[Reader-list] Islamism, modernity & Indian Mujahideen - PRAVEEN SWAMI

[Pawan Durani]

"“Haven't you still realised that the falsehood of your 33 crore dirty
mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute and naked idols
of Ram, Krishna and Hanuman”, the venomous Indian Mujahideen manifesto
released to media as bombs went off across Ahmedabad read, “are not at
all going to save your necks, Insha-Allah, from being slaughtered by
our hands.”


Islamism, modernity & Indian Mujahideen - PRAVEEN SWAMI

http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article267670.ece?homepage=true

Many believe the jihadist movement in India to be driven by religious
fanaticism. There is little doubt that the idiom of the Indian
Mujahideen drew on Islam, or at least a certain reading of Islam. The
manifestos the organisation released after its operations sought
religious legitimacy for the jihadist project.

Days before 21 improvised explosive devices ripped through Ahmedabad
on July 26, 2008, a young cleric from Azamgarh arrived to offer
religious instruction to the Indian Mujahideen's bombers.

Sheikh Abul Bashar hoped, Gujarat Police investigators say, to deepen
the bombers' theological understanding of the war they were engaged
in. He came armed with Salamat-e-Kayamat, an evangelical video replete
with scriptural prophecies of the triumph of Islam before the day of
judgment. He also acquired a copy of Faruk Camp, a paean to Taliban
rule in Afghanistan, from Usman Aggarbattiwala, a young commerce
graduate from Vadodara's Maharaja Sayaji University who allegedly
programmed the integrated circuits used as timers for a separate set
of bombs planted in Surat.

Bored by the religious polemic, though, Bashar's students turned
instead to Anurag Kashyap's movie Black Friday — a riveting account of
just how a group of hard-drinking, womanising gangsters carried out
the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai to avenge the anti-Muslim riots
that that tore apart the city after the demolition of the Babri
Masjid.

It seems improbable that the earnest cleric approved of these
decidedly irreligious role-models — and the Indian Mujahideen's
aesthetic choices — may point us in the direction of important
insights into the jihadist movement in India.

Many believe the jihadist movement in India to be driven by religious
fanaticism. There is little doubt that the idiom of the Indian
Mujahideen drew on Islam, or at least a certain reading of Islam. The
manifestos the organisation released after its operations sought
religious legitimacy for the jihadist project. They also point to
specific secular political problems facing India's Muslims,
specifically communal violence. Bashar's Black Friday story helps
debunk notions that the jihadist movement in India is spearheaded by
madrasa-educated fanatics indoctrinated in something called “extreme
Islam.” Both SIMI, and the Jamaat-e-Islami from which it was born,
would rail against watching films; Indian Mujahideen terrorists
revelled in them. Many seminaries are still struggling with modernity;
India's jihadists are natives of the new world.

Azamgarh and the Indian Mujahideen: Early last month, police in Uttar
Pradesh arrested Salman Ahmad, one of a string of alleged jihadists
associated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba's so-called “Karachi Project”: an
enterprise run by Karachi-based fugitive Indian jihadists Riyaz Ismail
Shahbandri, his brother Iqbal Shahbandri, and Abdul Subhan Qureshi to
execute a renewed wave of bombings across the country. Police say
Ahmad, who was arrested after the Research and Analysis Wing
intercepted phone calls he made from Nepal to Pakistan, had received
training at a Lashkar camp in Karachi before being tasked to set up a
safe-house in Kathmandu for routing new recruits to the Lashkar. Just
15, his lawyers claim, when he was alleged to have participated in the
2008 bombings in New Delhi, Ahmad studied at a government-run high
school and had enrolled for a computer-applications course at a
Lucknow college.

Ahmad's profile closely resembles that of many Azamgarh jihadists —
which, along with Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Bhatkal, near Mangalore,
served as a core recruitment base for the Lashkar-e-Taiba — linked
jihadist cells which are today collectively referred to as the Indian
Mujahideen.

Data obtained by The Hindu for 10 individuals alleged to be key
members of the Azamgarh jihadist cell show that just two individuals —
Bashar himself and Mohammad Arif Badruddin — had spent any length of
time in madrasas. Many likely received some religious education in
their spare time, in common with many small-town children of all
faiths, but their aspirations appear to have been decidedly
middle-class. Zeeshan Ahmad, one of the suspects involved in the 2008
shootout with the Delhi Police at Batla House, was pursuing a business
administration degree. His flat-mate, Mohammad Saif, a history
graduate, also hoped to secure an MBA. Mohammad Zakir Sheikh was
studying for a Master's degree in Psychology in Azamgarh. Sadiq Israr
Sheikh, who spent two years in an Azamgarh madrasa as a child, was
enrolled in a computer-educaiton course.

