376 



INDIA. 



directed the Punjab authorities " effectually to rid 

 our frontiers of the chronic cause of disturbance, the 

 Hindostanee fanatics," and even went so far as to 

 order that they should be rooted out from " the com- 

 pact area limited by the Barendo to the north, the 

 Indus to the east, and our Yusufzai frontier to the 

 south and southeast." But the Umbeyla force was 

 broken up and was, of course, succeeded by an army 

 twice the size five years afterward.^ The Wahabees 

 owe the only check they have received to the rival 

 spiritual pretensions of the Akhoond of Swat, who 

 hates them only in less degree than he detests the 

 infidels. 



We have reason to believe that there has been laid 

 before the Governments of Bengal and India very 

 startling evidence of a Mussulman conspiracy having 

 its ramifications spread all over Bengal north and 

 east of the Ganges, if not farther. The Mussulmans 

 of India are filled with a longing and a faith, more or 

 less vague according to the sect which they favor, 

 that their Imam is to appear in the West to give them 

 the government of Asia. At least from Patna to 

 Dacca there is hardly a mosque in which the Jehad, 

 the crescentade, is not preached; and every good 

 Mussulman is urged either himself to become a 

 Moojahideen or crescentader, or to contribute of his 

 substance for the holy cause. All classes are ap- 

 pealed to, and with general success. The landholder, 

 the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, the poor 

 laborer are fed, not so much by the regular preachers 

 in the mosques as by the itinerant Wahabees, with 

 visions of the immediate coming of the deliverer who 

 is to appear in glory on the mountain-tops of the 

 northwest, on that Mahabun where the Aryans first 

 rested on their march, and lead all those who are so 

 blessed as to be there waiting his coming, to victory 

 over the infidel here and sensuous delights hereafter. 

 With such dreams many classes of Mussulmans in 

 Behar and Northern and Eastern Bengal are filled. 

 For years they have been contributing their means 

 for this purpose. A regular rate of taxation is laid 

 down by the leaders, and cheerfully accepted by the 

 people. The poorest set aside one handful of rice 

 for the holy war when they proceed to cook their 

 daily meal, and every week the grain is taken to the 

 mosque where it is sold from time to time to recruit 

 the Jehadees' treasury on their frontier. The more 

 respectable classes contribute their two seers of 

 wheat, at fixed times, or pay the equivalent in money 

 at the market rate of the day. The rich landholder 

 and trader pays his 2? per cent, on the strict prin- 

 ciple of an income tax. The most dangerous feature 

 in the whole organization is one which, appearing for 

 the first time, appeals to the simplest peasants, how- 

 ever little of fanatics they may be. It is the promise 

 earnestly preached, and the belief now general, that 

 the great deliverer will, after breaking the infidel 

 yoke, free every Mussulman from the land tax, and 

 exact it only from the Hindoos. The Commissioners 

 of Bhaugulpore, Rajshaye, and Dacca, have reported 

 to the Bengal Government the existence and spread 

 of the Wahabee organization all over the Mussulmans 

 of their Divisions, and in the Dacca districts there 

 are three Mussulmans for every Hindoo. A number 

 of deluded men have returned to their homes from 

 the frontier, for .which they were recruited, and their 

 evidence is verv serious. Many Mussulman ryots 

 have made the frankest confessions as to the extent 

 and nature of the organization and the taxation. They 

 do not much realize the fact that they are part of a 

 plot against the English Government that is never 

 plainly preached to them. In their somewhat unso- 

 phisticated ignorance, they are led to believe that the 

 Imam will come soon, and that they must fight the 

 infidel for the sake of securing rent-free lands, but 

 they do not clearly realize who the infidel is in every 

 case that it is their Hindoo neighbor or their English 

 ruler. This was evident even among the half-edu- 

 cated preachers of the crescentade in 1864, as seen in 

 the confessions of Sheik Osman, whom the Nazir, or 



sheriff's officer of the Jessore Judge's Court sent forth 

 to preach. " I did not preach fighting against Gov- 

 ernment as a Government," he said, " but I preached 

 fighting for religion, and when people asked me if 

 Government were to be mixed up, then, I said, you 

 must fight with Government." But there is some- 

 thing more definite than even this. The Patna nest 

 was broken up in 1864, but the Bengal Government 

 of the day discouraged all attempts to destroy the 

 organization of which Patna was only the centre. 

