Moulana Showkat also doesn’t agree that Ahle Hadith owes its spread to the circumstances of the past 20 years. “The spread of Ahle Hadith is the direct result of the spread of education in Valley,” he maintains.

But the sweep of Deobandi Islam is extensive. It envelops the Valley’s dominant religious and political movements, from the Tabligul Islam to the Jamaat-I-Islami. In fact, Jamaat-I-Islami, J-K’s leading religious, political as well as secessionist organisation has been the chief propagator of the Deobandi thought in Kashmir. Though the organisation was active in Kashmir since the late Forties, its influence did not seep down to the grassroots until the Eighties, the Valley’s last peaceful decade before the onset of the armed separatist struggle in 1989.

Jamaat influence also started from its schools, which by the 1980s had proliferated all over the Valley. That is, despite being denied state patronage by the National Conference leader Shiekh Muhammad Abdullah who had even unsuccessfully moved to close them down. But to its credit Jamaat schools set up under its party organ Falah-i-Aam Trust don’t teach only religion. They were and still are in step with the modern education. Even in the Eighties, Jamaat schools also taught Hindi as a subject right from the primary classes, which was not generally the case in the government run schools.

ON the other hand, madrassas in Kashmir are only a recent phenomenon. They set up base mostly in the Nineties when Kashmir was in the firm grip of separatist militancy. So, their coming cannot be seen in isolation from the larger geo-political situation in the sub-continent, particularly its Afghanistan component.

... contd.