The stars, he might have complained, conspired to cheat him of his destiny. Late in the summer of 1852, the great astrologer, chess-player, and poet Momin Khan Momin ignominiously fell from the terrace of his home. And instead of becoming a martyr for his faith, he was quietly buried in the cemetery behind what is now Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi. For many years, Momin had worshipped mainly at the shrine of Venus, his lifestyle manifesting itself in charged erotic verse. Then, a great jihadist movement began to rise in India’s North-West, and Momin yearned to join it:
“God, make me worthy of martyrdom too.
Make me worthy of this highest of all forms of worship”
Last week, a suicide bombing ripped through Friday prayers at the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary at Akora Khattak, the ideological cradle of Pakistan’s jihadist movement. Founded at the site of jihadist mystic Sayyid Ahmad’s triumph over the army of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Sikh army in 1826, the seminary was to soon celebrate the second centennial of the battle.
Instead, Darul Uloom Haqqania finds itself under siege, from the forces it had helped nurture. The target of the bombing was the seminary’s head, Hamid Ul Haq Haqqani, who had been mediating between Islamabad and the Afghan Taliban factions, seeking to marginalise the anti-Pakistan jihadists of the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) and Islamic State.
Even though no organisation has claimed responsibility for the killing, online groups sympathetic to the Islamic State have been exulting. The Darul Uloom Haqqania counts among its alumni the pillars of the jihadist establishment: Sirajuddin Haqqani, architect of the Taliban’s suicide-bombing campaign, his slain former boss Akhtar Mansoor, and al-Qaeda’s former regional head, Sanaul Haq. For precisely that reason, newer jihadist formations like the Islamic State and the TTP see it as an enemy.
The long story leading up to Hamid Ul Haq’s assassination began with the battle just a year short of two centuries ago.
The seminary on the river
Late one night in December 1826, 900 men made their way along the Londe, as the Kabul River is locally known, and tore into the camp of the Sikh commander, Budh Singh. The attackers—some 700 followers of Amir Khan Khattak, chieftain of the Akora Khattak tribe, together with a hundred volunteers from Kandahar, and another group from the plains of Bihar and Bengal—used insurgent tactics. They led Budh Singh to fall back toward Shaidu, near Attock. For the largely untrained jihadists of Sayyid Ahmad, the victory must have seemed a sign from God.
Historian Mu’in-ud-din Khan notes in a letter written soon after the victory that it opened the floodgates for new volunteers, drawn from the ethnic Pashtun communities living along the Londe.
Leaving India as a Partition refugee, the cleric Abdul Haq Akorwi founded Darul Uloom Haqqania in 1947, hoping to bring to the Afghan-Pakistan border the values of the great seminary of Deoband, where he had studied. Abdul Haq’s leadership saw Darul Uloom Haqqania emerge as the region’s preeminent theological institution. The scholars Don Rassler and Vahid Brown note that from 1966 to 1988, a third of all Pakistani clerics of the Deoband theological school graduated from there.
The seminary soon became a hub for the jihadists who streamed into Peshawar, using the city as a base for fighting the Left-leaning government of Daud Khan. From 1973, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) began arming and training the Afghan Islamists through Brigadier Naseerullah Babar, the inspector-general of the Frontier Corps. This war would travel a strangely similar path to the first one, from euphoric religious frenzy to despair and death.
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The flowering of jihadism
Long cocooned inside the mystic world of the four great Sufi orders and given to visions and trace states—the consequence of epilepsy, his colonial detractors claimed—Sayyid Ahmad slowly concluded the defence of Islam needed more than piety. In the early 19th century, two great powers, imperial Britain and the Sikhs, had captured swathes of what he considered to be the lands of Islam. For a time, Sayyid Ahmad contented himself with proselytising for his order, the Tariqah-i-Muhammadia or the path of Muhammad, hoping to reform Islam’s practice.
Following a visit to Mecca for the Haj pilgrimage in 1823, though, Sayyid Ahmad decided to follow the path of the sword. Together with his followers, Sayyid Ahmad chose to make Hijrat, or immigrate to the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands. He began a struggle to restore the rule of Islam over tribes living under Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule.
