The Hadda Mulla (Najmuddin Akhundzada), died 1903

At a glance

• Najmuddin Akhundzada, called the Hadda Mulla, Hadda Sahib or Mulla Najmuddin, was a Sufi teacher who built a centre at Hadda, a few kilometres outside Jalalabad. He died in 1903. [5, 6]

• He was a deputy of the Akhund of Swat, and after the Akhund's death in the late 1870s he became the leading religious figure of the eastern Pashtun hills. [3, 5]

• He quarrelled with Amir Abdur Rahman in the 1880s and lived among the Mohmand, beyond both governments' reach, until after the Amir died in 1901. [2, 6]

• British and Indian official accounts name him as the chief instigator of the Mohmand rising of August and September 1897. [3, 4]

• His followers remember a saint who fed travellers, worked miracles and was saved at Jarobi by bees. British writers called him a fanatic. The Amir and a rival teacher had their own verdicts. [2, 5, 6]

• His disciples, among them the Haji Sahib of Turangzai, carried his line into the twentieth century. [5]

Names and sources

The official history of the 1897 campaign writes his name "Najm-u-din". [3] David Edwards, an anthropologist who interviewed the descendants of his disciples in Peshawar in the 1980s, writes Najmuddin Akhundzada. [6] The title akhundzada marks the son of an akhund, a religious teacher. [6] Edwards notes that religious leaders are nearly the only people able to name themselves, and that Najmuddin became what his contemporaries called him, the sahib, or master, of Hadda. [6]

Two modern scholars give most of what is known: Edwards and Sana Haroon, a historian of the frontier. The rest comes from British officers and war correspondents and from the Amir's own words. Almost all the stories Edwards heard from the Mulla's followers were miracle stories, with scattered bits of reliable biography between them. [6]

A student from Ghazni

Edwards's informants agreed that Najmuddin was a Pashtun from the Ghazni region and that his father was an akhund. They did not agree on the tribe. One said Suleiman Khel, from Shilgar near Ghazni. Others said the Musa Khel branch of the Suleiman Khel, from Katawaz. Others said Andar, from Ghazni itself. [6] Churchill, writing in 1898, calls Hadda "the Mullah's home and birthplace". [2]

Some informants told Edwards that his mother was a widow and that he spent his childhood as a poor shepherd. [6] He became a travelling student of religion. Edwards says he went first to Kabul, where he lived in the Tandur Sazi quarter, and then to Peshawar, where tradition places his meeting with the Akhund of Swat at the Mahabat Khan mosque. Edwards puts his time in Kabul about 1850, working back from the fact that he was an old man when he died. [6]

Followers tell the meeting as a story. An old man in the mosque asked Najmuddin to stitch his torn sandals and told him to go to Swat. The next morning the Akhund called him by name, and Najmuddin saw that he was the old man from Peshawar. [6] Haroon says only that he trained in the Shilgarh and Ghazni area, then arrived at Saidu Sharif, took the Qadiri oath (bait) with the Akhund alongside the Karboghay Mulla Sahib and the Miyan of Manki Sharif, and was made a khalifa, an emissary. [5] Edwards adds that the Akhund gave him permission to teach all four Sufi orders of the eastern frontier. [6]

The sources differ on the Akhund's death. Edwards, citing the obituary in The Times, gives 1877. Haroon and the official history of the 1897 campaign give 1878. [3, 5, 6] Haroon says that his sons had neither the charisma nor the following to hold the Akhund's position, and that the Hadda Mulla, as the Akhund's khalifa, consolidated and extended the Akhund's teaching line through the eastern Pashtun region during his life and for ten years after his death. [5]

The centre at Hadda

Haroon says he went back to Hadda and settled there after the Akhund died. [5] Edwards says followers more often tell it that the Akhund sent him there, while others say he was already at Hadda before he went to Swat. No evidence settles it. [6] Hadda lay a few kilometres from Jalalabad, inside the Amir's lands but near the Mohmand and Shinwari hills and the British border. Edwards reads that position as one that let pilgrims reach him easily and let him avoid being held by the state. [6]

Edwards describes the site as the former place of a large Buddhist complex (see Jalalabad for the monasteries). One informant told him that the Akhund told Najmuddin to turn the house of idols, butkhana, into the place of la illah il-lallah, "there is no god but Allah". [6]

The centre ran a langar, a guest house and kitchen. Edwards's informants describe such kitchens as feeding travellers, pilgrims and local people daily, supplied by disciples' yearly gifts of grain, firewood, cheese and money. [6] Haroon says the Mulla was reported to keep up to 200 disciples and deputies with him at a time, who travelled everywhere with him until ready to go out as his representatives. [5] Edwards counts twelve principal deputies, among them the Hazrat Sahib of Butkhak, the Sufi Sahib of Batikot, the Mulla Sahib of Kajuri, Sayyid Ismail Pacha of Islampur, the Ustad Sahib of Hadda and the Haji Sahib of Turangzai. [6] The Mulla never married and had no children. [6]

