Author: Sagarika Ghose
Publication: The Tablet
Date: November 17, 2001
URL: http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/archive_db.cgi?tablet-00581
The Taliban have been forced right
back in Afghanistan. These militant Muslims have their roots in a huge
college in northern India founded in the nineteenth century. A novelist
and journalist who lives in New Delhi went inside it.
Driving into the little town of
Deoband in Uttar Pradesh, where mustard fields slope away from a treacherously
narrow dirt track, it is hard to believe that this remote and primitive
place gave birth to the Taliban's anti-Western Islamic ideology. At first
sight Deoband looks like a dingy slum. Leaving the main road about 200
kms north of the Indian capital, New Delhi, the dirt track winds past mud
huts with corrugated iron roofs, then past a market square lined with open
vegetable stalls that are hung with Pepsi banners. A weary cyclist snatches
his siesta under banyan trees by the roadside. The road skirts sugar-cane
fields that are swaying with a new crop. Then the vast mosque belonging
to the Deoband Dar-ul-Uloom looms suddenly, its white minarets glancing
in the sun.
Next to the mosque is a gateway
which leads into the high-walled university town. "Cover head, cover head!"
vendors yell. The Deoband Dar-ul-Uloom madrasah, which was established
in 1867, trained the scholars and theologians who fanned out to Malaysia,
Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan to set up other madrasahs, or Muslim seminaries.
The students here are called talib; the Taliban of Afghanistan are the
descendants of the "Deobandi" maulanas (scholars) who developed a theological
opposition to westernisation.
Today, the Indian government has
banned overseas students. "But there was a time when Muslims from all over
the world came to study here at Deoband", Maulana Abdul Khaliq Madrasi,
the current deputy vice-chancellor, tells me proudly. How many of its current
graduates plan to leave to fight in Afghanistan? The maulana laughs. "Some
of the older Taliban studied from teachers who were trained here. But",
he wags his finger, "we have no direct links with them". The Deobandis
condemned, he says, the destruction by the Taliban regime of the vast Bamiyan
Buddha statues in March this year.
An architect who holds doctorates
in the hadith (Islamic jurisprudence) and in logic, the maulana is a hefty
man with a flowing beard whose walk is robust and energetic. Behind his
spectacles, his bloodshot eyes are intense, and when he speaks, his voice
is rasping and argumentative. He explains how the Dar-ul-Uloom or "House
of Knowledge" was founded just a decade after the Indian Mutiny of 1857
against British rule. Its founders were two Muslim theologians, Muhammad
Qasim Nanawtawi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, who had fought in the Mutiny.
India has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. There are
over 100 million Muslims in India (about 12 per cent of the population).
The majority, like the Deobandis, are Sunni.
"The British wanted to change our
inner selves, to make us Christian in heart and mind", the maulana says.
"But we became martyrs to the cause of independence. They wanted to make
us ashamed of who we were. But we stood up and faced them."
Among Muslims in India, two broad
streams developed as a result of colonial rule. While the upper classes
scrambled for an English education and employment opportunities, poorer
Muslims fell back into a religious revivalism. Their ideology sprang as
much from class hostilities to the new English babus as it did from religion.
The Deobandis firmly rejected the reformist and liberal spirit of Muslim
leaders like Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan who in 1875 established the Anglo-Muhammad
Oriental College several miles south of Deoband to teach scientific and
rational principles to upper-class Muslims. The Deoband seminary, on the
other hand, attracted poor students who saw liberals like Sir Sayyid as
colonial stooges. The ulemas (academics) of the Dar-ul-Uloom were heavily
influenced by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-97), the charismatic Iranian
founder of the modern Pan-Islamic movement. Afghani, who travelled widely
in Arabia and Europe, was acutely anxious about the power of the West,
which he was convinced would crush the Islamic world. He preached a simple
message: only by uniting under the banner of Islam could the Muslims counter
the threat of Western imperialism. During the First World War two Deoband
maulanas, Mahmud Hasan and Obeidulla Sindhi, took part in armed uprisings
against the British.
