They're kicking out outsiders: first the Russians, then the Americans," Maulana Arshad Madani, the 80-year-old principal of Darul Uloom, told NPR at his residence just outside the walled seminary's ornate brick gates. The way we kicked the British out of India, that's what the Taliban are doing in Afghanistan. "The Taliban say they are doing what we did in India. But while Afghanistan's new rulers call themselves Deobandis, clerics here in the birthplace of Deobandi Islam are keen to distance themselves from the Taliban - even if they occasionally speak admiringly of them. The late founder of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, graduated from a Deobandi seminary in Pakistan, along with several other Taliban leaders. The Taliban's roots are actually in a Hindu-majority country
This is where, in the 19th century, Muslim scholars founded the Deobandi school of Islam - which was later adopted by the Taliban. And let's start a movement."Ĭlassrooms on the campus of the Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband, India. "Then they decide it's time to get back the glory of Islam. So there comes a kind of state of despondency within the Muslims," says Luv Puri, a researcher, author and columnist. The previous Mughal - Muslim - rulers had been vanquished. Less than a decade earlier, the British crown had taken control of India from the East India Company. The Darul Uloom Deoband seminary, founded in 1866, taught that by returning to the core principles of Islam, Indian Muslims could resist British colonial rule. More than 150 years ago, this is where Muslim scholars started a seminary that also became entwined in the politics of that era. It's a small town in India about 100 miles north of the capital, New Delhi. It's not Afghanistan nor is it the Middle East. This is where the Taliban's ideology was founded. They start and stop in rounds, echoing like a canon across an otherwise scruffy landscape of rickshaws, tea stalls and open sewers. From a marble minaret above them, a dozen voices wail Quranic verse in unison. Among its more recent adherents are the Taliban.ĭEOBAND, India - Hundreds of young men in crisp white tunics and skullcaps sit cross-legged in classrooms ringed with porticoes, poring over Islamic texts.
The main entrance to the campus of the Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband, India, where the Deobandi strain of Islam was founded in the 19th century.
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