In its new garb, a SIMI faction found IM perfectly conveyed "home grown" militancy. The harkening to the two shaheeds — Sayeed Ahmad and Shah Ismail — marks a connection of a Delhi-based madrassa that attracted notice in the late 17th century under Shah Abdur Rahim as Madrassa Rahimiya. The school came up as part of a protest against the anti-orthodox views and policies of Akbar and was a centre of Hanafi learning.
The madrassa really came into its own under Rahim's son Shah Waliullah who is variously regarded as "reformer" or "hardliner". This apparent contradiction stems from his bid to rid Islam of "impurities" and "false beliefs" that had crept in. His views reflected the Muslim clergy's disquiet and anger but he gave it a sharper purpose, advocating "reform" of Islamic practices in line with those of early Muslims in Arabia.
Waliullah took a stringent view of Sharia and was pessimistic about the faith of converts. He advocated the need for persuasion to explain religion's superiority and scholars such as Sayyid Athar Rizvi and K S Durrany point to his injunctions against "polytheists and hypocrites" and opposition to influences of pre-Islamic Arabia and Greek philosophy in Islam.
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9:03 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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