ABSTRACT
While it first emerged in Arabia in the eighteenth century, from whence it migrated to India, the Salafi, or Wahabi variant of Islam was not systematized into a separate sect in South Asia until the 1880s. By the 1920s and ‘30s, scholars such as Sanaullah Amritsari, Daud Ghaznvi, Maulana Ataullah Shaheed, and Maulana Naik Muhammad were disseminating the puritanical message of the Wahabi, or Ahl-e-Hadith, (as adherents to the sect subsequently came to be known) throughout the Punjab, although its influence among Punjabi Muslims remained fairly negligible until the late 1970s. Spurred by the rise of fundamentalist movements elsewhere in the Islamic world such as the Iranian Revolution (which played a role in inspiring Zia ul Haq’s Islamisation of Pakistan), and jihad1 in Afghanistan (triggered by the Russian invasion of the country), sects such as the AeH rose to prominence through providing recruits for the latter (mostly young madrassa students), in which they were aided by funding from both the United States and Saudi Arabia. While their influence waned once again with the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1988 (and with it foreign funding), the emergence of the Talban in Afghanistan and the re-intervention of the United States in the region post 9/11 precipitated a resurgence. The aim of this chapter is to explore the role of Salafi scholars and seminaries, particularly those belonging to the AeH, in infusing a streak of religious extremism in Pakistani Punjab (where they command tacit yet tremendous support) as well as their wider global impact. Pakistan has recently been designated by some observers as ‘the world’s
most dangerous place’, a country in which Islamist extremism has spawned a terrorist movement with few parallels in recent history (‘Fixing Pakistan’ 2008). In addition to offering refuge to members of Al-Qaeda (The Base), it hosts thousands of religious seminaries that embrace a fundamentalist ideology (whose graduates, moreover, have proven active on the global jihadi scene) and has witnessed innumerable acts of violence – in 2007 alone it experienced 1,503 such incidents (ranging from terrorist attacks to political and sectarian clashes), which resulted in 3,448 deaths and 5,353 injuries (Murshid 2008). Efforts to curb the jihadist challenge (such as former President Musharraf ’s policy of dealing with it through ‘enlightened
moderation’) have had little effect. While the AeH sect constitutes one of the smallest of the fundamentalist Islamic sects in Pakistan involved in such activities, in recent years it has witnessed the highest number of new adherents (as well as becoming entrenched among the Punjabi urban bourgeoisie), thanks in part to its resourcefulness – since the 1980s, for example, it has received both material and moral assistance from Saudi Arabia (fearful of the growth of Shi’ism in Pakistan) (Rana 2004: 295). It has, moreover, spurred a number of offshoots, including LeT, TuM and JuMAeH.2
