"He's come to see where we make the bombs," Maulana (teacher)
Adil Siddiqui, said to a teenager who asked who I was. Siddiqui was a broadcaster
with All-India Radio, the state radio, until he retired to this seminary
to escape the world. This seminary is Dar-ul-uloom, or the place of knowledge,
home to 3,500 boys and young men, mostly from poor families, in the Indian
farming town of Deoband. It is also the spiritual home of the particular
brand of Islam practiced by the Taliban.
Dar-ul-uloom gave birth in the 19th century to the Doebandi movement, a
regenerative brand of Islam which rapidly spread across British India and
central Asia. It was picked up 20 years ago as a God-given practice, the
true path, by some village Afghans along Pakistan's border. As the Taliban
they imposed their version, which draws heavily from their own austere tribal
traditions, on a nation exhausted after years of civil war. While the intellectual
underpinnings are similar, Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, Militant Islam,
Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, a definitive history of the Taliban
writes, "the Taliban were to take these beliefs to an extreme which
the original Deobandis would never have recognised."
In Dar-ul-uloom there are no bombs, no dynamite, nothing explosive on the
eight-acre compound — not even in the written or spoken word. There
was just the routine and the defensive humor and goodwill of hard-working,
devout people who believe in the Word of God; people who study His revelations
and try to interpret correctly the utterances of His prophet Mohammed.
The classrooms are crowded but quiet, far removed from the noise of the
harvest outside. In one room under a dome, 800 young men, their beards thickening
as they move in their final year into mature manhood, sit cross-legged rocking
on their haunches as a professor takes them through an interpretation of
a religious text. All students and teachers sit on straw mats on the floor.
Classes begin as the sun rises after prayers before dawn, and end again
with prayers after dusk. Infractions are punished by banishment from meals.
Serious disciplinary lapses lead to expulsion. Television is banned. Women
visitors are infrequent and must be veiled.
Dar-ul-uloom is a product of the Indian mutiny of 1857, a watershed for
India's Muslims. After Britain's victory ended the Muslim dominance of the
subcontinent, the school became the center of a forward-looking movement
that sought to reform and unite Muslim society in a country now ruled by
non-Muslim foreigners. The key was education. They were suspicious of Western
learning and British attempts to educate Indians to think like Englishmen.
The Deobandis, as they are called, sought to create a new generation of
learned Muslims, self-confident and able to use the revealed texts and Islamic
law as a roadmap for modern life. They opposed hierarchies in every form
and opened their doors to the poor, offering free education to all students.
The movement spread across India to Afghanistan and into Central Asia where
Russia was taking over the Muslim Khanates. Deobandi scholars were involved
in the anti-colonial struggle for India's independence. After India and
Pakistan achieved their independence in 1947, the Deobandis switched their
political focus to the "secular" governments that took Britain's
place. They sought to ensure Muslim rights were protected.
It is the political reputation of graduates from Deobandi schools that
has led some governments in the region to keep the Deobandi movement at
arm's length. India refuses to grant visas to students from abroad to study
at Dar-ul-uloom, fearful that another leader like the Taliban's Mullah Omar
might emerge in one of its neighbors. But the government has no problems
opening immigration doors to foreign students who wish to study at the country's
other great center of Islamic scholarship and revival — Aligarh Muslim
University.
The Deobandis do not like to be called fundamentalists. They say that is
a term that can apply to every religion. And they don't like the term "Islamic
terrorist" either. "Islam means peace," says Maulana Said
Palanpuri, the school's Arabic professor. "There are people who distort
God's teaching and we condemn them. But why do people in the West use the
term Islamic terrorist and not Christian terrorist or Jewish terrorist when
Christian and Jews commit atrocities?"
Cut off from television because of its "corrupting" influence
but getting their information from radio broadcasts and India's newspapers,
the students find it hard to believe that Osama bin Laden was behind the
suicide attacks in New York and Washington. Islamic solidarity is the first
truth. "Osama bin Laden is not a terrorist. His mission is to highlight
the problem the U.S. has done to the Arabs," one student on his way
to classes said. And then he adds, almost as an afterthought: "The
attack was a terrible shock and the perpetrators must be punished."
Within the Vice-chancellor's office, Maulana Marghoob says "they were
acts of individuals and were not something guided by religion. We condemn
the attacks." He said that suspects within the Muslim community who
carried out acts that did not correspond with Muslim teaching should be
tried by their co-religionists and not by others. Later he said that if
evidence were provided by the U.S. pointing to Osama bin Laden's guilt he
should be handed over to an "international tribunal" for trial.
Asked to explain the Taliban's actions in Afghanistan, the vice-chancellor
said: "I am not going to justify them. Nor am I going to criticize
them. Over time distortions have crept in [to Islam]. That is the case with
all religions."
But
this leading Deobandi scholar, like most Muslims from every walk of life
in South Asia, said the United States needed to "look within itself"
to find out the causes of the attacks. His contention: That Washington has
failed to even acknowledge that its policies in the Middle East, Iraq, and
Yugoslavia could be offensive to Muslims and less powerful countries. Initial
sympathy and support for the U.S., he says is waning. And this comes from
individuals who say that Islamic militancy is unacceptable because their
religion is based on peace. "Violence has no religion," says Professor
Saud Alam Qasmi, Head of Religious Studies at Aligarh Muslim University.
"If you kill one person you kill all humanity."