… but the wretched Rohillas had no country; the country they had left had long been
possessed by others, and where were these miserable people to seek for a place of shelter –
from the persecution of whom? Of Englishmen – natives of a country renowned for its justice
and humanity. They will carry their melancholy tale into the numerous tribes and nations
among whom they are scattered, and you may depend upon it the impression which it will
make, will, sooner or later, have its effect.
Charles James Fox
The British literature about the military problems they encountered with the Pashtun tribes in the region lying along the border with Afghanistan is filled with references to antagonists they referred to as “Hindustani Fanatics.” Again and again, the huge British Empire went to war with these people, but they are little understood. The purpose of this paper is to explain who the “Fanatics” were, their tribal connection, and their links to both Islamic extremism and Deobandism. This study will also illustrate how political-religious leaders can modify a religion in order to match with the general beliefs of the population they are attempting to sway toward supporting a new movement.
There are several important keys to understanding this paper:
• The widespread unrest in India reflected in this paper was related to the disintegration of the Mughal Empire. This produced multiple opportunities for regional warlords to create independent states while chaos produced nearly constant local warfare and rapidly shifting alliances. European entry into the subcontinent during this period increased the unrest.
• Northern Pashtuns, primarily from the Yusufzai and Bangash tribes, had migrated into northern India where they were called “Rohillas” and served interchangeably as mercenaries and trader merchants. This process began during the 13th century and continued into the period of Mughal disintegration.
• The military immigrants maintained contact with the original segments of their tribe that didn’t migrate. Like the European Vikings, these warrior-traders gradually established their own nations.
• These Pashtuns spoke a unique common language that wasn’t understood by their southern cousins, even though they shared a common written language. They remained a separate culture within India where the Indians referred to them as “Pathans” to connect them to one of their major population centers, Patna. This eastern Indian city shows the breadth of Pashtun penetration into India, far from their original
homeland near Afghanistan.
• The greater percentage of the Pashtuns were from the Yusufzai tribe, a group reported by the British known for quickly turning to religious leaders for advice and control during tribal unrest. They accepted respected outsiders as leaders who could mediate between squabbling subtribes rather than select a member of any of their subtribes as a leader who would only polarize current animosities rather than minimize them.
• The Pashtuns were exceptionally religious and tended to view any external threat to the tribe as a parallel threat against Islam, itself. This perception of a dual threat allowed leaders to mobilize the tribes quickly to face outsiders, particularly those from another religion.
• Pashtunwali’s Badal, the cultural requirement to seek revenge, keeps an insult to the tribe or tribes current in the memories of new generations.
• “Storytelling” and visits from wandering Pashtun poets3 to isolated compounds having few other forms of entertainment, especially during periods of extreme winters, keeps the memory of tribal heritage, religion, and revenge fresh in the minds of succeeding generations. Hafiz Rahmat, the Rohilla chief killed by the British, was a recognized poet and his poetry and tales of his demise probably lingered long among
northern Pashtuns.
There were four key events that occurred within the Indian subcontinent during the 19th century and the effects, while little understood, remain as very significant factors in the religious politics of the Pashtun region lying between Afghanistan and Pakistan – the Pashtun belt. First, the Rohilla Pashtun “statelets” that were located in northern India were destroyed by their Indian enemies and the British in 1774. Second, the relocation of Sayed Ahmad Shah of Bareilly, a city within the lost Rohilla territory, from what is today’s Uttar Pradesh state to the region of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province is quite significant. He and his “Hindustani Fanatics” carried a new political-religious ideology system to the Pashtuns that was essentially indistinguishable, except for minor details, from Wahabbism. Third, and interrelated, was the “Sepoy Mutiny of 1857” that had a significant involvement of Sayed Ahmad Shah’s followers and supporters within the lost Rohilla territory in leadership positions among the “mutineers.” Finally, Deobandism was developed by two of Sayed Ahmad Shah’s adherents in the aftermath of the failed “Mutiny.” This revolt was worse within the Rohilla territory that had been destroyed in 1774. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the very plausible connection between these “Rohillas” and today’s political and religious strife found along the border separating Afghanistan’s Pashtuns from their cousins living in Pakistan.
Missing in the available literature is an understanding of the Pashtun tribal connections to all of this new form of “revolutionary Islam”, as it developed deeply within northeast India where scholars consistently refer to the Rohillas as “Afghans”, but there is an excellent reason for the speed with which Sayed Ahmad Shah’s political-religious message was accepted by the Pashtuns, especially the Yusufzai tribe. The answer is simple: the initial “Hindustani Fanatics” were simply returning home to Pashtun country. Most of the original group that followed and supported Sayed Ahmad Shah, if not all of them, were probably Yusufzai Pashtuns. At a minimum, they were born and raised in a part of India that was once controlled by the independent Rohilla Pashtuns, most of whom were members of the Yusufzai tribe.
Iqbal Husain, in his first-rate study, The Rise and Fall of the Ruhela Chieftaincies in 18th Century India, provides the necessary history that allows connections to be made with early Pashtun military immigrations into India and the 19th century anti-British Islamic to impose shari’a on their Muslim cousins. They established a cultural antagonism that revolutionaries seeking power that continues to exist today, possibly within some of the descendents of the original Hindustani Fanatics that fought nearly continuous wars with the Sikhs and the British throughout the 19th century.
Husain, however, does not identify these military immigrants as Pashtuns and refers to them, generically, as “Afghans.” They were far more than just Afghans. These people were northern Pashtuns with warrior traditions and great amounts of combat experience gained while fighting as mercenaries inside India
From Husain:
“The immigration of Afghans into India dates back to the time of the Ghorian conquests5: they are found serving the Sultans of Delhi in the 13th century with their own settlements at Gopalgir (Mewat), Afghanpur (Delhi), Bojpur, Kampil, Patiyali, and other places. During the Sultanate period, after many vicissitudes, they rose from being petty mercenaries to a position where they acquired control of the Delhi Sultanate under the Lodis and Surs. During the entire period stretching from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, the process of Afghan immigration to India seems to have been a continuous one; but after the fall of the Lodis6, and still more, the Afghan immigrants suffered greatly and their settlements in various areas were either destroyed or deprived of their prosperity
Much of this information escaped most western historians, but Husain’s use of both Urdu and Persian primary sources for his study of the Ruehelas, known by their Anglicized name, Rohillas, clearly identifies these migrant soldiers and traders in their occupations used interchangeably by the Pashtuns settling into India as far back the thirteenth century. As the new arrivals gained property and commerce brought them prosperity andaccess to power, the continuous flow of additional Pashtuns continued as some migrant tribes actually gained control of the Indian empire.
From Husain:
“Most Afghan immigrants came from three distinct regions. The first was the region to the north and west of Attock, comprising Bajaur, Tiran and Swat and the intervening areas, mainly inhabited by the Lodis and Yusufzais. The second was a large, and in parts fertile, district, called Bangash, which lay to the south of the Tirah range, bounded by the Safed Koh Range in the north-west and by the Indus on the west. The Afghans of this range mainly settled in Northern India, including present Uttar Pradesh. The third region, which comprised southeastern Afghanistan and the adjoining parts of Pakistan, contained the Panni, Tarin and Kakar tribes, amongst others who largely settled in Gujarat and the Deccan….
“…they served as soldiers, but were also ready to act as merchants or engage in trade, particularly in horses. The Afghans generally retained these characteristics until the beginning of the twentieth century…. Those who had engaged in trade often changed their profession and became soldiers.”
It was during the period that the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate that provided the chaos in local governance to allow the Pashtun colonists and their relatively newfound wealth to actually take control over broad regions of India, including the imperial capital, Delhi, and its entire sultanate. It was in India’s northern region, today’s Uttar Pradesh state, that the aggressive Pashtuns, primarily Yusufzai tribesmen, were able to gain full control and create an essentially independent principality
Husain explains:
“The decay of the Mughal empire after Aurangzeb’s death accelerated the process of Afghan immigration into India. Local chiefs, contending for supremacy against neighboring zamindars, were increasingly tempted to recruit Afghans as mercenaries for their own needs. Alternately, the Afghans having themselves become local potentates, invited their kinsmen and compatriots over from Roh both to aid them and to share in the gains. Afghan settlements in the north, especially in Katehr, therefore, continued to grow even without imperial patronage, as is shown by the profusion with which the eighteenth century settlements appear….
“An early Afghan settlement after Aurangzeb’s death took place at Bioli which was assigned to Daud Khan Ruhela, an Afghan adventurer, in the service of Madar Shah, an important zamindar. Daud Khan and his companions gradually occupied neighboring villages. This encouraged other Afghans to emigrate to Katehr. Originally a stronghold of the Katehriyas…. It continued to be held by the Katehriyas till A.D. 1730 when Ali Muhammad Khan Ruhela killed Duja, chief of the clan, seized it, and made it his capital.
“The settlement of Mirganj (Bareilly) was established at about the same time as other Afghan settlements in Rohilkhand.
