The British Indian bit of Islamic revivalism

The Birth of Radical Islam: One Cult, Two Cradles Saubhik Chakrabarti

Indian Express: Sunday, April 02, 2006

For Charles Allen’s thesis that today’s jihadist has two fathers, one in Arabia and one in Hindustan, his history can’t have a huge gap. The Arabia part is fine, but it’s not Allen’s showpiece. The British Indian bit of Islamic revivalism is his USP. How do we square that with the fact that the subcontinent’s challenge to the British, even when it ended in a communally determined Partition, never became non-secular in terms of looking for an unblemished Islamic universe? Pakistan was about territory, power struggle and intra-sub-continental religious/cultural divides.

When Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar formed a joint venture in what was once British India’s wild north-west, can one really say the Arabian and subcontinental heirs of radical Islam met up again? The Soviets and the Americans in different ways made Afghanistan hospitable for jihad. That gave the Pakistani state an idea. These historical discontinuities cannot be bridged by the fact that Islamic revivalists in India were the inspiration for the Deoband School, which Allen says is the model for the Pakistani institutions the Taliban graduated from.

It is tough to write an account of something that doesn’t quite exist: a live by the sword, pan-Islamic movement that was continuously relevant in subcontinental history. If Allen is never able to make it clear how much influence Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had on subcontinental Muslim movements it is perhaps because such influence was always rather limited.