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Although an overwhelming majority of South Asian Muslims has practiced several variations of Sufi Islam over history, the region has been home to minority puritanical movements resisting "un-Islamic influences" or non-Muslim rule. Most jihadi movements in South Asia have grown out of these Islamic revivalist movements. In recent years, jihad has been used by the fragile Pakistani state to bolster its national identity against India. Pakistan's crucial role as the staging ground for the anti-Soviet Jihad in Afghanistan created a nexus between Pakistan's military and secret services, which was heightened by the state sponsorship of jihad against India in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Several jihadi groups have emerged over the last two decades in Pakistan and Kashmir, occasionally spreading operations into parts of India. Some offshoots of radical Islamist movements in Bangladesh have also embraced jihadi ideology and rhetoric in recent years, increasing the prospect of militancy and terrorism in Bangladesh.
Sources of Islamism in South Asia
Until the decline of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century, Muslim rulers presided over South Asian kingdoms in which the majority of their subjects were Hindus. The exigencies of Muslim ascendancy in a nonMuslim environment demanded religious tolerance by the rulers and resulted in syncretism in the religion as practiced by local Muslims. Unlike in the Middle East, enforcement of Shariah in historic India was never complete. But Muslim ulema, muftis and qadis as well as laymen enjoyed a position of relative prestige as co-religionists of the rulers.
The rise of British rule, culminating in the formal addition of India to the British Empire after 1857, marked the end of the privileged position of Muslims. The Muslim community's response to the gradual decline in Muslim political power came in the form of revivalist movements seeking to sharpen an Islamic identity. South Asia's Islamist political movements trace their in- spiration back to Sheikh Ahmed Sirhandi's challenge in the sixteenth century to the ecumenism of Mughal emperor Akbar.
In the nineteenth century, the first jihadi group emerged in India and operated in the country's northwest frontier, including parts of present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. This puritanical militant movement fought the region's Sikh rulers. The rise of British power simply changed the militants' target. The movement's founder,...