“Useha, where the Afghans settled during the ascendancy of the Bangash15 Afghans of Furrukhabad, is described as an ancient place. Qaim Khan, the Bangash chief, held the pargana16 till his defeat and death in the battle of Daunri in 1748, when victorious Ruhelas seized the pargana and
assigned it to Fath Khan….”
The aggressive Rheulas, or Rohillas, and their martial experience soon dominated a wide region in north India after capturing lands belonging to the Katehriyas. They soon turned their expansionist tendencies toward their Pashtun cousins, the Bangash Pashtuns who were also military colonists and captured their territory that surrounded the major town of Furrukhabad. Their “Rohilkhand” consisted of independent “chieftaincies,”
as Husain labeled them, in an area that extended from the Himalayan foothills southward for approximately 600 kilometers and west of Delhi for approximately 250 kilometers. They were able to defend their territorial gains with forces of experienced warrior tribesmen that numbered as high as
80,000 fighters, many of whom were cavalrymen.
The Imperial Gazetteer of India explains the growth of Rohilla supremacy that developed within the power vacuum following the death of Aruangzeb, the Mughal ruler, and the break up of the Mughal Empire, in its discussion of the city where Sayed Ahmad Shah originated, Bareilly:
“…In 1657 Raja Makrand founded the new city of Bareilly, cut down the forest to the west of the old town and expelled all the Katehriyahas from the neighborhood. A succession of regular governors followed during the palmy [sic] days of the great Mughal emperors; but after the death of Aruangzeb, in 1707, when the unwieldy organization began to break asunder, the Hindus of Bareilly threw off the imperial yoke, refused their tribute, and commenced a series of anarchic quarrels among themselves for supremacy.
“Their dissentions only afforded an opportunity for the rise of a new Muhammadan power. Ali Muhammad Khan, a leader of the Rohilla Pathans, defeated the governors of Bareilly and Moradabad, and made himself supreme throughout the whole Katehr region. In 1744 the Rohilla chieftain conquered Kumaun right up to Almora; but two years later the emperor Muhammad Shah marched against him, and Ali Muhammad was taken a prisoner to Delhi. However, the empire was too much in need of vigorous generals to make his captivity a long one, and in 1748 he was restored to his old post in Katehr….”
But Ali Muhammad and the other Rohilla leaders were more than just military leaders. They also remained in contact with the region that is today’s Afghanistan through profitable horse-trading along developed, protected trading routes while also building a solid agricultural base for their
economy in northern India. Both are important factors that made them relatively wealthy, but this new wealth also attracted powerful enemies.
“… most Afghan states were formed along horse-trading routes, … the formation of the Rohilla state in Rohilkhand vividly illustrates the theme of horse trader turned state builder. Using money embezzled from his own adopted father, one of the founders of the Rohilla state, Da’ud Khan, bought horses at north Indian fairs and then launched a dazzling career as highwayman, revenue farmer, cavalry officer, and local landowner, all while recruiting other Afghans who migrated to Rohilkhand with their horses. By the 1730’s his adopted son, Ali Mohammad, had carved out an effective state, styling himself nawab, and was acknowledged as such by the Mughal emperor. But the Rohilla phenomenon was no “tribal
breakout.” In addition to fostering in Rohilkhand, a semipastoral economy sustained by close ties with horse markets in Afghanistan, the Rohillas also promoted deforestation in the territories they controlled, dug wells and canals, and generally promoted land reclamation and agrarian wealth.”
According to Safia Haleem’s Study of the Pathan Communities in Four States of India, the Rohillas that settled in Katehr, once they suitably conquered it, were immigrants and descendents of the Mandar Yusufzai Pashtuns, one of probably several migrant Pashtun tribes that entered India, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The region under their control was reported to be very fertile and composed of well-aerated loam soil that was easily cultivated. But in addition to its fertile land, Rohilkhand was a key trade crossroads with intersecting routes coming from several directions. For example:
“During 18th Century the eastern track [of the Grand Trunk Road] shifted northwards entering Rohilkhand via central Awadh [also known as Ould and Oudh in the literature] and Farrukhabad. From there traffic could bypass Delhi altogether and continue either south to Jaipur and other Rajput cities or through Bareily, along the hills via Najibabad. The route circumvented the Punjab and Delhi and caravans could reach Peshawar and Kabul without touching Sikh territory.”
“Hafiz Rahmat Khan, guardian to his sons [of Ali Mumammad], succeeded to the governorship of Rohilkhand….” And he was also involved in the horse trade, moved to Rohilkhand around 1730. He used to purchase horses from the north of present day Afghanistan disposed them off in
Delhi while going to his new home in Aonla.”
Wealth and the promise of additional prosperity to come from both trade and agriculture made a target out of the Rohilla tribal lands in India. One of the most powerful men in Dehli’s court soon moved against the region once controlled by the Bangash Pashtuns, Farrukhabad, and Safdar Jang sought to expand his control outward from Delhi. Fortunately for the Rohillas, another Pashtun leader, Ahmad Shah Durrani, was in the process of invading India from Afghanistan and his presence and de facto alliance with his fellow Pashtuns, the Rohillas, left Rohilkhand under the control of Hafiz Rahmat Khan. The Imperial Gazetteer of India provides some details:
“The Ould [Awadh] Wazir, Safdar Jang, plundered the property of the Farrukhabad Nawab after his death, and this led to a union of the Rohilla Afghans with those of Farrukhabad …. But the Wazir called in the aid of the Maratha, and with them defeated [Hafiz] Rahmat Khan and the Rohillas…. He then besieged them for four months at the foot of the hills; but owing to the invasion of Ahmad Shah Durrani terms were arranged, and Hafiz Rahmat Khan [guardian to the sons of Ali Muhammad] became de facto ruler of Rohilkhand.” Unfortunately for the Rohillas, the death of Safdar Jang in 1754 brought little long-term relief from the military pressures they were under. His son, Shuja-ud Daulah, was determined to undermine the Pashtuns and gain control of their territory and he embarked on a clever balance of power exercise between the Rohillas, the Marathas, and the English of the East India Company.
His goal was made considerably easier as the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani began to withdraw from India toward the west under pressure from the Sikhs. In 1767 the Afghan Durrani Pashtuns lost Lahore to the Sikhs as large numbers of Sikhs moved east into the Delhi region, attacking Rohillas as the moves were made.
The Marathas had lost two of their districts to the Rohillas when they were given to the Pashtuns during Ahmad Shah Durrani’s invasion of India and their goal involved the recovery of lost territory. As they moved in the direction of Rohilkhand in 1768, Rohilla leader Hafiz Rahmat Khan was encumbered with grumbling troops who had been unpaid for seven months and looted villages near Farrukhabad, but he was able to send men to the assistance of Ahmad Khan Bangash as the Marathas approached. By June 1772, the Rohillas had signed a treaty with Shuja-ud Daulah, one that had considerable financial consequences for the leaders of Rohilkhand.
Additional unprecedented tribal intrigue resulted, primarily over conflicting goals. Hafiz Rahmat Khan worked to eliminate the large financial obligation he had incurred as Shuja-ud Daulah worked to undermine the alliance in his efforts to gain control of Rohilkhand’s rich lands and control of multiple trade routes. The external threat to both of them, the Marathas, was forced to withdraw as Hafiz Rahmat Khan found himself in the least desirable position. He was faced with a powerful enemy in Shuja-ud Daulah, a leader who was allied with a powerful new force in India, the English, in a strange triangular relationship in which both Shuja and Hafiz Rahmat Khan courted the English commanders.
The animosity felt by Shuja-ud Daulah toward the Rohillas is difficult to understand. They were allied together while supporting the Afghanleader, Ahmad Shah Durrani, during his invasion of India, but Shuja turned on his former ally for an unknown reason. Part of his motivation involved their different religions, however. Shujah-ud Daulah, the Nawab of Awadh, was a Persian and a Shi’a, while the Rohillas were Sunni Sufis, and they occupied some of the same rich land in northern India at a time when the Mughal Empire was breaking apart during the period following the death of Aurangzeb. Survival depended on the acquisition of resources and Shuja planned on surviving.
Hafiz Rahmat Khan assembled his Sardars, or chiefs, in an effort to raise the large sum of money demanded by Shuja-ud Daulah, but none of the chiefs were willing to contribute money and the Rohilla chief was forced to prepare for a war he didn’t want to fight. As troops began to move Shuja increased his demand for additional money to avoid the war as Hafiz Rahmat Khan attempted to get the British commander in the region, Colonel Champion, to mediate. Shuja-ud Daulah knew the advantage was on his side. He had been allied with the British before and knew they would tilt toward him as the conflict approached.
