(rpting yesterday's DI 27 for all needing)

New Delhi, Nov 5 (UNI) For four years William Dalrymple typed furiously into his laptop what his "co-conspirator" Mohamoud Farooqi sent him from the murky world of war and religion. The words were mostly about Muslims, mutiny and massacre. Some also pointed to jihad, the Taliban and the al-Qaeda.

The search into hitherto untouched Persian and Urdu documents on the Mughal empire by his colleague Farooqi, whom he calls "co-conspirator", in the National Archives of India gave Dalrymple what he wanted. Emerging from the old pages were the telltale accounts of what happened in 1857, the events many historians count as India's First War of Independence.

''I was fascinated by the revelations about Bahadur Shah Zafar and the great city of Delhi in mid-19th century," says Dalrymple, the British author, from a poolside chair at the five-star hotel only a couple of km from the Red Fort, once the mighty seat of the last Mughal Emperor.

The result of his years of research is 'The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857', which has passages that read like they are images of a post-9/11 world, like "a flag of jihad" raised against the British in Delhi and the presence of 'suicide ghazis' from Gwalior.

The words ' jihad' and 'madrasas', which had no resonance to earlier historians, scream out of the dusty pages of manuscripts demanding attention in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, says Dalrymple, the author of the 'City of Djinns' and 'The White Mughal'.

Like Pico Iyer, whose 2003 novel 'Abandon' about Persian Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi points to the dramatisation of Islam while ignoring the amazing treasures it has given to the West, Dalrymple says the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and Western imperialism have often been closely and dangerously intertwined. "The jihadis received a boost from the destruction of the Mughal empire by the British," he says.

After the 1857 uprising by both the Hindus and the Muslims under a reluctant Emperor, Indian Muslims found themselves in two opposing paths. "There was on one side this Sayyid Ahmad Khan who tried to make the Aligarh Muslim University he founded the Oxbridge of India.

On the other side was the Deoband, the grandfather of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda.'' "One- hundred- and- forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged the al-Qaeda, and the most radical and powerful fundamentalist Islamic counter-attack the modern West has yet encountered." Dalrymple puts Shah Waliullah, an 18th century Delhi divine and father of the radical Islamic Reform movement, on the same footing as the great abolitionist William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect that helped generate the spread of fundamentalist Evangelical attitudes in English Christianity or even the Reverend Midgeley John Jennings, the chaplain of the Christian population of Delhi during the mutiny, who told an elderly British lady who complained of the winter cold in the city that 'if her heart was warmer her feet would be so also''.

MORE UNI FZ HS NK DS1520