Author: Rajeev Deshpande
Publication: The Times of India
Date: September 23, 2008
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Indian_Mujahideen_SIMI_have_purist_link/articleshow/3510433.cms
The references in Indian Mujahideen's Delhi
blasts email, and by its operatives held in connection with Friday's Batla
House shootout, to two "original" 18th century martyrs opens a revealing
window into the ideological founts that sustain and inspire the jihadi outfit.
The name Indian Mujahideen is apparently drawn
from a book on a "jihad" waged by two Islamic warriors in north-west
India around 1831 in Balakot, now Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and which suited
the terror mission devised by the banned Students Islamic Movement of India.
In its new garb, a SIMI faction found IM perfectly
conveyed "home grown" militancy. The harkening to the two shaheeds
- Sayeed Ahmad and Shah Ismail - marks a connection of a Delhi-based madrassa
that attracted notice in the late 17th century under Shah Abdur Rahim as Madrassa
Rahimiya. The school came up as part of a protest against the anti-orthodox
views and policies of Akbar and was a centre of Hanafi learning.
The madrassa really came into its own under
Rahim's son Shah Waliullah who is variously regarded as "reformer"
or "hardliner". This apparent contradiction stems from his bid to
rid Islam of "impurities" and "false beliefs" that had
crept in. His views reflected the Muslim clergy's disquiet and anger but he
gave it a sharper purpose, advocating "reform" of Islamic practices
in line with those of early Muslims in Arabia.
Waliullah took a stringent view of Sharia
and was pessimistic about the faith of converts. He advocated the need for
persuasion to explain religion's superiority and scholars such as Sayyid Athar
Rizvi and K S Durrany point to his injunctions against "polytheists and
hypocrites" and opposition to influences of pre-Islamic Arabia and Greek
philosophy in Islam.
He wrote in his 'Hujjat Allah al-Baligha'
that religious rules were to be obeyed unquestioningly and emphasised aspects
of Quran that stress "establishing the religion". He also saw Haridwar
as a centre of evil that promoted polytheism and agreed with the tradition
that held religious texts were not open to any reinterpretation.
It is this "purist" and two of his
followers - Sayeed Ahmed and Shah Ismail - who are IM-SIMI's role models.
The early "mujahids" were so upset by what they saw as un-Islamic
accretions like local customs and sufic deviations that they left for what
is today Pakistan's north-west frontier region and Kashmir to wage a "jihad"
against the Sikh kingdom. The project was ill-conceived and both died.
Shah Ismail was a grandson of Waliullah and
despite his lack of success, Waliullah's followers were active in 1857 and
two of them, Maulana Qasim Nanatawi and Rashid Gangohi, are seen to be founders
of the Dar-ul-uloom at Deoband. The objectives behind the Deoband school were
underlined by Maulana Mahmood Hasan (1850-1920) who studied there and he wrote,
"Was it founded just for education? Its main function was to avenge the
defeat of 1857."
The task was to give a "mujahid enterprise"
a cover of religious learning, fearing British retribution. But the goals
of Waliullah remained Deoband's guiding principles. At all times, it strove
to defend its tenets against what a leading light described as ploys by critics
"to invent new arguments based on modern philosophy". It is this
theological "inheritance" that led the IM-SIMI to believe its "war"
against India and "non-believers" is just and fair. It allowed its
leaders to recruit members by presenting them with a "divine" mission
and using all manner of grievances - real and imagined, ranging from riots
to conspiracies to keep minorities oppressed - to present their task as setting
right a wrong.
While communal clashes swell extremist recruits,
belief in an exclusivist philosophy helps preclude doubts and allows jihadi
groups to identify with the global movement of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden
as was apparently the case with IM operative Bashir aka Atiq, seen as the
brain behind the Delhi bombings. It also drives a deep hatred of innocent
victims who are seen as undeserving of compassion.
The harder position on religious issues, seen
to cover both the temporal and spiritual, saw belief as not merely a metaphysical
concept. It is in the nature of a contract by which man barters his life in
exchange for certainty of rewards in the hereafter.
Deoband has seen some churn recently with
the seminary issuing a "declaration" against terrorism - not a fatwa
- and some clerics arguing against the "Pakistan example". Waliullah's
teachings, as the IM-SIMI have shown, are still spawning violence more than
two hundred years after his passing. Until the theological repudiation of
violence does not get louder, it remains a beacon for those who use the jihad
doctrine as a vehicle for violence.