Bashar's story casts some light on just how the jihadist cells in
Azamgarh in fact formed. In the wake of the demolition of the Babri
Masjid, the Jamaat-e-Islami came under intense pressure from
hardliners calling for militant action. The party, deeply entwined in
mainstream politics and suspicious of a confrontation with the Indian
state, resisted. Maulana Abdul Aleem Islahi — a prominent
Hyderabad-based cleric who had graduated from Azamgarh's well-known
Madrasat-ul-Islah — earned the party's wrath by authoring an
inflammatory tract challenging its line. Expelled from the
Jamaat-e-Islami, Maulana Islahi became an ideological mentor to many
young radicals who played a key role in the jihadist movement in India
— among them, fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Abdul Subhan
Qureshi.

In the summer of 2005, Maulana Islahi offered Bashar a job at the
Jamaiat Sheikh ul-Maududi, a seminary named for the founder of the
Jamaat-e-Islami. The cleric and Bashar's father had been friends and
political allies in the Jamaat; their relationship evidently survived
his expulsion.

Later, though, Bashar was increasingly drawn to the jihadist project
advocated by Maulana Islahi's son, Salim. He left his job, began
addressing gatherings of the pro-jihadist organisations like the
Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahadat and Tehreek Tahaffuz-e-Sha'aire Islam, and
edited the Islamist magazine Nishaan-e-Rah, which drew its name from
the seminal ideologue Syed Qutb's key work, Milestones. Salim Islahi
introduced Bashar to Sadiq Israr Sheikh, a Mumbai-based SIMI radical
with Azamgarh roots who had studied at a madrasa there for some years
as a child. Sheikh, who was linked through SIMI to the Indian
Mujahideen's fugitive commanders Qureshi and Shahbandri, in turn
recruited jihadists in Azamgarh — key among them Atif Amin, who was
killed in the 2008 shootout.

The “Islamist Class”: Clearly, a complex matrix of factors — among
them, personal friendship, kinship networks and ideology — helped
build the Indian Mujahideen's networks. Madrasas or traditional
Islamist affiliations were not among them. Bashar, for example, did
not draw on students of the Madrasa Sheikh ul-Maududi for recruits.
Nor did he seek out students at the Azamgarh seminary where he and his
employer were educated, the Madrasat-ul-Islah.

Part of the reason for this may be that the jihadist movement, of
which SIMI was the most visible face, stood in opposition to both the
traditional clerics and organised Islamist politics. In his rich
anthropological study Islamism and Democracy in India, the scholar
Irfan Ahmad explored the frictions between the Jamaat-e-Islami
establishment and SIMI at the Jamaat-e-Islami-run Jamiat-ul-Falah
seminary in Azamgarh. Founded by the Jamaat-e-Islami to capitalise on
the new political space that opened up after the Emergency, SIMI soon
embarrassed the party's elders by its support for jihadists.

SIMI mounted polemical attacks on the Jamaat-e-Islami scholar Maulana
Mohammad Rahmani, and sought to take control of the Jamiat-ul-Falah's
old-students' association. In 1999, a time when it had become
increasingly vocal in its calls for jihad and support for
organisations like the Taliban, SIMI members provoked a showdown with
authorities at the Jamiat-ul-Falah. The Jamaat-e-Islami's official
students' wing, the Students Islamic Organisation, responded by
founding a parallel student body, the Tanzeem Tulba-e-Qadim, which
charged SIMI with propagating “katta [gun] culture”, saying that its
calls for jihad were “lethal for Islam, Muslims and the country.”
Notably, SIMI was proscribed by authorities at the Jamiat-ul-Falah
well before the Government of India finally acted against the jihadist
organisation in the wake of the Al Qaeda's attacks on the United
States on September 11, 2001. During the police crackdown that
followed the SIO refused to join in protests against SIMI leaders from
the Jamiat-ul-Falah.

Dr. Ahmad points to the existence of what he describes as a distinct
“Islamist class”. Unlike at some other seminaries, students living at
Falah did not come from among the ranks of the poor. Fees, including
food and incidental costs, ranged around Rs. 900 a month. Of 5,365
students, 4,300 came from cities. But class, he noted was “not just
based on monthly income and an urban location but, more crucial, the
specific cultural capital.” Just as cultural capital of the
Jamaat-e-Islami led its leadership to make specific political choices
to the crisis with which the Muslim community has been confronted, so,
too, did the jihadists linked to the institutions and organisations
that broke with the structured Islamist movement. Both sides drew on
Islam to legitimise their position — but their choices were shaped by
the challenges of politics in a modern, plural society.

“Haven't you still realised that the falsehood of your 33 crore dirty
mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute and naked idols
of Ram, Krishna and Hanuman”, the venomous Indian Mujahideen manifesto
released to media as bombs went off across Ahmedabad read, “are not at
all going to save your necks, Insha-Allah, from being slaughtered by
our hands.”

Below, though, were five demands, each entirely secular in character:
demands for restitution against police outrages, the punishment of the
perpetrators of communal violence, and the legal defence of terrorism
suspects.

Fighting the jihadists must obviously involve better policing and
intelligence. But it also needs political interventions built around
rights and justice — not the appeasement of religious neoconservatives
and clerics, as successive Indian governments have seemed to believe.