Taliban Attack – the Limits of Savagery: Akhlaq Ahan

DECEMBER 18, 2014

tags: Islam, Khorasan, Peshawar attack, Taliban

by Aditya Nigam

Guest post by AKHLAQ AHAN

Every sane person is aghast to see what has happened in Peshawar, where Taliban’s attack on a school has crossed all limits of savagery and senselessness. They killed over 140 innocents mostly children, after taking them hostage, burned a teacher with gasoline and made the students watch the ghastly act.

Historically the area is part of the region known as ‘Khorasan e Buzurg’ or the greater Khorasan spanning over the so called North West Frontier, Afghanistan, North East Iran and erstwhile Emirate of Bukhara. The area, for thousands of years, has been the heart and mind of Asia; as this was the region where Gathas of Avesta and Vedas were compiled, Buddhist teachings flourished and survived, Persian traditions were revived, the seekers of truth flocked around Sufi masters to be enlightened. This is the land that produced personalities like Zarathustra, Panini, Alberuni, Khwaja Ansari, Data Ganj Bakhsh, Khwaja Gharib Nawaz, Rumi, Jami, Rahman Baba and hundreds of others. Scores travelled to the region to seek knowledge and training like Faxian, Xuanzang, Yijing, Shams Taprez (Tabrez), Amir Khusraw, Guru Nanak, Jamali and countless others. Though the region has seen occasional strife in the past too but the traditions of inclusion had continued to prevail till about a couple of centuries ago, when these values began to face systematic attacks. A few like Bacha Khan, in his autobiography, gauged the extent of the spread of these exclusionist ideas and warned against them.

What an ironical turn of history that the claimants of this great tradition and self-declared upholders of a faith that means peace are taking responsibility for killing innocent school going children; haven’t they heard the verse that says, “If anyone slays an innocent person, it would be as if he slew the whole of humanity: and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of entire humanity.” Certainly they do not represent any holy text or faith, but are the products a vicious and venomous circle of politics and events plaguing many parts of the world today.

A couplet of Iqbal summarizes the situation:

Kise khabar thi ke lekar charagh-e Mustafwi
Jahan me aag lagati phiregi Bu – Lahabi

(Who could have thought that the followers of Bu-Lahab (cruelty personified) would hold aloft the Prophet’s torch, setting the world afire?)

This movement into the desert of ideas is a result of the incessant decline and erosion of the intellectual traditions of the region that flourished in the  great seminaries of the sub-continent, and the leading lights of which were, scholars and leaders like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan,Obaidullah Sindhi, Raja Mahendar Pratap, Barkatullah Bhopali and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Ulemas like Mahmud-ul-Hasan, Husain Ahmad Madni and Ahmad Sayeed Dehlavi, the comrades in arms of the struggle for freedom and the Scholars of tradition. It is is time for institutions like Deoband and its products to rise to the occasion and revive it, instead of falling into a slumber of ignorance or following up spurious issues and aspirations.

This short piece does not provide the space for a detailed analysis of the complexities of historical processes that have brought this region to this sorry pass where the world only sits and watches helplessly as the macabre opera of death unfolds on one stage after another. It is time for all of us to intervene and to try and arrest this slide into barbarity, or else this will go beyond anyone’s control and will begin to affect the lives of those who today watch the unfolding events as mute spectators because, soon enough, the political resonances of these events will begin to echo in our backyards too.

Akhlaq Ahmad Ahan is Associate Professor at the Centre for Persian and Central As