The Flowering of the Deobandi Movement Last week an estimated half a million people gathered near the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar to mark the founding in 1867 of a religious school in Deoband, India. They came not only to celebrate but also to renew their commitment to the philosophy of a branch of Sunni Islam that has been the cornerstone of that school. Dar-ul-Aloom Deoband, as the school is called, has played a pivotal role in shaping the Islamic revival movements of the past century.
The1857 Sepoy Rebellion, otherwise known as the Mutiny (and also as the War of Independence), against the British was a watershed for Islamic revival movements. The British blamed the Muslims for the uprising and subjected them to humiliating collective punishments and a total exclusion from the public life. The Deoband School was established to inculcate in Muslim youth the reassuring and comforting values of Islam and to provide them with the spiritual and philosophic underpinnings of their faith.
The school of Deoband was also an attempt to counter the influence of some Muslims reformists like Sayyid Ahmad Khan who advocated a mix of religious and Western education for the youth. For Muslims to do well, they reasoned, they had to learn the ways of their masters. The reformists established a parallel school, the Muhammadan Anglo-Indian Aligarh College, for the Muslims to be able to join government service. Ever since the establishment of those schools and their subsequent proliferation, their divergent educational philosophies have pursued parallel tracks.
Whereas the Deobandi schools produced ulema, the reformist schools educated the civil servants, the government functionaries and a new crop of Muslim politicians. One group ended up taking care of the mosques and the other ran the affairs of the government.
The followers of Deoband School and the followers of similar schools make a sharp distinction between the ‘revealed’ sacred knowledge and ‘human’ knowledge and thus exclude any learning that does not appear sacred.
They believe in Taqlid or acceptance of the old interpretations and do not condone Ijtehad or reinterpretation of religion according to times.
Their ideals are drawn from the life and deeds of Prophet Muhammad and his four successor caliphs. The distinction between Fard (obligatory) and Sunnah (optional) becomes rather blurry when the followers of these schools elevate the Sunnah to the level of the dictates of the Qura’an, as it is being practiced by the Taleban of Afghanistan. The Deobandis take a restrictive view of a woman’s role in the society, oppose all kind of hierarchy and reject Shia theology.
In the post-1857 malaise, Muslim youth flocked to Deoband to reconnect with their spiritual roots. The schools multiplied in the subcontinent at such a rate that at the time of the centenary of the original school in 1967, there were 9,000 Deobandi schools in south-east Asia. The Deobandi philosophy has also helped spawn many reformist movement in the Muslim world. The most recent example is the Taleban movement in Afghanistan.
The Afghans have been part of the Deobandi schools from the beginning.
They take to heart a well-known saying of the Prophet that the faithful must seek knowledge even if they have to travel to China. In the days of the Prophet China was the farthest part of the known world. There is an endearing story related by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the well-known Muslim scholar and the first education minister of independent India. In 1918 when Maulana Azad was under house arrest in Ranchi, a poor Afghan man traveled more than 1,500 miles on foot from Kandahar to Ranchi to understand the meaning of a certain passage in the Qura’an. The man was quiet familiar with the works of Maulana Azad and had read his magazines Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh. The man stayed for a few days and then left as suddenly as he had appeared. Maulana Azad dedicated the first volume of his celebrated Tarjuman-e- Qura’an to that unknown Afghan.
Over time the Deoband philosophy changed towards more orthodoxy and in the opinion of some, towards militant fundamentalism. The Taleban’s attitude towards women and the Shias is certainly to the extreme right of what the founders of the schools had preached. The same is true of the religious parties in Pakistan where a certain militancy and self-righteousness has become part of their creed. The Pakistani Deobandis, encouraged by the success of the Taleban in Afghanistan, are on a collision course with the government to make that happen in Pakistan as well. The military regime in Islamabad has so far dealt with them with considerable restraint, and according to some, with expediency when it backed off from nationalizing religious schools and to repeal the blasphemy law that blatantly discriminates against the minorities and which has no place in a tolerant civil society.
The large Deobandi gathering in Peshawar with its strident political and militant rhetoric does not bid well for the stability of Pakistan and for that matter of Southeast Asia. The Deobandi movement has come a full cycle from the days of a small religious school in India to its full flowering where it is now poised to turn Pakistan into a theocracy modeled after the Taleban of Afghanistan.
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