In the end, the two very mismatched forces engaged one another on April 23, 1774 and while the smaller Rohilla force fought gallantly the outcome was preordained. A British officer present during the battle wrote of the Rohillas:
“… gave proof of a good share of military knowledge by showing inclination to face both our flanks at the same time, and endeavoring to call our attention by brisk fire on our centre…. It is impossible to describe a more obstinate firmness of resolution than the enemy displayed; numerous were their gallant men who advanced and often pitched their colours between both armies in order to encourage their men to follow them.”
The British army was experiencing their first encounter with men they would later know as “Hindustanic Fanatics,” men who fought bravely against great odds in a manner that impressed at least one English officer. The battle ended quickly after a shot from a cannon struck Hafiz Rahmat Khan in the chest, killing him instantly. His two sons, commanders in the center of the Rohilla line, also lost their lives as the Rohilla survivors soon fled the battlefield for prepared sanctuaries, but they left 2,000 bodies of their men behind. Soon, they would have even more reasons to hate the British enough to continue their efforts against the British colonial authorities for several additional generations.
As the Rohilla army left the field the victors in the battle began to set deep, and lasting, hatred into motion. The victorious allies, Shujaud Daulah and Colonel Champion, remained on the battlefield for an additional three days as small detachments of their troops were sent into the countryside where they embarked on what Iqbal Husain described as a “reign of terror”. More than a thousand villages were burned and thousands of various structures were destroyed in what must have appeared to be an attempt at “ethnic cleansing” by Shi’a Shuja-ud Daulah’s men, in spite of Colonel Champion’s protests.
But the Rohillas learned little from their recent defeat and instead of regrouping under a single leader, they fragmented further with some of them, including some of Hafiz Rahmat Khan’s sons, seeking to accommodate with Shuja-ud Daulah. Their principle city, Bareilly, fell without resistance. Leaders of some of the Rohilla tribes remained neutral, but they were quickly attacked and their possessions looted.
According to Iqbal Husain, nearly 20,000 Rohillas sought refuge at Agra, but by the end of the campaign the Rohilla Confederacy had been destroyed28. Adding to the instability, Sikh raiders attacked the weakened Rohillas. In the end, Shuja-ud Daulah overcame his enemies, gained territory with rich agricultural land, enhanced his treasury with loot confiscated from Rohilla families, and the British, the Shi’as, and the Sikhs got the blame from the Rohillas who seem to have never forgotten that Colonel Champion allied himself with Shuja-ud Daulah instead of Hafiz Rahmat Khan. Rohillas were primarily
Yusufzai Pashtuns, a culture that looks at significant losses through lenses of “blame” rather than the “guilt” that is seen in western culture. Added to the “blame” aspects of their culture, there is another significant aspect of the Pashtuns that developed over thousands of years: Pashtunwali. And its
primary tenet is simple: revenge. The survivors of the Rohilla wars who lost to the Shi’a and Sikhs would not forget the British and the role Colonel Champion played in the destruction of their principalities inside northern India – and very possibly the humiliation of Hafiz Rahmat Khan’s family also played a role in their tribal anger. It appears that this animosity may have continued into modern times.
Britain’s Sir John Strachey attempted to justify, if not explain away, the British complicity in the destruction of the Rohillas in his 1892 book. An interesting point Strachey made in his preface shows how Pashtuns remember their history, especially the negative aspects of it:
“Several years of my Indian service were passed in the province of Rohilkhand. When I was first sent there, old men were still living who remembered having heard in their childhood the story of Hafiz Rahmat, the great Rohilla chief, of his defeat by the English, and his death.”
Strachey prepared an able defense of British actions against the Rohillas and explained that the Rohillas “were not a nation at all, but a comparatively small body of rapacious Afghan adventurers who had imposed their foreign rule on an unwilling Hindu population, and the story of their destruction is fictitious.” His account may have been well received by Victorian England, but the descendents of the Rohillas believed the story the old men told about a very dead chief who was killed with British assistance while trying to defend their nation.
The anger and frustration of the Rohilla survivors may have been worsened by probable forced conversions of their people from Islam to Hinduism and Sikhism in the regions where they sought refuge. There are reports of “Rohilla Hindus,” possibly explainable as the result of early Pashtun Rohilla immigrants arriving into regions ruled by Hindu Rajaputs, who later lost their territory to these same Pashtuns, but there is no doubt that religious conversions occurred. Zabita Khan, one of the last Rohilla leaders, converted to Sikhism to become “Dharam Singh,”for example.
The Rohillas lost their lands, families were disrupted – if not murdered – by Shi’a Shuja-ud Daulah’s looting, marauding troops, and many of them may have been forcibly converted to become Hindus or Sikhs by those conquering them or by those leaders agreeing to shelter them in return for religious conversions. This early form of “ethnic cleansing” may have had a very significant impact on the survivors, many of whom would eventually become the “Hindustani Fanatics” and their supporters who provided funds and recruits from the dismantled Rohilla territory.
Enter **Sayed Ahmad Shah of Bareilly **Into this complex cultural mix, with its recent losses to the Shi’a, Sikhs, and the British, the next leader of the militants was born in Bareilly on November 29, 1786 – a little over twelve years after the destruction of the Rohilla’s adopted homeland. While the historical record shows that Ahmad Shah was a “Sayed,” or could trace his family genealogy directly to the Prophet Mohammad, it is nearly a certainty that he was a member of the Yusufzai tribe, like the other Muslims living in this region. He was well aware of the military aspects of the area where he lived and, according to
Hafeez Malik, he played war games with his playmates and divided them into an “army of Islam” and an “army of infidels”, reflecting the seriousness the population viewed their recent defeat by Shujah-ud Daulah, the Sikhs, and the British army. If the contemporary sources are correct, even his mother took seriously her young son’s determination to fight the infidels, yet another indication that the surviving Rohillas accepted the Pashtunwali requirement for revenge. Shujah-ud Daulah, a Shi’a, was a Muslim; but the Sikhs and the British were not and they appear to have been singled out as primary enemies for Sayed Ahmad Shah. It seems that young Ahmad Shah was indoctrinated from a very early age to become a combatant. And his mother was not to be disappointed.
Associated with young Sayed Ahmad Shah’s ambitions to take war to the Sikhs and British enemies of Islam, infidels, was the relatively new political-religious ideology created by Shah Waliullah as he observed the chaos of repeated succession crises within the Mughal Empire as it began to fall apart. Waliullah probably associated the threat to Muslim rule in India with similar threat to Islam.
Shah Waliullah was also from northern India and would have been very familiar with the Rohillas who controlled much of the region where he was born. The district where he originated, Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, had begun as an Afghan settlement and he may have been a Rohilla, himself. The district remained under Rohilla control until 1780, eighteen years after Waliullah’s death in 1762, when it was plundered by Sikhs. His religious work seemed to focus on a revival of traditional Islam that he felt had been contaminated by beliefs absorbed from their contacts with India’s Hindu population. He also probably viewed the gradual disintegration of the Mughal Empire as a parallel decline of Islam and
worked against this trend as political instability began to spread. While he was a “traditionalist,” Waliullah was also revolutionary in some of his methods. For example, he was the first to translate the Koran into Persian, something that must have been condemned widely as an “innovation” by other religious leaders as Waliullah opened many schools that carried his religious views to large numbers of young Muslim students.
He also pointed out that while there was no provision for national churches for each country within the Islamic concept of the “Ummah,” Waliullah explained his belief that there were significant differences among the Muslim nations and each of them had generally developed separate schools of Islamic thought. Turkey had a significant Sufism influence, Iranian nationalism was centered on its Shi’a faith, and Arabia was closely connected to Wahabbism. Waliullah’s religious beliefs developed a school of Islamic thought that is relatively unique and is found primarily in today’s Pakistan.
The schools he founded trained religious nationalists and under the guidance of his eldest son, Shah Abdul Aziz, their goal was the liberation and the development of a state ruled by a caliph using the religious principles developed by Waliullah who carried his message to the upper classes in the region. Abdul Aziz took the message to the common people that they shouldn’t wait for the return of al-Mahdi, their Messiah, who would deliver them from “the bondage of the infidels,” but they should take their destiny in their own hands. Sayed Ahmad Shah was one of his best students. By the end of his training, Sayed Ahmad Shah had been trained into the Naqshbandi, Qadriya, and Chistiya Sufism orders.
As Sayed Ahmad Shah was receiving his religious training, the disintegration of the Mughal Empire continued as other powers moved to fill the political-military vacuum. From Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Durrani fought the Sikhs and defeated them several different times, but the Sikhs continued to grow in power and after gaining control of Lahore, they continued to spread their control, and at the expense of the Muslims. At the same time, the Muslims of India were being squeezed by the other growing power in India, the British. And as normally happens when Islam is perceived to be threatened, the religious leaders manage to take control of the political process and the entire Muslim community turns toward violence.
From Hafeez Malik:
“Shah Abdul Aziz … made a serious, concerted and organized effort to regain political control of some provinces. It was, therefore, decided that a national militia should be created which would be the nucleus of the future armed forces. Shah Abdul Aziz established two boards of directors, one for military purposes and the other to serve as a surveillance committee for the maintenance of the ideological and doctrinal purity of the movement…. Shah Abdul Aziz let it be understood that the unanimous decisions of the two committees would be tantamount to his own judgment.”
