Map of hate

From faith to hate, as Kafeel Ahmed's story demonstrates, can sometimes be just a short journey.

"I take pride," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a June 2005 interview, "in the fact that, although we have 150 million Muslims in our country as citizens, not one has been found to have joined the ranks of al Qaeda or participated in the activities of [the] Taliban."

Just two years later, the certitudes that underpinned the assertion have been blown apart. In June, north-Kashmir resident Aijaz Ahmad Malla was reported to have lost his life fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan. And now, news that three Karnataka men spearheaded a plot to bomb Glasgow and London suggests that the global jehad might have deeper roots in India than most people have imagined so far.

All the Glasgow suspects from India are the kind of upper-middle-class Muslims who policymakers liked to imagine had been made immune to Islamist seduction by privilege and prosperity. Indian responses to the questions the Karnataka jehadis pose have ranged, for the most part, from ostrich-like denial to communal invective. Little effort has been made, though, to explore the ideological landscape from which the Karnataka men emerged - and the systems of belief that led them to join al Qaeda's `war without borders'.

No full account has so far emerged of the ideological influences that drove Kafeel Ahmed on his journey from being a studious, upper-middle-class Bangalore undergraduate to becoming the suicide bomber who crashed a car-bomb into Glasgow airport. But a growing mass of evidence suggests he had discovered political Islam long before leaving for the United Kingdom - a fact that makes it imperative to map the ideas that drove his journey.

As he turned 20, Ahmed abandoned the faith of his parents. He turned to the Salafi movement - a theological tradition inspired by the 18th century preacher Muhammad ibn' Abd al-Wahhab. Known in South Asia as the Ahl-e-Hadith, the sect is intensely hostile to the syncretic practices of most Indian Muslims and characterises them as apostates. While the Ahl-e-Hadith neither advocates nor endorses terrorism, it is the springboard from which thousands of young people have jumped into the ranks of jehad groups.

What were Ahmed's new ideas? In conversations with one Bangalore-based friend, he used to argue that Islam and democracy were antithetical. His views on women became increasingly conservative. When his mother, Zakia Ahmed, raised the subject of his marriage, Ahmed asked her to find the kind of ultra-conservative, burqa-wearing woman almost unknown among middle-class Muslims in Bangalore. On one occasion, he demanded - unsuccessfully - that the clerics at a local mosque take down lights put up on the occasion of Eid.

Ahmed's critique of democracy and his attacks on the syncretic practices that suffuse the practice of Islam in India would be familiar to followers of the largest Salafi terror group in South Asia: the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

This March, the LeT's overall religious and temporal head, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, asserted that "current political systems, especially democracy, are against Islam". Speaking to a congregation at the al-Qadsia mosque in Lahore, he argued that "in Islam, there is a complete system of government based on Khilafat [a caliphate] and Amarat [political head of all Muslims]". Saeed went on to assert that "the real objectives for the establishment of Pakistan will be achieved when the original Islamic system, which was established in Mecca 1,400 years ago, will be implemented here".

At a conference in November 1997, Saeed called for an end to democracy in Pakistan, arguing that "the notion of the sovereignty of the people is anti-Islamic".

Pakistani newspapers noted that the venue was festooned with signboards proclaiming that the appropriate response to democracy was through grenade and bomb explosions ("jamhooriyat ka jawaab, grenade aur blast"). Ahmed's attacks on the use of lights at his Bangalore mosque, or his discomfort with music, closely resonate with the LeT position.

In Saeed's speech at al-Qadisa, the LeT leader expressed disappointment "that the majority of Pakistanis have been unable to pull themselves away from Hindu customs and traditions".

Saeed cited, as examples, the popularity of the Basant kite-flying festival and the Jashn-e-Baharan spring festival in Pakistan's Punjab province. According to a LeT press release, he explained that "Hindus have more than three million male and female gods to whom they pray, and there is one for the beginning of the spring season, too, and the spring festival is celebrated to please this god."

"It is shameful," Saeed went on, "that our rulers are wasting the money of Muslims to celebrate this Hindu festival, and they should fear Allah's wrath for doing so." From here, Saeed went on to link Pakistan's problems to President Pervez Musharraf's ideology of "enlightened moderation". The "real danger to Pakistan," he said, "is at the hands of its own rulers who, to reassure America and to prove that they are `enlightened' and `moderate,' continue to take weird and reckless measures in utter contempt of the safety, security and well-being of their people." Saeed concluded: "It was the Hindus who used to sacrifice humans at the altar of their fake stone, wooden, or animal gods, yet our rulers are doing the same even though they claim to be Muslims."

So far, the police in Bangalore have found no evidence that Ahmed was linked to the LeT. While it is likely that he accessed the LeT's website, his doctrinal turning to Islamic neo-conservatism was probably informed by online resources and books available across India. Much of this material is principally concerned with dismantling the creative, centuries-old accommodations Islam has made with South Asia's multi-faith environment.

