God's Terrorists Read online

  GOD’S

  TERRORISTS

  Also by Charles Allen

  Plain Tales from the Raj

  Tales from the Dark Continent

  Tales from the South China Seas

  Raj Scrapbook

  The Savage Wars of Peace

  Thunder and Lightning

  Lives of the Indian Princes

  A Soldier of the Company

  A Glimpse of the Burning Plain

  Kipling’s Kingdom

  A Mountain in Tibet

  The Search for Shangri-La

  The Buddha and the Sahibs

  Soldier Sahibs

  Duel in the Snows

  GOD’S

  TERRORISTS

  The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden

  Roots of Modern Jihad

  Charles Allen

  Copyright © 2006 by Charles Allen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

  Set in Caslon by M Rules

  Unless otherwise stated, maps drawn by John Gilkes

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press paperback edition 2007

  First Da Capo Press edition 2006

  First published in the United Kingdom by Little, Brown

  HC: ISBN-13: 978-0-306-81522-5; ISBN-10: 0-306-81522-2

  PBK: ISBN-13: 978-0-306-81570-6; ISBN-10: 0-306-81570-2

  eBook ISBN:9780786733002

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

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  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah.’ Such is the cry which electrifies 250 millions of the inhabitants of this globe. Such is the cry which thrills them so that they are ready to go forward and fight for their religion, and consider it a short road to Paradise to kill Christians and Hindus and unbelievers. It is that cry which at the present time is echoing and reechoing through the hills and mountain fastnesses of the North-West Frontier of India. It is that cry which the mullahs of Afghanistan are now carrying to mountain hamlets and to towns in Afghanistan in order to raise the people of that country to come forward and fight. That is a cry which has the power of joining together the members of Islam throughout the world, and preparing them for a conflict with all who are not ready to accept their religion . . . And it is especially these Mohammedans on the North-West Frontier of India who have this intense religious zeal – call it what we will, fanaticism or bigotry – but which, nevertheless, is a power within them overruling every passion.

  Dr Theodore Pennell,

  Missionary Doctor at Bannu, Among the Wild Tribes of the

  Afghan Frontier, 1909

  Maps

  Map 1 India and Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century

  Map 2 ‘The Peshawur Valley’: John Adye’s map of 1863 showing the Yusufzai country and Mahabun Mountain

  Map 3 Arabia in the mid-nineteenth century

  Map 4 ‘Mohmand, Swat and Buner’: map from 1898

  Map 5 The North-West Frontier in the 1930s

  Preface to the US Paperback Edition

  In the three years since I wrote God’s Terrorists things have moved on. In the memorable words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ‘stuff happens,’ and chief among that stuff is the continuing fallout from the US-British intervention in Iraq. It alienated millions of mainstream Muslims who had previously felt sympathy for America in the wake of 9/11 and had supported its war against Osama bin Laden and his local allies, the Taliban. It gave new authority to the Al-Qaeda confederacy, once more able to present itself as the defender of Islam in the face of US-British aggression. And it led to the revitalization of the Taliban.

  Three years ago there was a growing consensus among impartial observers of the Afghanistan scene that the war against the Taliban and their ‘Arab’ guests was close to being won. The reconstruction of the country under a democratically-elected government was under way. Military and political pressures had turned Osama bin Laden, Dr Ayman al-Zawahri and their lieutenants into hunted men, forced to keep moving from one hideout to another within the tribal areas on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Their long-suffering Pathan hosts were showing signs that their famous tradition of limitless hospitality did indeed have limits. In Pakistan, too, President Musharraf’s alliance with the United States and Britain had enough popular support within the country to allow him to stand up to the hard-line Islamist politico-religious parties led by Deobandi and Ahl-i-Hadith mullahs, and to begin purging the pro-Taliban elements in the Pakistan Army and the ISI military intelligence service. The war in Iraq sent all this into reverse. The Bush Administration diverted key assets and funds, aid donors reneged on their pledges, fair weather allies pulled out troops, the old corrupt practices resurfaced. Both in Afghanistan and Pakistan the perception grew that the United States had lost interest, lacked the will to continue the fight. The fanatics breathed again and regrouped, the waverers reconsidered their positions and those who had been vocal in their support for US policies fell silent.

