The curtain came down on the regal steps of the Town Hall in Kolkata, one gentle morning in 1871, as Chief Justice John Paxton Norman made his way from his carriage to the courtroom. For the past two years, his Lordship had heard the case of Amir and Hashmadad Khan, two elderly businessmen alleged to have sent funds to ethnic-Pashtun rebels fighting on the British Raj’s North-West Frontier. The judge threw bricks at his attacker, but Abdullah’s curved Gurkha knife succeeded in cutting through his abdomen, and carving between his spine and left shoulder. The next morning, Norman was dead.
Little evidence of Abdullah’s motives emerged during the trial. Asked for his plea, he replied with these cryptic words: “The earth is sunk below the water, and the men have gone up to the sky; the dog is eating the wall.”
This week, when Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited the great seminary at Deoband, much media discourse cast it as a pilgrimage to the theological tradition from which his own alma mater, the Darul Uloom Haqqania, draws its roots. The visit, which came even as the Taliban and the Pakistan Army traded lethal fire on their border, in fact had a much more complex message.
Even though Deoband has been an incubator of reactionary Islam, it also represents a long tradition of resistance to both British imperialism and the idea of Pakistan. As the jihadists of the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) carry out ever-more-lethal attacks on the Pakistan Army, demanding to carve out quasi-independent sharia-government states in Pakistan’s North-West, the Taliban has granted them a haven in the mountains running from Angoor Adda to Logar.
The Taliban might have been funded and sheltered by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate—but Muttaqi’s visit signals it isn’t willing to run a vassal state. Taliban’s factions are nurturing the TTP, seeing it both as an ideological ally, and because Taliban leader Emir Hibatullah Akhundzada’s regime sees the borderlands as Afghanistan, not Pakistan.
Rebellions of the clerics
Founded in 1866 by the clerics Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautavi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi,
Deoband aimed to resist British rule by separating Islam from the seductions of modernity. The question of political power—the crushing of Mughal power in 1857 led the clerics to believe that—was second to the revival of religion. The institution of Deoband was the tool through which Indian Muslims could be reintroduced to an authentic Islam.
This had not been the only tendency in Indian Islam, though. In 1826, the mystic Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi and his followers had marched to the North-West, hoping to rally the Pashtun against the Sikh Empire. Things went well at first, but Sayyid Ahmad soon found his Islam rubbing up against Pashtun custom.
Local customs like bathing naked in rivers were strictly prohibited; people caught doing so were initially fined eight annas and later subjected to lashing, historian Ayesha Jalal records. Lands were handed over to Sayyid Ahmad’s soldiers. And the cleric’s decision to enter secluded women’s quarters to administer lashings infuriated many. The Pashtun turned on the rebels, allowing their destruction by the Sikhs.
The idea of theocratic states in the North-West didn’t go away, though. In 1914, the Deoband clerics Husain Ahmad Madani—later to win a Padma Bhushan—and Ubaidullah Sindhi called for Indian elites and the Afghan court to join in jihad against the English. According to the clerics, historian Sana Haroon writes, the Pashtun tribes represented the ideal of a Muslim society founded on the principles of the Prophet Muhammad.
From this premise, Madani and Sindhi went on to reject the idea of Pakistan. Their decision would empower a wide range of ideological forces that rejected the division of Pashtun communities and territories.
A line in the mountains
Late in the 19th century, Tsar Alexander II’s forces stormed into the Central Asian Emirate of Kokand, one of the Silk Route centres for trade in cotton, silk, livestock, kerosene, matches and slaves often seized from Russian territory. Though generals Mikhail Skobelev and Konstantin von Kaufmann made short work of the Emirate and soon brought the Ferghana Valley into Russian control, they found themselves confronted by ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbek revolts. Long, bitter fighting lay ahead, but the Russians succeeded in pushing their way to the Panjsher valley in Afghanistan.
The English feared Russia’s southward push, but had long ago learned that fighting wars in Afghanistan was a dangerous—and expensive—business. Emir Dost Mohammad, Afghanistan’s ruler, had been given a purse of Rs 6,00,000, then about £60,000, for ceding the Khyber Pass, along with the regions of Khurram, Pishin, and Sibi.
Emir Abdur Rehman Khan, who succeeded Dost Mohammad, had meanwhile expanded the kingdom’s power. Abdur Rahman massacred rebellious Hazara communities and reclaimed Kandahar and Herat, which had been set up as independent emirates by the British.
The British Raj, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned about Islamist resistance. The actual extent of so-called Wahhabi opposition to the Raj remains disputed by historians. The British did stamp out rebel formations at Ambala in 1864, Patna in 1865, Maldah and Rajmahal in 1870, and again in Patna in 1871. Events like the murder of Chief Justice Norman gave fuel to these fears, but the idea that there were threads linking these to the North West is at best tenuous.
English Foreign Secretary Henry Durand arrived in Kabul in 1893 to try to avoid a more real problem: military collision between Russia and England over Afghanistan. Abdur Rahman was persuaded to relinquish his claims to the Transoxus river areas of Roshan and Shignan, which were claimed by Russia under an 1872-1873 Anglo-Russian agreement. In return, the Emir was to be given the Wakhan corridor, the narrow strip of land dividing China and Kashmir. Then, Abdul Rehman agreed to a borderline between the Pashtun lands.
The exact terms of that agreement have been bitterly disputed—especially since it was written in English, a language Abdur Rehman could not understand. The textual parts of the treaty and the roughly-drawn line, for one, do not align. Then, there are legal questions: Is a boundary the same as a border? And does the fact that Abdur Rehman continued to collect tribute from Chitral and Kunar mean they are Afghan?
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Fighting new wars in old lands
For much of the first half of the 20th century, British colonial forces waged a merciless war against the ethnic Pashtun who had found themselves made part of India. Air and land power were used to force the Pashtun into starvation, kill their livestock, and destroy their villages. The Faqir of Ipi, Haji Mirzali Khan Wazir, led a tenacious campaign against the British, which continued well after 1947. Though Nazi hopes of fuelling the insurgency were defeated by British intelligence, Britain failed to defeat the insurgency.
The ideas of Husain Madani and Ubaidullah Sindhi, though, gave ideological and political shape to the Pashtun rebellion, drawing Islamist and nationalist attention to the cause far beyond the North West. The new nation of Pakistan, historian Faridullah Bezhan writes, found itself at continuous war with Afghanistan, after a Loya Jirga, or popular assembly, repudiated the Durand Line in 1949.
King Zahir Shah, followed by Afghan President Mohammad Daoud Khan, demanded the creation of Pashtunistan, or the incorporation of the ethnic-Pashtun territories into the Afghan state. For his part, Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto allied with Afghan Islamists to retaliate against these claims.
After the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1977, Islamabad hoped the jihadist groups it backed would climb down from their climbs. The Islamists, though, proved as stubborn in their pursuit of ethnic Pashtun identity as the socialists and monarchists who had preceded them.
Worse, the Afghan Islamists provided shelter to their Pakistani counterparts, the TTP. The forces Pakistan unleashed, journalist and author Abubakar Siddiqui records, have emerged as a threat to Pakistan itself, with jihadists demanding “a complete Islamic overhaul of the state and society.”
From 2024, tensions have escalated repeatedly on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, with murderous exchanges of fire claiming lives on both sides. The visit Foreign Minister Muttaqi has made to Deoband signals to the Taliban rank and file that Afghanistan’s new theocratic regime remains committed to Pashtun ethnic nationalism—even at the cost of economic hardship and bloodshed.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)