The hippie who became an imam

By Nadene Ghouri

Forty years after following the hippie trail to South Asia, John Butt is still living in the region, and still spreading a message of peace and love – though now as an Islamic scholar.

As our car turned around the bumpy Indian road, a gleaming white marble minaret came into view. My fellow passenger, John Mohammed Butt, could barely contain his excitement.

“Can you see it?” he asks. “It’s like the Oxford University of Islamic learning. For me these minarets and domes are just like the spires and towers of Oxford.

“It’s been almost 30 years since I was last here and I am still getting the same thrill. This is my alma mater.”

John Butt is the only Westerner to have graduated from Darul-Uloom Deoband

The alma mater in question is Darul-Uloom Deoband, South Asia’s largest madrassa, or Islamic school.

Driving through the madrassa gates, we entered a world rarely seen by Western eyes.

Deoband was built in 1866 by Indian Muslims opposed to the then British rule. Little has changed since – winding streets and tiny courtyards lined with stalls selling fragrant chai, bubbling pots of rice and paintings of Mecca.

Everywhere are the Talibs, religious students, young men with dark-eyed fervent expressions carrying books or quietly reciting the Koran.

And in another scene reminiscent of Oxford, students riding bicycles.

A chai seller recognises John and runs towards him. “John Sahib, John Sahib.”

The two had not seen each other in decades, yet the man remembers him instantly. “John Sahib was the only student I ever saw who used to go jogging.

“There was only one John Mohammed – unique,” he laughs.

That is perhaps not so surprising, when you learn that John Butt remains the first and only Western man ever to have graduated from Deoband.

He showed me his old dormitory room, a windowless cell where he spent eight years in a life of virtual seclusion, living under a regime of prayer and Koranic study.

Imposing figure

But that is just one facet of this man’s extraordinary life.

Aside from his time at Deoband, he has spent most of the past 40 years living among the fierce Pashtun tribes, who inhabit the lawless hinterland between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He went there in 1969, he says, as a dope-smoking young hippie and never came home.

He laughs. “When people call me an ageing ex-hippie, I always reply that I am ageing maybe, but I’m certainly not ex. I’m still a hippie.”

John Butt cuts an imposing figure.

At 6ft 5ins (1.95m) tall, he sports a long white beard and alabaster skin that is almost translucent.

Dressed in flowing white ethnic robes, he reminds me of a Benedictine hermit monk or a Victorian explorer, swashbuckling straight out of the pages of an historical novel.

He tells me he adores the Queen, Stilton is his favourite cheese and that football is his passion.

Yet among the border tribes, he is regarded as a native Pashtun and revered as an Islamic scholar.

Home for him, until recently, was a tiny village in Pakistan’s Swat valley.

Swat was once a popular tourist destination but is now the scene of regular battles between the Pakistani military and the Taliban.

But back in 1969, the young John was hooked from the moment he saw Swat, describing to me snow-capped mountains, rivers like flowing jewels, forests and alpine pastures.

It was, he says, “like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, magical and other worldly” inhabited by tribal people who were “very pleasant, big-hearted, tolerant, easy-going and welcoming”.

When his fellow hippies grew up and went home to become accountants and lawyers, John stayed on – becoming fluent in the Pashto language and studying Islam.

But John’s world changed in the late 1980s, with the arrival of jihadists, who came to the border areas from all over the world to fight the war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

“I saw the rural, religious Pashtun way of life I had come to love so much being diluted, contaminated and poisoned, in particular by Arabs from the Middle East,” he says.

“The way they practise Islam is very different to the tribal areas, but they used money and influence to impose their own set of values.”

So he decided to fight for his adopted culture.

Peaceful Islam

In the early 1990s, he joined the BBC World Service Pashto service and helped to set up New Home New Life, a now iconic Afghan radio soap opera, known as The Archers of Afghanistan.

Six years ago, he set up a radio station which broadcasts across the Afghan-Pakistan border and which tries to promote tribal traditions along with peace and reconciliation.

More recently, John has switched his attentions back to Afghanistan and is spearheading the formation of a new Islamic university in the predominantly Pashtun city of Jalalabad.

