**Indian Town’s Seed Grew Into the Taliban’s Code **
New York Times; New York, N.Y.; Feb 23, 2002; Celia W. Dugger;
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, bearded 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. While Pakistan is 97 percent Muslim – and religion has been routinely exploited there for political gain – India, a much more populous nation with almost as many Muslims numerically, is only 12 percent Muslim.
‘‘The Muslims of India are scattered all over the place,’’ said Syed Shahabuddin, editor of Muslim India, a monthly magazine. ‘‘Out of 545 parliamentary districts, just 11 have a Muslim majority. How can you make a Muslim political party?’’ Still, in more districts Muslims form a crucial swing vote in a social system where the Hindu majority is often fractured politically by caste. As a result, they have a measure of influence at the ballot box, if not the ability to win outright control.
Deoband is in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the state election season is under way. The political parties of the low castes and the peasant castes are competing ferociously for Muslim votes. The severest provocation of Muslims happened here in Uttar Pradesh in 1992, when Hindu fanatics tore down a 16th-century mosque at Ayodhya. Ever since, Muslims have often cast their votes tactically for the party best positioned to defeat the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, whose leaders led the movement to build a Hindu temple on the site of the mosque.
Liaquat Ali, a 48-year-old farmer, declared that he supported the Samajwadi Party, led by a Hindu from the cowherd caste, because it is more secular and more influential.
But as Mr. Ali ranted on about the evils of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, a young farm hand, Mohammad Mustaqeem, cut him off. ‘‘He was the B.J.P. regional chief in the area!’’ Mr. Mustaqeem exclaimed. ‘‘He voted B.J.P. last time! He supported them because he realized they would be in power and that it would be good to be friendly with them.’’
A bit defensive, Mr. Ali conceded the point but insisted, ‘‘I supported the B.J.P. because they talked about justice, but in the past five years, they did everything but deliver it.’’ The Deobandi villagers of Labakri, like the Muslims of India, have overwhelmingly chosen to express themselves at the ballot box, not through organized violence.
But in Pakistan, Deobandis, who are Sunni Muslims, have been instrumental in armed Islamic militancies in Afghanistan and Kashmir and in efforts to turn Pakistan into a theocratic state. A series of powerful players – Pakistani military dictators and democrats, rich Saudis and the American government – tried to harness Islam to their own political and geopolitical purposes. They fed zealotry on a rich diet of money, patronage and arms, creating a fundamentalist force in Afghanistan and Pakistan that no one could control, say scholars and political analysts.
The Pakistani military sought to strengthen its rule through an alliance with clerics and from the 1980’s funded thousands of madrassas. The Saudis, many of whom followed their own austere and conservative brand of Islam known as Wahhabism, sought to build a Sunni wall around Shiite-dominated Iran and contributed heavily to Pakistan’s Deobandi madrassas, as well, Professor Nasr said.
The Americans poured money into Pakistan to fund Islamic militants who fought the Russians in Afghanistan. The elected government of Benazir Bhutto nurtured the Taliban in the hopes of setting up a malleable government in Afghanistan. Since the mid- to late 1990’s, both Pakistani military rulers and prime ministers have allowed secret funding of Islamic radicals who have fought Indian rule of Kashmir, India’s only majority-Muslim state. (Notably, with the exception of Kashmiris, India’s Muslims have not joined the war against their own country and often insist, like Hindus, that Kashmir belongs to India.)
Even here on the campus of Darul Uloom in Deoband, students admire the exploits of the Taliban, the Deobandis they have never known, but who stood up to the Americans. ‘‘Our schools have nothing to do with them, but still, what Americans did to the Taliban was unfair,’’ said Khalil-ur Rehman, 20. ‘‘They wanted to finish the Taliban because they brought Islamic rule.’’ But asked whether he would rather live in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, or in secular India, Mr. Rehman did not hesitate. ‘‘India is our motherland,’’ he said. ‘‘And we love it.’’