Shah Abdul Aziz died on July 17, 1823. But the Muslims now were prepared for a war of liberation. Their enemies were the Sikhs and the British and Abdul Aziz appointed Sayed Ahmad Shah of Bareilly the leader of their liberation movement.42 Maulana Ismail Shahid, one of Waliullah’s grandsons, was instrumental in ensuring that Sayed Ahmad Shah was recognized as the future Caliph of the Muslim forces when he declared that Sayad Ahmad Shah “instinctively attained perfection and being spiritually closest to the Prophet Muhammad.” Hafeez Malik correctly concluded that “although Saiyad Ahmad Shahid was officially declared Caliph of the Moslem44 forces in 1827, the doctrine supporting his elevation
had been enunciated much earlier.”
In order to learn military matters, Sayed Ahmad Shah served in the armed forces of Amir Khan, the Nawab of Tonk, where he remained for six years. Nawab Amir Khan traced his ancestry to the Salarzai tribe of Buner from where his grandfather had migrated. By late 1815, the Nawab had been maneuvered into a position where he came under the control of the British to become a part of the Dar-ul Harb that Shah Abdul Aziz had decreed could not be supported. Consequently, Sayed Ahmad Shah left the service of Amir Khan, disappointed that the Nawab’s forces would not become the nucleus of a liberation movement in India. But his departure was a shrewd strategic move and he gained the support of Nawab-ud-Daulah, the heir-apparent to the throne of Tonk. Soon, Sayed Ahmad Shah received the allegiance of the immediate members of Shah Abdul Aziz’s family, and he then had the religious and financial base that would support his movement as he continued to preach about the need for an all-out war for the
liberation of Dar-ul Islam. Large numbers were involved in his preaching and approximately 15,000 men and women took an oath of allegiance to him in a single month. More importantly, a man named Wilayat Ali, a son of one of Sayed Ahmad Shah’s key supporters in Patna, joined the movement at this time and would eventually inherit the entire movement.
Sayed Ahmad Shah left for Mecca with a very large group of followers and was away from India for a period as long as six years. According to Charles Allen, when he returned to India an important change occurred in his preaching:
“He went ashore briefly in Bombay and was feted as a saint by all sections of the Muslim community of the city. Again, there was talk of prophecies being fulfilled and of the approach of the end of days – and it seems to have been at this point that Mahdism first entered Syed Ahmad’s
newly enlarged religious vocabulary.”
There had been others proclaiming themselves Mahdis in this period and one, in particular is noteworthy in its connection to modern extremists.
Charles Allen explains a harbinger from the past that is seen again today:
“…adherents, who had proclaimed themselves the Mahdawis and set up a cult characterized by extreme asceticism, and violence towards other Muslims. ‘They always carried swords and shields, and all kinds of weapons,’ wrote the chronicler Nizamuddin Ahmad in his history Tabaqati- Akbari, ‘and going into cities and bazaars, wherever they saw anything that was contrary to the law of the Prophet, at first they forbade these things, with gentleness and courtesy. If this did not succeed, they made people give up the forbidden practices, using force or violence.’ The Mahdawi cult gained many converts among the Afghan leadership in India, so many in fact that it eventually provoked an orthodox backlash and was declared a heresy. Nevertheless, the belief in a messiah figure who would appear from the mountains to the west as the King of the West took hold in all sections of the Muslim community in India, becoming increasingly popular as Muslim power there waned.”
Allen continued:
“There was thus a well-established predisposition among all sections of the Muslim community in India to respond to the call of the true Imam-Mahdi in a time of religious crisis, and this now became an established part of Amir Syed Ahmad’s Wahhabi platform in India: the belief that the end of days was drawing nigh and with it the imminent return of the Hidden Imam-Mahdi, the King of the West.”
And Charles Allen described the scene they were entering into:
“The Hindustan to which Syed Ahmad returned was fast being reshaped on British terms…. Except for the Punjab, where the Sikhs still heldsway, all Hindustan was now under direct or indirect East India Company control. So it was not surprising that Syed Ahmad and his twin messages of Islamic revival and armed struggle against the infidel were received with an enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. And nowhere was this enthusiasm more marked than at Patna, the seat of his most loyal supporters, headed by the three families of Fatah Ali, Elahi Bux, and Syed Muhammad Hussain.”
By this point, Sayed Ahmad Shah had developed a highly popular political theology that soon proclaimed him to be the leader of the new revolutionary movement that he was planning to create in the “west” to fulfill the Mahdist prophesy. He was preparing for the move he had planned to make for most of his life.
There is some controversy in the available literature’s slim pickings regarding the religious underpinnings of Sayed Ahmad Shah and its connection to Saudi Wahhabism. One of the problems in comprehending this complex religious and political situation involves the inclusion of Sufism in Sayed Ahmad Shah’s early religious training and Hafeez pointed this important variable out clearly when he wrote “…by the end of his
training, Sayed Ahmad Shah had been trained into the Naqshbandi, Qadriya, and Chistiya Sufism orders.” And he swore bayat to Shah Waliullah in what was clearly a pir-murid relationship. But Sayed Ahmad Shah was an equally astute politician. Knowing how prevalent the “Mahdist” theology was in India, this was a blending of Sunni and Shi’a approaches to religion that had powerful military foundations in India and when Sayed Ahmad Shah returned from Mecca he came bearing a clearly less tolerant, and aggressive form of Islam. This was obviously inspired by contact with Wahhabi teachers, regardless of the fact that the Wahhabis had been driven from Saudi Arabia’s urban areas during the decade prior to his visit. But while the Wahabbi armies and its leaders had been driven into the deserts and its theologians had been killed following a four-day religious debate that failed to sway them, the Wahhabi approach to Islam still had to be prevalent in Mecca at the time of his visit. We need only to look at the early
Christian survival within polytheist and murderous Rome as a reminder of how an underground religion can survive, if not thrive, within a hostile political environment.
In the end, Sayed Ahmad Shah created a hybrid form of Islam that maximized his opportunity to attract militant followers and financial supporters as he added the Shi’a concept of the Madhi to his political, Wahhabi-like, revolutionary movement that aimed to force the Sikhs and British from India. He was not, however, intending to bring democracy to India after winning his jihad. His goal was the imposition of Muslim control over the entire subcontinent in a form of government that required “blind and implicit obedience to their spiritual guides or peers [pirs].”
But in addition to his religious preparations and the huge supporting auxiliary population that was backing him within India, Sayed Ahmad Shah and key members of Shah Abdul Aziz’s religious family continued to present him as the heir to their family’s distinguished religious lineage, another critical variable in the coming religious-political equation. His final political preparations ensured his acceptance as the “coming Imam-Mahdi” who would appear in the region to the west, the homeland of the Salarzai Pashtun, Nawab Amir Khan of Tonk, who he served as a soldier and now had sworn bayat to the young religious leader. The Imam-Mahdi legends prevalent in India foretold the appearance of the “King of the West”
and it seems very probable that Sayed Ahmad Shah was planning to fulfill this legend as he prepared to depart for the “West.” It is also very possible that he had prepared a contingency plan in case of his death after which his disappearance would allow his heirs to claim that he was now a “Hidden Imam” who was continuing the jihad from a cave, again borrowing from the Shi’a.
Again, it is Charles Allen who got this part of history right:
“Various qualifications were required of the Imam-Mahdi. He would be an imam and a caliph, bear the name Muhammad, be a descendent of the Prophet through his daughter Fatima, arise in Arabia and be forty years old at the time of his emergence. Syed Ahmad Shah fulfilled the most important of these qualifications: he was a Saiyyed, had been raised as ‘Muhammad’ (of which ‘Ahmad’ was a diminutive), and he became forty in 1826. In January of that year he began his hijra accompanied by a band of some four hundred armed and committed jihadis.”
The British seem to have generally ignored Sayed Ahmad Shah’s activities. His stated enemies were the Sikhs and it is very probable that as long as the Islamic revolutionaries surrounding him were focused on the Sikhs, the British derived some benefit from their activities. According to Hafeez Malik, “When two thousands Moslems had congregated in Rai Bareli to sacrifice their lives in the war with the Sikhs, Shahid decided that the time was right.”
His route westward had to bypass the Sikh territories of Ranjit Singh and this newly created Amir of India’s jihadis departed Tonk’s relative safety along a southerly route through Sind and across Baluchistan through six hundred miles of difficult, sometimes desert terrain to Afghanistan’s Kandahar before they turned toward the north to Kabul. Finding little support there, Sayed Ahmad Shah’s little army marched east through the Khyber Pass to arrive in the vicinity of Peshawar.
