Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [29]
Naturally, therefore, there has been intense opposition within Pakistan to the Pakistani military helping the US by attacking the Afghan Taleban in Pakistan’s border areas. For a long time, this opposition extended to the Pakistani militants in the region, who were seen as simply attempting to help their Afghan brethren carry on their legitimate struggle. This opposition diminished somewhat as the extent of the militant threat to Pakistan became apparent in 2008 – 10, and the Pakistani media became much more hostile to the Pakistani Taleban. It remains, however, a very powerful strain of public opinion, and opposition to the military campaign against the Pakistani Taleban, and hostility to the US alliance in general, have done terrible damage to the administrations of both President Musharraf and his successor President Zardari.
RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR RESPONSES
The specific religious forms that resistance to the West has taken have of course changed considerably over time, while nonetheless preserving an organic continuity. In the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, a prominent part was played by Sufi orders and local religious leaders belonging to those orders – just as in the resistance of the Muslim Caucasians to Russian conquest under Imam Shamil, and that of the Algerians to French conquest under Abdul Qadir. Today, the Wahabiinfluenced Taleban and their like are attacking the shrines of the very saints who formerly fought against the British, French and Russians – but nonetheless they are their heirs as far as anti-Western action is concerned.
Shah Waliullah (1703 – 62), the most significant intellectual Muslim figure of the era, was an Islamist reformist who preached the use of independent reasoning (ijtihad), but directed towards a return to a purer form of Islam based on the Koran, and towards the strengthening of Muslim states and mobilization for armed jihad to restore Muslim power in South Asia; a jihad which he and his followers – like their successors today – saw as ‘defensive’. Jihad against the British was declared and implemented by the great Muslim ruler of Mysore in southern India, Tipu Sultan.
Shah Waliullah’s teaching inspired both the Deobandi tradition which in recent years has inspired political Islamism in Pakistan, and more immediately Syed Ahmed Barelvi (1786 – 1831), who tried to lead a jihad against growing Sikh rule in the Punjab. Interestingly, he and his 600 followers became the first of a number of figures – of whom Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are the latest – to move from elsewhere to the Pathan tribal areas, both because the absence of government provided what we would now call a ‘safe haven’, and because the legendary fighting qualities of the Pathan tribes seemed to make them prime recruits for jihad.
Like many of his successors, however, Syed Ahmed Barelvi discovered that the tribes also have their own traditions and their own agendas. He was abandoned by most of his local Pathan allies after he tried to replace the traditions of the Pathan ethnic code of pashtunwali with strict adherence to the Koran, and, together with his closest disciples, was killed in battle by the Sikhs at Balakot. He is remembered by jihadi Islamists in the region as the greatest progenitor of their tradition, though the precise circumstances of his end tend to be glossed over. Following Shah Waliullah’s defeat and death, his grandson Muhammad Ishaq quit India in disgust for Arabia.
Because of