Pre-Islamic Times to the First World War, P. M. Holt,

  548 
  

                                                        
Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1970), pp. 34-35.

12 Elphinstone, Mountstuart. The History of India (London: John Murray, 1843), p. 307.

Several paragraphs after this quote, the old soldier adds, “Such was the nation

that gave birth to the false prophet, whose doctrines have so long and so

powerfully influenced a vast portion of the human race.”

13 Watt, p. 51.
14 Ibid, p. 53.
15 Ibid, p. 53.
16 Ahmad, Manzooruddin. “The Political Role of the ‘Ulama’ in the Indo-Pakistan Sub-

Continent.” Islamic Studies 6.4 (1967): 329.

17 Algar, Hamid. “The Naqshband Order: A Preliminary Survey of Its History and

Significance.” Studia Islamica 44 (1976): 126.

18 Ibid, p. 127.
19 Wahid, Abdul. Creed of Islam (Lahore: Idara-e-Islamiat, 2011), p. 168.
20 Ahmed, Akbar. Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society (London:

Routledge, 2002), p. 29.

21 Khan, Hussain. “The Rise and Expansion of Muslim Power.” Islam in South Asia,

Waheed-uz-Zaman and M. Saleem Akhtar, ed. (Islamabad: National Institute of

Historical and Cultural Research, 1993), pp. 21-22. The points noted in this

work are a paraphrased version of the instructions given during the Ghurid

period to a subordinate governor.

  549 
  

                                                        
22 This English translation comes from Kanda, K. C. Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry

(New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2005), pp. 14-15.

23 Taqi Usmani, Muhammad. The Authority of Sunnәt (New Delhi: Kitab Bhawan, 1991),

p. 32.
24 Watt, p. 30.
25 Interestingly, the question of why the State is needed at all to make religion a day-to-

day system of human action is rarely, if ever, addressed at length.

26 Robinson, Francis. “Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Islam and the Islamic

Revival.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 14.1 (April 2004): 47-48.
27 Elphinstone, p. 318.
28 Baloch, N. A. “The Advent of Islam.” Islam in South Asia, Waheed-uz-Zaman and M.

Saleem Akhtar, ed. (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural

Research, 1993), pp. 7-10.

29 Other historians paint a far different picture of the young Muslim conqueror of Sindh.

According to this alternate version, his attack was unjustified, as the Brahmin

king held no jurisdiction over the town wherein the Arab ships had been seized.

Upon conquering his first Sindhi city, he attempted to circumcise all the

Brahmin males; when they rejected such tactics of “conversion,” he executed all

Brahmins over the age of seventeen and reduced the rest, plus all Brahmin

women and children, to slavery. His later exploits saw him slaughter all

fighting men in each conquered city, followed by the enslavement, once again, of

their families, the destruction of temples, and the confiscation of Brahmin lands.

  550 
  

                                                        
The latter were restored only when the subjugated towns had agreed to pay

regular tribute to their new masters. See Elphinstone, pp. 317-318.

30 If Afghanistan is counted as a peripheral region of a broadly defined “South Asia,”

then this statement is not entirely correct; parts of Afghanistan had been

conquered and converted to the banner of Islam much earlier than the

Ghaznavid invasions.
31 Qureshi, I. H. “Muslim India Before the Mughals.” The Cambridge History of Islam, Vol.

2A: The Indian Sub-Continent, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Muslim West, P. M.

Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1970), p. 3.

32 Baloch, pp. 10-13.
33 Qureshi, p. 4.
34 Baloch, p. 13.
35 Qureshi, p. 4.
36 Rizvi, S. A. A. History of Sufism, Vol. 2 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1983), p.

382. Rizvi here is quoting from Shah Waliullah’s Qurrat al-aynain fi tafil al-

shaykhayan.
37 Wood, Michael. The Story of India (London: BBC Books, 2008), p. 203.
38 Ahmad, Aziz. “The Role of the Ulema in Indo-Muslim History.” Studia Islamica 31

(1970), p. 2.
39 Hassanali, Muhammed. “Sufi Influence on Pakistani Politics and Culture.”

Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies 2.1 (2010): 26-27.

40 Robinson, p. 49.

  551 
  

                                                        
41 Ahmad, Manzooruddin, pp. 327-328.
42 Ibid, p. 328.
43 Sanyal, Usha. “Generational Changes in the Leadership of the Ahl-e-Sunnat

Movement in North India during the Twentieth Century.” Modern Asian Studies

32.3 (Jul. 1998): 638.

44 Robinson, p. 49.
45 Sanyal, pp. 635-636.
46 Haroon, Sana. Frontier of Faith: A History of Religious Mobilization in the Pakhtun Tribal

Areas c. 1890-1950 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 59.

47 Algar, p. 126.
48 Swati, Muhammad Junaid. Personal Communication. Baffa (Mansehra Dist.),

Pakistan. 19 July 2012.

49 Khan, Sajjid. Mansehra, Pakistan. Personal Communication. 19 July 2012.
50 Robinson, pp. 47-49.
51 This chronicler was Ibn al-Athir. See Richards, D. S. The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for

the Crusading Period from al-Kamil I’l-Ta’rikh, Part 2: The Years 541-589/1146-

1193: The Age of Nur al-Din and Saladin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 64, 117.
52 Ahmad, Aziz, p. 2.
53 Qureshi, p. 5. 
54 Wood, Michael. The Story of India (London: BBC Books, 2008), p. 203.
55 Qureshi, I. H. “The Sultans of Delhi.” The Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. 2A: The

Indian Sub-Continent, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Muslim West, P. M. Holt, Ann

  552 
  

                                                        
K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1970), p. 30.
56 Metcalf, Barbara and Metcalf, Thomas. A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 4.

57 Gohar, Muhammad Hussein. waq’aat-e-yslam ka ynsaiklwpiDia (Lahore: Nazaria-e-

Pakistan Academy, 2012), p. 13. (Urdu)

58 See Akbar, M. J. Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan (New York: HarperCollins,

2012).
59 Ansary, Tamim. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (New

York: PublicAffairs, 2009), p. xvi.

60 Ahmad, Aziz, p. 4.
61 Ibid, pp. 4-5.
62 Ibid. p. 4. Ahmad provides several examples of battles lost by the ‘alәma against

perceived Sufi foes, including Najm al-din Sughra’s attempt to discredit popular

mystics Qutb al-din Bakhtiyar Kaki and Jalal al-din Tabrizi during the reign of

Iletmish; Iletmish seems to have sided with the Sufis over the ‘alәma as a rule.
63 Hassanali, p. 31.
64 Ewing, Katherine. “The Politics of Sufism: Redefining the Saints of Pakistan.” The

Journal of Asian Studies 42.2 (Feb. 1983): 254-256. For examples of the power of

the pir in the northwest, see also Haroon, Sana. Frontier of Faith: A History of

Religious Mobilization in the Pakhtun Tribal Areas c. 1890-1950 (Karachi: Oxford

University Press, 2011), pp. 33-40.

65 Hassanali, p. 33.

  553 
  

                                                        
66 Gohar, p. 13. (Urdu)
67 Digby, Simon. “The Sufi Shaykh and the Sultan: A Conflict of Claims to Authority in

Medieval India.” Iran 28 (1990): 74.

68 Hassanali, p. 34.
69 Haroon, pp. 34-35.
70 Much of the information in this paragraph comes from Digby, pp. 71-81.
71 Ahmad, Aziz, p. 4.
72 Haq, Mushir. Muslim Politics in Modern India (Meerut: Manakshi Prakashan, 1970), p.

9.
73 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xiii.
74 Ahmad, Aziz. p. 2.
75 Ahmad, Manzooruddin, p. 328.
76 Ahmad, Aziz, p. 6.
77 Ibid, p. 6.
78 Ahmad, Manzooruddin, p. 330.
79 Badauni, Abdul Qadir. Muntxab-u-Tawarix (Vol. 3). Trans. George Ranking,

Wolseley Haig, and W. H. Lowe (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1884), pp.

127-130.
80 Ahmad, Aziz, p. 6.
81 Von Garbe, Richard. Akbar, Emperor of India (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing

Company, 1909). Project Gutenberg. Web. 16 Nov. 2011.

82 Gohar, pp. 88-89. (Urdu)
83 Von Garbe.

  554 
  

                                                        
84 Algar, p. 143.
85 Weismann, Itzchak. “Sufi Fundamentalism between India and the Middle East.”

Sufism and the “Modern” in Islam, Martin Van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell,

ed. (London: I. B. Taurus, 2007), p. 117.

86 Khan, Hussain. “Rise and Expansion of Muslim Power.” Islam in South Asia, Waheed-

uz-Zaman and M. Saleem Akhtar, ed. (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical

and Cultural Research, 1993), p. 45.

87 Ahmad, Aziz, pp. 8-9.
88 The contemporary historian spoken of here is Rae Bindraban, as quoted in Khan,

Hussain. “Rise and Expansion of Muslim Power.” Islam in South Asia, Waheed-

uz-Zaman and M. Saleem Akhtar, ed. (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical

and Cultural Research, 1993), pp. 45-46.

89 Khan, Hussain, p. 48.
90 Ibid, pp. 48-49.
91 Ibid, pp. 50-51.
92 Ibid, p. 44.
93 Ahmad, Aziz, p. 9.
94 Khan, Hamid. Constitutional and Political History of Pakistan, Second Edition (Karachi:

Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 4.

95 Ahmad, Aziz, p. 9.
96 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.” Alahazrat.net: International Islamic Web, par. 23.

Accessed 30 October 2012. <http://www.alahazrat.net/islam/mufti-amjad-ali-

al-A’azmi.php>

  555 
  

                                                        
97 Weismann, p. 116.
98 Ahmed, Akbar, p. 4.
99 “Shah Abdur Rahim.” History. Jamiatul Ulema-e-Hind-Mysore official website.

Accessed 21 June 2012. <http://jamiatulamaihindmysore.com/history.html>

100 Robinson, Francis. “Shah Wali-Allah and His Times: A Study of Eighteenth Century

Islam, Politics and Society in India by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi; Shah Abd al-

Aziz: Puritanism, Sectarian Polemics and Jihad by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi”

(Book Review). Modern Asian Studies 18.3 (1984): 524.

101 Haroon, p. 32.
102 Malik, Jamal. Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror? (New York: Routledge, 2008),

p. 6.

103 This poet was Muhammad Rafi Sauda, in his poem wirani-e-shahjәhanabad. The

English translation of the line quoted in this work is from Kanda, K. C.

Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2005), pp.

16-21.
104 Haroon, pp. 38-39.
105 This scholar is Fazlur Rehman. See Rehman, Fazlur. “The Thinker of Crisis: Shah

Waliy-Ullah.” Pakistan Quarterly 6.2 (1956): 44-48.

106 Qasmi, pp. 3-4.
107 Dallal, Ahmad. “The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist Thought, 1750-

1850.” Journal of the American Oriental Society Jul.-Sep. (1993): 343.

108 Ahmad, Aziz, p. 10.
109 Ahmad, Manzooruddin, p. 331.

  556 
  

                                                        
110 Qasmi, p. 3.

111 Naqshbandi, Zulfikar Ahmad. ‘alәma diwbәnd ka tarixi pәs mәnžәr (Deoband: K. K.

Fakhriya, n.d.), p. 7. (Urdu)

112 Metcalf, Barbara. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 47-49.

113 Naqshbandi, pp. 8-9. (Urdu)
114 Metcalf, pp. 16-86.
115 Faruqi, Ziya-ul-Hasan. The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (Bombay:

Asia Publishing House, 1963), p. 19, including footnote 1.

116 Faruqi, p. 19, including footnote 1.
117 Metcalf, p. 99.

118 Naqshbandi claims that sәyyid Ahmad had one thousand mujahydin and ten thousand

formal disciples. See Naqshbandi, pp. 10-11. (Urdu)

119 Ibid, pp. 10-11. (Urdu)
120 Metcalf, pp. 75-80.

121 These included Rafiuddin (d. 1890 AD), who held top posts within the dar ul’alwm’s

administration for almost two decades. His father and uncles were not only

present on the frontier during sәyyid Ahmad’s campaigns, but, in the case of

three of his uncles, actually lost their lives in the fighting at Balakot. See

Metcalf, p. 92.
122 Haroon, pp. 36-40.
123 Allen, Charles. God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern

Jihad (London: Little, Brown, 2006).

  557 
  

                                                        
124 Robinson, Francis. The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahal and Islamic Culture in South Asia

(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 88, ft. 62.

125 An insight from Francis Robinson, as quoted in Sanyal, Usha. Ahmad Riza Khan: In

the Path of the Prophet (Oxford: OneWorld Publications, 2005), p. 59.

126 Imam Ahmad Raza: Sunni Scholar, Sufi & Scientist (Brea, CA: Ala Hazrat Network,

2009), p. 2.
127 Haroon, pp. 33-35.
128 Ibid, pp. 33-39.
129 Ibid, pp. 44-45.
130 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 4.
131 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad. The Causes of the Indian Revolt (Calcutta: F. F. Wyman, 1860),

pp. 3-4.
132 Stein, Burton. A History of India (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 222.
133 Stokes, Eric. “Rural Revolt in the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: A Study of the

Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar Districts.” The Historical Journal 12.4 (Dec.

1969): 606-611.
134 From his The Discovery of India (1951), as quoted in Faruqi, pp. 2-3.
135 Faruqi, pp. 15-16.
136 From the poem shәhәr ashwb. The English translation of the line quoted in this work

is from Kanda, pp. 24-29.

137 Qasmi, p. 5.
138 Aziz, Shah Abul. fәtawa әzizi (Delhi: Matba MajtabAi, 1311 A.H.), p. 17, as quoted

and translated from the Persian in Faruqi, pp. 2-3.

139 Faruqi, p. 2.

  558 
  

                                                        
140 Naqshbandi, pp. 8-9. (Urdu)
141 For both the second and third argument, see Metcalf, pp. 50-52.
142 Qasmi, p. 5.
143 Faruqi, pp. 17-18.
144 Qadiri, Badr al-Din Ahmad. sәvanyh a’alihażrәt (Siddarth Nagar [UP]: Maktaba

Qadiria, post-2004), p. 69 (Urdu)

145 Qasmi, p. 5.
146 Khan, pp. 7-8.
147 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xv.
148 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, pp. 55-59.
149 Muhammad Usman Rehman Ludhianvi. Personal interview. Ludhiana (Punjab). 22

Aug. 2012.
150 “The Shahi Imams of Punjab.” Jamyh Masjid Ludhiana. Inscription in stone.

Ludhiana, Punjab. Photo taken 22 Aug. 2012.

151 Bihari, Zafaruddin. hiat-e a’alihażrәt, jyld awwәl (Karachi: Maktaba Rizvia, 1938), p.

5. (Urdu)
152 Sanyal, Usha. Devotional Islam and Politics in British India (Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1996), pp. 52-54.

153 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza Khan, p. 52.
154 “Ancestors.” Hazrat.org. Web. Last accessed 14 March 2013.

<http://www.hazrat.org/ancestory.htm>
155 Naqshbandi, pp. 13-14. (Urdu)
156 “Hadhrat Maulana Rasheed Ahmed Gangohi.” Darul Uloom Deoband, Official

Website. Last accessed 9 November 2012.

