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foster an Islamic ascendancy. Revivalist groups blamed the collapse of
their empire on a society that had strayed too far from the teachings
of the Koran. They promoted a return to a more pure form of Islam,
modeled on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Others embraced the
modern ways of their new rulers, seeking Muslim advancement through
the pursuit of Western sciences, culture and law. From these movements
two great Islamic institutions were born: Darul Uloom Deoband in
northern India, rivaled only by al-Azhar University in Cairo for its
teaching of Islam, and Aligarh Muslim University, a secular
institution that promoted Muslim culture, philosophy and languages,
but left religion to the mosque. These two schools embody the
fundamental split that continues to divide Islam in the subcontinent
today. "You could say that Deoband and Aligarh are husband and wife,
born from the same historical events," says Adil Siddiqui, information
coordinator for Deoband. "But they live at daggers drawn."

The campus at Deoband is only a three-hour drive from New Delhi
through the modern megasuburb of Noida. Strip malls and monster
shopping complexes have consumed many of the mango groves that once
framed the road to Deoband, but the contemporary world stops at the
gate. The courtyards are packed with bearded young men wearing long,
collared shirts and white caps. The air thrums with the voices of
hundreds of students reciting the Koran from open-door classrooms.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

Founded in 1866, the Deoband School quickly set itself apart from
other traditional madrasahs, which were usually based in the home of
the village mosque's prayer leader. Deoband's founders, a group of
Muslim scholars from New Delhi, instituted a regimented system of
classrooms, coursework, texts and exams. Instruction is in Urdu,
Persian and Arabic, and the curriculum closely follows the teachings
of the 18th century Indian Islamic scholar Mullah Nizamuddin Sehalvi.
Graduates go on to study at Cairo's al-Azhar and Islamic University of
Medina in Saudi Arabia, or found their own Deobandi institutions.

Today, more than 9,000 Deobandi madrasahs are scattered throughout
India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, most infamously the Dara-ul-Uloom
Haqaniya Akora Khattak, near Peshawar, where Mullah Mohammed Omar, and
several other leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban first tasted a life
lived in accordance with Shari'a. Siddiqui visibly stiffens when those
names are brought up. They have become synonymous with Islamic
radicalism, and Siddiqui is careful to disassociate his institution
from those that carry on its traditions, without actually condemning
their actions. "Our books are being taught there," he says. "They have
the same system and rules. But if someone is following the path of
terrorism, it is because of local compulsions and local politics."

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College
at Aligarh in 1877, studied under the same teachers as the founders of
Deoband. But he believed that the downfall of India's Muslims was due
to their unwillingness to embrace modern ways. He decoupled religion
from education, and in his school sought to emulate the culture and
training of India's new colonial masters. Islamic culture was part of
the curriculum, but so were the latest advances in sciences, medicine
and Western philosophy. The medium was English, the better to prepare
students for civil-service jobs. He called his school the Oxford of
the East. In architecture alone, the campus lives up to that name. A
euphoric blend of clock towers, crenellated battlements, Mughal
arches, domes and the staid red brick of Victorian institutions that
only India's enthusiastic embrace of all things European could
produce, the central campus of Aligarh today is haven to a diverse
crowd of male, female, Hindu and Muslim students. Its law and medicine
schools are among the top-ranked in India, but so are its arts faculty
and Quranic Studies Centre. "With all this diversity, language,
culture, secularism was the only way to go forward as a nation," says
Aligarh's vice-chancellor, P.K. Abdul Azis. "It was the new religion."

This fracture in religious doctrine =97 whether Islam should embrace the
modern or revert to its fundamental origins =97 between two schools less
than a day's donkey ride apart when they were founded, was barely
remarked upon at the time. But over the course of the next 100 years,
that tiny crack would split Islam into two warring ideologies with
repercussions that reverberate around the world to this day. Before
the split manifested into crisis, however, the founders of both the
Deoband and Aligarh universities shared the common goal of an
independent India. Pedagogical leanings were overlooked as students
and staff of both institutions joined with Hindus across the
subcontinent to remove the yoke of colonial rule in the early decades
of the 20th century.

Two Faiths, Two Nations
But nationalistic trends were pulling at the fragile alliance, and
India began to splinter along ethnic and religious lines. Following
World War I, a populist Muslim poet-philosopher by the name of
Muhammad Iqbal framed the Islamic zeitgeist when he questioned the
position of minority Muslims in a future, independent India. The
solution, Iqbal proposed, was an independent state for Muslim-majority
provinces in northwestern India, a separate country where Muslims
would rule themselves. The idea of Pakistan was born.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Savile Row-suited lawyer who midwifed
Pakistan into existence on Aug. 14, 1947, was notoriously ambiguous
about how he envisioned the country once it became an independent
state. Both he and Iqbal, who were friends until the poet's death in
1938, had repeatedly stated their dream for a "modern, moderate and
very enlightened Pakistan," says Sharifuddin Pirzada, Jinnah's
personal secretary. Jinnah's own wish was that the Pakistani people,
as members of a new, modern and democratic nation, would decide the
country's direction.

But rarely in Pakistan's history have its people lived Jinnah's vision
for a modern Muslim democracy. Only three times in its 62-year history
has Pakistan seen a peaceful, democratic transition of power. With
four disparate provinces, over a dozen languages and dialects, and
powerful neighbors, leaders =97 be they Presidents, Prime Ministers or
army chiefs =97 have been forced to knit the nation together with the
only thing Pakistanis have in common: religion.