“It makes perfect sense. There is currently nowhere in Afghanistan where a young man can do higher Islamic studies. They go to Pakistan, where as we know some of them have become radicalised,” he says, emphasising that his university will give a platform to moderates.

But this promotion of peaceful Islam has set him on a collision course with militants. His beloved Pakistan has now become too unsafe for him.

“Swat is a militarised zone and people I see as foreigners there now treat me like I’m the foreigner, even though I lived there for 40 years.

“It’s hard to work out who is who any more – who is Taliban, who is criminal. The waters are very muddy.”

Last year, waters of another kind finally put paid to his idyll, when his house was washed away in the floods which devastated the area and killed thousands.

“It was a relief in some ways. When I lost the house, I knew I’d never go back there.”

Afghanistan has also become increasingly perilous after Taliban death threats.

The Taliban have delivered so-called night letters – notes hand-delivered in secret and at night for maximum impact – warning students not to study at the university and denouncing John as a Christian missionary or an “orientalist”.

Death threats have also been made to his teachers and staff.

“I’ve hired some of the best Islamic scholars in the region – pious, good and brave men,” he says. “They know this is for the benefit of Afghanistan and they insist they will stay working with me despite the dangers.”

As I said goodbye, he was planning to travel to Jalalabad on the local bus. We talked about the possibility of him being attacked and he admitted he could easily be killed.

But when I asked if he was scared, he brushed me off with a shrug. “You only die once. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

The insidious Indian propaganda

By Dr S.m. Rahman

The internet has become a vehicle to fan preposterous propaganda by the agencies in India, in order to promote ‘Hindutva’ sensibility to raise scare and trepidation among the Hindus that Pakistan in collusion with Bangladesh and Indian Muslim are now planning for a second partition of the subcontinent to carve our a much bigger chunk of territory out of India, which they have named as ‘Mughalstan’ that will comprise Pakistan, Bangladesh, including all of North and Eastern India. The so-called Mughal Muslim state will merge Pakistan and Bangladesh through a large corridor of land running across the Indo-Gangetic plain – the heartland of India. Jinnah’s Pakistan was envisaged to have the whole of Bengal and the Punjab – besides a corridor which could provide land links between the ‘west’ and the former ‘East Pakistan’. The moth-eaten Pakistan was accepted only ‘temporarily’ as Jinnah thought it expedient to accept what was made available, under the exigencies of the circumstances, but the idea of ‘Greater Pakistan’ was shelved for an appropriate time, as a necessary outcome of the partition, which the Hindu India had to reconcile with.

For propaganda message to appear credible a source had to be identified. It was deemed expedient to select Bangladesh, where this idea of Mughalstan was conceived and covertly planned at Jahangirnagar University, jointly supported by the ISI of Pakistan and DGFI (Director General Forces Intelligence of Bangladesh). In propaganda parlance, this is called ‘Black Propaganda source’, which is based on total distortion as the real originators are operating from somewhere else. It is for our intelligence agencies to find out as to from where such “hate propaganda” is being disseminated. They have also concocted an organisation called Mughalstan Research Institute (MRI) at Jahangirnagar University. The objectives of the propaganda are focused on the following themes so that Indian Hindus see the so-called vicious game the Muslims are playing to further divide Bharat, and that they are not content with the creation of Pakistan – an Islamic Republic and Bangladesh though apparently ‘secular’ nourishes deep Islamic ethos:

Ø The Punjabis pronounce Mughalstan, i.e. what is against the usual Urdu pronunciation Mughalistan. This is to establish that the ISI (Punjabi dominated organisation of Pakistan) is the contributor of the name. Such little details are meant to establish the credibility.

Ø The Islamic jihadis in India are being funded and organised by the Muslim countries, like Saudi Arabia and others.

Ø Osama bin Laden is behind the concept of ‘Greater Pakistan’ to liberate the Muslims of India from the domination of Hindus. The Mumbai bombings of 1993 was led by Karachi-based Dawood Ibrahim (a fugitive who is very much wanted by India for the crimes he committed), besides Jamat-i-Islami, Lashkar-i-Tayyaba, Jaish-i-Muhammad and Hizbul mujahideen all are involved in planning a greater Islamic country in the subcontinent. The Indian mujahideen are also involved and the students of Islamic Movement in India (SIMI) are partners in this mission.

