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At the leading edge of this Islamic reform, was Deoband, founded in 1867 by Ulema imbued with the tradition of Shah Waliullah. They believed that education should no longer be for the purpose of training Muslims for serving the Empire, instead it ought to train them in the art of ‘survival’ in a world where Muslims had no power. And yet, as would always happen, many ashraf continued even in early twentieth century to draw on their memory of a Perso-Islamic base for psychological and civilisational sustenance, reasoning that as their forbears had come to India to rule, power and its wielding was in their blood; it was their birthright, and it is this right that remained as their just and inevitable due. ‘It was but a question of time for power to return to them’, so at least they reasoned amongst themselves.

This attitude lay, perhaps still does, at the heart of most Muslim politics, certainly in the first half of the twentieth century, also in today’s Pakistan, and is currently in a diluted form in India, too. This thought both infused, and inspired, the writings of the Aligarh Movement as demonstrated by the persistence with which the All India Muslim League continued to assert the political importance of Muslims; also in the power-worship that infused so much of Iqbal’s poetry and led not just to the development of a demand for Pakistan, it continues still to confuse so much of the current political thought in India. While not at all devaluing the importance of the many other factors that contributed to the birth of Pakistan, this was perhaps also the last striking expression of Perso-Islamic values in India, which had been revealed to be, like other values of the early twentieth century, imbued with complex contradictions, several paradoxes and a self-defeating inwardness.

Deoband, this great Islamic seminary, some distance out of Delhi, and now renowned internationally as one of the great centres of Islamic learning, was in the early years of its founding supported entirely by voluntary contributions. The students were drawn solely from Muslim society, though not just from North India or UP but also from Punjab, Bengal and even from Afghanistan; some came from Iran, too. The course of study was strictly traditional. No English was taught, and of course, no sciences. Cut off from government employment and by tradition from the small crafts, except printing and book binding, Deoband graduates flocked to the madrasas of Muslim India, maintaining the system of fi rst educating and then dividing these educated Muslims from the rest. Deoband’s leading lights were mostly former students of the Delhi Madrasa started by Shah Waliullah and destroyed by the British in 1857, and they were, at least some of them, survivors of the battlefields of that uprising.

Excerpted from Page 33-34 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh