Frontier of Faith

"Because it brings out the tremendous depth of the tradition of religiously justified – though not always religiously motivated – resistance to foreign incursion and foreign domination in the Pashtun areas of what is now Pakistan. Sana Haroon studies the tradition of Pashtun rebellion against the British in that part of the world in the 19th and early 20th century. This is something that both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban today refer incessantly to – the idea that they are the legitimate heirs of this old tradition of local resistance. There is a reality to this. These traditions are very deep. At the same time Haroon analyses very well how the great majority of these rebellions against British rule by the tribes on the frontier were launched as jihads and in the name of religion but of course, just as today, this was a rallying cry, but one which covered and incorporated lots of local motivations in terms of tribal resentments and political ambitions of particular chieftains and local religious leaders. All these were subsumed in the jihad against the presence of the infidel. I think what she writes has a tremendous resonance for an understanding of what is happening today. I must confess that the other reason why I have chosen Haroon is that much of what she writes is close to accounts and analysis by British officials and imperial scholars writing at that time. Now the problem is that if you cite those people you get the whole sort of fifth-rate imitators of Edward Said jumping up to accuse you of orientalism and being nostalgic for British imperial rule. This is one of the stupidest, knee-jerk, self-serving reactions by third-rate intellectual hacks in academia today. Well, Haroon is not a British imperialist and has absolutely no sympathy for British imperialism, but she does analyse the actual traditions and the actual structures of the society in that part of the world and the roots of that society’s resistance to pressure and incursion from outside. It certainly has. The jihad , as it was called, against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s was very important from that point of view because it sucked in a great deal of both state and private money from Saudi Arabia , which then went into strengthening the Wahhabi influence. And it’s very clear that the training the leaders of the Afghan Taliban received in madrassas in Pakistan in exile was influenced mostly by the Deobandi tradition from South Asia, a puritanical but less extreme version, but certainly with Wahhabi inflections. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But one mustn’t fall into the trap, as I’m afraid a lot of Western and Pakistani commentators do, of regarding this as a completely new and a completely alien influence in that part of the world. The first outsiders with strong Wahhabi affiliations to move into that part of the world to rouse the Pashtun tribes to jihad against the West moved there in the 1830s, not in the 1980s or 1990s. And when you come to modern political Islamism and the whole tradition that was developed in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna, it’s quite true that this grew up in the Arab world and spread to South Asia through Maududi and others, but one of the people who taught and influenced al-Banna and his comrades in Egypt was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani from Afghanistan. The linkages in the Muslim world long predate the events of the last generation. There have been cross-fertilisations between separate Muslim countries going back to the very beginnings of Islam ."