 The new ringleaders have established their depots at 

 Pakour, a railway station in the extra-regulation dis- 

 trict of Chota Nagpore, where they might hope to 

 escape observation, and at Soorujghur, betwaen Patna 

 and Monghyr. Both these places are connected by a 

 network of hospices and recruiters with the whole of 

 Bengal north of the Ganges. Men and money are 

 passed on secretly, as they have been for years. The 

 state trials of 1864 and 1865, and the expeditions of 

 1863 and 1868, seem only to have given a stimulus to 

 the conspiracy. There lies, at this moment, in the 

 Rajmahai jail, one of the two ringleaders. Docooree 

 Mundle, who has assumed the name of Ibrahim 

 well known in the conspiracy of 1864 and has estab- 

 lished the village of Islampore, near the railway sta- 

 tian of Pakour. The head of the Soorujghur depot 

 is that Abdool Ghunnee, hide-seller, who was sec- 

 retary to the Patna conspirators, and was by them 

 deputed to assist the recruiting depot at Thanesur. 

 Ibrahim and Abdool Ghunnee have for years been 

 receiving crescentaders and money, and passing them 

 on to the frontier, exactly as Ahmedoolla did, but on 

 a larger scale. The papers already discovered refer 

 in a somewhat compromising manner to Mussulman 

 gentlemen at one time in the confidence of the au- 

 thorities in Calcutta, and point to Moorshedabad as 

 an important centre of treason. The conspiracy, 

 though still, as it has been all along, identified with 

 the Wahabees, or Islamites as they now call them- 

 selves, is by no means confined to them. Let us 

 give two instances. A band of Mussulman beggars, 

 suspected to be crescentaders, on their way to the 

 northwest lately, attracted the attention of the 

 police. Detectives in disguise managed to worm his 

 secret out of the leader, who was discovered to be a 

 perfect Persian and Arabic scholar, and to possess 

 not only a copy of the Koran which he expounded, 

 but a series of credentials from the Moollas of Samar- 

 cand and Bokhara, and many others. This Haji 

 Mahomed, as he called himself, is to be deported 

 from India under the Foreigners' Act of 1864, if he 

 is again met with, but it is now impossible to trace 

 his band, which did not consist of ordinary Waha- 

 bees. Again, there is evidence that the Akhoond of 

 Swat, however much he may oppose the Wahabees 

 as rivals, is pledged to a crescentade against us. 

 The returning Wahabees confess that his great argu- 

 ment is, that no one can become permanent master 

 of India unless he invades it from the north, and as 

 the infidel English sneaked into the country from 

 the south, they will soon be driven out. It is on rec- 

 ord that when Azim Khan, the dispossessed usurper 

 of Cabul, was on his way to Toorkistan in 1865, he 

 visited the Akhoond, and, in return for his blessing, 

 promised to proclaim a Jehad. He was to begin by 

 expelling our representative from Cabul. When, in 

 consequence as he believed of that blessing, he 

 gained the battle of Shekabad, which made him 

 master of Afghanistan, the Akhoond sent a moolla 

 as an envoy to Cabul to remind Azim Khan of his 

 promise. That moolla, in open Durbar, urged a 

 crescentade against the English ; Azim Khan backed 

 his entreaties, and only the influence of Mahomed 

 Eufeek Khan, with the nominal Ameer, Afzul Khan, 

 silenced the fanatics. 



On November 30th, the Calcutta corre- 

 spondent of the London Times reports con- 

 tinued arrests of "Wahabees by the detective 

 police of Bengal. He writes : 



