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REFASHIONING IDENTITIES 141helped enhance the latter’s profile, their religiopolitical capital, withinPakistan—and this even the fall of the Taliban is unlikely to dissipate. Astriking illustration of this enlarged profile was offered in April 2001,when the Jam‘iyyat al-‘Ulama’-i Islam organized a large international conferencenear Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province, to celebratethe achievements of Deoband as a reformist movement. Participants camefrom throughout Pakistan, from India (including the head of the Jam‘iyyatal-‘Ulama’-i Hind and the Deoband madrasa’s own top-ranking professorof hadith), Afghanistan, and from other places. And among thosewhose messages were read out to the more than half a million people orso who had gathered for this three-day conference were the Taliban leader,Mullah Muhammad ‘Umar, and even Usama bin Laden. 146 This was apeaceful show of force, of Deoband’s international standing, even—somewhatawkwardly—of Islamic universalism and sectarian amity. 147 But itsscale was unusual, and the conference would have been inconceivablewithout the symbolic significance of the rise of the Deobandi Taliban inneighboring Afghanistan.On other occasions the rhetoric has been more strident. The specter of“Pakistani Taliban” taking over the state has often been raised in Pakistaniand international media, and never more so than after Pakistanjoined the American war effort against the Taliban. Though the Pakistaniruling elite have vehemently and repeatedly denied that possibility, 148 itis worth noting that certain Deobandi ‘ulama have sometimes adoptedprecisely such rhetoric to threaten the government. Following the assassinationof Habib Allah Mukhtar, the president of the Jami‘at al-‘Ulumal-Islamiyya of Karachi and one of the signatories to the aforementionedNovember 1996 letter of advice to the Taliban, some ‘ulama were reportedto have “warned the government against adopting an indifferentattitude [towards the assassination] and threatened that ‘Pakistani Taliban’will march towards Islamabad . . . if it continued to remain unmoved.”149 As the closest Pakistani ally of the Taliban, the Jam‘iyyatal-‘Ulama’-i Islam displayed considerable, though carefully calibrated,belligerence in the wake of Pakistan’s decision to side with the UnitedStates against the Taliban. Before impassioned gatherings of protestors,leaders of the organization branded president Pervez Musharraf as a“traitor,” 150 threatened the removal of his government through mass agitations,151 and affirmed, with the Taliban leadership, that jihad againstthe United States had become incumbent on Muslims everywhere. 152Such challenges have come, inter alia, from Mawlana Sami‘ al-Haqqand Mawlana Fazlur Rahman of the Jam‘iyyat al-‘Ulama’-i Islam, theSipah-i Sahaba, and from leaders of the Jama‘at-i Islami. 153 Once again,some of the Deobandi ‘ulama have been rather more ambivalent. Afterthe United States gave an ultimatum to the Taliban to turn over Usama