  559 
  

                                                        
<http://www.darululoom-deoband.com/english/introulema/founders3.htm>
157 Qasmi, p. 6.
158 Dindrolvi, Muhammad. tarix-e-hynd: mәslym ‘ahәd-e-hәkwmәt se qiam-e-jәmhwriәt tәk

(New Delhi: Farid Book Depot, 2007), p. 231. (Urdu)

159 Allen, p. 189.
160 Husain, Mohammad Anwar. Ulema Freedom Struggle and Concept of Pakistan (Lahore:

Markazul Maarif, 2004), pp. 25-35.

161 Allen, p. 191.
162 “The Foundation of Darul Uloom Deoband.” Inter-Islam.org (Deobandi). Accessed

12 August 2012. <http://www.inter-islam.org/Pastevents/deoband.htm>

163 Allen, p. 190.
164 Stokes, p. 624.
165 Dindrolvi, p. 231. (Urdu)
166 Stokes, p. 615.
167 Dindrolvi, p. 231. (Urdu)
168 This account above more or less follows the narrative of Allen in God’s Terrorists,

which itself takes for granted many of the Deobandi historical claims about

Rashid Ahmad’s, Muhammad Qasim’s, and Imdadullah’s involvement in the

1857 uprising against the British.

169 Dindrolvi, p. 231. (Urdu)
170 Metcalf, p. 82.
171 Ibid, p. 83.
172 Robertson, H. D. District Duties During the Revolt in the North-West Provinces of India

(1859), pp. 133-134.

  560 
  

                                                        
173 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xiv.

Chapter 2
1 Mian, Sayyid Muhammad. әsiran-e-malTa (Deoband: Kitabkhana Naimia, 2002), p.

108. (Urdu)
2 Rawlinson, pp. 279-280.
3 From a 1946 chiefs of staff meeting in London, as quoted in Sarila, Narendra. The

Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition (Noida:

HarperCollins Publishers India, 2005), p. 27.

4 This according to Abul Kalam Azad in India Wins Freedom (Madras: Orient Longman

Limited, 1988), p. 5.
5 Azad, Abul Kalam. India Wins Freedom (Madras: Orient Longman Limited, 1988), p. 5.
6 Rai, Lala Lajpat. Young India: An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement

from Within (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1917), p. 89.

7 Dindrolvi, p. 231. (Urdu)
8 Metcalf, p. 92.
9 Ibid, pp. 99-100.
10 “Hujjat Al Islam al-Imam Muhammad Qasim Nanawtawi.” Al-Jamia Al-Islamia Darul

Uloom Deoband waqf. 2009. Accessed 6 September 2012.

<http://darululoomwaqf.com/imam-nanawtawi-brief-biography.php>
11 Adarvi, Asir. hażrәt shixh ul-hynd: hiat aur karname (Deoband: Sheikh ul-Hind

Academy, 2012), p. 33. (Urdu)

12 Ibid, p. 33. (Urdu)

  561 
  

                                                        
13 Powell, Avril. Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London: Curzon Press,

1993), pp. 199-200.

14 Faruqi, p. 22, footnote 1.
15 Adarvi, pp. 34-35. (Urdu)
16 Ibid, p. 37. (Urdu)
17 Bates, Crispin. “Commemorating the Indian Uprising of 1857.” Mutiny at the Margins

(Ediburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2007). Last accessed 5 November 2012.

<http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/mutiny/Commemorating1857.html> 
18 Adarvi, pp. 37-38. (Urdu)
19 Metcalf, p. 98.
20 Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob. tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld dәvvәm (New Delhi: H. S. Afast

Printers, 1993), pp. 12-13. (Urdu)

21 Metcalf, p. 43.
22 These included the still-functioning Mazahirul-Uloom in Saharanpur and the

appropriately named Qasimul Uloom, likewise still in operation, in Moradabad.

See Faruqi, pp. 23-24.

23 Faruqi, p. 19, including footnote 1.
24 Ahmad, Manzooruddin, p. 331.
25 Faruqi, p. 23.
26 Ibid, pp. 36-37.
27 Ibid, p. 37.
28 Rizvi, p. 9. (Urdu)
29 Ibid, pp. 13-14 (Urdu)

  562 
  

                                                        
30 Metcalf, pp. 100-101. Some, including Rashid Ahmad, wanted to go even further,

completely eliminating much of the mәqwlat material in the curriculum

(particularly the philosophy inherited from the classical Greek period). Even

Muhammad Qasim had such leanings. In the end the curriculum wasn’t

tampered with much outside of the strong emphasis on hәdis.

31 Allen, p. 211.
32 Goyal, D. R. Maulana Husain Ahmad Madni: A Biographical Study (Calcutta: Maulana

Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, 2004), pp. 26-27.

33 Metcalf, Barbara. “The Madrassa at Deoband: A Model for Religious Education in

Modern India.” Modern Asian Studies (12.1): 111.

34 Robinson, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahal, pp. 196-198.
35 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 264-267.
36 Robinson, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahal, p. 198.
37 Ibid, p. 28.
38 Ibid, p. 198.
39 Dindrolvi, p. 231. (Urdu)

40 From Muhammad Mian’s әsyran-e-malTa, as quoted in Dindrolvi, p. 232. (Urdu)

41Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xiii.
42 Armstrong, Karen. Islam: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. xi-

xii.
43 Mortimer, Edward. “Can the Afghans find their Arafat?” The Times [London,

England] 25 April 1984: 16. Print.

44 Goyal, pp. 27-28.

  563 
  

                                                        
45 Faruqi, p. 22, footnote 1.

46 Generally speaking, the term mәdrәsәħ might be considered the equivalent of

“school,” while dar ul’alwm is more akin to “university”—i.e. a step above a

mәdrәsәħ.
47 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 88-92.
48 Rizvi, Sayyid, pp. 17-18. (Urdu)
49 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 106.
50 Mahmud Hasan, the dar ul’alwm’s first student and eventually its top administrator,

once donated books to Muhammad Yasin, the father of renowned mufti

Muhammad Shafi, whose poverty was made evident when the boy began

skipping school in order to earn some extra cash. The books still retain a place

in the Muhammad Shafi family library, Mahmud Hassan’s and Mamluk ‘Ali’s

names scrawled on the inside cover (thus revealing that Mahmud Hasan had

given up the very copies he had himself used as a student). See Usmani,

Muhammad Rafi. hiat-e-mufti-e-‘ažәm (Karachi: Ahmad Printing Press, 2005)

(Urdu). Another sources claims that Mahmud Hasan gave up as much as a third

of his already meager salary each year to the school’s general fund. “shix ul-hynd

ymam ul-mujahәdin mәhmwd hәsәn.” Official Website, Al-Jamia Al-Islamia Darul

Uloom Deoband waqf. Last accessed 10 November 2012.

<http://darululoomwaqf.com/shaikhul-hind.php>
51 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 106.
52 Faruqi, pp. 41-42.
53 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 95-96. 

  564 
  

                                                        
54 Ibid, p. 110.
55 Ibid, pp. 99-100. Such familial relationships within the institutional structure would

later give way, Metcalf informs us, to the genealogical and geographical variety

“implicit in the organization of the school.”

56 Reetz, Dietrich. “Change and Stagnation: The Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband after the Split

in 1982.” The Madrassa in Asia: Political Activism and Transnational Linkages, ed.

Noor, Fraish A., Sikand, Yoginder, van Bruinessen, Martin (Amsterdam:

Amsterdam University Press, 2008), pp. 77-78.

57 Faruqi, pp. 22-23.
58 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 99.
59 Faruqi, p. 43.
60 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 108.
61 To this formulation Metcalf adds the leadership of a third generation [see also

Chapter 3]: Anwar Shah Kashmiri, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, and Hafiz

Muhammad Ahmad. Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 108. 

62 “shix ul-hynd ymam ul-mujahәdin mәhmwd hәsәn.”

63 Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob. tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl (Deoband: ydArah-e

yhatymAm dArul ulu’m dioband, 1980), p. 249. (Urdu)

64 Afzal, M. Rafique. Political Parties in Pakistan, 1947-1958 (Islamabad: National

Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 2011), p. 52.

65 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 4.

  565 
  

                                                        
66 Bihari, Zafaruddin. hiat-e a’alihażrәt, jyld awwәl (Karachi, Maktaba Rizwiyya, 1938) p.

22 (Urdu), as quoted in Sanyal, “Generational Changes,” p. 635.

67 Ahmad, Badr ul-Din. sәvanyh a’ala hәżrәt ymam ahmәd rәża (Bareilly: Qadiri Kitab

Ghar, 1984), pp. 85-86. (Urdu)

68 “Noble House of Sufis.” Khanqah Qadiriya Razviya, Official Website. Sunni Razvi

Society. 2005. Last accessed 14 March 2013.

<http://sunnirazvi.net/qadiri/barkatiyya.htm>
69 Sanyal, Usha. Ahmad Riza, p. 65. Ahmad Riza’s ascendency did not come without

some opposition from other power centers whose scholars had long enjoyed a

sort of preeminence. Some of the ‘alәma of Badayun, for example, for a time

seemed bent on asserting their own power as leaders; in 1916 AD, a libel case

was even been leveled from this quarter against the divine out of Bareilly. One

of their number, too, would help found the Deobandi-heavy JUH. Sanyal,

Devotional Islam, p. 297.

70 Ibid, pp. 111-112.

71 Rizwi, Muhammad Ramazan ‘Abd ul ‘Aziz. tәzkira-e-hәżrәt burhan-e-myllәt (Jabalpur:

Astana ‘Aliyya Rizwiyya Salamiyya Burhaniyya, 1985), pp. 20-21 (Urdu), as cited

in Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 299.

72 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 82.
73 Sanyal, “Generational Changes,” pp. 643-644. See also Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 58.
74 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, pp. 231-239.
75 As quoted in Pervez, Ghulam Ahmad. “Fatwas of Kufr.” Tulu’-e-Islam. August 1969.

(Urdu). Translation available on the official website of the Lahore Ahmadiyya

  566 
  

                                                        
Movement. August 1996. Accessed 3 October, 2012.

<http://www.muslim.org/sa-case/evidence/s18.htm>
76 Robinson, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahal, p. 37.

77 These works include: ul-qyladәt ul-murәs’ah fi nәhәr yl-ajwbәt ul-arb’aah (1895 AD), an

attempt to refute four of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s fәtawa; әl-jәbәl ul-shanwi ‘ali

kәliәt ul-Thanawi (publication date unclear), an effort to discredit Ashraf ‘Ali by

portraying him as disrespectful to the Prophet vis-à-vis the kalimah; and әjhas-e-

әxirah (1910 AD), a rebuttal of Deobandism in general and Ashraf ‘Ali in

particular.
78 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, pp. 233-237, including footnotes 18-20.
79 “Pakistani: Cleric’s speech prompted Punjab governor’s attacker.” BBC Monitoring

South Asia – Political 28 January 2011.

80 Naeemi, Ahmad Yar Khan. ja ul-hәq (Delhi: Khwaja Book Depot, 2012), p. 11. (Urdu)
81 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 233.
82 Dindrolvi, p. 233. (Urdu)
83 Naqshbandi, p. 5. (Urdu)
84 Ibid, p. 5. (Urdu)
85 Dindrolvi, pp. 233-234. (Urdu)
86 Nu’mani, Muhammad Manzur (Translator: Zameelur Rahman). Fayslah Kun

Munazarah. (1933; English translation 2012), pp. 5-6.

87 Ibid, p. 7.

88 Ghaman, Ilyas. fәrqah-e-bәrilwiәt pak o hynd ka tәhqiqi jaәzah (Mumbra: Maktaba

Shaikhul Islam, 2012), pp. 34-38. (Urdu)

  567 
  

                                                        
89 Ibid, pp. 40-41. (Urdu)
90 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 13.
91 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 244.
92 Naeemi, p. 10. (Urdu)

93 Rizvi, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 315-316. (Urdu)
94 Ibid, pp. 316-317. (Urdu)

95 See Mian, sәyyid Ahmad. tәhrik-e-rishmi-e-rumal (Deoband: Maktaba Javed, 2002)

(Urdu)
96 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, pp. 58-60.

97 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 150. Metcalf’s source is a collection of fәtawa written by

Rashid Ahmad, fәtawa-e-rashidiyyah I.

98 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 5.
99 Ibid, pp. 159-161.
100 Gugler, Thomas K. “When Democracy is Not the Only Game in Town: Sectarian

Conflicts in Pakistan.” Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia, ed.

Stig Toft Madsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Uwe Skoda (London: Anthem Press,

2011), p. 281.
101 Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (New Delhi: Millat

Book Center, 1983), p. 21.

102 These include: hadi ul-hiran fi nәfi ul-fi ‘an sayyid әl-akwan (1882 AD), nafi ul-fәi

‘amәn ystәnar be nwrah kәl shәi (1879 AD), and qәmәr ul-tәmam fi nәfi ul-žәl ‘an

sayyid әl-anam (1879 AD), each dealing with the issue of Muhammad’s shadow,

  568 
  

                                                        
or lack thereof; and Sәlat ul-Sәfa fi nwr yl-mәSțәfa (1911 AD), on the

“luminosity” of the Prophet.

103 The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. John L. Esposito, ed. (Oxford

University Press, 1995), p. 201.

104 Jameel, Azka. “Pakistan with Muslims world-over celebrate Eid Milad-un-Nabi

(SAW) tomorrow.” Pakistan Times. 21 April 2005.

105 Sanyal, “Generational Changes,” p. 644.
106 Naeemi, pp. 411-414. (Urdu)

107 Ahmad Riza Khan’s books on this topic include ә’alam әla ‘alam ban hyndustan dar ul-

yslam (1907 AD) and әfSah ul-bian fi hukәm mәzar’a hyndustan (1900 AD).
108 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 274, including footnotes 21-22.
109 Singh Sarila, Narendra. The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s

Partition (Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2005), p. 36.

110 Quoted in Singh Sarila, Narendra. The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of

India’s Partition (Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2005), p. 60.

111 Singh Sarila, p. 61.
112 Singh, Jaswant. Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence (New Delhi: Rupa Co., 2009), p.

18.
113 Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press,

2009), p. 269.
114 Rai, p. 176.
115 “Jamiat upholds fatwa against Vande Mataram.” The Times of India, 4 November

2009.

  569 
  

                                                        
116 The British observer mentioned in this paragraph is Dr. Sidney Webb of the London

School of Economics and Political Science, in his preface to Rai, Lajpat. The Arya

Samaj: An Account of its Aims, Doctrine and Activities with a Biopgrahical Sketch of

the Founder (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915). The following quote

comes from pp. 220-221 of Rai’s above-cited work.

