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The distant war in the neighbourhood

One hundred years ago, a man known only as Mullah Hindustani began an extraordinary journey. Born in 1892, Hindustani studied theology in Kokand and Tashkent, before travelling to Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir and, finally, the Dar-ul-Uloom seminary at Deoband. It was in Uttar Pradesh that he learned the conservative theology that was so central to the story of Islamism in Central Asia — and, of course, very literally earned the young Uzbek theologian his name.

Hindustani returned to Uzbekistan in 1933, only to be jailed along with hundreds of other clerics — often traditionalists who might have otherwise proved a significant line of resistance to the neoconservative Islam that now threatens regional security in Central Asia. It was only in 1953, after Joseph Stalin’s death, that Hindustani was released from a camp in Siberia and allowed to work at the Tajik Academy of Sciences.

But why is Hindustani’s story interesting or relevant to anyone other than historians?

Last month, a group of scholars from across Asia met at Thiruvananthapuram to discuss regional security issues in Central and South Asia. Organised by the Himalayan Research and Cultural Foundation, the conference saw a first-of-its-kind engagement between experts on Islamist movements in South and East Asia with their counterparts from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China’s Xingjian province.

Governments across this region are profoundly concerned about the growing influence of Islamist movements and their terrorist offshoots — problems which, in India, are often incorrectly understood as responses to purely local events.

Islamists in the Ferghana Valley, which straddles Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, have long waged war against states in the region. Since late-2001, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan has been fighting alongside the Taliban and the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Xinjiang-based Islamists, who form part of the Islamic Movement of Central Asia coalition, hijacked a civilian airliner earlier this month.

Pakistan’s continuing ideological and military crisis, as well as the resurgence of the Islamists in Afghanistan, will thus impact not just these states or India. It will, instead, contribute to the shaping of a wider regional destiny. Despite this, the conflict in Central Asia is little understood — and even less reported on — in India.

From the outset, Islamic revivalism in Central Asia was ideologically divided. Even Hindustani’s star student, Hakimjan-Qori Morghiloni, sometimes described as the father of Salafism in the Ferghana Valley, often accused his teacher of being excessively deferential to the Soviet state.

Both tendencies worked closely together in the years after Hindustani’s arrival in Tajikistan. Hindustani set up elaborate networks of clandestine religious schools and study groups, in which most of the clerics, now serving communities in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, learned their theology. Often, the clandestine schools functioned out of chaikhanas, or tea houses, with funding from the devout amongst local officials and members of an emerging petty bourgeoisie, who were disgruntled with the economic system.

In the three decades after Hindustani’s return, Central Asia saw what the scholar Sebastien Peyrouse has described as “the discreet return of Islamic practices in the daily lives of peoples.” Alongside Soviet festivals, traditional Muslim events — the start of Ramdan, the Eid fast, the rite of circumcision — were practised by local citizens. It was, however, a gentle revival: the same citizens who adopted these practices, several commentators have noted, also continued to eat pork and drink alcohol.

During the 1970s, though, many of Hindustani’s students began to reject his Hanafi-school conservatism. A new generation of Salafi radicals influenced by the neo-conservative Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis and Ahl-e-Quran — most influential among them Rahmatullah Allama and Abdulvali-Qori Mirzoev — lashed out at the local practice of Islam, like the veneration of religious relics and the reading of certain verses at funerals. The neoconservatives called on men to grow long beards, and women to wear the hijab.

Underpinning this message was a political project. In 1979, Allama made a public speech declaring that the Muslim ummah, or community, could not exist outside of an Islamic state, and charged mainstream clerics with failing to fight the Soviet Union. In his clandestine pamphlets, Hindustani continued to counsel restraint, arguing that Islam should celebrate its post-Stalin reconciliation with the state rather than endorsing violence against it. But the bulk of the seminarians he had educated, though many had gone on to become state-authorised clerics, opposed their ageing master.

All of this fed into the wider geo-strategic crisis precipitated by two transformative events on the fringes of Central Asia: the revolution in Iran, and the war in Afghanistan.