  Just as the British and the Russians did in Afghanistan before them, the United States and its remaining allies have waged their ‘war on terror’ almost exclusively in military terms, all but ignoring the far more important parallel battle for hearts and minds. There is an uncomfortable parallel here with the Prophet Muhammad’s division of jihad into a greater and lesser struggle and his statement that the spiritual struggle of the greater jihad was more important than the physical struggle of the lesser jihad. Back in 1994–5 many Pathans gave their support to the Taliban not because they shared their religious ideology but because they represented the least worst option. Today, the Pathans are again turning to the home-grown enemy they know and for the same reason. For want of evidence to the contrary they have accepted the Wahhabi propaganda that the US Nasrani (Christian) agenda is the destruction of their religion.

  As I write, the Taliban are once more in the ascendant and Pakistan is in deep trouble. In the tribal areas along the Afghan border the Islamist politico-religious parties dominate local government and are backing the Taliban to the hilt. They have made it clear that their agenda is nothing less than the Talibanization of Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. Three years ago their pretensions seemed laughable but the reality today is that they are winning the greater jihad as mainstream Sunni Islam in Pakistan becomes increasingly demoralized and polarized. This radicalization extends to the streets of Britain, where large numbers of young Muslim Britons have rejected the tolerant, inclusive Islam which their parents brought with them from Pakistan in favor of the hard-line jihadism preached by the Islamist mullahs. The cult of the suicide bomber has won converts among young men desperate to find a Muslim identity in a non-Muslim land and eager to embrace the chimera of martyrdom. Homeland America is as vulnerable to these young would-be martyrs as Britain, Spain or other European countries where the bombers have left their bloody handprints. Their war against the West will not end with the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Dr Ayman al-Zawahri.

  Charles Allen

  London, June 2007

  Preface to the First E
dition

  Since 9/11 a lot has been said and written about global jihad, the international movement which seeks to bring about Islamic revival by forcing the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds into violent confrontation. Understandably, the focus has been on modern events and on how and why rather than whence. This book is not about the present. It is a history of the ideology underpinning modern jihad and, in particular, a first full account of one important strand in that founding ideology: Wahhabism. This initially took shape in Arabia at the end of the eighteenth century, and was then brought to the Indian sub-continent early in the nineteenth century. It took on the Sikhs, the British and mainstream Muslim society. Time and time again it was suppressed, only to reform and revive, eventually to find new life in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late twentieth century. This history offers no solutions but it does illustrate patterns of behaviour, successes and failures from which lessons might be drawn.

  The following pages contain a great many personal names that may sound alien to those unfamiliar with Muslim tradition, where it is customary to use Arabic names hallowed by religious connotations, the most obvious example being ‘Muhammad’ and its diminutive ‘Ahmad’, both meaning ‘praised’. To get over the inevitable duplication of personal names Islamic custom makes good use of honorific titles (e.g., Sheikh – man of learning) and terms that define status (e.g., Shaheed – martyr), occupation (e.g., Maulana – learned priest), place names (e.g., Delhvi – of Delhi), and paternity (e.g., ibn, bin – son of). Assumed names are often used as, indeed, are noms de guerre. Patience is called for, of the sort familiar to non-Russian readers of Count Tolstoy’s novels. As an aid, the first time the name of a Muslim figure of importance appears (or reappears after a long gap) the most commonly used short version of his name is in small capitals, and used thereafter: for example, Amir-ul-Momineen Shah SYED AHMAD Barelvi Shaheed (Commander of the Faithful King Syed Ahmad of Bareli Martyr). To guide the reader through this minefield of names, a list of the main Muslim personalities featured is provided. There are also two charts at the back of this book. The first illustrates the ties between the two families who first secured Wahhabism in Arabia: the second sets out what I have dubbed the ‘Wahhabi’ family tree in India, showing the key promoters of the several strands of Wahhabi revivalist theology in the nineteenth century. A glossary is provided.

