Thursday, February 05, 2009

The Deobandis

Deoband is a small town in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. In the 1850's a Muslim scholar known as Said Ahmed went on the hajj to Mecca and there met other scholars who were part of the Wahhabi sect of strict adherence to Sunni Islam that had developed in the Hejd region in northern Arabia. Upon his return to India he founded with others a school or madrassa in Deoband that taught the Wahhabist or Salafi version of strict Islam.
The extreme Islamist teachings of the Deobandis was very antagonistic to British imperialism that was at that time expanding in India. However, most of India was then controlled by the East India Company and there were many individual British living there. Sepoys were Indian soldiers who were under British command and there were more Sepoys in India than regular British Army troops. Trouble started in 1867 when it was rumored that the bullets supplied to the Sepoys, that they had to bite in order to fire, contained pig and beef fat. Both Muslims and Hindus refused to do this and a mutiny started.
Gradually the mutiny spread around Delhi and elsewhere, and as it did the rioters attacked all British locations and killed hundreds of men, women and children. Stories of their brutality, including bayoneting, mutilating, burning alive and burying alive civilians, gradually filtered back to England and there was a strong reaction. In response, the British Government sent the Army to quell the riots. Gradually the rioters came to be led by extremist Muslims, particularly Deobandis. They remained the hard core of the 85 or so rioters who held the center of Delhi and fought to their death. The British put down the mutiny with comparable brutality, including numerous massacres of Indian civilians. The former Muslim Mughal Empire was disbanded and India was put directly under British rule.
What is the relevance of this story to today? The Deobandi teachings gradually spread all over India and to what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is thought that ca. 600 of Britain's nearly 1,400 Mosques are run by Deobandi clerics and 17 of the country's 26 Islamic seminaries belong to the Deobandi sect. Furthermore, the Walthamstow Mosque where the 6 British-born Muslims who attempted to carry out explosions using liquid explosive aboard US bound airliners is a Deobandi center.
The movements of Jama-Islamiya, responsible for the recent attacks on Mumbai, and al Qaeda, are both examples of Wahhabist-Deobandist teachings. Incidentally, it was a coalition between tribal leader Ibn Saud and the Wahhabis that took over Arabia from the traditional Hashemites in 1932. The particular aspect of the Deobandists were their extreme anti-British/European views, that soon extended to the Great Satan, the USA. In Marxist terms they would be called anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist, but this is simplistic and misleading. For example, one result of the Deobandist movement was the establishment of the Taliban (which means "scholar") and another is the lack of control of the Pakistani State in the northern territories that are dominated by Deobandist teachings.
Many of the Pakistani and other extremists who have taken specific terrorist actions against the US have been Deobandists, for example: Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (real name Ahmed Omar Saed Sheikh) is a British national of Pakistani origin who murdered Daniel Pearl in Karachi, several of the 9/11 terrorists and some of those now in Guantanimo Bay are also Deobandis. Deobandists have been waging a long-term and ruthless war against the western world and will continue to do so.

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