this article explains how islam is practised
in india and pakistan
Indian Town’s Seed Grew Into the Taliban’s Code
By CELIA W. DUGGER
DEOBAND, India — The orthodox Islamic school of thought
that came to find its most virulent expression in the
Taliban originated in this placid north Indian town where
Hindus and Muslims peaceably coexist to the eternal rhythms
of sowing and harvesting.Along streets ornamented with shrines to blue-skinned Hindu
gods, cows, sacred in Hinduism, forage unfettered. Five
times a day, the muezzins’ calls to prayer sound from the
minarets of the 135-year-old Darul Uloom seminary that is
famed throughout the Islamic world and teaches the form of
Islam known as Deobandism.But while the Deobandis of India, and India’s 130 million
Muslims in general, have embraced India’s secular
Constitution and religious diversity, the Deobandis of
Afghanistan and Pakistan sought to impose their
fundamentalist brand of Islam by force.Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the nations that were once
Britain’s Indian empire, have the world’s second-, third-
and fourth-largest Muslim populations. Almost one out of
every three of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims lives in the
subcontinent.So, to American policy makers newly interested in South
Asia, it is important to ask why South Asia’s Deobandis
have taken such sharply divergent paths.“Everybody thinks of Islam as Arab, but you have to pay
attention to Islam in South Asia,” said Vali Nasr, a
political scientist at the University of San Diego. “If you
don’t, you confront something like the Taliban and everyone
says, `Where did these guys come from?’ To understand that,
you have to understand Deoband.”Here in Deoband, the concept of jihad as a holy war is
simply not taught. “In our madrassas you will not find even
a stick to beat anyone,” said Marghboor Rahman, the
seminary’s elderly vice chancellor.By contrast, the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan became
training grounds for holy war and many of the Taliban
leaders. Masood Azhar, Deobandi leader of the Pakistan-
based Army of Muhammad, is believed to have been behind
terrorist attacks on India, and the Taliban, as the
Deobandi harborers of Osama bin Laden, posed a mortal
threat to the United States.The answers about the different brands of Deobandism on the
subcontinent appear rooted in India’s secular, democratic
tradition and in the region’s complex interplay of history,
politics and demography.To step onto the campus of Darul Uloom in Deoband is to
step back in time. The 3,500 boys and young men, mostly
from peasant backgrounds, attend free of charge. They leave
their sandals outside the scalloped doorways of classrooms
that are more than 100 years old.In one, a teacher read by the hour from the Hadith, a
collection of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, while
hundreds of students wrapped in shawls against the winter
chill and wearing white caps sat on the floor, listening
respectfully.Mr. Rahman, 86, the school’s leader, turns to history when
he talks about why India’s Deobandis are different from
their cousins across the border. He explains that the
seminary opposed the creation of Pakistan, a Muslim
homeland. “We are Indians first, then Muslims,” he said,
speaking in Urdu.The divide between Deobandis had its origins in the 1947
partition of the British Indian empire into India and
Pakistan, an event that set off cataclysmic violence
between Hindus and Muslims and sundered the Muslims of the
subcontinent, too.No longer were devout young Muslims from all over the
former empire free to attend the seminary at Deoband, and
today, the Deobandis of Pakistan who were educated in
Deoband itself have largely died out.“They have adopted the same educational syllabus, but
beyond that, they developed in a different manner,” Mr.
Rahman said. “We do not have any relationship with them.”The seminary in Deoband was founded in 1866 to preserve
Muslim identity and heritage in the face of British
imperialism, which had replaced the rule of the Mughals,
India’s Muslim conquerors.The seminary’s teachers imparted to their students a
socially conservative vision of Islam purified of folk and
Hindu customs and concerned with teaching individuals how
to practice their faith properly.In politics, the Deobandis joined the independence movement
led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, a Hindu, and opposed the
separate Muslim homeland of Pakistan that was ultimately
founded by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a secular-leaning barrister
who smoked cigarettes, wore hand-tailored suits and spats
and married a Parsi, a non-Muslim.“Jinnah never used to offer prayers, so how could he have
created an Islamic state?” Mr. Rahman asked.Secular democracy has proved to be a bulwark against
fundamentalism in India, and it was built on a demographic
foundation that made Islamic nationalism impractical here.
Secular democracy is only part of the answer why deobandis
are different in India compared to Pak. Another reason is
that as you go east from India, Muslims are not as fanatic
(ex. Bangladesh, Malaysia). The fundamentalism line stops
at the India-Pak border.
[This message has been edited by rvikz (edited March 30, 2002).]