BOOK REVIEW: Jihad and retribalisation in Pakistan

BOOK REVIEW: Jihad and retribalisation in Pakistan
by Khaled Ahmed
http://www.dailytim es.com.pk/ default.asp? page=2008\07\13\story_ 13-7-
2008_pg3_4

Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia
By Ayesha Jalal
Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore 2008
Pp373: Price Rs 695
Available at bookstores in Pakistan

Not far from Balakot, the votaries of the Sayyid are fighting on the
side of Al Qaeda against `imperialist' America and its client state,
Pakistan, and killing more Muslims in the process than Americans,
just as the Sayyid killed more Muslims than he killed Sikhs

Ayesha Jalal studies the jihad of Sayyid Ahmad Shaheed (1786-1831)
in India as the most immaculate articulation of the theory of jihad
in Islam. Sayyid Ahmad may have conceived his holy war against East
India Company while living in Rai Bareilly in the central region of
northern India, but he moved his warriors to where Pakistan's North
Western Frontier (NWFP) province is today because he thought that
the Pashtun living in the tribal areas under non-Muslim Sikh
occupation were better Muslims than the settled Muslims of the
plains.

Here was the first indication that Islamic utopia could be
constructed more easily in a tribal society. He probably wanted to
take on the British after creating a mini-state on the pattern of
Madina in the NWFP and probably hoped to reform the contaminated
Muslims of the plains as a means of enhancing his challenge to the
British. Al Qaeda too discovered the Pashtun straddling the border
of Pakistan and Afghanistan as the tribal matrix where an Islamic
utopia would grow into a centre of the global caliphate devoted to
reforming and uniting Muslims living unhappily as subjects of
today's nation-states.

Sayyid Ahmad was feared by Muslims in the urban centres of India and
was wrongly called a Wahhabi — a negative term pointing to the
intimidation and violence associated with Saudi Islam — because they
thought he would use `retribalisation' as a method of returning them
to the true faith. Pakistan fears Al Qaeda and its Pashtun foot
soldiers as it sees the same kind of process in evidence under what
is called Talibanisation.

Historian Ayesha Jalal has a fair claim to knowing the various
communal narratives of Muslim India, as proved in her 2000
monumental work Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in
South Asian Islam since 1850. One can say that her latest book on
Jihad has grown out of this earlier work and that her identification
of one of the most ideologically `explained' holy wars in the 19th
century India is intended to understand the location of Al Qaeda
inside Pakistan's Tribal Areas in the 21st century. She writes on
page 16:

`The geographic focal point of the jihad of 1826 to 1831 on the
northwest frontier of the subcontinent corresponds to the nerve
centre of the current confrontation between Islamic radicals and the
West. The jihad movement directed primarily against the Sikhs was
transmuted in the course of the war into a conflict pitting Muslim
against Muslim. This feature of intrafaith conflict in a jihad as
armed struggle has not diminished its appeal for contemporary
militants, who evidence many of the same failings that undermined
Sayyid Ahmad's high ideals. The martyrdom of those who fell at
Balakot continues to weave its spell, making it imperative to
investigate the myth in its making'.

The story goes like this. Sayyid Ahmad, convinced of his own semi-
divinity and admired by a large number of followers for his exact
adherence to Islam, marched from Rai Bareilly in Central India in
1826 in the direction of the north-western city of Peshawar with a
an `army' of 600 local Muslims optimistically posing as warriors.
The aim was to establish an Islamic state on the land of the
Pashtun. As he meandered through the various regions of India and
Afghanistan, he was greeted by Muslim rulers not very keen to
support him in his jihad. But in Kandahar, 200 Pashtun warriors
joined him, clearly in expectation of the loot which jihad in their
view brought in its wake. Some Yusufzai tribesmen, irritated by Sikh
rule, also joined his lashkar.

If he thought he was walking into a `people' of uniform views, he
was mistaken. The Durrani Pashtun of Peshawar were not particularly
enthusiastic about his movement. Scared of the internecine Pashtun
warfare, they had become allies of the Sikhs and paid tribute to
them.

In the first engagement with the Sikh army near Peshawar Sayyid
Ahmad suffered a defeat because his soldiers took to looting after
the first attack and thereby allowed the Sikhs to regroup and attack
again. The next battle at Hazro met with the same fate: the Pashtun
warriors took to looting before the battle was won and failed to
gain decisive edge later on. The warriors fought over the spoils of
war and the various groups carried off what they thought was their
share, no one listening to the Sayyid.

