Kashmir: The Rise of a Hard Faith

On a cool, bright morning this fall, I was on the scruffy grounds of a Salafi madrasa, located off a busy highway in a crowded and dilapidated part of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir. I wanted to meet with Abdul Lateef Al Kindi, a Salafi cleric, whom I had pursued hard for nearly three weeks, hoping to get an interview and permission to sit in his class.

Al Kindi has a busy schedule: from madrasa lectures and sermons to television interviews and brainstorming sessions with fellow clerics. He draws his credibility and popularity from having lived and studied in Saudi Arabia for 18 years, where he earned a PhD in Islamic studies. Like many graduates of the Islamic University of Medina, he goes by his nickname, Al Kindi—a new trend in which young Salafis in Kashmir adopt an Arabic-sounding sobriquet to demonstrate both their cultural familiarity with the birthplace of Islam and a more nuanced understanding of theological matters.

I asked a somber-faced doorman with a long beard and sunken cheeks for directions to the main office. At first, he was suspicious of a man in blue jeans, a partly buttoned, untucked shirt and sunglasses. He relented, guiding me through the wide hallways of an austere three-story building painted red and white, its bland architecture at odds with the decaying but graceful houses of its neighborhood.

Up a flight of stairs, he went inside the office of the chief cleric, a slight man with a white beard sitting behind a desk. The doorman whispered to him, pointing to where I stood in the hallway. The cleric gave me a hard stare. I bowed in reverence. He avoided my gaze.

I was directed to wait for the cleric outside where the morning sun beat down in the open courtyard. I was standing on a porch when a trail of young students with beards and wearing skullcaps, long shirts and billowy pants came out of a classroom. Clutching canvas bags filled with books, they walked past looking quizzically at the stranger in their midst. My presence, it seemed, was an intrusion into their closed world of rigid beliefs and doctrines. I smiled, but they looked away. I felt out of place and underdressed.

In the last few years, young Kashmiri Muslims are becoming part of the first generation of locally-raised Salafi followers. Drawn mainly from low-income families, they are schooled in a narrow interpretation of Islam that not only calls for a spiritual return to the era of the Prophet Muhammad, but also tries to infuse the currents of daily life with a pure Islamic spirit. And preachers like Al Kindi are playing a lead role in bringing this puritan faith to a region where religion was always a relaxed affair.

A short, portly and a self-assured man of 46, Al Kindi has a thick salt-and-pepper beard, a professorial bearing and a reputation for causing sensation by his divisive and iconoclastic views. In the last five years since he returned from Saudi Arabia to teach and sermonize in Kashmir, he has led a "charge of Puritanism," denouncing the practices of Sufism—a sect of Islam deeply embedded in Kashmir. According to Al Kindi, the Sufi practice of venerating the tombs and relics of saints is not a part of Islam, belonging instead to ancient Greek and Hindu mythologies.

The sun streamed through the long windows at the back of the classroom. A rapt class of two-dozen students seated in two rows listened to Al Kindi read from a book of Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, Salafi Islam's greatest icon. The young students are being trained in an Islamist discourse that stresses a cultural shift towards a uniform community of believers, stripped of local innovations, and infused with the cultural worldview of Arabia.

Al Kindi notes with regret how the lack of knowledge of Arabic language and culture in Kashmir has led Islam on a course where the line dividing it from the practices of other religions has blurred, allowing polytheistic practices to become part of Islam. He pleads with students to root out these "evil practices" and embrace a pure, strict faith.

The effect of preaching this strict faith across the valley of Kashmir has laid the ground for polarizing the local Muslim population. Followers of sects condemned by the Salafis are closing ranks, preserving what they believe is a faith blessed by the very saints who laid the foundation of Islam more than six centuries ago.