117 Faruqi, pp. 43-45.
118 Rai, p. 224.
119 “A fatwa issued in 1889 by Maulana Rashid Ahmed Gangohi of Deoband, permitting

Muslims to cooperate with hindus in the field of politics.” Exhibit. Nehru

Museum, New Delhi. Visited April 2012. (Urdu)

120 Rai, p. 2.
121 As reported by Azad himself in India Wins Freedom (Madras: Orient Longman

Limited, 1988), p. 8.
122 Niazi, Kausar. Imam Ahmad Raza: A Versatile Personality (Alahazrat Network, 1991),

p. 16. That Iqbal and Jinnah adopted the two-nation theory from Ahmad Riza

has been put forward by some Barelvis in recent times. This may have been so,

but doesn’t appear to have been either acknowledged or recognized during the

heydey of independence Barelvi politics. For example, Jamaat ‘Ali Shah, long-

time head of the predominantly Barelvi All-India Sunni Conference, would, in

1946 AD, describe the genesis of the two-nation theory thus: “Sir sәyyid Ahmad

Khan put forward the two-nation theory and ‘alama Iqbal impressed the people

with his poetry. Now qayd-e-ә‘ažәm [Jinnah] took upon himself the duty of

materializing this two-nation theory, demanding a separate homeland for the

  570 
  

                                                        
Muslims.” According to this ideological pedigree, the two-nation theory sprung

from the mind of Sir Sayyid, and from thence to Iqbal, and finally to Jinnah. See

“Services for the Creation of Pakistan.” Ameer-e-Millat (official website of the

‘Alipur Sayyidan Sharif dәrgah). Last accessed 8 January 2013.

<http://ameer-e-millat.com/svcs.htm>
123 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.” Alahazrat.net: International Islamic Web, par. 23.

Accessed 12 October 2011. <http://www.alahazrat.net/islam/mufti-amjad-ali-

al-A’azmi.php> An Urdu novel by Khan Asif, celebrating the exploits of

Mahmud of Ghazni, is named but shykәn (Lahore: Nir Asad Press, 2012).
124 Incidentally, according to Elst, it was the invading Muslims who first applied the

term “Hindu” to the non-Muslim inhabitants of Hindustan, hundreds of years

before the British essentially codified the practice. See Elst, Koenraad. Who is a

Hindu: Hindu Revivalist Views on Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other Offshoots of

Hinduism (New Delhi: Voice of India, 2001). This is an “updated and adapted”

version of Koenraad’s Ph.D. dissertation.

125 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 269.
126 Naeemi, p. 8. (Urdu)
127 Niazi, p. 16.
128 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, pp. xi-xii.
129 Robinson, Francis. Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United

Provinces’ Muslims, 1860-1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974),

p. 422.

  571 
  

                                                        
130 Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. Custodians of Change: The Ulama in Contemporary Islam

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 77.

131 Metcalf, Thomas R. The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Ideologies of the Raj

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 4.

132 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 78.
133 Sanyal, Devotional, p. 298.
134 Mian, pp. 52-53. (Urdu)
135 Qureshi, M. Naeem. Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat

Movement, 1918-1924 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 76.

136 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 79.
137 From Tabdir-e Falah wa Nijat wa Islah (Bareilly: Hasani Press, 1913), as quoted in

Sanyal, Usha. Ahmad Riza Khan: In the Path of the Prophet (Oxford: OneWorld

Publications, 2005), p. 79.

138 Khan, Hamid, p. 10.
139 Faruqi, p. 51.
140 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xv.

141 “shix ul-hynd ymam ul-mujahәdin mәhmwd hәsәn.” 

142 Faruqi, pp. 46-47.
143 Adarvi, pp. 33-37. (Urdu)
144 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 134.
145 Haroon, pp. 41-43, 50.
146 Ibid, p. 49.
147 Ibid, pp. 52-54.

  572 
  

                                                        
148 Ibid, pp. 55-58.
149 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, pp. 73-74.
150 Ibid, pp. 75-82.
151 “Shaikhul Hind Mahmood Hasan Deobandi.” Official Website, Al-Jamia Al-Islamia

Darul Uloom Deoband: Waqf. Last Accessed 8 November 2012.

<http://darululoomwaqf.com/shaikhul-hind.php>

152 Rizvi, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 317-318. (Urdu)

153 “shix ul-hynd ymam ul-mujahәdin mәhmwd hәsәn.”  

154 Khan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar. ap beTi (Jay Parkash Narain 1969), p. 35. (Urdu)

155 Mian, Sayyid Ahmad. tәhrik-e-rishmi-e-rumal (Deoband: Maktaba Javed, 2002), p. i.

(Urdu)
156 Qureshi, M. Naeem, p. 79.
157 According to the Rowlatt Committee, it was Sindhi who acted as the main influencer

of Mahmud Hasan, not vice-versa. But Deobandi sources clearly mark Mahmud

Hasan as the mastermind of the great pan-Islamic plan plan to rid the

subcontinent of the British, and Sindhi as his loyal associate.

158 Though little is known of the jәm’aiәt ul-әnsar, reports of several of its conferences,

written by ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi, are preserved within the dar ul’alwm’s central

library in Deoband (together with Sindhi’s other works). The group appears to

have been an organization of dar ul’alwm Deoband graduates and teachers who

were aware of Mahmud Hasan’s religio-political program. The organization was

likely meant to facilitate the political mobilization of the Deobandi “network,”

  573 
  

                                                        
should events make such a mobilization necessary in the eyes of the movement’s

leadership.
159 Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza. Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 18.

160 “German Plots In India.” The Times [London, England] 17 September 1918: 5.

Print.
161 Faruqi, p. 60.

162 “shix ul-hynd ymam ul-mujahәdin mәhmwd hәsәn.”  

163 See for example Faruqi, p. 59. What seems to have actually happened, however, is

that Mahmud Hasan left for his Hijaz mission, unknowingly just ahead of an

arrest warrant. Indeed, if not for a man on the inside, who delayed the order

reaching Bombay to prevent the great ‘alym’s ship from leaving, Mahmud Hasan

would have likely been behind bars before his journey even began. He likewise

met with luck on disembarkation, when he was able to mix with the regular

Muslim pilgrims and thus avoid arrest. See Mian, Sayyid Muhammad, p. 57.

(Urdu)

164 “shix ul-hynd ymam ul-mujahәdin mәhmwd hәsәn.” 

165 “German Plots In India.”
166 Qureshi, M. Naeem, pp. 79-81.
167 Adarvi, p. 282. (Urdu)
168 Ibid, pp. 36-37. (Urdu)
169 “German Plots In India.”

  574 
  

                                                        
170 Hardinge would later advocate the following position: “It is most important for us to

be able to show to the Muhammadans of India that we have been doing what we

can to put an end to the war with Italy which they resent very much and regard

as the beginning of the end of Islam in Europe. They think also that we might

have stopped it.” Heller, Joseph. British Policy towards the Ottoman Empire, 1908-

1914 (London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1983), pp. 55-56.
171 Rai, p. 221.
172 Tinckom-Fernandez, W. G. “Turks Stir All Islam By Deposing Caliph.” New York

Times 9 March 1924: XX4. Print.

173 Nehru, p. 76. 
174 Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.

8.
175 “Indian Mahomedans and the Caliphate.” Winnipeg Free Press [Winnipeg MB] 26

February 1923: 9. Print.

176 Thursby, Gene R. Hindu-Muslim Relations in British India (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975),

p. 23.
177 Rai, p. 103.
178 Ibid, p. 94.
179 Indeed, at the same conference in which the League president had expressed his

Indianness, sentiments of “loyalty to the [British] Government and [for] what

they have done for India” were likewise uttered—embodying a crucial difference

between the Deobandis and the League (as well as the latter’s many Barelvi

supporters), right to the end. For example, compare this position vis-à-vis the

  575 
  

                                                        
British to, say, Mahmud Hasan’s unambiguous anti-British statements. See Rai,

p. 103.
180 Rai, p. 87.
181 Adarvi, pp. 282-283. (Urdu)
182 Tabassum, Farhat. Deoband Ulema’s Movement for the Freedom of India (New Delhi:

Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, 2006), p. 140.

183 Faruqi, p. 66.
184 Ibid, p. 66.

185 Mian, әsiran-e-malTa, pp. 104-105. (Urdu)

186 Niazi, p. 17.
187 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 282, including footnote 49.
188 Ibid, p. 287.

189 Derwi, Jalal ul-Din. tәhrik-e-pakystan min ‘alәma-e-kәram ka kyrdar (Lahore: Maktaba

Nabaviya, 2010), pp. 93-99. (Urdu) Another example of Barelvi assertions

against the Deobandi leadership vis-à-vis Gandhi and “the Hindus”: that

“Mahmud Hasan paid homage to Gandhi as his first and foremost leader.” See

Derwi, p. 199.
190 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 78.
191 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 296.
192 “Spiritual Life of A’laa Hazrat.” AlaHazrat Network: International Islamic Website.

Last accessed 7 November 2012.

<http://www.alahazrat.net/events/ursealahazrat/spirituallife.htm>
193 Derwi, pp. 99. (Urdu)

  576 
  

                                                        
194 Ibid, pp. 129. (Urdu)

195 Mian, әsiran-e-malTa, pp. 108-110. (Urdu)

196 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xvii.
197 Robinson, Separatism, p. 422.
198 Nehru, p. 53.
199 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, pp. 284-285.
200 Jalal, Ayesha and Seal, Anil. “Alternative to Partition: Muslim Politics between the

Wars.” Modern Asian Studies 15.3 (1981): 415-430.

201 Rai, pp. 225-226.
202 Wolpert, p. 318.
203 Jalal and Seal, p. 421.
204 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xvii.
205 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 293. The continued importance of the cow slaughter ban

to Hindus may be best demonstrated by its being strictly enforced in all but two

Indian states. Winter, Robin. “Sacred Cow.” Archaeology Online. Last accessed 16

November 2012.

<http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/sacred-cow.html>
206 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xvii-xviii.
207 Ibid, pp. xvi.
208 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, pp. 296-297.

209 Mian, әsiran malTa, p. 106 (Urdu). In truth, Mahmud Hasan authored many juridical

rulings, even if he did not consider himself a full-fledged mufti. His statement is

all the more odd when one takes into account that fact that Mahmud Hasan

  577 
  

                                                        
spent twenty years composing fәtawa (and teaching) at the Mazahir Uloom in

Saharanpur before spending an additional fourteen in “the post of principal and

fәtwa-writing” at a seminary in Kanpur. To top it off, his first job at the dar

ul’alwm in Deoband was that of mufti in the university’s fәtwa-writing

department! Sayyid Muhammad Mian, in his әsiran malTa, refers to Mahmud

Hasan’s 1920/1339 ruling as a fәtwa. A collection of Mahmud Hasan’s

numerous fәtawa can be found at the school, bound in twenty-five volumes under

the title fәtawa mәhmwdiәħ. See “The Eminent Muftis of Darul Uloom.” Darul

Ifta: Deoband. Last accessed 27 November 2012. <http://darulifta-

deoband.org/>
210 Thursby, p. 82.
211 Yadav, Bhupendra. “Tilak: Communalist or Political Pragmatist?” Bal Gangadhar

Tilak, ed. Pati Biswamoy (Delhi: Primus Books, 2011), p. 48.

212 The previous paragraphs citing Ahmard Riza’s 1920/1338 fәtwa regarding non-

cooperation is based on the translation of the same in Sanyal, Devotional Islam,

pp. 294-295.
213 Translation from the original Arabic according to the Sahih International version of

the Qur’an. This verse was cited by Mahmud Hasan in his 1920/1339 juridical

ruling. Mian, әsiran-e-malTa, p. 105. (Urdu)

214 Main, әsiran malTa, pp. 105-106. (Urdu)

215 Ibid, p. 83. (Urdu)
216 All quotes from Mahmud Hasan’s ruling taken from Main, pp. 97-107. (Urdu)

  578 
  

                                                        
217 Deobandi domination (indeed, out-and-out leadership and control) of the JUH wasn’t

a reality at first. Indeed, the party’s founding members came from a variety of

persuasions within the Muslim scholar community, and included such luminaries

as Abul Kalam Azad of Congress fame and ‘Abd ul-Bari of Farangi Mahal .
218 Dindrolvi, pp. 256-258. (Urdu)

Chapter 3
1 Nehru, pp. 70-73.3
2 Ibid, p. 73.
3 “Indian Congresses.” The Times [London, England] 28 December 1922: 7. Print.
4 “Indian Congresses.”
5 “Discord at Indian Congresses.” The Times [London, England] 30 December 1922: 7.

Print.
6 “India and the Empire.” The Times [London, England] 2 January 1924: 9. Print.
7 Jalal and Seal, p. 417.
8 Ibid, pp. 419-420.
9 Pirzada, Sayyid A. S. The Politics of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Pakistan 1971-1977

(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 3.

10 Ali, Asghar. Communal Riots in Post-Independence India (Hyderabad: Sangam Books,

1991), p. 53.
11 Wolpert, p. 320.
12 “Multan Riots: Tension Still Acute, No Further Trouble Expected.” Advocate (Burnie,

Tasmania) 11 September 1922: 1.

  579 
  

                                                        
13 Thursby, p. 162.
14 Tinckom-Fernandez, W. G. “India a Great Moslem State is Bright Mohammedan

Dream.” New York Times 20 May 1923: XX7.

15 Ibid.
16 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 939.
17 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, pp. 302-306.
18 Ibid, p. 306.
19 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xviii.
20 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 306.
21 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxix, footnote 17.
22 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, pp. 307-308.

23 At least one Barelvi source puts the number of scholars and mәshayx present at three

hundred. “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.” Ameer-e-Millat (official

website of the ‘Alipur Sayyidan Sharif dәrgah). Last accessed 14 January 2013.

<http://ameer-e-millat.com/svcs.htm>
24 “Mohammedan New Year: Disturbances in India.” The Mercury (Hobart) 16 August

1924: 9. Print.
25 Arifi, Muhammad Akram. “Pakistan. Jam’iyyat al-‘Ulama Pakistan.” Muslim

Organizations in the Twentieth Century, ed. Gholamali Haddad Adel, Mohammad

Jafar Elmi, and Hassan Taromi-Rad (London: EWI Press, 2012), p. 151.
26 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xix. At least one Barelvi source disagrees that the 1925/1343

meeting represented the “first” major summit of Barelvi (“Sunni”) scholars across

India with such aims in mind, pointing to a 1918/1336 gathering organized by

  580 
  

                                                        
the renowned pir of Kichhauchha Sharif (home to the dargah of the great

fourteenth-century/eighth-century Sufi saint Ashraf Jahangir Semnani), ‘Ali

Hussain ‘Ashrafi. See Ashrafi, Basharath ‘Ali Siddiqui. “Sadr al Afazil Qudwat al

Ulama Nayim-Allah Jalali Imam Sayyid Muhammad Nayimuddin Qaudri Ashrafi

Muhaddith Muradabadi.” Basharath Siddiqui (Hyderabad: Ahl us Sunnәt

Foundation). 12 December 2012. Last accessed 8 January 2013.

<http://basharathsiddiqui.webnode.in/news/sadr-al-afazil-qudwat-al-ulama-

nayim-allah-jalali-imam-sayyid-muhammad-nayimuddin-quadri-ashrafi-

muhaddith-muradabadi/>
27 Ahmad, p. xix, xxx.
28 “Who are the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat?” Islamic Encyclopedia (Kuwait:

NooreMadinah Network). Web. 2013. Last accessed 15 March 2013.