The lure of loot attracted 80,000 more local warriors to his lashkar
which now became an army. At the battle of Shaidu, the warriors of
Islam outnumbered the army of Budh Singh, the general who
represented the suzerain Maharaja of Lahore, Ranjit Singh. This time
a part of the Islamic army refused to fight, and the Durranis
actually poisoned the Sayyid fearing his growing spiritual power,
and let him be defeated as their imam. Weakened by poisoning, he
nevertheless sought solace in marrying an Ismaili girl as his third
wife.

As author Jalal points out, the parallels are shockingly close.
Sayyid Ahmad's main objective was the expulsion of the British from
India (p.70). Osama bin Laden's foray into Pakistan is also a phase
in his jihad against America. Sayyid Ahmad was under pressure from
the puritans of the faith from India to first wage war against
the `Muslim infidels' and for this he had to enforce sharia on the
Pashtun population of Hazara which was under his military control:

`The scope of the laws was broadly defined to include the compulsory
enforcement of Islamic injunctions relating to prayers and fasting,
as well as a ban on usury, polygamy, consumption of wine,
distribution of a deceased man's wife and children among his
brothers, and involvement in family feuds. Anyone transgressing the
sharia after swearing allegiance to Sayyid Ahmad was to be treated
as a sinner and a rebel. Any breach was punishable by death, and
Muslims were prohibited from saying prayers at the funerals of such
people. Two weeks later, after another meeting of tribesmen, Sayyid
Ahmad began appointing judges in different parts of the
frontier...the moves infringed on the temporal powers of the tribal
chiefs and seriously undermined the prerogatives of local religious
leaders (p.94)'.

The three conditions that Sayyid Ahmad and the Taliban fill are:
fighting enemy number one (the British, the Americans) through a
secondary enemy (the Sikhs, Pakistan); mixing local Islam with
hardline Arab Islam; and using the tribal order as matrix of Islam.
The Taliban derive their radical Islam from the Wahhabi severity of
the money-distributing Arabs; the mujahideen of Sayyid Ahmad derived
their puritanism from Shah Waliullah's `contact' with the Arabs in
Hijaz in 1730.

In the battle of Balakot, Sikh commander Sher Singh finally
overwhelmed Sayyid Ahmad after he was informed about his hideout by
his Pashtun allies. Ahmad fought bravely but was soon cut down. To
prevent a tomb from being erected on his corpse, the Sikhs cut him
to pieces but `an old woman found the Sayyid's severed head which
was later buried in the place considered to be his tomb' (p.105).

Author Jalal notes that in the battlefield of Balakot, where Sayyid
Ahmad of Rai Bareilly was martyred in 1831, another kind of `cross-
border' deniable jihad is being carried out by other mujahideen. She
writes: `To this day Balakot where the Sayyid lies buried is a spot
that has been greatly revered, not only by militants in contemporary
Pakistan, some of whom have set up training camps near Balakot, but
also by anti-colonial nationalists who interpreted the movement as a
prelude to a jihad against the British in India' (p.61).

Not far from Balakot, the votaries of the Sayyid are fighting on the
side of Al Qaeda against `imperialist' America and its client state,
Pakistan, and killing more Muslims in the process than Americans,
just as the Sayyid killed more Muslims than he killed Sikhs.
According to Sana Haroon (Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-
Afghan Borderland; Hurst & Company London 2007), Ahmed Shah Abdali
had induced descendants of Mujaddid Alf Sani to move to Kabul after
his raid of Delhi in 1748. In 1849, Akhund Ghafur set up the throne
of Swat and put Syed Akbar Shah on it as Amir of Swat, the Syed
being a former secretary of Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly.

It was a Wahhabi war in the eyes of mild Indian Muslims. It was
therefore a virulently Sunni war which pointedly did not attract the
Shia. It is difficult to believe that Urdu's greatest poet Mirza
Ghalib (1797-1869) could have supported the jihad (p.61). Writers
have claimed that he wrote in cipher and used complicated metaphor
in his poetry to attach himself surreptitiously to jihad; but that
is not true if you read his Persian letters recently made accessible
in the very competent Urdu translation of Mukhtar Ali Khan `Partau
Rohila' in a single volume Kuliyat Maktubat Farsi Ghalib (National
Book Foundation Islamabad 2008).

Far from being attracted to the movement of jihad inspired by anti-
Shia saints like Shah Waliullah and Shah Abdul Aziz, Ghalib praises
an opponent of the Sayyid, Fazle Haq, and is more forthright about
his own conversion to Shiism from the Sunni faith. Like Al Qaeda's
war against America, Sayyid Ahmad's jihad was a Sunni jihad, an
aspect that must be made note of. Al Qaeda today kills Shias as its
side business.