Perhaps the most influential Ahl-e-Hadith ideologue in India is Zakir Naik, a doctor-turned-theologian, who often appears on television shows and has travelled across the world on his evangelical mission. Naik has often condemned terrorism in unequivocal terms, including the September 11 2001 al Qaeda attack on the United States and the Mumbai serial bombings of 2006. Yet, the cleric's Mumbai-based Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) has proved to be a magnet for LeT-linked figures. Rahil Sheikh, a key LeT organiser who helped organise the Mumbai serial bombings, used a 2003 Ahl-e-Hadith convention addressed by Naik to recruit cadre. Sheikh's associate, Feroze Deshmukh, worked as a librarian at the IRF.

While Naik cannot be held responsible for their actions, one question cannot be avoided: what is it about his message, and that of other less high-profile clerics, that draws violent Islamists into their fold?

In Naik's view, the Quran "is the instruction manual for the human being [sic.]". His reading of the instructions is literalist: faith, in this vision, transcends history. Writing on the IRF website, Naik insists that "we Muslims would prefer that in India the Islamic Criminal Law be implemented on all the Indians, since, chopping the hands of a thief will surely reduce the rate of robbery in India. Similarly, 80 lashes for giving false testimony will prevent a person from giving false witness."

Islam, he proceeds, "gives you a solution showing how to prevent the crime, e.g. chopping the hands of a robber, death penalty for the rapist. The punishment is so severe that it is a deterrent for the criminal to commit the crime. He will think a hundred times before committing a crime. Thus if crime has to be reduced or stopped in India the best solution is to implement `The Common Islamic Criminal Law'."

Although Naik's lectures often point to common principles in Hindu scripture and Islam, he is also explicit in his rejection of religious pluralism. In an IRF pamphlet, Comparative Study Between Islam and Hinduism: Presenting Islam to the Hindus, he writes: "Even if the Vedas and the other scriptures were the revelations from God, they were only meant for people of that time and were to be followed only for that particular period of time. Today all human beings throughout the world including India should only follow the last and final Revelation of God, i.e. the Quran."

Like Christian and Hindu neoconservative theologians, Naik proceeds to make a politically charged case against syncretism.

He writes: "Some Muslims, especially certain Muslim politicians who try to appease the Hindus, say Ram Alai-his-salaam, i.e. Ram, may peace be on him. This is totally wrong, since there is no authentic proof from the Quran and Sahih Hadith that he was a prophet of God."

Sheikh Ahmed Deedat, the al Qaeda-backed South African Salafi evangelist who mentored Naik, and whose work is extensively republished by the IRF, spent much of his career in similar efforts to rebut a founding principle of secular societies: the equality of faiths.

In one essay, Deedat used the problem of alcoholism to illustrate the limitations of Biblical injuctions. He approvingly cited the television-evangelist Jimmy Swaggart as saying that the US has 11 million alcoholics. "Swaggart," Deedat wrote, "like a good Muslim, goes on to say that he sees no difference between the two. To him they are all drunkards!" Yet, "the Holy Ghost has not yet made its pronouncement on this evil through any Church. Christendom winks at drunkenness on three flimsy pretences based on the Holy Bible."

In an effort to defend polygamy, a practice now abolished in many Muslim-majority states, Deedat turns to "the problem of surplus women." "We learn," Deedat wrote, "that the U.S.A. has a surplus of 7.8 million women. It means that if every man in America got married, there would still be 7800 000 women left over, women who would be unable to get their share of a husband. One thing we do know, and that is that every man will never get married for so many different reasons. Man gets cold feet and finds many excuses. A woman, even if frigid, would not mind getting married. She would marry, even if it is just for shelter and protection. But the American problem of surplus women is compounded. Ninety-eight per cent of its prison population is male. Then, they have 25 million sodomites."

For Deedat, polygamy was the answer. He railed: "The Jews, a very vociferous lot in every controversy, remain quiet as mice, for fear of being labelled backward Easterners. The Church, with their millions of born again votaries claiming to be the dwelling houses of the Holy Ghost, are also silent on this topic. The founders of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, claiming a new revelation in 1830, preached and practised unlimited polygamy to solve the problem of surplus women. The present-day prophets of Mormonism have abrogated the teaching of their Church fathers to placate American prejudice on the subject of polygamy. What are the poor American/Western/European surplus women to do? They have literally gone to the dogs."

In an article on Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Deedat blamed the violent gang rape of a New York woman on the author and his supporters, notably his former wife Marianne Wiggins and the feminist writer Susan Sontag.

"That poor jogger," Deedat wrote, "was an innocent victim. It should have been Susan Sontag, or Marriane Wiggins."

Deedat's polemic against Rushdie concluded with this grim curse: "Mired in misery, may all his filthy lucre choke in his throat, and may he die a coward's death, a hundred times a day, and eventually when death catches up with him, may he simmer in hell for all eternity."

In the improbable event that the engineer-turned-suicide-bomber Kafeel Ahmed read Salman Rushdie, he may have come across this admonition: "The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens."

From faith to hate, as Ahmed's story demonstrates, can sometimes be a short journey.