<http://www.nooremadinah.net/Documents/Ahle-

SunnәtWalJamaat/18)TheAhleSunnatWalJamaat/TheAhleSunnatWalJamaat.as

p>

29 Ameer-e-Millat (official website of the ‘Alipur Sayyidan Sharif dәrgah). Last accessed

14 January 2013.

<http://ameer-e-millat.com/svcs.htm>
30 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xx.
31 “Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India

Muslim League.” Columbia University website. Last accessed 12 December

2012.

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<http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.

html>
32 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxxi, footnote 35.
33 Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin Books, 2003), p.

xxix.
34 Afzal, p. 49.
35 Darling, Malcolm Lyall. At Freedom’s Door (Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 18.
36 Derwi, pp. 99-102. (Urdu)
37 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xx.
38 Arifi, Muhammad Akram. “Pakistan. Jam’iyyat al-‘Ulama Pakistan.” Muslim

Organizations in the Twentieth Century, ed. Gholamali Haddad Adel, Mohammad

Jafar Elmi, and Hassan Taromi-Rad (London: EWI Press, 2012), p. 152.
39 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, pp. 312-313.
40 Nehru, p. 293.
41 Jama’at ‘Ali Shah provides a good example of how a pir might exert widespread

influence politically. In one of his speeches (in 1945/1364), he directly appealed

to his disciples, as well as “the people at large,” to vote a certain way. “I enjoin

strictly upon my colleagues in the mystic order,” he said, “as well as my disciples,

to vote for the Muslim League candidates only…” (italics added). “Services for

the Creation of Pakistan.” Ameer-e-Millat (official website of the ‘Alipur

Sayyidan Sharif dәrgah). Last accessed 14 January 2013.

<http://ameer-e-millat.com/svcs.htm> 

  582 
  

                                                        
42 Von Tunzelmann, Alex. Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

(New York: Picador, 2007), pp. 106-107.

43 Singh, Jaswant, p. 34.
44 Rai, p. 223.
45 Singh Sarila, p. 57.
46 Ibid, p. 66.
47 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxi.
48 “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.” 
49 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxi.
50 Krishan, Yuvraj. Understanding Partition: India Sundered, Muslims Fragmented (Delhi:

Alpha Publications, 2002), p. 75.

51 Ahmad, Syed Nur. From Martial Law to Martial Law: Politics in the Punjab, 1919-1958

(Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1985), pp. 156-157.

52 “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.”  
53 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxi.
54 Krishan, p. 75.
55 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxxi, footnote 43.
56 “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.” 
57 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxiv.
58 Ibid, p. xxiv.
59 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 311, including footnote 34.
60 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxiv.
61 Naimi, p. 195. (Urdu)

  583 
  

                                                        
62 Sanyal, Devotional Islam, p. 313-314.
63 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 113.
64 Naeemi, Raghib Hussain. Personal Interview. Lahore. 11 June 2012.
65 “Mournful Impression of Sadrul Afazil Maulana Naimuddin Moradabadi on His

Demise.” Jame Ashraf (Dargah Kichhoucha Sharif). Last accessed 23 November

2012. <http://www.ashrafjahangir.com/index.php/personalities/hazrat-

maulana-syed-ahmad-ashraf-ra?showall=&start=17>
66 According to the official website of the dar ul’alwm, Husain Ahmad was born on 6

October 1879/19 Shawwal 1296 and he arrived at Deoband on 3 January 1892/2

Jumada II 1309, making him twelve years and almost three months old when he

began his studies there. “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed Madani.”

Darul Uloom Deoband, official website. Last accessed 11 January 2013.

<http://www.darululoom-deoband.com>
67 Goyal, pp. 23-24, 29.
68 Ibid, pp. 17-18.

69 Mian, әsiran-e-malTa, p. 111. (Urdu)

70 Goyal, pp. 19-20. It seems Husain Ahmad did “not intend” to migrate to the Hijaz,

but did so—and remained there—out of filial piety, intending to remain “as long

as his august father was alive.” See “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed

Madani.” Darul Uloom Deoband, official website. Last accessed 11 January 2013.

<http://www.darululoom-deoband.com>
71 Goyal, pp. 22-23.
72 Ibid, p. 32.

  584 
  

                                                        
73 “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed Madani.” Darul Uloom Deoband, official

website. Last accessed 11 January 2013.

<http://www.darululoom-deoband.com>
74 “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed Madani.”

75 Mian, әsiran-e-malTa, p. 114-118. (Urdu)

76 Tabassum, p. 139.
77 “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed Madani.”
78 Tabassum, pp. 138-139.
79 “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed Madani.”
80 Qasmi, p. 12.
81 Tabassum, p. 141.
82 As quoted in Tabassum, p. 142.
83 The booklet was co-authored by Muhammad Mian, who served as general secretary

of the JUH. As quoted (with minor changes by the author) in Tabassum, p. 142.

See also Yoginer Sikand. “All For a Song: Vande Mataram.”

Countercurrents.org. 17 November, 2009. Last accessed 5 December 2012.

<http://www.countercurrents.org/sikand171109.htm>
84 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 14.

85 See Qasmi, Khurshid Hasan. dar ul’alwm әwr diobәnd ki tarixi shәxSiat (Deoband:

Maktaba Tafsir ul-Qur’an, 2003), p. 25. (Urdu) The school’s official website

describes the situation thus: “In 1346/1927, when Maulana Syed Anwar Shah

Kashmiri resigned from Darul Uloom, there was no such personality among the

  585 
  

                                                        
group of Darul Uloom, save Maulana Madani, who could fill that momentous

vacany…” See “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed Madani.”

86 “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed Madani.”  
87 Ibid.
88 Tabassum, p. 145.
89 Ibid, pp. 145-146.
90 Von Tunzelmann, pp. 85-86.
91 Jayapalan, N. Constitutional History of India (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1998) pp.

91-92.
92 Tabassum, pp. 149-150.
93 Wolpert, pp. 326-327.
94 Von Tunzelmann, p. 84.
95 Tabassum, pp. 146-147.
96 Qasmi, M. Burhanuddin, pp. 14-15.
97 Awan, Samina. Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam: A Socio-Political Study (Karachi: Oxford

University Press, 2010), p. 18.

98 Dindrolvi, p. 263. (Urdu)
99 Tabassum, pp. 148. See also Qasmi, M. Burhanuddin, pp. 14-15.
100 Habib, Irfan. “Civil Disobedience 1930-31.” Social Scientist 25.9/10

(September/October 1997): 55-56.

101 Nojeim, Michael J. Gandhi and King: The Power of Nonviolent Resistance (Westport

[CT]: Praeger Publishers, 2004), pp. 145-146.

102 Habib, p. 43.

  586 
  

                                                        
103 Metcalf and Metcalf, p. 193.
104 Afzal, p. 49.
105 Wolpert, p. 332.
106 Von Tunzelmann, p. 90.
107 Ahmad, Syed Nur, p. 94.
108 Von Tunzelmann, p. 89.
109 Qasmi, M. Burhanuddin, pp. 15-17.
110 Jenkins, Laura Dudley. “Competing Inequalities: The Struggle Over Reserved

Legislative Seats for Women in India.” Complicating Categories: Gender, Class, Race

and Ethnicity, ed. Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens (New York: Press

Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1999), p. 59.

111 Afzal, p. 54, footnote 168.
112 “Moslem Unity.” The Times [London, England] 21 November 1932: 11. Print.

Gallagher notes that many Indian politicians of the time “specialized” in such

“Unity Conferences, where they turned real conflicts into bland unrealities.” See

Gallagher, John and Seal, Anil. The Decline, Revival, and Fall of the British Empire

(Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 1982), pp. 185-186. Apparently a few

Leaguers did attent the Allahabad Conference, too. See McPherson, Kenneth.

“How Best Do We Survive?”: A Modern Political History of the Tamil Muslims (New

Delhi: Routledge, 2010).

113 Afzal, p. 54.
114 Ahmad, Syed Nur, p. 139.
115 Tabassum, pp. 151-152.

  587 
  

                                                        
116 Qasmi, M. Burhanuddin, pp. 15-17.
117 Ahmad, Syed Nur, pp. 144-145.
118 Pirzada, p. 4.
119 Ibid, p. 4.
120 Usmani, Zafar Ahmad. I’la al-Sunan (Karachi: Idarat al-Qur’an wa al-‘Ulum al-

Islamiyyah, 1976), introduction.

121 Pirzada, p. 5.
122 Afzal, p. 55, footnote 172.
123 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxii.
124 “Moslem India On Guard.” The Times [London, England] 27 March 1940: 9. Print.
125 Tabassum, p. 155.
126 Mitra, Asok. Towards Independence, 1940-1947 (Bombay: Jayati Datta Mitra, 1991),

pp. 79-81.
127 Ahmad, Syed Nur, p. 156.
128 Tabassum, p. 153.
129 “The Next Step in India.” The Times [London, England] 5 July 1945: 3. Print.
130 Usmani, Mohammad Rafi. Jihad in Afghanistan against Communism (Karachi: Darul-

Ishat, 2003), pp. 23-24.

131 Tabassum, p. 158.

132 Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob. tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, p. 318. (Urdu)
133 Ibid, p. 318. (Urdu)
134 “Hadhrat Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmed Madani.”
135 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.”

  588 
  

                                                        
136 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 71.
137 Azizi, Alauddin. The Saga of a Freedom Fighter (Jaipur: Book Enclave, 2004), p. 80,

footnote 15.
138 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.”
139 Derwi, pp. 103-104. (Urdu)
140 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.”
141 Ibid.
142 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, p. 79.
143 Ibid, p. 84.
144 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xviii.
145 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.”
146 Ibid.
147 Razvi, Muhammad Afthab Cassim. “Mufti-e-Azam-e-Hind – Imam Mustapha Raza

Khan.” Islamic Encyclopedia (Barelvi). Noore Madinah Network. Last accessed

30 November 2012. <http://www.nooremadinah.net/EnglishBooks/Mufti-e-

Azam-e-Hind/Mufti-e-Azam-e-Hind.pdf>
148 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.”
149 Ludhianivi, Muhammad Usman Rehman. Personal interview. Ludhiana. 12

September 2012.
150 For one example, see Derwi, pp. 130-135. (Urdu)
151 “Racial Disturbance at Lahore.” Northern Times [Carnarvon, WA] 10 July 1935: 3.

Print.
152 Awan, p. 86.

  589 
  

                                                        
153 Gilmartin, David. “The Shahidganj Mosque Incident: A Prelude to Pakistan.” Islam,

Politics, and Social Movements, ed. Burke III, Edmund, and Lapidus, Ira M.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 153. Still, there were some

Barelvi leaders preaching restraint and recourse to “legal and constitutional”

measures. One of these was AISC leader Jama’at ‘Ali Shah. See “Services for the

Creation of Pakistan.” Ameer-e-Millat (official website of the ‘Alipur Sayyidan

Sharif dәrgah). Last accessed 8 January 2013.

<http://ameer-e-millat.com/svcs.htm>
154 Derwi, p. 138. (Urdu)
155 Awan, pp. 87-88.
156 “Moslem India On Guard.” The Times [London, England] 27 March 1940: 9. Print.
157 “Riot in Lahore.” Western Argus [Kalgoorie, WA] 16 July 1935: 12. Print.
158 “Racial Disturbance at Lahore.”
159 The Australian Cable Service reported ten [Indians] shot, but also admitted that

“casualties are uncertain.” “Lahore Riots.” Cairns Post 23 July 1935: 12. Print.
160 “Lahore Riot.” The West Australian [Perth] 23 July 1935: 13. Print.
161 “Lahore Disorders.” The West Australian [Perth] 31 July 1935: 19. Print.
162 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.”
163 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xxiv-xxv.
164 “Maulana Abdul Hamid Badayuni (1898-1970).” Pioneer of Freedom (Series), Date of

Issue: August 14, 1999). Official Website, Pakistan Post Offic Department. Last

accessed 30 November, 2012.

<http://www.pakpost.gov.pk/philately/stamps99/pioneer_of_freedom.html>

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Manzooruddin would later argue that it wasn’t until the mwlana from Badayun

threw his weight behind Jinnah and joined the Muslim League that the Barelvi

school directly aligned itself against the Deobandis of the JUH. See Ahmad,

Manzooruddin. “The Political Role of the ‘Ulama’ in the Indo-Pakistan Sub-

Continent.” Islamic Studies 6.4 (1967): 333.

165 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxv.
166 Ibid, p. xxii.
167 Some Barelvis rejected the League outright—and often, by extension, the AISC

itself. Such influential men included Muhammad Mian Marahrawi (d. 1952 AD),

who characterized the League as including apostates and hypocrites, prompting

him to organize his own party in 1935/1251, the Jamiat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat; pir

Muhammad Sirajul Huda Qadiri, who opposed the League not only for its role,

as he saw it, in inciting violent communalism, but also for its acceptance of any

Muslim sect (including the Deobandis) into its ranks; Qari Muhammad Tayyib,

“[t]he most vocal opponent” of the Muslim League, whose denunciation of the

ML was based on its being an unholy mixture of the various Muslim sects—

Deobandis included—led by a Shi’a, to boot; and Hashmat ‘Ali Khan, who

rejected the League for striving to quell the divisions between the Muslim sects,

primarily Barelvis and Deobandis (though he would later change his mind).

Note each of these leaders’ arguments was based on Ahmad Riza Khan’s

prohibition against working with “bad” Muslims like those out of Deoband.

Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xxiv-xxviii.

  591 
  

                                                        
168 Indeed, even Abdul Hamid Badayuni, the very source of the AISC-ML merger

proposal, reportedly emphasized, around this time, that “[Muhammad ‘Ali

Jinnah] is not our ymam or religious leader. He is just a political wәkil [“lawyer”

or “advocate”] in the case of Pakistan.” In fact, Jinnah was often referred to by

the Barelvi ‘alәma as their wәkil. See Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xxv-xxvi. Some Sunni

leaders, however, were unafraid to paint Jinnah in more elevated strokes. “I call

him [Jinnah] a saint,” declared Jama’at ‘Ali Shah on the occasion of the

1946/1365 Benares conference. “[I]n my eyes he is a saint.” See “Services for

the Creation of Pakistan.”

169 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. xxvi.

170  “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.”

171 The Lahore meeting was the 60th annual conference of the Anjuman-e-No’maniah-e-

Hind.
172 His nephew, Yousaf Raza Gillani, a Pakistan People’s Party member, would serve as

Pakistan’s sixteenth Prime Minister, from 25 March 2008/17 Rabi I 1429 until

his (retroactive) ouster on 26 April 2012/4 Jumada II 1433 (he would actually

serve until 19 June/29 Rajab). “Makhdoom Yousuf Raza Gillani nominated

Prime Minister designate.” PPP News/Press Releases. Pakistan People’s Party

official website. 22 March 2008. Last accessed 8 January 2013.

<http://www.ppp.org.pk/party/pm.html>
173 “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.”
174 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxiii.
175 Ibid, p. xiv.

  592 
  

                                                        
176 “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.”  
177 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxii.
178 “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.”  
179 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xxiii.
180 Ibid, p. xxiii. Sylhet holds especial status among Bengali Muslims as the burial place

of the great thirteenth- to fourteenth-/seventh- to eighth-century Sufi saint

Shah Jalal, credited with first introducing Islam to northeastern Bengal. Indeed,

Sylhet, still home to Shah Jalal’s oft-visited dәrgah, was once known as Jalalabad.
181 “Mufti Amjad ‘Ali Al A’azmi.”
182 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 108.

