God?s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad By Charles Allen, Little, Brown, ? 8.99

Jihadis or Islamic fundamentalists have become the West?s bogeymen after 9/11. Charles Allen looks at the Wahhabi cult and seeks to locate in it ?the hidden roots? of Islamic fundamentalism. The timing of the book could not have been better and the name more sensationalist.

The reader is also warned by the author that he is deficient in Arabic, Urdu and Persian, the three principal languages of Islamic texts. He has not read any of the important texts in their original. This warning, however, is tucked away in the bibliography. Allen writes the history of a movement without access to the principal texts in the original. I wonder what would be thought of an Oriental scholar who attempted to write a history of a fundamentalist Christian sect, say Opus Dei, without access to its seminal texts in the original. Would a publisher like Little, Brown even look at such a manuscript, let alone publish it?

The Wahhabis represented a revivalist strand within 18th-century Islam. They wanted to hark back to Islam in its pure form. The founder of the movement declared jihad on what he declared to be corruption within the Islamic faith and the movement quickly developed its own militant politico-religious ideology. Wahhabis fell back on intolerance and violence. This occurred in the overall context of the Islamic lands coming under threat of Western imperialism. There grew modes of thought that wanted to rejuvenate Islam on the basis of its fundamental tenets. Allen does not quite explain why such a movement turned militant. He seems to assume that this was a natural development. There are no grounds for such an assumption. Similarly, he draws too facile a link between Islamic revivalism of the 18th century and the pan-Islamism of today. The Firanghi Mahal of Lucknow was a centre of Islamic learning and scholarship that never turned to or preached militancy.

As a student of the revolt of 1857, I came to Allen?s chapter on it with some interest. The Wahhabi involvement in the revolt (Allen insists on calling it the Sepoy Mutiny) is well-known, especially after Qeyammuddin Ahmed?s study of the Wahhabi movement in India. Allen adds nothing new, and to one?s great disappointment, this chapter often deviates from the main theme to describe internal squabbles within the British-Indian administration. It is difficult, indeed, to piece together from Allen?s account a coherent account of the Wahhabi involvement in the uprising except for a short phase in Delhi. Yet Muslim rebels often saw themselves as jihadis, and both Hindus and Muslims saw their fight against British rule as a defence of their faiths.

The problem with Allen?s book is that it is too episodic. The other problem is his refusal to question the label Wahhabi. There were a lot of Muslim fanatics around in 1857 and subsequently in North India. British sources often lumped these under the rubric Wahhabi. It is necessary to probe and question these sources and to seek out their biases and prejudice.

Perhaps it is unfair to expect Allen to raise such questions. He, is described in the blurb as ?a renowned historian of the British Raj?. This, in the manner of all blurbs, is an extravagant claim. Allen, at his best, is a good popularizer. Most historians of India, even in England, will not even consider him as a peer.

But for all that, his heart in this book is in the right place. He knows that the people of West Asia have serious grievances against Western powers. He believes that Islamic militancy grows out of this context. If the grievances are addressed and removed, ?moderate Islam stands a better chance of reasserting itself?.