There are today around 10,000 students
at the seminary, all studying for free. Most come from impoverished peasant
families who lack the means to send their sons to regular schools. After
12 years of study, students get a degree. They stay on as teachers, or
get jobs in radio, Urdu-language newspapers or in the embassy offices of
Islamic nations in Delhi. I asked one student, a 15-year-old named Jawed,
if he wanted to go to Afghanistan after his degree. "If a Muslim is being
attacked", he solemnly answered, "another Muslim will definitely go to
his defence". The central paved courtyard of the school is ringed with
study halls whose frail wooden doors are always kept open. Hundreds of
boys with uncut beards, wearing white salwar kurtas (long shirts and loose
trousers) and white cloth caps, sit in neat rows, cross-legged on the floor,
rocking back and forth, as they recite from texts spread out on small wooden
tables. The courtyard is packed with flowering trees. Under one of them
a glass-fronted bulletin board displays Urdu press reports of 11 September.
"America has still not proved that
it was Osama who was behind it", a 16-year-old, Haaris, roundly declares.
"Such a big attack. So well-planned. Could one man have done it?" Farid,
a tall, thin boy with a Palestinian headscarf, alleges that 4,000 Yehudis
- Jews - "were on holiday on that day and didn't come into work at the
World Trade Centre". His astonishing explanation: "This a Yehudi plot!"
The boys say they never watch television
or play cricket. They play kabaddi (catch) and learn karate. What sort
of jobs do they want to do? Only to serve "Din" (god). What about money?
Money doesn't matter. "When I see my teacher on the road", says Muhammad,
"I always get off my cycle in deference to him. Respecting elders is my
duty, not to make money." The students are generally unsmiling, sullen
and hostile to questions. Only when they are told that their views are
rigid do they laugh delightedly and seem gratified.
In the market outside the madrasah
walls there are colour posters of gun-toting Bollywood heroines advertising
a film about wife-swapping. Inside the madrasah, the view is that "ladies
should stay behind the veil", according to the maulana, who is unmarried.
"A woman should not try to be like a man", he tells me, "because she can't
be like him. If she emerges from the veil, she's only trying to titillate
men." Do women have a right to earn their living? "Women should not try
to work. If they do, men will covet them. All men covet women. That's a
fact. A woman's beauty is irresistible to men."
The maulana relishes being out of
sync with modernity. "My views are extremely rigid and orthodox", he declares
proudly. "If the modern time is at one end, then I am on the other."
Yet just as the pan-Islamic ideologue
Afghani was convinced that modern science and mathematics were the key
to the future, the Dar-ul-Uloom's stand against the modern world does not
exclude its technology. The students are fascinated by my camera and microphone,
and their objections to being photographed are unconvincing. The seminary's
computer centre, an L-shaped room whose floors are covered in bamboo matting,
contains three ancient IBMs that hum under a creaking ceiling fan. In spite
of the frequent power cuts, these venerable machines are enough to power
a website, www.darululoom-deoband.com, that can be read in English, Urdu,
Hindi and Arabic. Its editor is Aijaz Arshad Qasmi. He tells me how the
West wants to take away the money from the Islamic world. "The wealth of
the Islamic world offends them", he explains. "That is why they're trying
to subdue us." Qasmi, a recent graduate of the seminary, says modern education
fails to teach the relationship between morality and knowledge. "All knowledge
is the knowledge of Din (god)." And technology? "Technology is a tool to
spread the knowledge of God."
Indeed Qasmi emphasises the need
to use modern technology as efficiently as possible to disseminate "true"
knowledge. Contrary to proud claims that there is no English language on
campus, a well-thumbed Urdu-English dictionary lies on its side on one
of the computer tables. The boys are at pains to tell me how much they
admire modern technology, including space research. One of them says he
would like to learn how to use a video camera.
Qasmi is visibly proud of the new
mosque being built next to the madrasah. It is a mammoth edifice, designed
to look like an imitation Taj Mahal and constructed almost entirely of
white marble. Next to the shabby seminary, the mosque gleams richly. Where
did the money come from? "Entirely from donations", says Qasmi.
In the long hospitality room, visitors
are entertained with bananas, biscuits and cola. "My apologies that I could
not serve you anything stronger", says Maulana Madrasi, gesturing towards
the bottles. "We cannot give you the drinks to which you are no doubt accustomed."
The room is hung with a dusty chandelier and the white sofas smell musty
and old. The walls are lined with sepia portraits of famous maulanas. Bright
paper flowers are arranged in curved vases. Outside the room, a parrot
squeaks in a cage. "A Muslim will never be anybody's slave", Madrasi assures
us.
As I drive away from the seminary,
the cyclist whom I had seen sleeping under the banyan tree waves to me
cheerfully. "Looking for Osama?" he calls, adding with a grin: "He's hiding
in there in the Dar-ul-Uloom. Didn't you see him?"