  The English spelling of Arabic, Persian, Pashtu and Hindustani names and words is always problematic, not least because the Victorians transliterated these words very differently from modern usage. For example, the Arabic word for a descendant of the Prophet is usually set down in English as ‘Saiyyed’ but is also written ‘Sayyed’, ‘Sayyid’, ‘Syed’, ‘Syad’ or ‘Said’. Here, to help delineate different individuals and groups of people, ‘Saiyyed’ is used for the central meaning; ‘Sayyed’ to describe the two clans occupying the Khagan valley in northern Hazara and Sittana in the Indus Valley; ‘Sayyid’ in relation to Sayyid Nazir Husain Muhaddith of Delhi, suspected leader of the Delhi Wahhabis in 1857 and after; ‘Syad’ for the moderniser Sir Syad Ahmad Khan of Alighar; and ‘Syed’ for the Indian revivalist-cum-revolutionary Syed Ahmad. In much the same way, ‘Shah’ denotes kingship but is also an honorific title granted to Saiyyeds; here it is used chiefly to identify Shah Waliullah, founder of the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya school in Delhi, his son Shah Abdul Aziz and grandson Shah Muhammad Ishaq.

  With many sources still closed to me, this history can best be described as a work in progress. Corrections and further information on this subject are invited and can be posted on my website at www.godsterrorists.co.uk.

  Charles Allen, 2006

  Acknowledgements

  Some informants have asked not to be named. My particular thanks to them and also to Bashir Ahmad Khan, Omar Khan Afridi, Major Tariq Mahmood, Rahimulla Yusufzai, Gulzar Khan, Hugh Leach, Ron Rosner, Sue Farrington, Theon and Rosemary Wilkinson; Norman Cameron, Secretary of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs; Dr Peter Boyden, Assistant Director, and staff of the National Army Museum; Nicholas Barnard, Curator of the South Asian Department, and Tim Stanley, Asian Department, at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Alison Ohta, Curator, and Kathy Lazenbatt, Assistant Librarian, at the Royal Asiatic Society; Muhammad Isa Waley, Curator of Persian and Turkish Collections at the British Library; Matthew Buck at the Royal Artillery Museum; Helen George, Prints and Drawings, and the Director and staff of the Oriental and India Office Collection at the British Library; the Director and staff at the University of Cambridge Library; the Director and staff at the Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies. I am particularly grateful to David Loyn for reading my manuscript and correcting a number of factual errors. While I have sought advice and listened, I should make it clear that the reading which follows is my own. Some passages have previously appeared in World Policy Journal, Volume XXII, Number 2 (Summer 2005) and are republished here by kind permission of Karl Miller, Editor, World Policy Journal.

  A special shukria, also, to the many kind persons who have helped to make my visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan memorable for the best of reasons. Their Pakistan and their Afghanistan are not well represented in this book, but it is they and others like them who embody the virtues of Islam.

  Lastly, my continuing thanks to that inner band without whom no author can hope to get by: my editor Liz Robinson, for her unsparing determination to keep me on the path of literacy; at Time Warner, my commissioning editor Tim Whiting, for having faith in me, and also Linda Silverman and Iain Hunt; my agent at Sheil Land, Vivien Green, for continuing moral support; and my life partner, Liz, for always being there. Bismallah.

  Introduction: ‘Am I not a Pakhtun?’

  When the Pathan is a child his mother tells him, ‘The coward dies but his shrieks live long after,’ and so he learns not to shriek. He is shown dozens of things dearer than life so that he will not mind either dying or killing. He is forbidden colourful clothes or exotic music, for they weaken the arm and soften the eye. He is taught to look at the hawk and forget the nightingale. He is asked to kill his beloved to save the soul of her children. It is a perpetual surrender – an eternal giving up of man to man and to their wise follies.

