RISE OF THE SECULAR MODERNISTS 307For that audience their message had resonance, especially in India. When
they spoke of a glorious past, revivable only by a return to the ways of the
First Community, the poor and dispossessed knew who they were talking
about. They could see their own elites drifting away from the Muslim way
of life, and boasting about it! They were to blame for Muslim weakness. In
fact, if the Wahhabi narrative held water, the poverty of the rural poor was
the fault of the urban rich.
In 1867, a group of puritanical Indian Wahhabis had built a religious
seminary in a town called Deoband. For fifty years, missionaries pouring
out of this seminary had been spreading through the subcontinent preach-
ing Indian Wahhabism. In the late 1920s, these Deobandis gave a glimmer
of their strength in Afghanistan.
King Amanullah, upon coming to the throne, had dazzled his country
by declaring full independence from the British and sending troops to the
border. The battles were inconclusive but he won Afghanistan's indepen-
dence at the bargaining table, making him the first and only Muslim
monarch to win a direct confrontation with a major European power. In-
dian Wahhabis exultantly proclaimed him the new khalifa; but Amanullah
was not the kind of man to accept that mantle. In fact, he "betrayed" the
Deobandis by launching the full array of Atatiirkist initiatives mentioned
earlier. The Indian Wahhabis swore to bring the apostate down.
And they did it, but not by themselves. They got help from Great
Britain. This may seem odd, because Amanullah was culturally so much
more in tune with British values than the Deobandis were. European
ideals were his ideals. But perhaps the British recognized him as a threat
for that very reason. They knew what an anti-imperialist revolutionary
was; they had seen Lenin. They didn't know what a Deobandi was.
Bearded preachers swathed in turbans no doubt struck them as picturesque
primitives who might serve a purpose. Britain therefore fed funds and guns
into the Deobandi campaign against Amanullah and soon, with further
help from radical local clerics, the Deobandis set Afghanistan ablaze. In
1929, they managed to drive Amanullah into tragic exile.
Amid the uproar, a really primitive bandit, colorfully nicknamed the
Water Carrier's Son, seized the Afghan capital. The bandit ruled for nine
riotous months, during which time he not only imposed "pure" Islamic
rule but undid all of Amanullah's reforms, wrecked the city, and drained