The caravan headed from Rai Bareilly to Gwalior to Tonk, then into Sindh and through Balochistan to Kandahar—an extraordinary arc of thousands of kilometres, to avoid Sikh-held territory. The mystic had no knowledge of war. Though he had served in the army of the Mughal warlord Amir Khan, Mu’in-ud-Din Khan records, his time there was mainly spent in prayer and contemplation.
Faith and treachery would collide at Akora Khattak, shaping the course of the war to come. Leaders of the tribes in Kandahar had decided to join Sayyid Ahmad, some drawn by the idea of jihad against the Sikhs, others by the prospect of loot from quick raids. Aamir Khan Khattak, for his part, hoped the tribal militia, as well as Sayyid Ahmad’s Bihar and Bengal followers, would help him crush a troublesome nephew, Khwas Khan.
General Budh Singh, for his part, had some 5,000 trained troops and the support of Khwas Khan, the police chief of Khairabad, and the ethnic-Pashtun ruler of Peshawar, Yar Muhammad Khan. The first contact at Akora Khattak was not a significant battle.
The retreat of this powerful imperial force seemed to prove God fought on the side of the mystic. Fresh groups of followers began arriving from Bengal and Bihar to make up the ranks of those lost in battle. Later, Sayyid Ahmad would write to the Emir of Bukhara: “I have been commanded to raise aloft the word of God, to revive the Sunnah [traditions of the Prophet Muhammad], and to eliminate the rebellious infidels”.
Following the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan more than a century later, the jihadists nurtured at Darul Uloom Haqqania also seemed to have divine support. Facing endless ranks of volunteers arriving from across the Islamic world, armed with massive materiel support from the United States, the Soviet Union flailed, and then retreated. Less than a decade after the war began in 1979, Darul Uloom’s alumni network ruled Kabul.
Abdul Haq’s son, Samiul Haq, who inherited the seminar in the 1980s, reaped the harvest of the services his father had rendered to the Pakistani state. Leading the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, the largest party of clerics, he made his way to Pakistan’s senate. The resurgence of the Taliban after the 9/11 war led Ambassadors and high officials from around the world to make their way to Akora Khattak, hoping to persuade Samiul Haq to intercede with his Taliban students-turned-rulers.
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The end of a dream
Like the Taliban emirate that rose from 1996, the little empire of Islam, Sayyid Ahmad built from Panjtar to Amb, proved not to be the promised land. The mystic’s religious beliefs, historian Ayesha Jalal writes, ran up against local ethnic Pashtun custom. The local custom of bathing naked in the river was strictly prohibited; violators were fined and lashed. The lands of those who left Amb were appropriated, and handed to the holy warriors. The mystic once even entered a Zenana, a cloistered space, to have a woman flogged for wanting to leave her husband.
The resentments of the ethnic-Pashtun tribes mounted, as they realised they had exchanged an imperial oppressor with another just as determined to impose his norms and codes over their fiercely-independent highland communities.
Encouraged by the kings of Chitral and Kawai, Sayyid Ahmad decided to try to conquer Kashmir. This time, though, things didn’t work out according to plan. The ruler of Amb, Painda Khan, declined to allow the jihadists to pass through his territories. The jihadists won the battle that followed, but Painda Khan then allied with the Sikhs to trap them in a pincer movement. Sayyid Ahmad’s shattered army could move no further.
Finally, in 1831, Sayyid Ahmad faced the Sikhs in a final battle, at Balakote—the site where India bombed a Jaish-e-Mohammed seminary in 2019. Together with his closest follower, Shah Ismail, Sayyid Ahmad is said to have read out the Takbir—the declaration of God’s greatness—and charged into battle. He ended up decapitated in battle, and his army was crushed.
The Darul Uloom Haqqania entered a long period of decline, too. Even as the negotiations that would lead the Taliban back to power in Kabul began, Samiul Haq was stabbed to death, a murder that remains unresolved. There have been dark hints that the killing might have been a crime of passion, linked to unconventional sexual practices that led the cleric being called “Maulana Sandwich” by his detractors.
And even though the Taliban’s triumph in 2021 should have given Hamid Ul Haq enormous influence, his position was soon undermined by savage violence between its factions, as well as with the Taliban and the Islamic State.
The stars, perhaps, had it right for Momin: Today remembered for his beautiful poetry, his desire for martyrdom would only have led him to a meaningless death.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)