Charles Allen - God's Terrorists

Wahhabism is declared by its defenders to be no more than Islam in its purest, original form, and without links to either the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. A number of serious academics and political observers have taken the same view, representing Wahhabism as little more than a puritanical reformist teaching within Islam which still has political clout in Saudi Arabia but little relevance to modern-day events elsewhere, particularly when it comes to the driving ideologies of men like the Yemeni Osama bin Laden, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, the Afghan Mullah Omar and the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and others who use terror in the name of Islam as a political weapon.

The founder of Wahhabism saw himself as a reformer and revivalist reacting against corruptions inside Islam. He declared holy war on those corruptions and took that war to his fellow Muslims. But his Wahhabism very quickly developed its own militant politico-religious ideology built around an authority figure who was both a temporal and spiritual leader. It became, in essence, a cult.

Wahhabism of itself never enjoyed mass support. Its ideology always was and remains rooted in violent intolerance, which has few charms for most people. It would have gone the way of all extremist cults but for the fact that it appeared as a champion of faith at a time when the world community of Islam, the umma , began to question why it was that the triumph of Islam was not proceeding as ordained.

Islam’s first great crisis of faith occurred at the time of the eruption of the Mongols in the late twelfth century, but a second and more serious crisis began with the rise of Western capitalism. At the time of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent the Ottoman Empire appeared invincible: a world of shared faith under one central authority, the khalifa , and one rule of law, sharia, governing all aspects of Muslim behaviour. This was the civilisation of dar ul-Islam , the ‘domain of Islam’, inhabited by those who had submitted to the will of God, surrounded on all sides by dar ul-harb , the ‘domain of enmity’, inhabited by unbelievers who would all finally convert to Islam and become subject to sharia. But with the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1663 the Ottomans began a long, slow retreat before the advance of Christian Europe. That advance was much more than brute imperialism: it was all-enveloping, neatly summed up in the triumphalist words of the British missionary doctor Dr Theodore Pennell when he wrote in 1909 that ‘The Old Islam, the old Hinduism, are already doomed, not by the efforts of the missionaries, but by the contact of the West, by the growth of commerce, by the spread of education, by the thirst for wealth and luxury which the West has implanted in the East.’

The questions ‘How can this be?’ and ‘What can we do?’ came to be asked with increasing concern by ordinary Muslims. By tradition it was the local ruler, the amir and the nawab, who defended Islam in the name of the Caliphate, but these secular leaders were giving way to Christian governors. In their absence it was the ulema who increasingly came forward with the answers that people wanted to hear. One response was Islamic revivalism, which continues today under the generic term of ‘pan-Islamism’, a movement for reshaping the world along Islamic lines, to which many disparate individuals and groups turned (and continue to turn) for comfort and salvation. This remains a perfectly legitimate ideal, no different from Christians wishing to see all non-Christians saved – until it is subsumed by the employment of compulsion, violence and terror as instruments to achieve that ideal. What made this terrorising not merely acceptable but a religious duty was the ideology articulated in Wahhabism.

Now it is the West’s turn to ask the questions. Since 9/11 immense efforts have been made to understand the phenomenon of Islamist extremism. An entire industry of think-tanks and defence centres has sprung up to satisfy the demand for explanations. Most of this attention has been focused on recent events, with correspondingly little notice being taken of origins. Wahhabism is only part of the answer, but it is an important part, and one aspect of Wahhabism in particular has been all but ignored. Here I have tried to make good that gap in our understanding.

On the afternoon of 10 September 1853 Colonel Frederick Mackeson was working on the veranda of his bungalow in the Civil Lines at Peshawar. As Commissioner of Peshawar, Mackeson was the most senior British official on the North-West Frontier of the Punjab, overseeing the work of a dozen or so assistant commissioners and magistrates. He was also the most experienced political officer in the region; he had made it his business to know the Pathans and their ways, and was liked and respected, both by his junior officers and the tribal chiefs, among whom he was known affectionately as Kishin Kaka or ‘Uncle Mackeson’. One of his first acts on his appointment two years earlier had been to build a new kutcherry or office, together with a residential bungalow. These new quarters were on open ground between Peshawar city, where the native inhabitants lived, and the cantonment housing the British political and military officers and their troops. This was in keeping with the political philosophy that Mackeson and his fellow politicals had imbibed from their chief, Henry Lawrence, which was that they should always make themselves accessible.

Having completed his official duties in the kutcherry, Mackeson had walked across the road to his bungalow to work on his papers. It was his habit to see petitioners only in the morning, so when a tribesman advanced towards him holding out a roll of paper, Mackeson told him to come back the next day. He was unknown to Mackeson’s staff but had earlier been seen praying outside the office. As recounted to a young officer named Sydney Cotton, newly arrived on the frontier, the stranger then fell down at the feet of the Commissioner and, clasping his hands, implored him to read his petition: ‘Colonel Mackeson then took the paper and commenced to read, and being intent on its contents, the native suddenly sprung upon the Colonel, and plunged a dagger into his breast.’ The Commissioner died four days later.

The assailant was seized and interrogated. He had come from a village outside British territory, in Swat, declared himself to be a talib, and claimed to have acted to stop the British invading his land. Further questioning revealed him to be a ‘religious fanatic’ who saw himself as a mujahedeen set on a course of martyrdom. He was duly tried and hanged. He died, according to Cotton, ‘glorying in his deed of blood’. To prevent his grave becoming a martyr’s shrine his remains were burned and the ashes thrown in the river.

As for the unfortunate Mackeson, fears that his body might be further violated led to his being interred not in the Christian cemetery, which lay outside the perimeter on the cantonment, but in a garden known as the Company Bagh. A black marble obelisk was erected over the grave, inscribed with a fulsome tribute penned by the Governor-General of India himself, Lord Dalhousie.