A man who lost his life while working among the Pashtuns, Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, wrote about the arrival of Sayed Ahmad Shah into Yusufzai territory:
“About the year 1823 appeared one of those religious impostors on the arena of Yusafzai politics who have at all times and seasons beguiled the incredulous and simple Pathan race for their own ends, and have been the means of creating discord, up-heaving society, and fomenting rebellions which have been checked and crushed with the utmost difficulty. The career of Pir Tarik in the 17th century, and that of Sayad Ahmad of Bareilly and the Akhud of Swat in the 19th century, show but too clearly what single men are able to perform amongst the credulous Pathans. This man was Sayad Ahmad Shah, a resident of Bareilly, who, after visiting Mecca-Kabul, suddenly appeared in the Peshawar district with about 40 Hindustani followers, and gave out that he had been commissioned to wage a war of extermination against the Sikhs and other infidels. It was just the time to raise the spirits of the Yusafzais and other Pathans, which had been lowered by the crushing defeat they and the Peshawar sardars had received from Ranjit Singh at the battle of Nowshera, by religious exhortations. Followers speedily surrounded the new prophet, who was aided by Mir Baba of Sadum and the Khans of Zeyda and Hind. A numerous army, animated by a zeal of fanaticism, though wanting in discipline, was now at his disposal; his own Hindustani band had been increased by recruits till it numbered 900 men. In addition to this the Peshawar sardars, feeling the influence of the movement and hoping to break the Sikh rule, joined in the crusade against their oppressors.”
The Yusufzai tribe was ideal for Sayed Ahmad Shah’s proselytizing. The British recorded key comments about their tribal culture that played directly into his plans. Not only did the Yusufzai still smart under their recent defeat at the hands of the Sikhs, they accepted holy men into their confidence quickly. Sayed Ahmad Shah had recently been in Mecca, was a Sayed, and had inherited the considerable religious mantle of Shah Waliullah, a man well known in Muslim India.
The British wrote of the Yusufzai:
“Their superstition is incredulous and has no limits. Miracles, charms, and omens are believed in as a matter of course. An inordinate reverence for saints and religious classes generally is universal, and their absurdly impossible and contradictory dicta are received and acted upon with eager credulity.”
And:
“The Yusafzai clans are always famed for turbulence and rebellion wherever they have settled, and in occupying lands they now possess they did not improve. They gave equal trouble to Akbar, Arangzeb, Shah Alam, Nadir Shah, to the Durranis, and to the Sikhs.”
There is another very important factor that ensured Sayed Ahmad Shah’s acceptance by the Yusufzai and other Pashtun tribes in the region where he arrived. He was from Bereilly, now a city in India’s Uttar Predesh state, where much of the Muslim population were Rohilla Pashtuns.
According to multiple sources, the Rohillas were Yusufzai Pashtuns who immigrated into that area over time. If he was not a Rohilla, he was definitely a Muslim whose family lived within Rohilla ruled territory before his birth. Given his early interest in jihad and his mother’s encouragement in that direction, he was very possibly a Rohilla and spoke Pashtu. Given the traditional and deeply ingrained xenophobia found with all of the Pashtun hill tribes, it is highly unlikely that that anyone, regardless of his Sayed status, its lineage derived from the Prophet Mohammad, and his recent trip to Mecca – there were many, many men having these attributes in the region – that someone speaking a foreign language would ever have found
acceptance within the Pashtun tribes, much less with the speed that Sayed Ahmad Shah was elected as their leader and about to lead them into a war with the powerful Sikhs. Sayed Ahmad Shah was probably a Rohilla or his mother belonged to that group of Pashtuns. There are few other explanations for the speed with which he became the war leader of the Yusufzai and allied Pashtun tribes.
The jihad against the Sikhs could only be declared by an imam and Sayed Ahmad Shah was soon selected by the assembled Pashtun tribal leaders to become their “imam” and they also proclaimed him to be the “Amir ul-Momineen,” a title the modern world would see again. But this was very significant and Charles Allen explains it succinctly:
“Amir ul-Momineen Imam Sayed Ahmad was now presented to the entire Muslim community on the Indian frontier as their long-awaited saviour.”
And the war began between the Yusufzai Pashtuns under Sayed Ahmad Shah of Bareilly. The first action was a disaster for the Pashtuns and Sayed Ahmad Shah seems to have barely escaped, but continued with his chosen course. According to multiple sources, one of his key allies, Khadi Khan of Hund, switched sides during the battle and according to Sayed Ahmad Shah’s rigid view of Islam, Khadi Khan was guilty of apostasy and deserved punishment.
After gathering his few remaining supporters, he attacked Khadi Khan and entered into an unusual episode of Pashtun history that also had a continuing influence in the region. Interestingly, and in keeping with the confusion of the history of this region, there are two accounts of this intra-
Pashtun fighting. Hafeez Malik, writing in 1963 from a particularly Pakistani nationalist perspective, reported:
“On August 8, 1829, Hand [Hund] was besieged by nationalist forces and Khade [Khadi] Khan was cut down.”
The British reported much the same thing:
Fanatics murdered Khadi Khan of Hund in 1827. (Meeting brokered by man who would later become Akhund of Swat.)
“Despite this near annihilation, Syed Ahmad held to the hard line that characterized his vision of Islam, as demonstrated by his response when one of his most influential local allies, Khadi Khan of Hund, switched sides after suffering heavy losses among his tribesmen. To the Amir ul-Momineen Imam this was an act of apostasy. He immediately rallied his remaining friends and marched against Hund. After an untidy melee whichneither side could claim as a victory, a much-loved Sufi hermit, revered on all sides as a saint, stepped in to act as an intermediary. This was a young man of humble origins named Abdul Ghaffur, known then as ‘Saidu Baba’ but later to achieve great eminence among the Pathans as the Akhund of Swat. Abdul Ghaffur duly interceded and persuaded Khadi Khan to come to the Hindustani camp under flag of truce, whereupon he was separated from his companions and had his throat cut – an act of treachery justified by Syed Ahmad on the grounds that under sharia the crime of apostasy was only punishable by death.
“Because of his role in the affair, Abdul Ghaffur was driven from his hermitage into exile. Already alienated by the Amir’s attempts to impose the Wahhabi version of the law upon them, a number of villages in the plains now publicly expressed their disquiet. This, too, was interpreted as apostasy – the worst of all sins in the Wahhabi book – and orders went out for the twin villages of Hoti and Mardan to be looted and fired as an example to other waverers. A decade later, when Hoti Mardan was chosen as the base for the new border force to be known as the Guides, this outrage was still remembered. It helps to explain why the irregulars who joined the Guides Cavalry and Infantry in later years regarded the Hindustanis in the
hills as their inveterate enemies.”
The people the British referred to as “Hindustani Fanatics” in their reports were now deeply embedded in what was to become northwest Pakistan and they brought something with them that took deep root in the immediate region: Sayed Ahmad Shah’s modified version of Wahhabism.
British records continue:
“Sayad Ahmad had now seated himself so firmly as to take tithes from the Yusafzais, and his power was independent of the khans who derived their authority from him, amongst whom was Mir Balm Khan, of Sadhum. His army was not very numerous, composed chiefly of Hindustanis and fanatics, but when-ever required he could summon a host of Pathans. Looking upon the Durránis as enemies, he kept them constantly under alarm by threatening Hashtnaggar, and inciting the Khaibaris to annoy them on that side, many of which tribe took service with him, being inimical to the Barakzai sardars, who had stopped the allowances formerly made them by the Saddozai Princes.”
At this point in Afghanistan’s history, the “Saddozai Princes” – from the Popalzai tribe that ruled the nation from its inception – had been replaced by the Khan Khel of the Barakzai tribe, the Mohammadzai. Interestingly, some of the hostility currently seen between the Government of Afghanistan where Popalzai Hamid Karzai serves as president and receives considerable support from the Durrani Confederation may have developed through the long ago influence of the leader of the “Hindustani Fanatics” with the northern Pashtun tribes. Soon Sayed Ahmad Shah’s supporters moved from Swat to settle in the remote village of Sitana.
“Sitana is a village on the right bank of the Indus river, at the east foot of the Mahaban mountain, 13 miles above Topi. The village was originally made over by the Utmanzai to Syud Zanian, from Takhta-band in Buner. His descendants allied themselves to Sayad Ahmad, who settled in Sitana, and they aided him in all his ambitious struggles to establish a Wahhabi empire of Muhammadan reformers on the Peshawar border. The ablest of the Sitana Syads was Syad Akbar, who, in 1849 or 1850 was chosen to be badshah or king of Swat.” A British report from the period explains the next stage of Sayed Ahmad Shah’s plan:
“It is impossible to say how long this priestly rule and anomalous power of the Sayad might have existed, or to what extent it might have swelled, holding in restraint a wild, brave and independent people, and overpowering, with its undisciplined hordes the regular armies of ruling chiefs in a manner which served to give some color to the popular superstition that he possessed the faculty of silencing guns and rendering bullets harmless, had he not, in the pride of his success, forgotten to be moderate, and ventured to impose upon his subjects a strict and oppressive regime, from which even their superstitious reverence revolted.
