India: Deoband's image | Growing irrelevance of the Indian ayatollah

In 1953, the Ahrar spearheaded a violent campaign seeking the sacking of Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Chaudhury Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmadi. The clerics won. Pakistan's 1956 Constitution decreed it would henceforth be called an “Islamic Republic.”

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: The Hindi | India | Excerpt
By Praveen Swami | February 2, 2012

The following is an excerpt from a larger article published in The Hindu.

Deoband's image as the ideological vanguard of the modern jihadist movement has not a little to do with its dramatic growth in Pakistan's Punjab. In 1929, dissidents who broke away from the Congress-led Khilafat movement set up the Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam. The Ahrar campaigned against Hindu and Sikh monarchs, and attacked what it characterised as Shi'a and Ahmadiyya heresies. In 1953, the Ahrar spearheaded a violent campaign seeking the sacking of Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Chaudhury Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmadi. The clerics won.


Pakistan's 1956 Constitution decreed it would henceforth be called an “Islamic Republic,” and pass no laws repugnant to the Koran or the hadith. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared Islam the state religion, promised to bring secular laws into line with the Shariah, and introduced blasphemy laws which ejected the Ahmadiyya from Islam. His successor, the military despot Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, expanded state patronage to Deobandi-jihadist groups. Key among those groups was the Harkat-ul-Ansar, co-founded in 1991 by Maulana Masud Azhar and Fazl-ur-Rahman Khalil.

In 1999, following Azhar's release from an Indian prison in return for the lives of passengers on board an aircraft hijacked to Kandahar, he set up the Jaish-e-Muhammad — still one of the largest jihadist organisations.


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