Tanveer Ahmed
How I access the history of Jihad in the valley
I hope your blog will be brave enough to give this write up its due space..
Nevertheless here it is
#rudranotes
The Fourfold Reckoning: Jihads of the Valley's Soul
In the shadow of Shalimar's frozen gardens, where the Jhelum whispers secrets of forgotten kings like Zain-ul-Abidin, a murmur rises from the Valley's heart: they said there are three jihads in force in the Valley. One more shall even the tables.
This is no mere slogan scrawled on a bunker wall; it pulses with the cadence of prophecy, a Kashmiri requiem for a land caught in eternal dialectic.
Think of it as echoing poets like Habba Khatoon, whose laments for lost lovers mirrored a people's exile, or modern militants' fatwas, framing conflict as divine phases ordained by the unseen hand of history. The first jihad erupted like a mountain storm in (19) '89—armed militancy at its rawest, boys with Kalashnikovs dreaming of caliphates amid the rubble of bunkers. Hizbul Mujahideen's thunder rolled through Srinagar's alleys, Lashkar-e-Taiba's fire scorched the Pir Panjal passes.
Schoolboys turned shaheeds, their blood scripting azadi on snow-dusted streets. This lesser jihad of flesh and fury birthed a generation of ghosts, where every crackdown fuelled the blaze—CRPF convoys ambushed, pellets blinding the innocent. It was the body's rebellion, visceral and immediate, yet it merely cracked the earth's crust. The second jihad shifted to shadowed boardrooms and fractured alliances: political separatism, waged with words sharper than steel. Hurriyat elders, kufis tilted like question marks, bartered in Delhi's corridors of power and Islamabad's labyrinthine bazaars.
UN resolutions yellowed like forgotten love letters, Article 370 frayed like a prayer rug under bureaucratic shears. Plebiscite pleas echoed in empty chambers, while engineered elections mocked the mandate of the masses. This was chess played on a bloodstained board—pawns sacrificed for kings who watched from afar, their diplomacy a veil over deeper designs.
The third jihad burns unseen, infiltrating the mind's hidden chambers: ideological and cultural, a war of whispers in the digital age. It flickers on Facebook feeds and encrypted Telegram chats, radicalizing restless youth who scroll past Bollywood glamour for beheading clips and fatwa threads. Cultural erosion clashes with demographic defiance—mosques amplify not just the azan, but algorithms of awakening. Here, online radicalization seeds sleeper cells in suburban homes, while assertions of identity reclaim narratives from history's erasers.
Consciousness fractures along these fault lines: the atman wrestles maya in pixelated dawns, as Sufi introspection meets Salafi fire. One more shall even the tables. The fourth jihad looms as a hypothetical tipping point, perhaps a mass uprising of the silenced millions or external intervention shattering the stalemate—not with guns or gavels alone, but a primordial surge of the collective soul. This mirrors prophetic styles in Urdu ghazals or Sufi texts, like those of Allama Iqbal, urging transformation amid oppression: Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai—the desire for uprising now stirs our hearts.
Iqbal's Asrar-e-Khudi (Secrets of the Self) frames it as ego's reconstruction, where oppression forges a new ummah, much like Habba Khatoon's Yusmane mane govan evokes longing turned to resolve. Philosophically, these phases probe the epistemology of resistance: are they external forces imposed by Delhi's iron fist or Islamabad's proxies, or inner dialectics of the self?
In Vedantic terms, the Valley embodies the play of purusha (consciousness) against prakriti (nature's chains), Hegel's thesis-antithesis barrelling toward synthesis. The three jihads represent maya's escalating illusions—militant rage, political mirage, cultural corrosion—culminating in the greater jihad: self-realization as revolution. When the Valley's atman stirs like Shiva's tandav, shattering colonial illusions, equilibrium dawns.
Oppressors' scales tip, not by fleeting force but the inexorable karma of history. The Jhelum flows free, tables evened in clay and cosmos. Yet this reckoning demands caution. Prophecy can intoxicate, birthing cycles anew. Will the fourth jihad liberate, or merely rename the chains? Kashmiris, stewards of Sufi syncretism—from Lalla Ded's ecstatic verses to Agha Shahid Ali's elegies—must wield it as mirror, not sword, reclaiming agency from zealots and states alike.
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