LAST month an unidentified gunman hurled a grenade at a procession of worshippers in South Kashmir led by Abdur Rashid Dawoodi, a prominent cleric of the Barelvi sect. Five people—four of them children—were killed and many injured. While the prompt response from the government and the condemnations from across the state’s political divide contained any immediate fallout of the outrage, the incident brought out into the open the simmering sectarian schism, which over the past two decades has become the undertone to the Valley’s Sufi Islamic homogeneity.

The period of turmoil was crucial. For not only did Kashmir slide headlong into unremitting chaos but its social landscape also witnessed a sweeping crisscrossing of different political ideologies and a drift towards a new Islamic orthodoxy.

Most of the action came in the 1990s. Seminaries and madrassas influenced and inspired by the Deobandi thought, sprang up all over the Valley—their number, a rough estimate says, is 450-500.

Though madrassas in the Valley, in sharp contrast to their counterparts in Pakistan, steered clear of the militant struggle, the effect on the Valley’s traditional religious orientation has been far reaching. Thousands of students graduating from these institutions have started preaching the “pure, intrinsic Islam”, in line with the interpretations of Hazrat Abu Haneefa, the originator of Islam’s Hanfia school of thought followed by the Deobandis. They look down upon the inherent Sufi leanings of the people who visit shrines and seek blessings of the saints as generally antithetical to the spirit of monotheistic Islam, which doesn’t tolerate a worshipful attitude towards even the Prophet, leave alone saints. And their message is not lost on the people and has in fact resonated in the ears of the Kashmir’s new generation bred under the shadow of a rough Kalashnikov culture.

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