KNOWING YOUR ENEMY:

The late founder of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, graduated from a Deobandi seminary in Pakistan, along with several other Taliban leaders. But while Afghanistan's new rulers call themselves Deobandis, clerics here in the birthplace of Deobandi Islam are keen to distance themselves from the Taliban -- even if they occasionally speak admiringly of them.

"The Taliban say they are doing what we did in India. The way we kicked the British out of India, that's what the Taliban are doing in Afghanistan. They're kicking out outsiders: first the Russians, then the Americans," Maulana Arshad Madani, the 80-year-old principal of Darul Uloom, told NPR at his residence just outside the walled seminary's ornate brick gates. "What they say is right."

But Madani -- and everyone else NPR met in Deoband -- denied any contact with the Taliban and seemed uncomfortable with any association with them.

"They call themselves Deobandi, but 99% of the Taliban have never even visited India. We have no connection to them," Madani says. "The Taliban say our guiding idea -- of not being enslaved by anyone -- that comes from a Deobandi scholar who had gone [to Pakistan and Afghanistan]. Apart from that, there is no connection."

Scholars say he's right -- that the Taliban's version of Islam diverged from the original Deobandi movement in the latter years of the 20th century.

"The Indian Deobandi [version] is classical, whereas the one in Pakistan and Afghanistan is neo-Deobandi," explains Soumya Awasthi, a security expert at the Vivekananda International Foundation, a think tank in New Delhi. "I call it 'neo-Deobandi' because it's walking away from the true tenets of Deobandi Islam. It has a strain of Wahhabism in it," she says.

Wahhabism is another ultraconservative movement within Sunni Islam, named for the 18th-century Saudi theologian Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab. It's the version of Islam enshrined in Saudi law and practiced there today.

"After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Saudi Arabia was worried that the Muslim world would be dominated by a Shia country -- Iran. So they started funding [Sunni-majority] Pakistan to run these madrassas on their [Afghan] border," Awasthi says. "Slowly the Wahhabi culture came into Deobandi Islam."

Wahhabi influence grew in Pakistan and Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, when the CIA and Saudi Arabia both funneled arms to mujahedeen guerrilla groups fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, during the Cold War.

Over time, different strains of Deobandi Islam were influenced by the different politics of the countries in which they flourished: the Wahhabi-infused strain, practiced by the Taliban, whose adherents have attacked more moderate Muslims and people of other faiths, and the original Deobandi strain, which has existed overwhelmingly peacefully in India for more than 150 years.

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