“Attended by but few followers at Panjtár, he avoided all stately pretensions, and maintained the appearances of a life passed in devotional exercises, fastings and prayer; but, with all this affectation of pious zeal, his mind was bent on intrigue and ambitious scheming. His paid retainers were scattered
over the country, collecting fines and dues, and reporting the most trifling incidents to their master. Even the exactions and insolence of his soldiery might have been borne, but he now began to interfere with Pathan customs, and found too late that he was thereby exceeding his bounds. The Afghans have
retained many peculiarities contrary to Muhammadan law and usage, and the strictly orthodox have been shocked at the open sale of their daughters carried on by them. Sayad Ahmad ordained that this practice should cease; and, to assist in its abolition, decreed that all Patháns should give their daughters in marriage at an early age, without receiving money, and if not then betrothed they might be claimed by their nearest relatives. This domestic interference, combined with the sayad’s growing demand for wealth, determined the Yusafzais to throw оff the yoke, and at a secret council a day was appointed for the slaughter of his soldiers and agents throughout the country. The proposed massacre was spoken of in the interval under the phrase of threshing makai, and a signal was concerted of lighting a bonfire when the work was to commence. It seems probable that the Peshawar sardars [Barakzai Durranis] were associated in the plot, for on the stated Friday, whilst the fires of Yusafzai notified the carnage enacting there, they slew Maulvi Mazhar Ali, the agent left with them, and Faizulla Khan, Hazárkhaníwála, who had aided the sayad on his visit to Peshawar, and by whose abandonment of them they had been compelled to make terms.
“Several thousands were slain on this occasion, and the excited Ahmad Shah escapes….”
The Amir ul-Momineen had exceeded his religious authority by placing demands that had an impact on Pashtun culture and the Yusafzai tribe turned on him. But the violent Wahhabi-like sect now had arrived among the Pashtuns of future Pakistan and Afghanistan’s border regions and more would be heard from them for a full century. Later, Sayad Ahmad Shah was killed fighting the Sikhs and punitive operations and raids conducted by
the British forced the “Hindustani Fanatics” to retreat further into more inaccessible areas in Dir, Swat, and Bajaur. Driven from Sitani, they moved their colony to Chamarkandin southern Bajaur agency.
The death of Sayed Ahmad Shah was a true disaster for his movement since there was no other leader available to replace him. Additionally, there were questions regarding the legality of the war in the absence of the “Caliph,” but Wilayat Ali, one of the sons of a member of the six-man leadership council of the Wahhabi movement in Patna, developed – or implemented – a plan that resulted in a pamphlet claiming that Sayed Ahmad Shah had not died, but “had been ordered by God Almighty to spend some time in the mountains in silent prayers and a forty-day fast. People could actually go and see him, ‘like the bright sun illuminating the universe.’’’
From the keenly observant Charles Allen:
“It appears to have been Wilyat Ali who first grasped the significance of the doubts emerging about their leader’s death, and who made the first public announcements of his survival. He then let it be known that he himself had heard Syed Ahmad foretell his disappearance some years earlier in a sermon. Now he could report the glad tidings that their beloved master was indeed alive and well, but that God, displeased by the faint-hearted response of the Muslims to His prophet’s call to arms, had withdrawn him from the eyes of men. Their Imam and Amir ul-Momineen was even now hidden in a cave in the Buner mountains, waited on by his two faithful disciples. Only when his followers had proved their faith by uniting once more
to renew the jihad would their lost leader reappear. He would them manifest himself as padshah and lead them to victory against the unbelievers.
“This was, in essence, a retread of the Shi’a version of the Imam-Mahdi story, in which the Hidden Imam absented himself from the sight of man in a cave in the mountains, awaiting the summons of the faithful to make himself known as King of the West.”
This story was quite durable and Wilayat Ali was actively preaching and converting additional Indian Muslims to his followers. In 1839 he was preaching in Hyderabad where he received support from the city’s noble families. Not many years passed before the British were driven from Afghanistan and following their January 1842 retreat from Kabul in which a single officer, a physician, survived to arrive at Jalalabad, the opportunity arrived once again for Wilayat Ali to make his move. Letters were received in Patna summoning the faithful to rally in Buner where the holy war would be continued. It was during this phase of the Fanatic’s history that they were joined by non-Pashtuns from eastern India in their revolts. British
commentators described the capture of smaller, darker men on their way to Sittana and these were probably the result of the widespread preaching done in Bengal by Wilayat Ali. Interestingly, the final survivors later split into two groups, possibly following ethnic lines.
The letters were obviously the work of Wilayat Ali and Charles Allen discussed their impact and some failed theatrics that also occurred in an effort to maintain the Iman-Mahdi story of Sayed Ahmad Shah:
“The mystique of Syed Ahmad, both as martyr and lost leader in waiting, had grown over the years and to many young men of faith he now came to be seen as a unique symbol of Islamic resistance and resurgence…. Large numbers of mujahedin volunteers responded to the call, among them a devout but unusually independent-minded mullah from Hyderabad named Maulvi Zain ul-Abdin, who had been converted to Wahhabism by Wilyat Ali during one of his visits to the city. Traveling across India in small parties to escape detection, Zain ul-Abdin and almost a thousand recruits from the Deccan75 made their way to Sittana to begin their military training. However, Zain ul-Abdin was determined to meet the Hidden Imam whose call he and his fellow Hyderabadis had answered. He demanded to see the Amir ul-Momineen and, after being repeatedly fobbed off with excuses, was finally led into the mountains above the Hindustani camp to a point where he and a number of other curious mujahedin could make out a distant cave, at the entrance of which stood three figures dressed in white robes. These, he was told, were the Amir ul-Momineen and the two disciples who attended to his daily needs. The spectators were then made to promise not to go any closer, because if they or anyone else did so the Hidden Imam
would again disappear, and remain hidden from the sight of man for fourteen years.
“Thrilled as he and the others were by this distant glimpse of their leader, Zain ul-Abdin found himself unable to contain his curiosity. Finally, he and a number of comrades bolder than the rest went back up the mountain to take a closer look. They clambered right up to the cave and found, to their horror, that the three figures were nothing more than effigies. As Zain ul-Abdin later reported it, he examined the figure of the supposed imam ‘and found it was a goatskin stuffed with grass, which with the help of some pieces of wood, hair, etc. was made to resemble a man. The supplicant enquired from Qasin Kazzab [Maulvi Qasim Panipati, the Wahhabi’s caliph at Sittana] about this. He answered that it was true, but that the Imam Humam had performed a miracle, and appeared as a stuffed figure
Thoroughly outraged by this deception, Zain ul-Abdin promptly decamped from Sittana together with most of his thousand volunteers from Hyderabad.”
The followers of Sayed Ahmad Shah were far from being finished with their attacks on the British, however. A British intelligence assessment on the “Hindustani Fanatics” prepared in 1895 concluded:
“…t will be seen that during the past half century the Hindustanis have come into collision with us on no less than six occasions; each time they have suffered severely and been obliged to shift their residence, but, as was stated at the beginning of the report, they still remain a factor for mischief, although in a less degree than formerly, in any complication which may arise with the independent tribes on this part of the Punjab frontier.”
The report was correct, except the part regarding “in a less degree than formerly” and within two years the British would have yet another uprising. The population of the Lower Swat region had been cooperating with local authorities and trade had developed between nearby Bajaur and adjacent areas. The Swatis were described as “contented.” A reporter for The Times reported on an abrupt change in their attitude:
“Yesterday, without the least warning, the attitude of the population of the Lower Swat Valley underwent a sudden change. The first news which reached Malakand was that a disturbance had taken place at Thana, near Chakdara bridge. A few hours later further news was received that the “mad mullah,” a priest who is apparently known locally, had gathered about him a number of armed men with the view of raising a jehad.”
The reporter concluded: “Malakand, which is a fortified position, is too strong to be stormed, but the garrison must be reinforced in order that the Swat Valley may be kept clear and that Chakdara may be relieved. Unless this be done, the rising may spread among the neighboring clans.
The news of the attack quickly became known along the frontier, and it may possibly have an effect in Waziristan, stimulating the tribesmen there to
action….
The Times’ reporter made a very accurate prediction and the tribesmen were soon “stimulated.” The “mad mullah,” or Lewanai Faqir, claimed to have “been visited by all deceased Fakirs” and relied upon the usual assertions that bullets would be turned to water and that a pot of rice would feed multitudes. Mobilizing the Pashtuns against the British was a comparatively easy task for Saidullah, the Lewani Faqir. Soon, Saidullah would be positioned to take advantage of this belief within a highly superstitious population and invoke the legend of the Fanatic’s Hidden Imam by claiming to have discussed the new revolt with “deceased Fakirs” to good effect against the British, much like Sayad Ahmad had done against the
Sikhs 70 years earlier. But this rebellion fell apart, as they all did.
