History often portrays religious scholars and socialist revolutionaries as ideological opposites. Yet in the early decades of the twentieth century, a remarkable convergence challenged that assumption. A group of Deobandi clerics from British India embarked on a radical anti-colonial journey that took them through Afghanistan and into Soviet Russia, earning them the label “Surkhay Maulvi”, the Red Mullahs.
At the heart of this forgotten movement was Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi, a scholar whose life defied conventional categories. Born in 1872 into a Hindu family in Sindh, Sindhi converted to Islam and later studied at Darul Uloom Deoband, where religious learning was closely tied to resistance against British rule. For Deobandi scholars, colonial domination represented not only political subjugation but moral humiliation.
As the First World War destabilised global power, these clerics believed the British Empire was vulnerable. Their response was the Silk Letter Movement, a clandestine network that communicated plans for armed revolt using messages written on silk to evade British intelligence. Led by figures such as Maulana Mahmood Hasan and Ubaidullah Sindhi, the movement sought support from Afghanistan, the Ottoman Empire, and Germany.
When the plot was uncovered and arrests followed, Sindhi escaped to Kabul, where he helped establish a provisional government of India in exile. The gamble ultimately failed: Afghanistan hesitated, Germany lost the war, and the Ottomans collapsed. But a new force soon emerged.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 transformed the global political landscape. Soviet Russia’s anti-imperialist rhetoric resonated deeply with colonised intellectuals. In the early 1920s, Sindhi travelled to Moscow, where he encountered socialist ideas firsthand. Though he never abandoned Islam, he was impressed by land reforms, anti-feudal policies, and the emphasis on economic equality.
This ideological evolution unsettled both British authorities and traditional elites. Clerics speaking of class oppression and landlord exploitation were viewed as dangerous anomalies. The term “Red Mullahs” reflected both suspicion and alarm.
Politically, the movement failed to dismantle empire. Yet its intellectual legacy endured. Sindhi spent his later years writing on Islamic socialism and economic justice, returning to Pakistan shortly before his death in 1949, disillusioned by the persistence of feudal power.
Today, the Red Mullahs stand as a reminder that anti-colonial resistance was diverse and imaginative, and that the language of revolution once included both scripture and socialism.