183 Rizvi, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 123-125. (Urdu)

184 Arshad, ‘Ali. ‘alama shabir aħmad ‘asmani ka taħrik-e pakәstan mi(n) kәrdar. (Lahore:

Punjab University, 2005), pp. 1-2. (Urdu)

185 Ibid, p. 2. (Urdu)
186 Ibid, pp. 2-3. (Urdu)

187 This journey took place in 1914. Rizvi, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 238-

239. (Urdu)

188 Rizvi, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 244-245. (Urdu)
189 Arshad, p. 4. (Urdu)
190 Sanyal, Ahmad Riza, pp. 80-81.
191 Arshad, pp. i-ii. (Urdu)

192 Rizvi, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 353-354. (Urdu)
193 Ibid, pp. 392-393. (Urdu)

  593 
  

                                                        
194 From a December 1974 article (“dar ul’alwm diobәnd babәt”) in the Urdu magazine

Mujalla, as referenced in Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld

әvvәl, pp. 250-251. (Urdu)

195 Taqi Usmani, Muhammad. “Shayk Muhammad Shafi’: The Mufti of Pakistan.”

Deoband.org. 4 December, 2011. Accessed 11 May, 2012.

<http://www.deoband.org/2011/12/history/biographies-of-scholars/shaykh-

muhammad-shafi%E2%80%98-the-mufti-of-pakistan/> 

196 Rizvi, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 256-258. (Urdu)

197 Taqi Usmani, Muhammad. әkabәr diobәnd kia the? (Deoband: Zamzam, 1995), p. 76.

(Urdu)

198 Rizvi, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, p. 221. (Urdu)
199 Shabbir Ahmad apparently never even owned a house of his own. “Until the time of

his death he continued residing in two rented rooms… And [he died] without a

bank balance, or a personal house, or property.” Taqi Usmani, Muhammad.

әkabәr diobәnd, p. 76. (Urdu)

200 Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 269-273. (Urdu)
201 Shabbir Ahmad described the university at Dabhel as “watering every part of

Gujarat with its academic benefits,” illuminating an erstwhile “remote” area

“absolutely deprived and destitute of knowledge and…the sunnәt.” He would

serve as its dean at the same time he was acting as the dar ul’alwm Deoband’s

chancellor. The official history of the university at Deoband contradicts itself on

the matter of Shabbir Ahmad’s time spent at Dabhel as opposed to Deoband.

When he was appointed chancellor, the history records that “in the beginning he

  594 
  

                                                        
would stay at Dabhel for a time and at Deoband for a time. But in the end the

centrality of the dar ul’alwm drew him to Deoband.” At the time of his

resignation, however, the history explains that “the chancellor…used to stay

very little in Deoband. He spent most of the year at Dabhel.” Rizvi, Sayyid

Mahboob, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 273, 285, 310-311. (Urdu)

202 Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 272-273. (Urdu)
203 Afzal, p. 54, footnote 168.
204 Ibid, p. 54, footnote 168.
205 Abul Qasim Nomani. Personal Interview. Deoband. 28 September 2012. mufti Abul

Qasim is the great-grandson of Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and the son of

long-time (1928-1980/1346-1400) school chanceller Muhammad Tayyib.

206 Afzal, p. 54, footnote 168.
207 Arshad, pp. ii. (Urdu)
208 French, Patrick. Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London:

Flamingo, 1998), p. 148.

209 From Alan Campbell-Johnson’s Mission with Mountbatten (1951), as quoted in French,

p. 154.
210 Singh Sarila, p. 134-135.

211 Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, pp. 309-310. (Urdu)
212 According to Rizvi, mwlana Muhammad Ibrahim and mwlana Zahoor Ahmed would

subsequently be convinced to return to the dar ul’alwm at Deoband. See Rizvi,

Sayyid Mahboob, tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, p. 311. (Urdu)

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213 Sikand, Yoginer. “A Page From Freedom Movement.” The Milli Gazette (6.3) 1

February 2005.
214 Arshad, pp. ii. (Urdu)
215 Taqi Usmani, Muhammad, in the “Foreward” to the English translation of Usmani,

Muhammad Shafi. Ma’ariful Qur’an (Karachi: Darul-Uloom, 1995), p. 12.

216 Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob. tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, p. 312. (Urdu)
217 Al Mujahid, Sharif. “Jinnah's Team: The Top Ten.” Keynote address presented to the

International Conference on Leaders of the Pakistan Movement, National

Institute of Historical & Cultural Research, Islamabad, on 7 April 2008.

218 Gilmartin, David. “Religious Leadership and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab.”

Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1979), p. 511.

219 These are the words of mwlana Hamdullah Jan. See: Kaul, Suvir. The Partitions of

Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2001), p. 52.

220 Haroon, Sana. “The rise of Deobandi Islam in the North‐West Frontier Province and

its implications in Colonial India and Pakistan, 1914‐1996.” Journal of the Royal

Asiatic Society, Series 3, 18, 1 (2008), p. 53.

221 Awan, ix-xxix.
222 Ibid, p. 16.
223 Kamran, Tahir. “Evolution and Impact of ‘Deobandi’ Islam in the Punjab.” The

Historian (Lahore: GC University, 2010).

224 Awan, p. 17.
225 Al Mujahid, Sharif. “Jinnah's Team: The Top Ten.”

  596 
  

                                                        
226 Gilmartin, p. 511.
227 Ahmad, Manzooruddin, p. 333.
228 Gilmartin, p. 512.
229 “Jamiatul Ulama-e-Islam Conference.” Bombay Sentinel, 8 March 1946, p. 3.

230 The exact phrase used is țwl w ‘arż. Taqi Usmani, Muhammad. әkabәr diobәnd kia

the? (Deoband: Zamzam, 1995), p. 75. (Urdu)

231 Arshad, ‘Ali. ‘alama shabir aħmad ‘asmani ka taħrik-e pakәstan mi(n) kәrdar. (Lahore:

Punjab University, 2005), p. i. (Urdu)

232 Gilmartin, David. “Religious Leadership and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab.”

Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1979), p. 512.

233 Taqi Usmani, әkabәr diobәnd, p. 76. (Urdu)

234 Arshad, pp. ii. (Urdu)
235 Al Mujahid, Sharif. “Jinnah's Team: The Top Ten.”
236 Gilmartin, David. “A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Election

Process in Colonial Punjab.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 14,

No. 3 (July, 1998), p. 426.

237 Arshad, pp. iii. (Urdu)
238 Al-Mujahid, Sharif. “1945-46 Elections and Pakistan: Punjab’s Pivotal Role.”

(University of the Punjab), pp. 1-2. Web. Last accessed 18 March 2013.

<http://pu.edu.pk/images/journal/studies/PDF-FILES/Artical%20No-1.pdf>
239 Sen, S. N. History: Modern India (Delhi: New Age International, 2006), p. 209.
240 Al-Mujahid, Sharif. “1945-46 Elections and Pakistan: Punjab’s Pivotal Role.”
241 Gilmartin, “A Magnificent Gift,” p. 428.

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242 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 14.
243 Sen, p. 209.
244 Arshad, pp. iii. (Urdu)
245 Pyarelal. Thrown to the Wolves (Calcutta: Eastlight Book House, 1966), pp. 96-97.
246 Darling, p. 12.
247 Ibid, p. 28.
248 Ibid, pp. 18-19.
249 Ibid, p. 30.
250 Schofield, Victoria. Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Conflict (London: Tauris

Parke, 2003), p. 242.

251 Upon learning of the partition plan and the frontier referendum that it included,

Congress president J. Kripalani evidently protested before the Viceroy. There

was growing support, he insisted, for an independent Pashtunistan, thus this

option must be included on the referendum ballot. But Mountbatten evidently

informed Kripalani that it had been Nehru himself who had insisted that voters

receive only two options: join India or join Pakistan. Independence would not

and could not be allowed. See article by Qaid-e-Azam University professor of

history Sayed Wiqar ‘Ali Shah: “Abdul Ghaffar Khan” (Islamabad: Baacha Khan

Trust, 2010), p. 26. <http://www.baachakhantrust.org/AbdulGhaffarKhan.pdf>

252 Gupta, Amit Kumar. Northwest Frontier Province: Legislation and Freedom Struggle,

1932-1947 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1976), p. 200.

253 Haroon, Frontier of Faith, p. 178.

  598 
  

                                                        
254 Khan, Wali. Facts Are Facts: The Untold Story of India’s Partition (Fairfax, VA:

Academy of the Punjab in North America, 2004), p. 149.

255 Chaudhry, Kashif. “Jinnah’s Pakistan, hijacked by clerics.” The Express Tribune, 19

September 2011.
256 Jama’at ‘Ali may have had personal reasons to provoke Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan; he

would claim around 1945/1354 that the Frontier Gandhi’s KK had “threatened

me with murder.” To them he announced publicly, “I would like to tell them

that I am a sayyid, and a sayyid is never afraid of death.” See “Services for the

Creation of Pakistan.”
257 Talbot, Ian. Pakistan: A Modern History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 85.
258 Arshad, pp. iii. (Urdu)
259 Banerjee, Mukulika. The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West

Frontier (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 189.

260 Khan, Wali, p. 148.
261 Banerjee, p. 189.
262 Al Mujahid, Sharif. “Jinnah's Team: The Top Ten.” On top of the 1946/1365

majority vote in their favor, Ghaffar Khan and the Congressites among the

eastern Pathans had also managed to pass a move of no-confidence against the

short-lived League ministry (in power since 1943/1362) in 1945/1364.

263 Taqi Usmani, әkabәr diobәnd, p. 75. (Urdu) 

264 Kaul, p. 51.

265 Taqi Usmani, әkabәr diobәnd, p. 76. (Urdu)

266 Arshad, pp. iii. (Urdu)

  599 
  

                                                        
267 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 13.
268 Darling, p. 28.
269 Derwi, p. 154. (Urdu)

Chapter 4
1 “Services for the Creation of Pakistan.”
2 Choudhury, G. W. “Constitution-Making Dilemmas in Pakistan.” The Western Political

Quarterly 8.4 (December 1955): 589.

3 Rizvi, Sayyid Mahboob. tarix dar ul’alwm diobәnd, jyld әvvәl, p. 319. (Urdu)
4 Khan, Hamid, p. 50. In a February 1948/Rabi II 1367 speech broadcast to the

American public, Jinnah out-and-out stated that Pakistan would not be a

theocratic state. He said, “Islam and idealism have taught us democracy; it has

taught equality of man; justice and fairplay to everybody. We are the inheritors

of these glorious traditions and are fully alive to our responsibilities and

obligations as framers of the future constitution of Pakistan. In any case,

Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission.”

See Choudhury, p. 590.

5 “Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah’s first Presidential Address to the constituent assembly of

Pakistan (August 11, 1947).” Columbia University website. Last accessed 18

January 2012.

<http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_jinnah_asse

mbly_1947.html>
6 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 7.

  600 
  

                                                        
7 Afzal, M. Rafique “Pakistan: Struggle for an Islamic State, 1947-1971.” Islam in South

Asia, Waheed-uz-Zaman and M. Saleem Akhtar, ed. (Islamabad: National

Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1993), pp. 502-503.

8 Afzal, Political Parties, p. 213.
9 Ibid, p. 215.
10 Troll Christian. “Two Conceptions of Da’wa in India: Jama’at-i Islami and Tablighi

Jama’at.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 39e Annee, No. 87 (Jul.-Sep.

1994), pp. 126.

11 Troll, pp. 125-127.
12 Singh Sarila, p. 11.
13 Jackson, Roy. Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam: Authority and the Islamic State

(New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 2.

14 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 1-2.
15 Ibid, p. xi, 2.
16 Ibid, p. xi.
17 Ibid, pp. 3-4.
18 Ibid, p. 5.
19 Afzal, Political Parties, p. 213.
20 Khan, Hamid, p. 64.
21 As quoted in Khan, Hamid, p. 58.
22 Rafi Usmani, pp. 32-33.
23 Singh, R. S. N. “Pakistan’s Islamic Journey.” Indian Defence Review (June 2007): 144.
24 Khan, Hamid, pp. 60-61.

  601 
  

                                                        
25 Those who delivered formal speeches from the House floor in favor of the resolution

included Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, Abdur Rab Khan

Nishtar, Nazir Ahmad, Omar Hayat Malik, Nur Ahmad, Mohammad Husain,

Begum Shaista, and Chaudhry Mohammad Zafarullah Khan. See Khan, Hamid,

p. 61.
26 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 7.
27 Afzal, Political Parties, p. 219.
28 Afzal, M. Rafique “Pakistan: Struggle for an Islamic State, 1947-1971.” Islam in South

Asia, Waheed-uz-Zaman and M. Saleem Akhtar, ed. (Islamabad: National

Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1993), p. 505.

29 Khan, Hamid. Constitutional and Political History of Pakistan, Second Edition (Karachi:

Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 58.

30 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 505. The one Muslim member to vote “no” on the Objectives

Resolution: Mian Iftikhar al-Din of the Azad Pakistan Party (which never held

more than three seats in the constituent assembly). See Afzal, Political Parties, p.

219.
31 Cohen, Stephen Philip. The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings

Institution, 2004), p. 57.

32 Chaudhry, Kashif. “Jinnah’s Pakistan, hijacked by clerics.” Statements like this one,

however, tend to clump the ‘alәma together, completely ignoring the diverse

spectrum of clerical opinion regarding Jinnah, a South Asian Muslim homeland,

and the partition of Hindustan. Such statements also hint at the complexity of

the clerical relationship with Jinnah—even of those ‘alәma who supported the

  602 
  

                                                        
League vigorously, for their visions of a future Pakistan (and their role vis-à-vis

the Islamic state and its rulers) probably diverged sharply from that of the qayd-

i-ә‘ažәm—but they would never have been classified in their time as Jinnah’s

“enemies” by anyone, least of all by the League leader himself.

33 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 505-506.
34 Afzal, Political Parties, p. 221.
35 Faruqi, Ejaz Ahmad. Pakistan: A Crisis in the Renaissance of Islam (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel

Publications, 1991), pp. 213-215.

36 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 7.
37 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 506-507.
38 Ibid, p. 507.
39 Khan, Hamid, p. 52.
40 Ibid, pp. 52-53.
41 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 8.
42 Binder, pp. 32-33.

43 The organization should not be confused with another of similar name, the tәhrik-e-

nyfaz-e-shәri’at-e-muhәmmәdi, established in 1992/1412. This latter group is a

Deobandi-leaning pro-Taliban outfit, active along the border between Pakistan

and Afghanistan (especially in the Swat valley) and banned by the Pervez

Musharraf regime in 2002/1423. One Sufi Muhammad, a one-time member of

the political party Jamaat-e-Islami, founded the outfit in order to promote the

enforcement of Islamic law. See “Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi.”

South Asia Terrorism Portal. Last accessed 14 January 2013.