Following the 1971 civil war, when East Pakistan, now Bangladesh,
broke away, the populist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto embarked
on a Muslim identity program to prevent the country from fracturing
further. General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq continued the Islamization
campaign when he overthrew Bhutto in 1977, hoping to garner favor with
the religious parties, the only constituency available to a military
dictator. He instituted Shari'a courts, made blasphemy illegal, and
established laws that punished fornicators with lashes and held that
rape victims could be convicted of adultery. When the Soviet Union
invaded neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979, Pakistan was already
poised for its own Islamic revolution.

Almost overnight, thousands of refugees poured over the border into
Pakistan. Camps mushroomed, and so did madrasahs. Ostensibly created
to educate the refugees, they provided the ideal recruiting ground for
a new breed of soldier: mujahedin, or holy warriors, trained to
vanquish the infidel invaders in America's proxy war with the Soviet
Union. Thousands of Pakistanis joined fellow Muslims from across the
world to fight the Soviets. As far away as Karachi, high-school kids
started wearing "jihadi jackets," the pocketed vests popular with the
mujahedin. Says Hamid Gul, then head of the Pakistan intelligence
agency charged with arming and training the mujahedin: "In the 1980s,
the world watched the people of Afghanistan stand up to tyranny,
oppression and slavery. The spirit of jihad was rekindled, and it gave
a new vision to the youth of Pakistan."

But jihad, as it is described in the Koran, does not end merely with
political gain. It ends in a perfect Islamic state. The West's, and
Pakistan's, cynical resurrection of something so profoundly powerful
and complex unleashed a force whose roots can be found in al-Qaeda's
rage, the Taliban's dream of an Islamic utopia in Afghanistan, and in
the dozens of radical Islamic groups rapidly replicating themselves in
India and around the world today. "The promise of jihad was never
fulfilled," says Gul. "Is it any wonder the fighting continues to this
day?" Religion may have been used to unite Pakistan, but it is also
tearing it apart.

India Today
In India, Islam is, in contrast, the other =97 purged by the British,
denigrated by the Hindu right, mistrusted by the majority,
marginalized by society. India has nearly as many Muslims as all of
Pakistan, but in a nation of more than a billion, they are still a
minority, with all the burdens that minorities anywhere carry.
Government surveys show that Muslims live shorter, poorer and
unhealthier lives than Hindus and are often excluded from the better
jobs. To be sure, there are Muslim success stories in the booming
economy. Azim Premji, the founder of the outsourcing giant Wipro, is
one of the richest individuals in India. But, for many Muslims, the
inequality of the boom has reinforced their exclusion.

Kashmir, a Muslim-dominated state whose fate had been left undecided
in the chaos that led up to partition, remains a suppurating wound in
India's Muslim psyche. As the cause of three wars between India and
Pakistan =97 one of which nearly went nuclear in 1999 =97 Kashmir has
become a symbol of profound injustice to Indian Muslims who believe
that their government cares little for Kashmir's claim of
independence, which is based upon a 1948 U.N. resolution promising a
plebiscite to determine the Kashmiri people's future. That frustration
has spilled into the rest of India in the form of several devastating
terrorist attacks that have made Indian Muslims both perpetrators and
victims.

A mounting sense of persecution, fueled by the government's seeming
reluctance to address the brutal anti-Muslim riots that killed more
than 2,000 in the state of Gujarat in 2002, has aided the cause of
homegrown militant groups. They include the banned Student Islamic
Movement of India (SIMI), which was accused of detonating nine bombs
in Bombay during the course of 2003, killing close to 80. The 2006
terrorist attacks on the Bombay commuter rail system that killed 183
people were also blamed on SIMI, as well as the pro-Kashmir Pakistani
terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). Those incidents exposed the
all-too-common Hindu belief that Muslims aren't really Indian. "LeT,
SIMI, it doesn't matter who was behind these attacks. They are all
children of [Pervez] Musharraf," sneered Manish Shah, a Mumbai
resident who lost his best friend in the explosions, referring to the
then president of Pakistan. In India, unlike Pakistan, Islam does not
unify, but divide.

Still, many South Asian Muslims insist Islam is the one and only force
that can bring the subcontinent together and return it to preeminence
as a single whole. "We [Muslims] were the legal rulers of India, and
in 1857 the British took that away from us," says Tarik Jan, a
gentle-mannered scholar at Islamabad's Institute of Policy Studies.
"In 1947 they should have given that back to the Muslims." Jan is no
militant, but he pines for the golden era of the Mughal period in the
1700s, and has a fervent desire to see India, Pakistan and Bangladesh
reunited under Islamic rule.

That sense of injustice is at the root of Muslim identity today. It
has permeated every aspect of society, and forms the basis of rising
Islamic radicalism on the subcontinent. "People are hungry for
justice," says Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani journalist and author of the
new book Descent Into Chaos. "It is perceived to be the fundamental
promise of the Koran." These twin phenomena =97 the longing many Muslims
have to see their religion restored as the subcontinent's core, and
the marks of both piety and extremism Islam bears =97 reflect the lack
of strong political and civic institutions in the region for people to
have faith in. If the subcontinent's governments can't provide those
institutions, then terrorists such as the Trident's mysterious caller,
will continue asking questions. And providing their own answers.

With reporting by Jyoti Thottam / Mumbai and Ershad Mahmud / Islamabad