Followers describe a man who ate barley bread and a bitter boiled vegetable, withdrew for forty-day retreats, and could find money under his prayer carpet when the langar ran empty. [6] The best-known story, told by his attendant Abdul Baqi, has a dragon who is the prince of the fairies carry the Mulla to the Mountain of Qaf, where in one night he performs about seventy marriages. Edwards heard it in Peshawar in 1983. The only copy he heard of Abdul Baqi's manuscript of the Mulla's miracles was kept at Hadda until the Soviet invasion, after which the library was reportedly taken to Pakistan. [6] Edwards uses such stories as a lens for the moral landscape in which the Mulla was placed. [6]

The Amir and the Mulla

Amir Abdur Rahman, who ruled until 1901, wrote in his autobiography that many "priests" "taught as Islamic religion strange doctrines which were never in the teaching of Mahomed". [1] Edwards says that of this breed none was more objectionable to the Amir than Najmuddin. [6] In a letter to the Superintendent at Peshawar in 1897, which Haroon quotes, the Amir names him. He calls Hadda a village of tanners that the Mulla's disciples "have named" Hadda Sharif, says his disciples "regard him as a prophet", and says that for fourteen years the mullas had raised every part of Afghanistan against him. [5]

Edwards reconstructs the quarrel from British records and Afghan stories. He dates the break to the late 1880s. The Amir tried to have other mullas call Najmuddin a Wahhabi and failed. He then asked him to mediate with the Ghilzai, who had risen, and the Mulla set a condition about taxes that the Amir refused. The Amir reportedly tried to have him killed. [6] The Mulla fled through Shinwari country, where the people offered to accept him as king, and he declined. In the followers' telling he told them: "Jihad against Muslims is forbidden because it will result in the shedding of Muslim blood". [6] Churchill puts the quarrel about thirteen years before 1897, and says that the Amir summoned the Mulla to Kabul, that the Mulla refused, and that he then retired into Mohmand territory. Churchill adds that the Amir, content with that exile, wrote of him as "a light of Islam" and told his officials to honour him. [2]

In the followers' story the Amir also imprisoned the Hazrat Sahib of Butkhak, one of the Mulla's deputies, for over two years, after spies reported that he had called the Amir an infidel. Edwards says that the Amir imprisoned a number of the Mulla's principal deputies and that it is likely he tried to make the Hazrat Sahib issue a judgment against his teacher. [6]

Exile among the Mohmand

In the Mohmand hills the Mulla lived in territory that neither the Amir nor the British administered. Churchill places his home at Jarobi. [2] Edwards judges that exile cost him. He was cut off from his disciples, had to negotiate each move with tribal leaders who drew British allowances, and was no longer "sahib of Hadda". [6]

From there he took part in the quarrels of the eastern hills. Churchill says that in 1895 he sent the Mohmand fighting men against the Chitral Relief Force. [2] Edwards says the Mulla took the lead in organising a tribal blockade of that column. [6] Haroon says he also backed Umra Khan's seizure of power in Dir in 1890. [5]

In April 1896, according to Edwards, he met the Manki Mulla, a fellow disciple of the Akhund, at Gandab in front of about eight thousand mullas and spectators. They debated for days whether a worshipper should raise a finger at certain points in the prayer. The Hadda Mulla said yes, citing one set of hadith. The Manki Mulla said no. [6] Churchill says the Hadda Mulla ended the argument by publishing a book, printed in Delhi, which sold widely among Muslims in India and was sent to Afghan notables. [2] The official history calls him a bitter opponent of the Manki Mullah and says the Manki Mullah took a neutral line toward the government. [3] Haroon says that the Miyan of Manki Sharif, of the Manki line, was later "critical and derisive" of the Hadda Mulla's legacy and called it a sham. [5]

The summer of 1897

On 26 July 1897 tribesmen attacked the posts at Malakand and Chakdara. [4] The official account names two mullahs as mainly responsible for the risings: the Hadda Mullah and the Swat preacher the British called the Mad Fakir, who is Saadullah, the Sartor Faqir, in Haroon. [3, 5] The Frontier and Overseas Expeditions history says that on 7 August the Hadda Mulla came down the Gandab valley, burned the frontier village of Shankargarh and attacked the Shabkadr post with about 6,000 men, mostly Mohmand. Churchill gives the 8th. [2, 4] Churchill writes that the Mulla proclaimed a jihad, telling the Mohmand that those who fell would become saints and those who lived would be rich, for the unbelievers had money. [2]

The Mulla also wrote to others. In a letter to the mullas and elders of the Afridi and Orakzai, which Haroon quotes in English, he says that the unbelievers have taken Muslim countries, that Bajaur and Swat now attack them day and night, and "I have myself informed the people of Laghman and Kunar and the Mohmands, Ningraharis and Shinwaris and they are all prepared to take part in the fighting." [5] Edwards, noting that only an English translation survives, observes that the letter orders no one to do anything. [6] The Chamkani, answering Sir William Lockhart's proclamation, wrote that they could not refuse any order from the Fakir of Swat, the Mulla of Hadda or the Aka Khel Mulla. [4]