Ø Hindus are declared enemies by Lashkar-i-Tayyaba and Jaish-i-Muhammad, and besides liberating Kashmir they have vowed to hoist the Islamic flag atop the historic Red Fort after capturing Delhi and the rest of India.

Ø Establishment of an Islamic caliphate is the objective of SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India) and as such they have launched jihad in the Indian States, as secularism, democracy and nationalism – the keystone of the Indian statehood, are antithetical to Islam. The Indian mujahideen have claimed responsibility for bombings in Lucknow, Vanarsi and Faizabad, Banglore, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and New Delhi in 2007 and 2008. Their role models are Muhammad Bin Qasim, Muhammad Ghouri and Mahmood Ghaznavi. They consider ‘Hindu blood’ as the cheapest of all mankind, and taunt Hindu history as full of subjugation and humiliation.

Ø Muslims population is steadily rising in the UP state, as it has risen to 18 percent and in Bihar 17 percent. A vast number of mosques are disproportionately growing through excessive funding by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Ø Muslim Banghbhoomi comprises various districts along the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bangladesh borders. Bangladesh is craving for Taliban type militants and madrassas are teaching that the Muslims are the best in the world and that the non-Muslims are “to be converted, beaten, killed and their women are to be raped as maal-e-ghaneemat.” Atrocities against Hindus in Bangladesh can be seen from the fact that there is no single woman between the ages of 7 to 70, who has not been raped.

Ø Bangladeshis have succeeded in infiltrating into Maripur, Mizoram, Meghalaya. Arunchal Pradesh and Tripura. In other words, they are responsible for fanning fissiparous trends in many of the states of India.

The message, therefore, is loud and clear that Hindus must rise to stop this grandiose plan of the Muslims. Mughalstan is not a question of “If” or “but”, but “when”, unless we, “Hindus” stand up to counter the treacherous plan. Undoubtedly, all this implicitly carries a message of coercive policies against the Indian Muslims, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The ostensible purpose of the propaganda is to malign both Bangladesh and Pakistan. The whole propaganda is motivated by a typical Kautalian sensibility to use deception, duplicity and deceit to fan hatred against the Muslims. It is also aimed at frustrating all the attempts to bring peace and cooperation between Pakistan and India through much dramatically publicised Aman Ki Aasha. One should interpret the outlandish proclamation by the Indian Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor that India was capable of defeating both Pakistan and China within 96 hours. Stereotyping Muslims justifies all actions to destabilise Pakistan and even to launch a war if necessary.

The hate against Muslims is a combined strategy of the US, Israel and India. Thus, the so-called War on Terror has a covert design to suppress the Islamic resurgence and undermine its identity through a well-orchestrated plan. Pakistan should not dismiss it as a ‘whimsical idea’. There’s a method in the madness. They have killed around 90,000 Muslims in Kashmir alone notwithstanding regular communal riots like the one in Gujrat, where Muslims were cut into pieces like vegetables. Besides Muslims, Sikhs have been killed to the tune of 250,000 in the operation against the Golden Temple. A significant number of Christians have also been slaughtered only in Orissa. Dalits are being most brutally treated at the hands of Hindus, and yet the propaganda is to whitewash the Hindu propensity for violence.

Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah was indeed a man of great foresight. He saw through the game, the Hindus were playing that they were the true inheritors of the British Empire and everyone else was to be left high and dry.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world is uncritically accepting the Indian propaganda that it is a vibrant democracy, quite oblivious of the reality that India is notoriously following its apartheid repressive policy against its religious minorities. They are covertly planning to destabilise through subversion in Balochistan, tribal areas and extending it to Punjab and Karachi.

George Orwell said very rightly: “In time of universal deceit, telling to truth is a revolutionary act.” The truth must be heeded to and our countrymen must rise against Indian machinations.

The writer is secretary general, FRIENDS.
Email: friendsfoundation@live.co.uk