  603 
  

                                                        
<http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/terroristoutfits/TNSM.ht

m>
44 Jamaat ‘Ali Shah died on 30 August 1951/27 Dh’ul Q’adah 1370—at the ripe old age

of one hundred ten. He would be posthumously recognized for his efforts

toward establishing Pakistan when, in 1987/1408, the government of the Punjab

(Pakistan) bestowed upon him the Tehrik-e-Pakistan Award. See “Services for

the Creation of Pakistan.”

45 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 4.
46 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 509.
47 Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza. “Mawdudi and the Jama’at-i Islami: The Origins, Theory

and Practice of Islamic Revivalism.” Rahnama, ‘Ali, ed. Pioneers of Islamic Revival

(London: Zed Books, 1994), p. 114.

48 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 5.
49 Ibid, p. 4.
50 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 504-505.
51 “Maulana Ehtisham-ul-Haq Thanawi.” Thanawi Masjid, official website. 2010. Last

accessed 26 January 2013.

<http://www.thanvimasjid.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar

ticle&id=112:mualana-ehtisham-ul-haq-Thanawi&catid=43>
52 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 8.
53 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 508.
54 Pal, Izzud-Din. “Religious orthodoxy during Ayub regime.” Dawn. (n.d.) Last

accessed 28 January 2013. <http://archives.dawn.com/archives/67417>

  604 
  

                                                        
55 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 509.
56 Ibid, p. 510.
57 Ibid, p. 510.
58 Choudhury, p. 591.
59 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 8-9.
60 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 510.
61 Khan, Hamid. p. 71.
62 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 515.
63 “The Queen’s Man Acts in Pakistan Now.” The Mail (Adelaide) 30 October 1954: 63.

Print.
64 Ibid.
65 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 515-516.
66 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 10.
67 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 515.
68 Ibid, p. 516.
69 Choudhury, 592.
70 “The Queen’s Man Acts in Pakistan Now.”
71 Wilkie, Douglas. “As I See It: Ahrar and Begorrah at Karachi.” The Advertiser

(Adelaide) 28 October 1954: 2. Print.

72 Nair, M. Bhaskaran. Politics in Bangladesh: A Study of Awami League, 1949-58 (New

Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 1990), pp. 158-159.

73 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 516-517.
74 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 10-11.

  605 
  

                                                        
75 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 517.
76 Afzal, Political Parties, p. 132.
77 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 517-518.
78 Ibid, pp. 518-519.
79 Ibid, pp. 521.
80 Palmer-Fernandez, p. 176.
81 Afzal, Political Parties, pp. 62-63.
82 “Kashmir Dispute is a Powder Keg.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney) 23 February

1950: 2. Print.
83 Khan, Hamid, p. 68.
84 “India Defies U.N. Commission.” Advocate (Burnie, Tasmania) 22 September 1949: 4.

Print.
85 Nasr, “Mawdudi and the Jama’at-I Islami,” p. 114.
86 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 5-7.
87 Rafi Usmani, pp. 26, 39-40.
88 Ahmad, Syed Nur, p. 309.
89 See, for example, Schechtman, Joseph B. “Evacuee Property in India and Pakistan.”

Pacific Affairs 24.4 (Dec. 1951): 406.

90 Khan, Hamid, pp. 54-56.
91 Ibid, p. 68.
92 Khuhro, Zarrar. “Unexplained assassinations.” The Express Tribune 26 December

2010. Pakistan section.

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93 “Aug 1952 – Report of Inquiry Commission on Assassination of Mr. Liaquat ‘Ali

Khan. – Statement by Afghan Ambassador in New Delhi.” Keesing’s Record of

World Events, Vol. 8-9 (August 1952) Pakistan, p. 12426. 2006. Last accessed

22 January 2013.

<http://www.keesings.com/search?kssp_selected_tab=article&kssp_a_id=1242

6n03pak>
94 Zahari, Mahboob Hussain Ala. The Gnostic of Siyal: Shaykh al-Islam wa’l Muslimeen

Khwaja Muhammad Qamar al-Din (1324-1401 AH / 1906-1981 CE) (Zia-ul-

Ummat Shaykh, 2011), p. 13.

95 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. 5.
96 Afzal, Political Parties, p. 216.

97 Rafi Usmai, Muhammad. hiat mufti-e-‘ažәm (Karachi: Ahmad Printing Press, 2005),

pp. 15-18. (Urdu)

98 “Tehrik-e-Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nabuwwat.” All-India Majlis Ahrar Islam official

website. Last accessed 28 January 2013.

<http://ahrarindia.com/Khatm-e-NabuwatMovement.html>
99 “Chaudhri Zafrullah Khan’s Speech in Jahangir Park.” Report of the Court of Inquiry.

ThePersecution.org. 30 November 2004. Last accessed 26 January 2013.

<http://www.thepersecution.org/archive/munir/p75.html>
100 Stevenson, Adlai. “The Angry Men of Pakistan.” The Mail (Adelaide) 11 July 1953:

11. Print.
101 “Moslem Conference In New Delhi.” The Times [London, England] 28 December

1931: 10. Print.

  607 
  

                                                        
102 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 511-512.
103 “Pakistan: Jamaat-e-Islami.” Library of Congress Country Studies. 1994. Last

accessed 28 January 2013.

<http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+pk0121)>
104 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 11-16.
105 “Demonstrations in Karachi.” The Times [London, England] 14 May 1953: 7. Print.
106 Hazelhurst, Peter. “Bhutto under attack in mosques.” The Times [London, England]

28 February 1969: 6. Print.

107 Naeemi, Raghib Hussain. Personal Interview. Lahore. 11 June 2012.
108 “Selections from the Munir Report (1954).” Columbia University website. Last

accessed 28 January 2013.

<http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_munirrepor

t_1954/0809apostasy.html>
109 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 512.
110 Afzal, Political Parties, p. 230.
111 Khan, Hamid, p. 72.
112 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 513.
113 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, pp. 27-28.
114 Khan, Hamid. pp. 73-76.
115 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 521.
116 Ibid, pp. 522-525.
117 Khan, M. Asghar. We’ve Learned Nothing from History: Pakistan: Politics and Military

Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 18.

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118 Sahai, Shashi B. South Asia: From Freedom to Terrorism (Delhi: Gyan Publishing

House, 1998), p. 102.

119 Khan, M. Asghar, p. 3.
120 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 525.
121 Ibid, p. 525, including footnote 42.
122 Richter, William L. “The Political Dynamics of Islamic Resurgence in Pakistan.”

Asian Survey, 19.6 (Jun. 1979), pp. 547-548.

123 Singh, R. S. N., p. 144.
124 Khan, M. Asghar, p. 18.
125 Pearl, David. “Three Decades of Executive, Legislative and Judicial Amendments to

Islamic Family Law in Pakistan.” Mallat, Chibli and Connors, Jane Frances, ed.

Islamic Family Law (London: Centre of Islamic and Middle East Law, 1993), p.

323.
126 Hazelhurst, Peter. “Bhutto under attack in mosques.” The Times [London, England]

28 February 1969: 6. Print.

127 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 527.
128 “President Ayub Weathers His First Storm Of Opposition.” The Times [London,

England] 4 December 1963: 10. Print.

129 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 529-530.
130 Singh, R. S. N., p. 144.
131 Afzal, “Pakistan,” pp. 531.
132 Bhashani was reportedly so awed by the “achievements of China” that, he said, “he

was inclined…to spend the rest of his life in prayer.” See “President Ayub

  609 
  

                                                        
Weathers His First Storm Of Opposition.” The Times [London, England] 4

December 1963: 10. Print. Many Barelvi leaders would later accuse Bhashani of

being a “communist” (as well as a regionalist, of course) and oppose him

vociferously.
133 Alvi, Salim. Pakistan: Illusion and Reality (Karachi: Ushba Publishing International,

2003), p. 99.
134 Sayeed, Khalid B. The Political System of Pakistan (New York: Houghton Miffline,

1967), p. 172.
135 Khan, A. A. The Despot (Rawalpindi: Freedom Print Press, 1968), p. 184.
136 Munir, Muhammad. Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under the Punjab Act II of

1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953. (Punjab: Government of

Pakistan, 1954), p. 132. This is the “Munir Report.”

137 Ahmad, Mumtaz. “Islam, State, and Society in Bangladesh.” Bakar, Osman, Esposito,

John L., and Voll, John, ed. Asian Islam in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2008), p. 60.

138 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 531.
139 Sayeed, Khalid B. “1965—An Epoch-Making Year in Pakistan—General Elections

and War with India.” Asian Survey 6.2 (February 1966): pp. 76-79.
140 Ibid, p. 78.
141 Nevard, Jacques. “Son of President Ayub is Accused of Murder.” New York Times 19

January 1965: 4. Print.

142 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 532-533.

  610 
  

                                                        
143 Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale

University Press, 2000), p. 89.

144 Qureshi, Ishtiaq Husain, p. 189.
145 Pradhan, p. xvii.
146 Brzoska, Michael. Arms and Warfare: Escalation, De-escalation, and Negotiation

(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 25-26.

147 Nasr, Seyed Vali Reza. The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: the Jama’at-i Islami of

Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). UC Press E-Books

Collection, 1982-2004. Last accessed 5 February 2013.

<http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9j49p32d/>
148 “Ayub Khan bought Indian war plan, claims son.” The Tribune, 30 May 2005.
149 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, p. 29.
150 Ibid, pp. 29-31.
151 Sayeed, “1965,” p. 83.
152 Nasr, The Vanguard.
153 Sayeed, “1965,” p. 83.
154 Ibid, p. 84.
155 Khan, M. Asghar, pp. 18-19.
156 Choy, Lee Khoon. Diplomacy of a Tiny State (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing

Co., 1993), pp. 141-142.

157 “Bleak hope for opponents if Ayub Khan.” The Times [Lond, England] 14 October

1967: 4. Print.
158 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 32-33.

  611 
  

                                                        
159 Afzal, “Pakistan,” p. 532-533.
160 Ibid, pp. 533.
161 Nasr, The Vanguard.
162 “Bleak hope for opponents if Ayub Khan.” The Times [Lond, England] 14 October

1967: 4. Print.
163 Hazelhurst, Peter. “Bhutto under attack in mosques.” The Times [London, England]

28 February 1969: 6. Print.

164 “Warning of action to end violence in Pakistan.” The Times [London, England] 17

March 1969: 5. Print.

165 Nasr, The Vanguard.
166 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 41-43.
167 Blood, Peter, ed. Pakistan: A Country Study (Washington: GPO for the Library of

Congress, 1994). Online version. Last accessed 7 February 2013.

<http://countrystudies.us/pakistan/19.htm>
168 The “Six Points,” distributed at an Awami League meeting in March of 1966,

included a demand that Pakistan institute a truly federal system on the basis of

the Lahore Resolution, with the federal government over only national defense

and foreign affairs; separate reserve banks for the east and west wings (and, if

possible, even separate currencies); a vesting of the power to tax on the

provincial level only, with the federal government entitled to a share; a free

market between both wings for “indigenous products”; and separate armed

forces. For more information, see “Six-point Program.” Banglapedia. Asiastic

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Society of Bangladesh. 2006. Last accessed 8 February 2013.

<http://www.banglapedia.org/HT/S_0426.HTM>
169 Nasr, The Vanguard.
170 Paracha, Nadeem F. “Maulana who?” The Nadeem F. Parcha Work(s) Archive. 15

October 2011. Last accessed 14 February 2013.

<http://nadeemfparacha.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/maulana-who/>
171 Pirzada, pp. 31-33.
172 Rashid, p. 89.
173 Blood.
174 Hussain, Rizwan. Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan

(Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), p. 76.

175 Mahmud, Safdar. Pakistan: Political Roots and Development 1947-1999 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000), p. 147.

176 Nasr, The Vanguard.
177 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 42-44.
178 Hyder, Khurshid. “Pakistan Under Bhutto.” Current History, 63:375 (Nov. 1972), p.

202. Quoted in Richter, p. 548.

179 Blood.
180 Hazelhurst, Peter. “Bhutto under attack in mosques.” The Times [London, England]

28 February 1969: 6. Print.

181 Pirzada, p. ix.
182 Ahmad, Mujeeb, pp. 51-52.

  613 
  

                                                        
183 There were some Barelvi pirs who did not exhibit this sort of behavior. The Pir of

Bharchundi Sharif, for example, refused to sign a statement pledging non-

cooperation with the JI, urging instead “unity among Islamic forces.” Ahmad,

Mujeeb, pp. 52-53.

184 Wilder, Andrew. “Islam and Political Legitimacy in Pakistan.” Syed, Muhammad

Aslam, ed. Islam and Democracy in Pakistan (Islamabad: National Institute of

Historical and Cultural Research, 1995), p. 51.

185 Pirzada, p. 34.
186 Nasr, The Vanguard.
187 Ibid.
188 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, pp. 33-37.
189 “Warning of action to end violence in Pakistan.” The Times [London, England] 17

March 1969: 5. Print.

190 Blood.
191 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, p. 35.
192 Haqqani, Husain. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.:

Brookings Institution Press, 2005), p. 77.

193 Ibid, p. 78.
194 Solaija, Tariq et al. “Pakistan Disturbances.” The Times [London, England] 22 April

1969: 11. Print.

195 Paracha, Nadeem F. “Smoker’s Corner: Violent Ghosts.” Dawn.com. 13 March 2011.

Last accessed 9 February 2013.

<http://dawn.com/2011/03/13/smokers-corner-violent-ghosts/>

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196 Haqqani, pp. 78-80.
197 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, p. 36.
198 Blood.
199 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, p. 36.
200 Hussain, p. 76.
201 Jalal, Ayesha. “The Past as Present.” Maleeha Lodhi, ed. Pakistan: Beyond the Crisis

State (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 14.

202 Sayeed, “1965,” p. 85.
203 Blood.
204 Kapur, Ashok. Pakistan in Crisis (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 161.
205 Richter, p. 548.
206 Mahmud, pp. 145-149.
207 “N-W Frontier challenge to Bhutto regime.” The Times [London, England] 10 April

1972: 1. Print.
208 Naqshbandi, p. 11. (Urdu)
209 Daultana, Mumtaz. “Incident in Pakistan.” The Times [London, England] 9 October

1973: 21. Print.

210 Datta-Ray, Sunanda. “Old Prejudices, New Politics Hold Indian-Pakistan Peace.”

Winnipeg Free Press 10 September 1973: 6. Print.

211 Mahmud, pp. 145-149.
212 Baid, Samuel. “Self-Determination for Kashmiris: A Camouflage for Pak’s own

Claim.” Singh, Jasjit, ed. India and Pakistan: Crisis of Relationship (New Delhi:

Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 1990), p. 216.

  615 
  

                                                        
213 Esposito, John L. Islam and Politics (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), p.

174.
214 Blood.
215 Mahmud, p. 150.
216 Nasr, The Vanguard.
217 Esposito, Islam and Politics, p. 173.
218 Mahmud, p. 157-158.
219 Blood.
220 Esposito, Islam and Politics, pp. 174-175.

Chapter 5
1 Chaudhry, Kashif. "Jinnah’s Pakistan, hijacked by clerics." The Express Tribune, 19

September 2011.
2 Haqqani, p. 141.
3 Nasr, The Vanguard.
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5 Ahmad, Mujeeb, p. xi.
6 Nasr, The Vanguard.
7 Lodhi, Maleeha. “Beyond the Crisis State.” Lodhi, Maleeha, ed. Pakistan: Beyond the

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8 “Opposition leaders held in Pakistan.” The Times [London, England] 17 February

1981: 8. Print.

