The Deoband Doctrine

AS A JOURNALIST based in Mumbai in 2008, I had the misfortune of witnessing Islamist rage ravage the city. Over those three fateful days, beginning November 26, I was assigned to cover the attack on Nariman House. It was one of three buildings under siege. But unlike the resplendent Taj Mahal Palace hotel and the glitzy Trident hotel, Nariman House was a squat unremarkable building nestled among the fading charm of Art Deco Colaba.

Nariman House was also called the Chabad House, and as the name suggests, it was an Israeli-run Jewish spiritual centre. It was, therefore, on the terror hit list. But it was also from here that a miracle survival story emerged lifting dashed spirits. Against all odds, a Jewish child—Moshe Holtzberg—was rescued from the bombed-out building by his intrepid nanny.

Mumbai is a melting pot. And perhaps that’s why, even before 26/11, it had been the repeat target of Islamist terrorists fattened on a gruel of bigotry, in Pakistan, and in allied safe houses in India. But 26/11 was different. At the heart of the attack was a diabolic scheme to break India. The idea was to unleash such carnage that Hindus and Muslims would be locked in a cycle of never-ending retributive violence.

The foot soldiers of this apocalyptical scheme—10 Pakistan-trained radicals— almost succeeded. At the end of the 72-hour-long siege, all but one survived. His name was Ajmal Kasab. Before he was sentenced to death after an unimpeachable trial, Kasab gave up his masters. One of them was Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Pakistan army man, some say deserter, recruited by that nation’s dubious intelligence agency, ISI. Rana operated undercover from Canada, and he ‘handled’ another intelligence agent, David Coleman Headley, to scour targets in Mumbai. The information Headley provided would help the 10 terrorists who were sneaked into Mumbai on that fateful November day to easily locate the sites they wanted to eviscerate.

Today, 17 years after that act of zealotry, Rana is finally in Indian hands—extradited from the US on the back of firm diplomacy by the Modi-led NDA government. Over the next few weeks, even months, Rana is expected to incriminate many of his associates in Pakistan. His confessions will further cement India’s already watertight case against Pakistan.

While there is little doubt about Rana’s Pakistan links, the motivations behind the 26/11 plot draw their inspiration from an ideology with roots in India—in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh. This otherwise unprepossessing town, some 100km from Delhi, is home to a seminary called the Darul Uloom. It was here in its cloisters more than a century ago that its pious inmates patented the radically austere and insular theology that has now grown global wings. Their dogma that implored the faithful to return to the core principles of Islam sees the world in binaries: the Darul Harb (Abode of War) and the Darul Islam (Abode of Islam). Darul Harb is essentially impious land (like India) beyond the fold that needed to be either won back or converted to Darul Islam, or the land of the faithful.

On the subcontinent, despite Partition, the mission to reclaim India has never abated. This unfinished conquest is a point of great consternation in jihadist circles because ‘the idea of India’ is the strongest intellectual riposte to their preposterous obscurantism.

But beyond the subcontinent, the Deobandi world view has powered a global crusade against the ‘dissolute’ morals of the Christian West. Political theorist Samuel Huntington ominously warned that this new Islamic creed posed an existential threat to Western civilisation. While many have punctured holes in his thesis, there are many indoctrinated Ranas who live in the so-called Islamic crescent as also in the West, who are determined to prove him right.

9/11 attacksDarul UloomDeobandideologyIndian MuslimsTahawwur Ranaterrorism