Sir Olaf Caroe provided an insightful review of a major weakness found within Pashtun tribes that shows why they generally unite for only special purposes and fail to remain united in a dynamic social system that is only strong in the short term:
“A leader appears, and united tribal sentiment in a surge of enthusiasm that carries all before it. For a while internal jealousies are laid aside, and an enthusiastic loyalty is forthcoming. Individuals are found ready to face death for a cause, and no one counts the cost. The idea of sacrifice is
in the air. The crest of the wave bursts over the barrier, and the victory seems won. Then the leader gives way to vain-glory, the stimulus which gave unity fails, envy and malice show their heads. The effort, steady and sustained, which is needed to maintain the position won proves to be beyond the
tribal reach. The ground won is lost, and the leader forfeits confidence and is discarded.”
This short paragraph seems to be axiomatic when conflicts involving Pashtuns are considered. This pattern repeats itself again and again as tribal leaders during conflict reach for the broad secular power denied them during less turbulent times. As their power grows, their list of powerful
enemies, many within their own families, also expands.
Rohillas during the Mutiny of 1857
Charles Allen, in God’s Terrorists, explains the complex situation the British were attempting to manage in Indian kingdoms they recently annexed:
“In January 1857 the first of a series of disturbances occurred among the sepoys at the military depot of Barrackpore outside Calcutta, fed by rumours that new cartridges being introduced to the infantry were greased with cow and pork fat. Despite assurances from Halliday and from Lord Dalhousie’s successor
as Governor-General, Lord Canning, that the Government would continue to treat ‘the religious feelings of all its servants, of every creed, with respect’, these rumours spread up-country. In Lucknow, former capital of the annexed Kingdom of Oude82, there was widespread support for the restoration of the deposed Nawab – support that extended to large numbers of sepoys and sowars in the Bengal Army many of whom were originally from Oude. In and around Delhi, too, there were just as many who wished to see the old emperor to his former glory and an end to the humiliations heaped on him by the British.
“Had these various conspirators acted together, the outcome of the 1857 Mutiny would have been very different. That they failed to do so was in some measure due to the Wahhabis, who alone had a well-thought-out plan to overthrow the British and the links to co-ordinate its execution.
But theirs was a plan that called for an exclusively Sunni Muslim jihad and for the strike against the British to come not from a city in Hindustan but from Sittana and in alliance with the Afghan border tribes. The surviving evidence suggests that the Wahhabi council in Patna, under the leadership of Muhammad Hussain as the movement’s senior imam, with Ahmadullah, eldest son of Elahi Bux, acting as his counselor, held themselves aloof when approached by other non-Wahhabi conspirators from Lucknow.”
There were other reasons that the men of Sittana and Patna didn’t cooperate with the mutineers from Oudh. This was the region ruled by Shujah ud-Daulah when Rohilkhand was destroyed in 1774 by combined armies of Shujah and the British East India Company. The other major reason involved the fact that Shujah was Shi’a and neither factor sat well with the Sunni “Fanatics” in Sittana. There was little thought of cooperation with the Shi’a who worked with the British to kill their leader, Hafiz Rahmat Khan, humiliate his family, and destroy their nation, Rohilkhand.
Rohilkhand was reported to be quiet following the destruction of Rohilla rule following their defeat in 1774. There is evidence that the descendents of the defeated Rohillas found employment for their military skills in the British army where they were well positioned to participate in the Mutiny. Charles Allen wrote:
“… cavalry sowars of the Bengal army … were Muslim cavalryman of Pathan-Afghan origin whose forebears had settled in Delhi and in Rohilkhand, the fertile plains east of the Jumna.
The region was ripe for revolt. Allen also wrote that “… since Syed Ahmad’s day Bareilly had been an outpost of Wahhabism on a par with that other Pathan bastion, Tonk.”
The Imperial Gazetteer of India has the following information regarding the situation in Rohilkhand:
“In 1805, Amir Khan, the Pindari, made an inroad into Rohilkhand, but was driven off. Disturbances occurred in 1816, in 1837, and in 1842, but the peace of the district was not seriously endangered until the mutiny of 1857.
“In that year the troops at Bareilly rose on May 31. The European officers, except three, escaped to Naini Tal; and Khan Bahadur, Hafiz Rahmat’s grandson, was proclaimed Nawab Nazim of Rohilkhand…. But the rebellion at Bareilly had been a revival of Muhammadan rule, and when the commander-in-chief marched on Jalalabad, the Nana Sahib fled back to Oudh…. The principle insurgents were congregated together in Bareilly when the English army arrived on May 5. The city was taken on May 7, and all the chiefs fled with Khan Bahadur into Oudh.
”
Much like their “Hindustani Fanatic” cousins following the British defeat in Afghanistan in 1848, the Rohilla Pashtuns also had been biding their time until an opportunity arose. There is only a small amount of literature available regarding the ethnic divisions during the mutiny, but the intensity with which it occurred in northwestern India suggests that the survivors of the 1774 war were much like Sayed Ahmad Shah’s mother and had prepared their offspring for revenge attacks against the British. The Journal of Asian Studies had an informative article that explained much:
“Rohilkhand, at the time of the Mutiny of 1857, was a division … comprising the districts of Bijnor, Moradabad, Budaun, Bareilly, and Shahjahanpur. It was here and in neighboring Oudh that the uprising achieved its greatest intensity…. The Mutiny in Rohilkhand was accomplished by the Muslims, especially the Rohillas. They provided the leadership, the organization, and the momentum. The other classes, with the natural exception of the predators, were largely inactive. There can be no doubt that the Rohillas of Bareilly were aware of the intention of the local troops to mutiny and they quickly assumed command.”
Interestingly, the region of the Mutiny’s greatest intensity was in Rohilkhand, where the Rohillas were defeated and their nation destroyed by the British and their Shi’a ally. As evidence that revenge is as important to a Rohilla Pashtun as it was to his Yusufzai forebears, the leader of the Rohilkhand mutineers was the grandson of the very Rohilla chief who was killed in the 1774 war. “The rebel leader of Rohilkhand, Khan Bahadur Khan, … the grandson of Hafiz Rahmat Khan, the ruling chieftain at the time of Hastings’ invasion of 1774.”
Additional research is needed in this interesting history and if the naming conventions of Rohillas are analyzed carefully for family connections or a leadership genealogy was available, much would be revealed about the probable intensity of the Rohillas during this attack against British interests
in India. Far more of these Pashtuns were involved in the 1857 Mutiny than just Khan Bahadur Khan.
**
Deobandi origins: A Highly
Probable Connection to the Rohillas**
“It will be remembered that after the martyrdom of Syed Ahmad at Balakot divisions had opened up between the Wahhabi ‘Patna-ites’ led by Wilayat Ali and the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’. For many years the latter were led by Shah Waliullah’s grandson, Shah Muhammad Ishaq, whose cousin and brother-inlaw
were Syed Ahmad’s first two disciples. Following the death of his cousin with Syed Ahmad in 1831, Shah Muhammad Ishaq and a group of his disciples had migrated to Arabia. After an absence of many years he and his followers returned to Delhi, where Shah Muhammad Ishaq placed himself at the head of
a radical circle of scholars working within the traditions established by his grandfather. After Shah Muhammad Ishaq’s death in 1846 the Madrassah-i- Rahimiya broke up into a number of interlinked schools, of which the most obviously Wahhabi was that led by Maulana Sayyid Nazir Hussain of Delhi.
“Born in 1805 Sayyid Nazir Hussain had begun his religious studies in Patna at the Sadiqpore house of one of the heads of the three Patna families, Muhammad Hussain, and it was there that he first heard Syed Ahmed speak in the 1820s. He later moved up to Delhi to sit at the feet first
of Shah Abdul Aziz and then of his son and successor, Shah Muhammad Ishaq, becoming in time a highly respected teacher of Hadith. The degree to which Sayyid Nazir Hussain participated in the 1857 Mutiny can only be guessed at.
“The undisputed facts are that on 19 May 1857, eight days after the arrival of the mutineers from Meerut, a group of mullahs erected a green banner on the roof of the city’s greatest mosque, the Jama Masjid and published a fatwa proclaiming jihad. As soon as he heard of it, the Emperor ordered the banner to be removed and denounced the jihad fatwa as great folly because it would alienate his Hindu supporters. His actions were supported by the Wahhabi ‘Delhi-ites’, but for very different reasons. Sayyid Nazir Hussain is said to have considered this declaration of jihad to be ‘faithlessness, breach of convenant and mischief’, and to have pronounced that it was a sin to take part in it. But his reasons for doing so were essentially doctrinal: he and other Sunni fundamentalists viewed the emperor as ‘little better than a heretic’ on account of his insistence on working with Shias and Hindus; and he did not consider Delhi to be a Dar-ul-Islam, making it unlawful to proclaim jihad from there. All the evidence suggests that the ‘Delhi-ites’ and other Sunni hard-liners in the city initially remained aloof from the mutineers and kept their own counsel.