Edwards calls Shabqadar a military defeat. British reports, which he says recounted the aftermath "with barely suppressed glee", have the Mulla's camp short of food, rain spoiling supplies, and followers saying that he had boasted he could feed 10,000 men twice a day and could not feed 200 once. [6]

In September the Government of India ordered its columns into Mohmand country "to destroy the Hadda Mullah's power and disperse his hostile gathering". [3] At Nawagai the Hadda Mulla's gathering held the Bedmanai pass. [2, 3] On the night of 19 September a force led by the Sufi Mullah of Batikot, a follower of the Hadda Mulla, attacked the British camp until about two in the morning, and the official account calls the attack well carried out tactically. [3] Churchill says the Hadda Mulla promised his men that no bullet would harm those who charged home, and that his followers "had three times as many killed and wounded" as the Sufi Mullah's followers. He puts the tribesmen's losses at about 700. [2] The gathering then dispersed. [2, 3]

Churchill's picture of the Mulla is hostile. He calls him "a priest of great age and of peculiar holiness" and says he "was known to be a physical coward". [2] A British report that Edwards quotes says the Mulla's pony fell at the Bedmanai pass and he was carried off in a litter while women cursed him. Edwards says such stories may be true or imagined. [6] British troops entered Jarobi to find it deserted, and burned it. [6]

The followers' story is different. Maulavi Ahmad Gul Rohani, a grandson of the Ustad Sahib of Hadda, told Edwards in 1984 that the British demanded the villagers give up the Mulla or send him away, that he went to the mountain to pray, and that when soldiers came to seize him, bees swarmed over them and they withdrew. [6] Edwards notes that the two accounts share an outline: the British came to Jarobi for the Mulla, he was not there, and they left. [6]

The Amir's part

The British suspected the Amir. The Frontier and Overseas Expeditions history says Abdur Rahman told the Government of India that the Hadda Mulla "was just as much an enemy to himself as to the British", and that on 17 August he assured a durbar in Kabul that he had never urged his subjects against the British. [4] The same history says the Afghan commander-in-chief, Ghulam Haidar, who had been a friend of the Mulla for years, took a different line and did not restrain Afghan subjects from joining. [4] In 1896 the Amir had taken the title "Light of the Religion and the Faith" and published a book on jihad, which the mullas used as proof that he was with them. [3, 4] Edwards cites British reports of wheat sent from Kunar and 25,000 rupees given through an intermediary. He judges that whatever help the Amir gave was small and passed through third parties. [6] Edwards adds that only a lawful ruler could declare a jihad, and that without one those who died would not count as martyrs (shahidan) in doctrine. [6]

How the rising has been read

British writers called the rising fanaticism. Churchill ties it to rumour and to the promises of holy men. [2] Edwards answers that "fanaticism" was a charge that denied the Mulla any moral standing, and that it has to be unpicked to see him clearly. [6] Haroon says that he has largely been read as a reactive leader opposing the tools of the modern state. She argues that he was also extending the Akhund's network of religious leaders across the areas that the Afghan and British states agreed to treat as autonomous, and points to his support for Umra Khan and to his sending the Sartor Faqir in 1897 to take over the shrine of Pir Baba in upper Swat. [5] Abdul Karim Chamarkandi, in a memoir Haroon cites, says that because the Mulla was the unbelievers' enemy, his disciples were enemies of the foreigner. [5]

After 1897

The official account says that the Hadda Mullah was reported at Chamarkand on the Kunar and Bajaur border, where he had a small plot of land and a small mosque. [3] Edwards says he stayed among the Mohmand until after Abdur Rahman died. [6] Edwards and Haroon give his death as 1903, though one passage in Haroon prints 1901. [5, 6] His tomb is at Hadda, and the Ustad Sahib of Hadda took over the centre. [6]

Haroon says that after his death and the failure of the mobilisation his successors kept the fraternity together. [5] The Haji Sahib of Turangzai took the oath at his hand after returning from Mecca. Haroon ties the Haji's work among the Mohmand to this line (see the Haji Sahib). [5] Mulla Babra of Bajaur took the oath to him after the Akhund's death, and the Mulla Chaknawar studied under him briefly. [5] In 1908 the Sufi Sahib of Butkhak led about 5,000 Mohmands against Shabqadar, which Haroon calls the last major movement by the Mulla's contemporaries and direct accomplices. [5]

In the late 1940s, Edwards says, the Afghan government took over the centre and turned its school into a state institution. Haroon says the old shrine then housed a state madrasa. [5, 6] For the wider setting of such holy men, see religion among Pashtuns. The wars between Britain and Afghanistan that framed his life are told in the Anglo-Afghan wars.