  Ghani Khan, The Pathans, 1947

  A few years ago, while researching an episode of British imperial history, I made a brief journey to Kabul by way of the Khyber Pass, that notorious defile which opens on to the plains of India. Ever since men first learned to march under one banner this fatal chink in the mountain ranges guarding the Indian sub-continent’s north-western approaches has been a zone of conflict. Down through this rocky pass wave after wave of invaders have picked their way, intent on securing for themselves the three traditional prizes of the plunderer: zan, zar, zamin – women, gold and land. Among those invaders are the present incumbents of Afghanistan’s eastern and Pakistan’s western borders, a group of some two dozen tribes, large and small. While each clings fiercely to its own territory and tribal identity, they refer to themselves collectively as the Pakhtuna or Pashtuna, better known to the West as the Pathans. All claim descent from one or other of the three sons of their putative ancestor, Qais bin Rashid, who went from Gor in Afghanistan to Arabia and was there converted to Islam by the Prophet Muhammad himself. Although Sunni Muslims, they follow their own code of ethics, known as Pakhtunwali, which by tradition takes precedence even over the Islamic code of law known as sharia. There is a common Pathan proverb which states, ‘Obey the mullah’s teachings but do not go by what he does.’

  Almost everyone I met on this journey was a Pathan, as was my guide and mentor Rahimullah Yusufzai, a gentle, scholarly journalist based in Peshawar, the ancient frontier town which an early British administrator long ago termed the ‘Piccadilly of Central Asia’. When I came knocking on his door Rahimullah was already well known among journalists and foreign correspondents – and is even better known today. Because he broadcast for the BBC World Service in Pashtu, the Pathan language, his voice was familiar on both sides of the border – so much so
that the mere sound of it was enough to bring a group of panicky guards to their senses after they had begun poking Kalashnikovs through our car windows at a check-post: ‘Ah, Rahimullah Yusufzai,’ they cried, shouldering their weapons and beaming at us. ‘Come inside and have a cup of tea!’

  Rahimullah Yusufzai had been covering the fighting in Afghanistan since before the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 and the civil war that raged thereafter as the mujahedeen (‘those who engage in struggle for the Faith’, but most often interpreted as ‘holy warriors’) who had liberated their country from the infidel Russians turned on each other and transformed an already wartorn region into Mad Max country, where warlord fought warlord and both terrorised the civil population.

  Rahimullah’s contacts were legendary, so it was only to be expected that when a new phenomenon appeared on the Afghan scene in the autumn of 1994 he was the first journalist to note it and the first to appreciate its significance. This new phenomenon came in the form of earnest, unsmiling young men with untrimmed black beards who wore black turbans and black waistcoats, and who almost invariably carried either Kalashnikov automatic rifles or grenade launchers. They called themselves Taliban or ‘seekers of knowledge’ and they expressed allegiance not to a general or a tribal leader but to a one-eyed cleric by the name of Mullah Muhammad Omar.

  Rahimullah Yusufzai and BBC correspondent David Loyn were on hand to cover the swift advance of these new insurgents northwards from Kandahar. They followed them as they fought their way through the gorges carved in the mountains by the Kabul River and observed how they combined military incompetence with extraordinary valour, charging the enemy without a thought to tactics or personal safety, secure in the belief that their death in jihad (the struggle against forces opposed to Islam) would win them the status of shahid (the martyr who goes straight to Paradise). It was this religious madness that vanquished their opponents, causing large numbers to switch sides. Of their leader, Mullah Omar, little was known other than that he had lost an eye fighting the Russians, and that before and after taking up arms against the infidels he had spent years studying the faith in a number of madrassahs, or religious schools, across the border in Pakistan. Some said that he had returned to the struggle after the Prophet Muhammad appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to bring peace to Afghanistan; others that he had grown so disgusted by the corruption of the warlords – in particular, the very public marriage of one such warlord to his young catamite – that he had become a willing puppet of Pakistan’s secret intelligence agency, the ISI. Whatever the case, in April 1996 Mullah Omar appeared on a rooftop before a large crowd of mullahs in Kandahar, draped in the city’s most precious relic: the Mantle of the Prophet Muhammad. This was in deliberate imitation of the ceremony by which the second Caliph, Omar ibn al-Khattab, had established his right to rule over all Muslims before going on to enter Jerusalem riding on a white camel in the year 637. The parallel was further reinforced when Mullah Omar was proclaimed Amir ul-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful), a title first used by the Caliphs in the days of Islam’s golden age. In September 1996 Kabul fell to the Taliban, the Amir ul-Momineen entered the city in a minivan, the deposed former President was castrated and hanged from a lamp-post, and Afghanistan was declared an Islamic state under the divinely ordained laws of Islam (sharia).