By 1980, the strength of the neoconservatives became evident. In March that year, the Soviet Union was forced to recall Central Asian conscripts from Afghanistan, after religion-fuelled riots broke out in Kazakhstan and volunteers from Tajikistan were reported to have joined Islamist training camps in Peshawar. Juma Namangani, the former head of the IMU, was later to tell interviewers his experience of the Afghan jihad as a Soviet soldier led him to embrace neoconservative Islam. Tahir Yudalshev, who founded the IMU, was a cleric produced by the neoconservatives’ clandestine religious schools.

Although the Soviet Union hit back, suspending the visits by West Asia-based clerics to Central Asia and prohibiting planned Islamic conferences, it was too late. Within the decade, when the Soviet Union itself began to disintegrate, neoconservative Islam was well poised for the power struggle that ensued.

In the 1990s, contact between Islamists in Central Asia and the affluent, state-backed West Asian neoconservative establishment flowered. Both Uzbekistan’s Mufti, Mohammad Sodiq, and the Tajik religious judge, Akbar Turajonzoda — both products of Salafi clandestine seminaries — met with the Muslim brotherhood during visits to Jordan. Radical figures such as Said Abdullo Nuri, Islamists from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan and Turkey, in turn, travelled to the region bearing literature — and funds. Al-Qaeda figures are also known to have met with Islamists in Central Asia around this time.

New, often violent, organisations proliferated: among them, the Islom Lashkarlar (Warriors of Islam); Islom Adolati (Equity), Tawba (Repentance); Khalifatchilar; and Akromiyya, well known for propelling on the Andijan insurrection of May 2005. From December 1991, Tawba and Adolat personnel participated in a series of increasingly violent actions in Uzbekistan — taking hostages, for example, to demand the imposition of their version of the Sharia law and, in the process, provoking a brutal state crackdown.

In Tajikistan, following a 1997 peace deal, the Islamic Renaissance Party dropped some of its more extreme demands as well as its commitment to armed struggle, and joined the parliamentary process. Elsewhere in Central Asia, though, struggles continue. Uzbekistan was hit by suicide bombings — the first in the region carried out by women — in 2004, followed by attacks on police and military posts in May 2005. Insurgents in Tajikistan carried out incursions into Kyrgyzstan’s Batken region in May 2006, killing several border guards and civilians.

All these events would, more likely than not, have horrified Mullah Hindustani. Still, as Muzaffar Olimov has pointed out, the cleric’s clandestine networks, and his conservative reading of his faith, “created the basis for Islamist political movements in Central Asia.”

It is interesting to consider just what Mullah Hindustani’s story — and the Central Asian experience of political Islam — might mean for India. Much commentary on the Dar-ul-Uloom’s recent edict against terrorism has seen it as a dramatic departure from tradition, noting that terrorist groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Taliban locate their theological legitimacy in the ultra-conservative seminary’s teachings.

However, this could prove a misreading of events: Deoband, after all, never endorsed terrorism in the first place. In the seminary’s vision, religious revival holds out the keys to political power — but on the specific shape of this power, its clerics are un-committed. Dar-ul-Uloom’s clerical networks have little practical influence on notionally Deoband-inspired organisations like the Jaish or Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami. Instead, the Deoband fatwa is a consequence of the fact that traditionalist clerics realise that the young radicals drawn to these groups, often through the medium of the Students Islamic Movement of India, threaten their authority and influence — just as Mullah Hindustani was marginalised and then defeated by his students.

As eminent historian Barbara Metcalf has noted, a striking feature of Deoband theology is “the extent to which politics is an empty box, filled expediently and pragmatically depending on what seems to work best in any given situation. Islam is often spoken of as ‘a complete way of life’ — arguably a modernist and misleading distinction from other historical religious traditions — so that political life must be informed by Islamic principles. In fact, as these movements illustrate, virtually any strategy is accepted that allows the goal of encouraging what are defined as core, shari’a-based individual practice.”

Across South Asia — from the Deoband fatwa to SIMI’s efforts to marginalise the terrorists amongst its ranks; from clerics speaking against al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Central Asia — efforts are under way to fill the empty political box Metcalf describes. Until secular political organisations intervene in this debate, and transform both its terms and content, a defeat for the neoconservatives does not seem imminent.

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