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9 Kureshi, Manzoor H. “Homage to Makhdoom Nuh of Hala.” Dawn 24 October 2009.

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11 Hamlyn, Michael. “Pakistan: stalemate for fateful spark?” The Times [London,

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12 Hamlyn, Michael. “Pakistan police put stop to demonstration at Bhutto family tomb.”

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13 Hamlyn, Michael. “Mrs Bhutto tells of massacre.” The Times [London, England] 27

September 1983: 6. Print.

14 LaPorte, Jr., Robert. “Pakistan: A nation still in the making.” Harrison, Selig S.,

Kreisberg, Paul H., and Kux, Dennis, ed. India and Pakistan: The First Fifty Years

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England] 14 October 1983: 7. Print.

16 “K. M. Azhar passes away.” Dawn 30 October 2006. Dawn.com. Last accessed 5

March 2013. <http://archives.dawn.com/2006/10/30/top11.htm>

17 Akhtar, Hasan. “Talks to open with opposition party.” The Times [London, England]

10 October 1983: 5. Print.

18 Hamlyn, Michael. “Zia seizes chance for political manoeuvre.” The Times [London,

England] 4 October 2983: 7. Print.

19 Akhtar, Hasan. “Talks to open with opposition party.”

  617 
  

                                                        
20 Akhtar, Hasan. “Zia offers earlier date for Pakistan election.” The Times [London,

England] 14 October 1983: 7. Print.

21 Hamlyn, Michael. “Pakistan: can discipline survive democracy?” The Times [London,

England] 5 March 1985: 14. Print.

22 Hamlyn, Michael. “Letter from Karachi.” The Times [London, England] 23 February

1985: 36. Print.

23 Hamlyn, Michael. “Pakistan: can discipline survive democracy?”
24 Thapar, Karan. “Zia stands to gain from ‘waiting game’ tactics.” The Times [London,

England] 15 June 1988: 9. Print.

25 Paracha, Nadeem F. “Maulana who?” The Nadeem F. Parcha Work(s) Archive. 15

October 2011. Last accessed 14 February 2013.

<http://nadeemfparacha.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/maulana-who/>
26 Haydar, Afak. “The Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan.” Malik, Hafeez, ed. Pakistan: Founders’

Aspirations and Today’s Realities (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 266.
27 “Zia ul-Haq, interview by Brian Barron, BBC.” President of Pakistan, General

Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Interviews to Foreign Media, Vol. 1, March-December 1978

(Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, 1980), pp. 29-30.

28 Haqqani, pp. 133-134.
29 Kennedy, Charles. “Islamization Under Zia.” Syed, Muhammad Aslam, ed. Islam and

Democracy in Pakistan (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural

Research, 1995), pp. 135-138.

30 Ibid, pp. 138-144.
31 Ibid, p. 143.

  618 
  

                                                        
32 Haqqani, p. 138.
33 Mahmud, p. 156.
34 Fishlock, Trevor. “Dilemma for Zia: Fundamentalists put universities in peril.” The

Times [London, England] 6 September 1982: 5. Print. One friend of the author,

attending a Pakistani university’s art school (in Lahore) during this period,

reported being harassed by JI student activists who sought to close down the art

school. On at least one occasion, the JI student members beat their opponents

with hockey sticks.

35 “Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI).” Islamopedia online. Last accessed 23 March 2013.

<http://www.islamopediaonline.org/country-profile/pakistan/islam-and-

politics/jamiat-ulema-e-islam-jui>
36 Jalal, Ayesha. “The Past as Present.” Maleeha Lodhi, ed. Pakistan: Beyond the Crisis

State (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 15.

37 Haydar, Afak. “The Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan.” Malik, Hafeez, p. 266.
38 It should be noted that the TNFJ has “always denied” the allegation that it ever

sought the implementation of Shi’a law over Sunnis. Zaman, Muhammad Qasim.

The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2002), p. 115.

39 Nasr, Vali. “The Iranian Revolution and Changes in Islamism in Pakistan, India, and

Afghanistan.” Keddie, Nikki R. and Matthee, Rudi, ed. Iran and the Surrounding

World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 2002), p. 336.

  619 
  

                                                        
40 Swami, Praveen. “Serious threat to Pakistani’s civil society.” The Hindu 18 April 2006.

Last accessed 4 March 2013.

<http://www.hindu.com/2006/04/18/stories/2006041805780800.htm>
41 Haydar, p. 268.
42 Some sources claim Ghani, who would spend years of his life in jail in independent

Pakistan and become one of the greatest Pashto poets of modern times, headed

up the militant organization. Others credit Wali, who would continue to play a

major role in Pakistani politics and eventually become president of the National

Awami Party. See Afzal, M. Rafique. Political Parties in Pakistan, 1947-1958

(Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 2011), pp. 50-

51. Compare, for example, with Pal, Amitabh. Islam Means Peace: Understanding

the Muslim Principle of Nonviolence Today (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011), p. 115.
43 Afzal, Political Parties in Pakistan, 1947-1958, pp. 50-51, footnote 156.
44 “Muslims sack nine temples in Pakistan.” The Times [London, England] 4 March

1986: 7. Print.
45 Haydar, pp. 270-271.
46 Ibid, p. 271.
47 “Shaheed-e-Islam.” Haq Char Yaar Global. Last accessed 15 February 2013.

<http://www.kr-hcy.com/shaheed.shtml>
48 “General Zia-ul-Haq personally intervened for Haq Nawaz Jhangvi’s release: Tariq

Khosa’s revelations in the Senate.” ShiiteNews.com. 3 October 2012. Last

accessed 14 February 2013.

<http://www.shiitenews.com/index.php/articles/5203-general-zia-ul-haq-

  620 
  

                                                        
personally-intervened-for-haq-nawaz-jhangvi-s-release-tariq-khosa-s-

revelations-in-the-senate>
49 Haydar, pp. 273-280.
50 Ibid, pp. 271-272.
51 “Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan.” South Asian Terrorist Portal. Institute for Conflict

Management, 2001.

<http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/terroristoutfits/Ssp.htm>
52 “Sectarian clashes kill seven in Pakistan.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 28 February,

2010.
53 Raman, B. “Pak leaders quarrel as Lahore continues to bleed.” Sri Lanka Guardian. 5

July 2010.
54 Rahman, B. “Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, bin Laden and Ramzi

Yousef” (Paper no. 484). South Asia Analysis Group. 1 July 2002.
55 Clements, Frank. Conflict in Afghanistan: a historical encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-

CLIO, 2003), pp. 17-19.

56 Zaeef, Abdul Salam. My Life with the Taliban (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2010), pp. 8-9.
57 Clements, pp. 18-19.
58 Hussain, p. 104.
59 Mortimer, Edward. “Can Afghans find their Arafat?” The Times [London, England]

25 April 1984: 16. Print.

60 Margolis, Eric S. American Raj: Liberation or Domination? (Toronto: Key Porter, 2008),

p. 196.
61 Swati, Muhammad Junaid. Interview. Baffa (Mansehra Dist.), Pakistan. 8 June 2012.

  621 
  

                                                        
62 Jalal, “The Past,” p. 15.
63 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, pp. 9-11.
64 Zaeef, p. 46.
65 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, pp. 39-40.
66 Ibid, pp. 51-54.
67 Akhtar, Hasan. “Children die in blast.” The Times [London, England] 20 February,

1987: 9. Print.
68 Zaeef, p. 44.
69 Ibid, pp. 42-43.
70 Ibid, p. 44.
71 Margolis, p. 199.
72 Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi was, incidentally, one of Muhammad Taqi

Usmani’s (son of Muhammad Shafi) main teachers, qualifying him, for example,

to teach hәdis.
73 Sikand, Yoginder. “The Tablighi Jama’at and Politics.” ISIM Newsletter 13 (December

2003), p. 42.
74 “Migration and Motion Collectiveness.” Tablighi Jama’at. Web. 15 October 2012.

Last accessed 7 March 2013.

<http://tablighijamaat.org/post/2012/10/15/Migration-Motion-and-

Collectiveness.aspx>
75 Alexiev, Alex. “Tablighi Jamaat: Jihad’s Stealthy Legions.” Middle East Quarterly 12:1

(Winter 2005), pp. 3-11. It should be noted that such connections to

Deobandism—or Barelvism—were often not black-and-white. After migrating

  622 
  

                                                        
from Amritsar in 1947/XXXX, for example, the Nawaz Sharif family often

attended a mәsjyd likewise frequented by the aforementioned disciple of

Naimuddin Moradabadi, the Barelvi cleric Muhammad Hussain Naeemi. As a

result, a “very close” relationship developed between the Nawaz Sharif and

Muhammad Hussain Naeemi families. Nawaz Sharif and Muhammad Hussain’s

own son, Sarfraz Hussain Naeemi, would be born not two years apart (25

December 1949/XXXX and 16 February 1948/XXXX, respectively), and the

connection between the families would remain strong through the time of this

writing. Naeemi, Raghib Hussain. Personal Interview. Lahore. 11 June 2012.

76 “PAKISTAN: Coup Attempt.” Oxford Analytical Daily Brief Service 31 October, 1995.
77 Alexiev, pp. 3-11.
78 “Question 2492,” “Answer 2492.” Darul Ifta. Darul Uloom Deoband. 21 January

2008. Accessed 5 October 2012. <http://www.darulifta.org>

79 Alexiev, pp. 3-11.
80 Sikand, p. 42.
81 “Tarar sworn in as Pakistani president.” BBC News. 1 January 1998. Last accessed 8

March 2013. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/43645.stm>

82 McDonald, Zahraa. “Legitimate practice constructs a contemporary Muslim identity

in South Africa: the case of the Tabligh Jamaat in Johannesburg.” African

Identities 8.3 (August 2010), pp. 267-280.

83 Alexiev went on to describe the TJ “problem” thus: “At best, they and their proxy

groups form a powerful proselytizing movement that preaches extremism and

disdain for religious tolerance, democracy, and separation of church and state.

  623 
  

                                                        
At worst, they represent an Islamist fifth column that aids and abets terrorism.

Contrary to their benign treatment by scholars and academics, Tablighi Jamaat

has more to do with political sedition than with religion.” Alexiev recommended

that U.S. Government policymakers focus law enforcement efforts on the TJ as

the source of “al-Qaeda terrorists.” He closed his article warning that “[i]f the

West chooses to turn a blind eye to the problem, Tablighi involvement in future

terrorist activities at home and abroad is not a matter of conjecture; it is a

certainty.” See Alexiev, pp. 3-11. 

84 Alexiev, pp. 3-11.
85 Mishra, Manjari. “Barelvis take on Deobandis over religious property.” Times of India

6 January 2010. Online edition. Last accessed 9 March 2013.

<http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-

06/india/28127094_1_sunni-waqf-board-barelvis-madrassas>
86 “Spectrum: A Roll Call of UK Islamic Groups—Islam and Britain.” The Times

[London, England] 17 August 1987. Infotrac Newsstand. 30 January 2013. Last

accessed 30 January 2013.

87 Zaeef, p. xxxviii.
88 Jalal, “The Past,” p. 15.
89 Haqqani, p. 142.
90 “Hakimul Islam Qari Muhammad Tayyib.” Al-Jamia Al-Islamia Darul Uloom

Deoband, par. 13. Accessed 13 October 2011.

<http://darululoomwaqf.com/qari-muhammad-tayyib.php>

  624 
  

                                                        
91 Long, Justin. “Darul Ulum Haqqani: Training Camp for Islamic Leaders, Afghani

Taliban” (Article 5608). The Network for Strategic Missions. 11 Jun. 2001.

<http://www.strategicnetwork.org/index.php?loc=kb&view=v&id=5608&fto=

403&>

92 Khalid, Saleem Mansur. dini mәdarys min talim: kafiyәt, masil, ymkanat (Islamabad:

Idara-e-Fiqr-e-Islami, 2004) p. 150. (Urdu)

93 sunni tәhrik ki muqasyd. Sunni Tehreek Official Website (in Urdu). August 2009.

<http://www.sunnitehreek.net/Home/Intro>
94 Siddiqui, Salman. “Battle over the houses of God.” The Express Tribune Official

Website. 18 October 2010. Last accessed 28 February 2013.

95 Thomas, Christopher. “India hurls defiance at Pakistan with claim to all Kashmir.”

The Times [London, England] 16 August 1994: 11. Print.

96 “Establishment of All India Sunni Conference.” Ameer-e-Millat (official website of the

‘Alipur Sayyidan Sharif dәrgah). Last accessed 14 January 2013.

<http://ameer-e-millat.com/EstAllIndiaSun.htm>
97 This was the 2003/XXXX ICG Report. See “Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI).”

Islamopedia online. Last accessed 23 March 2013.

<http://www.islamopediaonline.org/country-profile/pakistan/islam-and-

politics/jamiat-ulema-e-islam-jui>
98 Shaikh, Riaz Ahmed. “Afghan War—Global Jihad and Sectarian Conflict in

Pakistan—Internal and External Links.” Manas Chatterji, Darvesh Gopal, and

Savita Singh, ed. Governance, Development and Conflict (Contributions to Conflict

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Management, Peace Economics and Development, Volume 18) (Bingley: Emerald

Group, 2011), p. 255.

99 “Editorial: Clashing Interpretations of Islam.” Daily Times. 5 May 2009.
100 Shaikh, p. 255. 
101 Siddiqui, Salman. “Battle over the houses of God.” The Express Tribune Official

Website. 18 October 2010. Last accessed 28 February 2013.

<http://tribune.com.pk/story/64046/battle-over-the-houses-of-god/>
102 Baixas, Lionel. “Thematic Chronology of Mass Violence in Pakistan, 1947-2007.”

Online Encylcopedia of Mass Violence (Paris: Sciences Po Paris, 2008), p. 23.

103 Shaikh, p. 256.
104 Siddiqui, Salman.
105 Shaikh, p. 256.
106 Swami, Praveen. “Serious threat to Pakistani’s civil society.” The Hindu 18 April

2006. Last accessed 4 March 2013.

<http://www.hindu.com/2006/04/18/stories/2006041805780800.htm>
107 Thomas, Christopher. “Student warriors cut swath through Afghan opposition.” The

Times [London, England] 17 February 1995: 14. Print.

108 “Politically Motivated Major Kaleem Case Against MQM Founder and Leader Mr.

Altaf Hussain Set Aside by the Sindh High Court.” MQM Official Website. 6

February 1998. Last accessed 7 March 2013. <http://www.mqm.org/news-

1998-02-06a.htm>
109 Dawat-e-Islami, official website. Last accessed 23 March 2013.

<http://dawateislami.net/home.do>

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110 Masood, Salman. “Assassin tells court he acted alone.” The International Herald

Tribune 12 January 2011.

111 Tohid, Owais. “Pakistan’s Islamic preachers: Gateway to radicalization?” The

Christian Science Monitor 14 September 2011.

112 “Ansar-ul-Islam (AI) (Pakistan), GROUPS – ASIA – ACTIVE.” Jane’s World

Insurgency and Terrorism. 1 February 2012. Last accessed 27 February 2013.