“However, everything changed with the arrival in Delhi on 2 July of a large contingent of sepoys accompanied by ‘three or four thousand ghazis [warriors of the faith but, in British eyes, fanatics]’. A significant number of these ghazis, led by one Maulvi Sarfaraz Alu, were Wahhabis. They had
come from the town of Bareilly (not to be confused with Syed Ahmad’s birthplace in Oude, Rae Bareli), capital of Rohilkand, which in earlier days had been an Afghan-Pathan stronghold in the plains. Ever since Syed Ahmad’s day Bareilly had been an outpost of Wahhabism on a par with that other Pathan bastion, Tonk.”
As the Delhi mutineers began to split, there were some among them who decided to leave the city to create their own Dar-ul-Islam, an abode of faith from which jihad could be proclaimed. Two of Nazir Hussain’s disciples leaving Delhi were Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad, key leaders soon to become even more significant in the political-religious aspects of India. Charles Allen’s excellent work continued to explain this phase of the Mutiny:
Nanautawi, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi and Rahmatullah Kairanawi – decided to make their own jihad. For reasons that are unclear but were most probably linked to their doubts about Delhi’s religious status as a seat of jihad, these four left the city and with a number of supporters made their way along the river Jumna to the districts of Thana Bhawan, about fifty miles due north of Delhi. Here they raised their own green banner and proclaimed holy war. The town of Thana Bhawan and the surrounding area fell to them without a fight, the British civil authorities having abandoned their posts long before.
“Hajji Imdadullah and his jihadis now set about transforming the district into a theocracy modeled on that first tried in Peshawar by Syed Ahmad thirty years earlier. Imdadullah acted as the group’s imam, but it was twenty-four-year-old Muhammad Qasim who emerged as the real leader of the group. He appointed himself its military commander, with twenty-eight-year-old Rashid Ahmad serving as his lieutenant and judge and the slightly older Rahmatullah acting as the link-man between their group and the rebels in Delhi.”
The British counteroffensive continued against the mutineers within the walls of Delhi. Allen continues:
“As Delhi’s walls were being breached and the city stormed on September 12, a cavalry squadron moved on the second stronghold, Thana Bhawan. Meeting strong resistance, they moved to the town of Shamlee where they left a detachment to secure the town. Returning later, they found the remains of the men they left behind, victims of a massacre during a last stand they attempted in a mosque.”
The cavalry squadron soon found itself in a difficult position, blocked by superior forces to their front and pursued by determined and well-led men from their rear. As several Muslim troopers deserted as the remaining cavalrymen turned to charge, an aggressive action that resulted in victory
and the deaths of “several men of importance.”
Back to Charles Allen:
“However, it seems that the true leaders of the revolt at Thana Bhwan were not among the dead…. Two years later Rashid Ahmad was arrested as a suspected rebel, but was released after six months’ detention for lack of evidence. In due course he and the man who may well have commanded
the rebels at Thana Bhawan, Muhammad Qasim, went back to Delhi to resume their studies under their old teacher Maulana Sayyid Nazir Husain.”
Following the end of the mutiny and the trials of captured mutineers, the religious leaders of Delhi split into two groups, one that remained confrontational with the British authorities while the other group moved from confrontation toward educating a new generation of Muslim leaders.
Allen explains the more pragmatic approach taken by the other group, led by Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad:
“Their leaders were Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad, two of the four-man group of jihadis that had left Delhi in the summer of 1857 to create their own Dar ul-Islam at Thana Bhawan. Muhammand Qasim had acted as the group’s military commander and may well have had a hand in the massacre at Shamlee mosque; Rashid Ahmad had presided over the imposition of sharia as the group’s judge.
“In May 1866, one year after the ending of the Patna trial, these two mullahs set up their own madrassa at Deoband, a small town seventy-five miles north of Delhi and within a day’s march of their earlier stamping-ground at Thana Bhawan.”
Firm evidence connecting Muhammad Qasim and Rashid Ahmad to the Rohilla Pashtuns is not available in the literature surveyed to this paper, but sufficient circumstantial evidence can be found to support this assertion. For instance, Thana Bhawan, located north of Delhi is inside India’s current Uttar Pradesh state, the Rohilla homeland destroyed by Shuja ud-Daulah and Warren Hasting’s East India Company forces in 1774.
Iqbal Husain explains that this region was populated by large numbers of “Afghans” that we now know were Rohillas, or probably Yusufzai Pashtuns.
Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi’s surname was derived from his village of origin, Nanauta, which is located in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur district. According to Iqbal Husain, Nanauta was under Afghan control and they lost some of the land they had owned by 1844.
Rashid Ahmad Gangohi’s surname was also derived from his village of origin, Gangoh, another of Uttar Pradesh’s Afghan villages that was also located in Shahranpur district.
Finally, not only was Deoband within a “day’s march” of Thana Bhawan, Gangoh and Nanauta were even closer. Deoband is also located in what was once Rohilkhand, populated and once dominated by Yusufzai Pashtuns. It appears probable that the Deobandi Madrassa was probably created by a pair of Yusufzai Pashtuns, probably taught in Pashto, as well as Arabic, and the missionaries created at Deoband were quickly accepted by the Pashtuns on the Afghan frontier, especially in the northern sections where they called themselves “Pakhtuns” in a Pashto dialect that was essentially unintelligible in the Pashtun south and where Qadiriya Sufism’s influence remained strong. The difference was simple: the early graduates
of Deoband’s new madrassa, probably Rohilla Yusufzais in many cases, were unable to communicate with the southern Pashtuns and their efforts were concentrated in the Pashtun belt’s northern areas where the missionaries shared a common language with those tribes they sought to influence
and covert to the new form of Islam.
The connection to India’s Pashtuns appears to have occurred well before Sayed Ahmad Shah led his followers to the region adjoining Peshawar. Shah Waliullah, the mentor of many of India’s future religious revolutionaries, was from the town of Phulat in what is now Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Predesh – the center of the Rohilla Pashtuns. One of his ancestors migrated to India and settled in the town of Rohtak, a location connected to the Pashtuns by the word “Roh” in its name – Rohilla. While Rohtak is located in a strategic location west of Delhi, it is very possible that Shah Waliullah’s ancestors were Pashtuns or influenced religiously by them.
Shah Waliullah was taught by Muhammad Hayat, a Naqshbandi Sufi, who was a contemporary – if not a fellow student – of Abd al-Wahhab.
Charles Allen explains this connection:
“In the case of Abd al-Wahhab the facts are not quite so well documented, but we know that he studied Hadith in Medina in his late twenties under the Indian Muhammad Hayat al-Sindi, a Naqshbandi sufi and a Shafi jurist who was an admirer of Ibn Taymiyya and a student of Ibrahim al- Kurani—the teacher who taught Hadith to Shah Waliullah and introduced him to the ideas of Ibn Taymiyya. So we have the intriguing possibility that the two greatest Sunni reformers of their age not only sat at the feet of the same teachers but may even have sat in the same classes. We can also be confident that some of these teachers encouraged their students to follow Ibn Taymiyya’s hard line and to regard militant jihad as a prime religious duty—which is what both Abd al-Wahhab and Shah Waliullah then went home to implement.”
Muhammad Hayat’s specific area of origin is hard to document, but this is easy to accomplish with his teacher, Sheikh Ahmad Sarhindi, also an admirer of Ibn Taymiyya. Sheikh Ahmad Sarhindi al-Farooqi an-Naqshbandi, was born in Sarhind on June 26, 1564. Sarhind was located in a region under the control of Pashtuns, particularly the Lodis and Surs,and it was destroyed by the Sikhs in 1761. Ahmad Sarhindi also lived and studied in Sialkot, another Pashtun town that was located in a part of India that was under the control of Pashtuns. Ahmad Sarhindi may or may not have been a Pashtun, himself, but he spent most of his early life in towns in which Pashtuns were the dominant portion of the population. He passed
the concept of militant jihad he shared with Abd al-Wahhab to his students, a group that included Muhammad Hayat. Hayat passed this belief to Shah Waliullah who shared it with his son, Shah Abdul Aziz, and with Sayed Ahmad Shah of Bareily. These were the common experiences they shared:
Naqshbandi Sufism, acceptance of the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, a belief that militant jihad was a religious duty, and strong connections with India’s Pashtuns, particularly the Rohillas that had their state destroyed by a Shi’a leader originating from Persia and the British East India Company. The
combination of a belief in militant jihad as a religious duty and Pashtunwali’s badal now entered into the religious beliefs of a large population that also believed that Islam was also endangered by foreign invaders.
Charles Fox provides the impact the tragedy of the Rohillas has had on modern history as their resistance to British colonialism developed into the “Hindustani Fanatics” and the six major campaigns over half of a century that were fought to control them, repetitive insurgencies that may be continuing today:
They will carry their melancholy tale into the numerous tribes and nations among whom they are scattered, and you may depend upon it the impression which it will make, will, sooner or later, have its effect