Madrassa and terrorists in the expansion of Dar ul Islam

Many Westerners, and their red Indian (communist) followers have been commenting
that the perversion of the Madrassa to mass produce talibs and the use
of the so called asymmetric warfare in the form of terrorists is a
recent innovation of the otherwise “peace loving” Islamic world.
Nothing can be farther from the truth. I thought, I should bring to
the lists attention that these were integral aspects of the Mohammedan
war machine. If one were to carefully study Indian history they were
very much in place especially during the Sikh wars and the Maharashtra
campaigns of both the Mogols and the local sultans.

However, they are best illustrated in the campaigns of the expansion
of the greatest upholder of Dar ul Islam- the Osman sultans. In their
revived expansion following recovery from Timur’s invasion, the
sultans Mehmet the Conqueror, Selim the Grim and Suleiman the
Magnificent, caliphs of Islam, took defeat and destruction into heart
of Europe. While the remarkable organizational ablities and strategic
planning of these sultans cannot be ignored at the heart of their
machinery lay two fundamental instruments that have been largely
ignored in secular surveys of their rise to glory. The Osman sultans
repeatedly proclaimed that they were waging wars for no other purpose
other than the expansion of Dar-ul-Islam. The sultans literally waged
an annual jihad for this purpose. It is said that when Suleiman in his
old age failed to go on his annual jihad, his daughter chided him that
he had forgotten the duties of a Ghazi.

The two primary instruments of Osman success was the ghulam army of
the sultan called the Yenicheri and the vast army of the irregular
sipahis. The Yenicheri was recruited by the devshirme system- it
comprised entirely of young christian boys who had been captured from
Eastern Europe and forcibly converted to Islam (The women landed up
in the sultan’s Haram). Cut off from home and family, traumatized by
circumcision, they spent all their youth in madrassas, learning the
Koran, rigorous military skills and absolute devotion to the caliph.
They disallowed from marriage or property. With their pent up
frustrations directed in battle with nothing to live for but to die as
a shahid they formed the elite war machine of the Sultan that
delivered the coup de grace for the Dar ul harb from whom they had
sprung.

The other force of the Osmans was the irregular Sipahis who used to be
sent off to fan over the country side a few weeks before the main
march of the Sultan, his Begs and the elite Turkish cavalry via the
well maintained military roads. These irregulars indeed were homologs
of the very Islamic terrorists of today- terrorizing the countryside
through incessant raids and slaughter of the hapless immates. This
prevented any distraction for the march of the main elite force. Any
Armenian or Greek will tell you how effective these irregulars were as
late as the last century.

This model of action with the irregular terror specialist followed by
the elite division is essentially what Pakistan uses in both Kashmir
(Kargil) and Afghanistan. The analogy is complete when one sees the
production of the Talibs by the truck load, like the Yenicheri, to
become shahids to expand the Umma. If one looks harder, this analogy
is not a merely chance coincidence but a time tested model inherited
by the ISI quite directly from their Kilafat precursors.