<http://articles.janes.com/articles/Janes-World-Insurgency-and-

Terrorism/Ansar-ul-Islam-AI-Pakistan.html>
113 Sareen, Sushant. The Jihad Factory (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2005), p.

119.
114 “Haji Hanif Tayyab.” Pakistan Herald. 1999. Last accessed 27 February 2013.

<http://www.pakistanherald.com/Profile/Haji-Hanif-Tayyab-1084>
115 “Pakistanis bury Punjab governor.” Al Jazeera 7 January 2011. Last accessed 38

February 2013.

<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2011/01/201115135528691282.html>
116 “2 dead, 54 hurt in Mumbai protest over Assam violence.” The Indian Express Official

Website. 17 August 2012. Last accessed 28 February 2013.

<http://www.indianexpress.com/news/2-dead-54-hurt-in-mumbai-protest-

over-assam-violence/987126/0>
117 “About.” Allama Azmi Official Website. 2011. Last accessed 28 February 2013.

<http://allamaazmi.com/about.asp>
118 t’aaruf. Anjuman Talaba-e-Islam Official Website. Last accessed 27 February 2013.

<http://www.atipak.org/Introduction.htm> (Urdu)

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119 Gorman, Edward. “Pakistan poll becomes three-sided fight.” The Times [London,

England] 12 October 1988: 9. Print.

120 “Mehrangate.” The News 26 January 2012. Web. Last accessed 6 March 2013.

<http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-8-89527-Mehrangate>
121 Mahmud, p. 156.
122 Lieven, Anatol. “Bhutto fails to gain mass support as poll draws near.” The Times

[London, England] 11 November 1988: 15. Print.

123 Lieven, Anatol. “Historic Step for Muslim Women.” The Times [London, England]

18 November 1988: 1. Print.

124 Lieven, Anatol. “President calls in Bhutto and rival.” The Times [London, England]

21 November 1988: 1. Print.

125 Ibid.
126 Thapar, Karan. “Bhutto says President is ‘behaving illegally’.” The Times [London,

England] 21 November 1988: 9. Print.

127 Lieven, Anatol. “US envoy’s visit increases Bhutto’s chances of leadership.” The

Times [London, England] 26 November 1988: 9. Print.

128 Hussain, Syeda Abida. “Opposition to Bhutto.” The Times [London, England] 24

August 1989: 13. Print.

129 Hussain, Zahid. “Muslims step up Bhutto attack.” The Times [London, England] 1

March 1989: 8. Print.

130 Mahmud, pp. 156-157.
131 Zaeef, pp. 48-52.

  628 
  

                                                        
132 Saikal, Amin. Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B.

Taurus & Co., 2006), p. 352.

133 Lieven, Anatol. “Can Bush bring his unruly pet to heel?” The Times [London,

England] 31 July 1989: 12. Print.

134 Ibid.
135 “Fighting raises fear of permanent civil war.” The Times [London, England] 27 April

1992: 9. Print.
136 Zaeef, p. 57-60. Zaeef himself describes a demonstration he witnessed several miles

east of Kandahar during which the local commander, identified as a former

mujahyd named Baru, fired into a crowd with a tank; dozens died, according to

Zaeef.
137 Rafi Usmani, Mohammad, Jihad, p. 13.
138 Margolis, p. 199.
139 Zaeef, pp. 64-65.
140 Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban: The Story of the Warlords, as quoted in Allen, p. 291. 
141 Rafi Usmani, Jihad, p. 13.
142 Zaeef, p. 75.
143 Margolis, p. 197.
144 Thomas, Christopher. “Student warriors cut swath through Afghan opposition.” The

Times [London, England] 17 February 1995: 14. Print.

145 Ibid.
146 See Jalal, Ayesha. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam

since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 26

  629 
  

                                                        
147 Margolis, pp. 202-203.
148 Allen, pp. 289-290.
149 Margolis, pp. 201-202.
150 Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from

the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004) Audio book,

track 6.

Epilogue
1 Zaeef, p. 233.
2 Margolis, p. 199.
3 Ibid, p. 216.
4 Ibid, p. 210.
5 Ibid, p. 210.
6 Anonymous. Personal Interview. Baffa (Mansehra District). 8 June 2012.
7 Baixas, Lionel. “Thematic Chronology of Mass Violence in Pakistan, 1947-2007.”

Online Encylcopedia of Mass Violence (Paris: Sciences Po Paris, 2008), p. 23.

8 Guha, Ranajit. “Chandra’s Death.” Subaltern Studies Vol. 5 (1987), pp. 135-165.
9 The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. Esposito, John L., ed. (Oxford

University Press, 1995), p. 201.

10 “MQM demands ban on Jamāt.” Dawn. 15 April 2006.

11 “PWs examined in Haideri mosque bomb blast case.” Dawn. 21 October 2004.
12 “LJ man indicted in mosque blast case.” Dawn. 25 November 2004.
13 “Govt names Nishtar Park bomber.” Dawn. 16 June 2007.

  630 
  

                                                        
14 “Jamshed Town: diverse but dissected.” Apna Karachi. 4 April 2008.
15 Zabeeh, Zia-ur-Rahman. “Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar.” Pakistan Herald. 2001.
16 “Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.” South Asian Terrorism Portal. 2010.

<http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/terroristoutfits/Lej.htm>
17 “Shia mob in Lahore rampage.” The Times [London, England] 13 January 1998: 13.

Print.
18 “Three LJ activists indicted in Nishtar Park blast case.” Dawn. 2 Sep. 2009.
19 Kennedy, Charles. “The Creation and Development of Pakistan’s Anti-terrorism

Regime, 1997-2002.” Limaye, Satu; Malik, Mohan; Wirsing, Robert, ed. Religion

Radicalism and Security in South Asia (Honolulu: Asia-Pacific Center for Security

Studies, 2004), p. 389.

20 “Three LJ activists indicted in Nishtar Park blast case.” Dawn. 2 Sep. 2009.
21 Khan, Nisar Ahmed. “Alleged bomber’s brothers call for parents’ release.” Dawn, 24

June 2007.
22 “Two shot, several injured during Eid-e-Milad celebrations.” Dawn. 29 Jun. 1999.
23 ‘Ali, Zulfiqar. “Mansehra militant camp humming again.” Herald (Pakistan) 11 July

2005. The Herald’s claim has been contested both by politicians and at least one

Pakistani media outlet (though the article’s author was based in Washington).

See: Hassan, Khalid. “Mansehra remains in the news.” Daily Times 29 August

2005.
24 Kamran.
25 Khan, Amir Mohammed. “Radio Venom.” Newsline, 12 Aug. 2006.

  631 
  

                                                        
26 Masood, Azhar. “Pakistan: Mangal Bagh Badly Injured, But Alive.” Foreign Policy

Journal, 3 Jul. 2009.

27 “Karachi: Govt names Nishtar Park bomber.” Dawn, 16 June 2007.
28 Khan, Nisar Ahmed. “Alleged bomber’s brothers call for parents’ release.” Dawn, 24

June 2007.
29 “Suicide bomber’s photo released; army deployed in Karachi.” Reuters. 13 Apr. 2006.
30 Khan, Faraz. “Alleged Nishtar Park bomber was thrice stopped by police on the way.”

Daily Times. 10 Jul. 2007.

31 Ayub, Imran. “Karachi: Search for missing men ends at Edhi’s graveyard.” Dawn. 1

Feb. 2010.
32 Khan, Nisar Ahmed. “Alleged bomber’s brothers call for parents’ release.” Dawn, 24

June 2007.
33 Ghori, Habib Khan. “KARACHI: Top leadership of Sunni Tehrik wiped out.” Dawn.

13 Apr. 2006.
34 “Govt names Nishtar Park bomber.” Dawn. 16 Jun. 2007.
35 Metcalf, p. 152.
36 Pratt, Kathryn, ed. Being and Belonging: Muslims in the United States since 9/11 (New

York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), p. 168.

37 Cornell, Vincent, ed. Voices of Islam (Westport [CT]: Praeger Publishers, 2007), p.

182.
38 Fallon, S. W. A New English-Hindustani Dictionary (Banaras: E. J. Lazarus and Co.,

1883), p. 414.
39 Cohen, p. 182.

  632 
  

                                                        
40 “Editorial: Clashing Interpretations of Islam.” Daily Times. 5 May 2009.
41 “Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (JUP).” Islamopedia online. Last accessed 23 March 2013.

<http://www.islamopediaonline.org/country-profile/pakistan/islam-and-

politics/jamiat-ulema-e-pakistan-jup>
42 “Editorial: Clashing Interpretations of Islam.” Daily Times. 5 May 2009.
43 Waraich, Omar. “Why Pakistan’s Taliban Target the Muslim Majority.” Time 7 April

2011.
44 “Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (JUP).”
45 “Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI).” Islamopedia online. Last accessed 23 March 2013.

<http://www.islamopediaonline.org/country-profile/pakistan/islam-and-

politics/jamiat-ulema-e-islam-jui>
46 “Sectarian clashes kill seven in Pakistan.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 28 February,

2010.
47 Raman, B. “Pak leaders quarrel as Lahore continues to bleed.” Sri Lanka Guardian. 5

July 2010.
48 “Blasphemy accused severely beaten by infuriated mob.” The Express Tribune 2 July

2012. Web. Last accessed 9 March 2013.

<http://tribune.com.pk/story/402221/blasphemy-accused-severely-beaten-by-

infuriated-mob/>
49 “Pakistan paper says terrorists distribute ‘hit-list’ in Karachi city.” BBC Monitoring

South Asia – Political 25 June 2011.

50 “Slain religious party activist buried amid tight security in Pakistan’s Karachi.” BBC

Monitoring South Asia – Political 21 February 2011.

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51 Yousaf, Kamran. “Dawat-e-Islami comes under military’s radar.” The Express Tribune

12 September 2011.
52 Mir, Amir. “Agencies explore Qadri’s links.” The News 7 January 2011. Web. Last

accessed 23 March 2013. <http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-2-

24375-Agencies-explore-Qadri’s-links>
53 “Pakistan: Cleric’s speech prompted Punjab governor’s attacker.” BBC Monitoring

South Asia – Political 28 January 2011.

54 “Pakistan: Probe report says Punjab governor’s assassin not ‘religious fanatic.’” BBC

Monitoring South Asia – Political 10 January 2011.

55 Butt, Anjum. Personal Interview. Lahore. 14 June 2012.
56 Nasr, S. V. R. “The Rise of Sunni Militancy in Pakistan: The Changing Role of

Islamism and the Ulama in Society and Politics.” Modern Asian Studies, 34.1 (Feb.

2000), pp. 153-154.

57 Stromberg, Joseph. “A Plain Folk Perspective on Reconstruction, State-Building,

Ideology, and Economic Spoils.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 16.2 (Spring 2002),

p. 130.

  634 
W. KESLER JACKSON: Curriculum Vitae
1973 N 270 East, Orem UT 84057
Phone: 1 (801) 225-8042
Email: [email protected]

EDUCATION
Syracuse University (Syracuse, New York)
Ph.D in History, August 2013
Major Field: Modern South Asia
Minor Fields: Modern America; British Empire
Dissertation: “A Subcontinent’s Sunni Schism: The Barelvi-Deobandi Dynamic
and the Creation of Modern South Asia” (644 pp.)
Syracuse University (Syracuse, New York)
MA in History, December 2011
Emphasis: Same as above
Pennsylvania State University (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)
MA in Humanities, May 2010
Emphasis: American History; American Studies
Thesis: “Elijah Abel: His Life and Times, 1810-1884” (141 pp.)
Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah)
BA in Asian Studies, December 2004
Singapore American School (Singapore)
Diploma, June 1998
RELEVANT EMPLOYMENT
Westminster College (Salt Lake City, Utah)
August 2013 – present
Adjuct Professor (Modern World History; Western Civilization)
Salt Lake Community College (Taylorsville, Utah)
August 2013 – present
Adjunct Professor (Modern World History; U.S. History)
Syracuse University (Syracuse, New York)
August 2010 – May 2013
Maxwell Fellow
American Embassy School (New Delhi, India)
August 2011 – May 2012
History/English substitute instructor; 170+ 90-minute sessions taught
Department of Defense (Washington, D.C. area)
March 2006 – July 2007
South Asia analyst
Utah State Historical Society (internship) 2005
Chase Home Museum of Utah Folk Arts (internship) 2005
Relief Alliance (501(c)3 non-profit), president 1998-1999, 2001-2003
[Others: Head Political Reporter (NextPage News); Globetrotting
Correspondent (The NewStandard); Research Assistant (Harold B. Lee Library); Web
Developer (Worldwide Organization for Women; Deseret International
Foundation); Editor (Adventure Journey)]
PRESENTATIONS
“The Suicide of Muhammad Siddiq.” Paper presented at the Conference on Articulations
of Power, Syracuse University (2011).
“The Barelvi-Deobandi Dynamic within the Political Structure of the Pakistani State.”
Paper presented at the 3rd Annual Conference on Power and Struggle,
University of Alabama (2011).
“Elijah Abel: From Slave to Settler.” Paper presented at the Mid-Atlantic American
Studies Association Conference, LaSalle University (2010).
“The State of Pakistan.” Guest Lecture. Temple University (2009).
“Tibet in the Limelight, Xinjiang in the Dark.” Paper presented at the Middle East and
Central Asia Conference, University of Utah (2005).
Organizer. Consumer Awareness Symposium, Brigham Young University (2003).
Organizer. Khabachen II: A Night Celebrating Tibetan Culture and the Tibetan Spirit,
Salt Lake Downtown Marriott (2002).
Organizer. Khabachen I: A Night Celebrating Tibetan Culture and the Tibetan Spirit,
University Marriott (1999).
BOOKS
Elijah Abel: The Life and Times of a Black Priesthood Holder (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort,
2012). Monograph. 160 pp.
The Tibet Gamble (Cardiff-by-the-Sea, CA: Waterside Productions, Inc., 2012).
Monograph. 360 pp.
ARTICLES
“Robbers and Incendiaries: Protectionism Organizes at the Harrisburg Convention of
1828.” Libertarian Papers 2:21 (2010). Journal article.
“Tibet in the Limelight, Xinjiang in the Dark.” Eurorient 20:123-132 (2005). Journal
article.
“The Boston Massacre.” Encyclopedia of Oft-Altered, Oft-Misrepresented, and Generally
Misunderstood People, Events, and Ideas in American History (Syracuse:
TextbookCheck.com, 2012). Encyclopedia entry.
SKILLS
Languages:
Urdu (working proficiency, spoken and written)
Hindi (working proficiency, spoken and written)
Persian (limited working proficiency, written)
Tibetan (limited working proficiency, written)
Polish (working proficiency, spoken and written)
Computer:
Microsoft Office, Adobe graphic design suite, HTML, web design/implementation
AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS
Maxwell Fellowship (2010-2013)
Maxwell Teaching Assistantship (2013)
Dean’s Summer Research Grant (2012)
Bharati Memorial Grant (2011)
Dean’s Summer Research Grant (2011)
Maxwell Teaching Assistantship (2011)
Multiple Awards of Merit, DoD (2007)
Brigham Award (1999)
Foreign Service Youth Award (1995)