While the consequences of this line of argument has no more than academic relevance for Pakistan, it has real and potentially chilling applications in Modi’s India...
Source/Credit: Daily Times | Pakistan
By Yasser Latif Hamdani | March 16, 2015
Were the Aligarh modernists, who spearheaded the Pakistan Movement, interested in creating a theocracy?
When Dr Ayesha Jalal wrote her bestselling work The Sole Spokesman, Jinnah, Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan in 1985, the national narratives of India and Pakistan were already pretty set. Pakistan’s creation was seen as the culmination of a millennial Muslim desire to create an Islamic state, brought to fruition by Jinnah, the formidable Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan and the number one villain in India. Dr Jalal’s groundbreaking work, researched and thoroughly sourced, changed all that.There were others who took cue. H M Seervai’sPartition of India: Legend and Reality came soon after. These works showed that Jinnah was not just willing to negotiate but had indeed accepted a compromise that would have kept India united and that Jinnah’s strategy was not wholly irreconcilable with the sufficiently imagined unity of India. Around the same time the previously censored pages of Maulana Azad’s India Wins Freedom (Azad himself had asked these pages to be published posthumously) were also published,confirming that Congress under Nehru and Patel pressed ahead with partition. The conclusion was unmistakable: partition had been the choice of the Congress leadership, in particular Nehru, who was unwilling to accommodate any departure from his own centralised vision for India.
Dr Jalal’s work was immediately denounced as anti-national in Pakistan. She also made powerful enemies in snobbish Indian academic circles who blocked her path to tenure at Columbia University. However, she persisted. Thirty years later, her views on partition constitute the new mainstream, so much so that the re-hashing of old nationalist myths of the pre-Jalal era, as done by VenkatDhulipala in his volume, Creating a New Medina, is considered ground breaking. I have addressed some of the fallacies in this book in my article ‘Creating a New Medina?’(Daily Times, August 18, 2014). In short, the book argues that Pakistan was not a vague idea but was a desire on the part of the Muslim community to establish a new Medina. Dhulipala has a hard time explaining why such desire did not translate itself into some sort of a document, such as, say, the Lahore Resolution. After all, the Lahore Resolution — the document supposedly cementing the so-called desire for a New Medina for Muslims — has no mention of Medina or even Islam for that matter. It does not explain why Jinnah had asked his colleagues, like the Raja of Mahmudabad, to distance themselves from the League when they began to harp on about Islam and Islamic laboratories. And it certainly does not explain why or how a Shia Muslim who was an anglicised lawyer, and not some Sunni maulana in flowing robes, who came to embody this desire of Muslims to establish this Medina. Similarly, the book has no answer to the question of why Bengal’s peasant Muslims threw in their lot with Pakistan. UP seems to be the main preoccupation of MrDhulipala’s work and there too it leaves a lot to be desired.
That the Muslims of North India had begun to see themselves as a people by the late 19th and early 20th centuries has never been doubted. But did this identity automatically mean a fundamentalist rigid variety vying for an Islamic state? Were the Aligarh modernists, who spearheaded the Pakistan Movement, interested in creating a theocracy? Sidestepping the whole intra-Muslim debate around modernity, Dhulipala conveniently imagines Muslims a monolith, downplaying the significance of a Shia Muslim leading a big tent non-sectarian non-theological Muslim party with representation of various sects, including Ahmedis, schools of thought and even class interests (peasants in the East, middle class in UP and feudal in the West). His narrative all but ignores the violent extremism of Majlis-e-Ahrar, a pro-Congress nationalist group, which started bigoted campaigns against Ahmedis and Shias primarily to undermine the Muslim League. He also forgets that mere commonality of the idiom does not make for a convergence of worldviews. The Iqbalian idealism of a National Assembly modernising Islamic jurisprudence to fit the needs of the times was very different from the fundamentalist revivalism of MaulanaMaududi’sJamaat-e-Islami (JI). Deobandi clerics like Ataullah Shah Bukhari, who had come to champion a perverse form of Hindu-Muslim unity based on the lowest common denominator,nonetheless refused to coexist with Shias and Ahmedis. This irony completely escapes Dhulipala as does the fact that the Muslim voters by and large rejected Bukhari and Maududi, choosing instead a seemingly irreligious barrister to represent them. This indicates secularisation if not secularism. Congress chose the wrong horse to back amongst the Muslims. Now Indian nationalist hagiography wants to paint it in different colours.
The Muslim League only managed to bring Muslims of different sectarian affiliations under its big tent by ensuring the religion and religious debates did not take centre-stage. So, when Ashraf Ali Thanvi — one of the few Deobandi clerics to support the Muslim League — appealed to Jinnah to institute congregational prayers in the League meetings, Jinnah asked him who — a Deobandi, Barelvi or Shia — would lead such a prayer and who would follow. Jinnah insisted on a practical form of secularism. He told his followers, supposedly on their way to create a new Medina, that he was not their religious leader but political leader. Muslims already had good Muslims but what they really needed was a great politician and Jinnah was just that: a Muslim not known to wear his religion on his sleeve but a politician of the highest rank. It is equally significant that irreligious Jinnah eulogised Kemal Ataturk of Turkey publicly and presented Turkey as the model for all Muslim nations. Jinnah was concerned about the material welfare of the Muslim community and wholly unconcerned with their spiritual wellbeing. To him, the issues before the Muslim community were economic and political, and the solutions were equally worldly. It was never about creating a new Medina.
More importantly, however, Jinnah’s idea of a Muslim homeland was not inconsistent with the idea of a greater India in a federal or confederal form. Dhulipala’s effort seems to be aimed at proving that even if Jinnah was ready to negotiate till the last minute, any compromise would not have lasted because the community was irreversibly committed to a separate Pakistan. The alternative would have been civil war. While the consequences of this line of argument has no more than academic relevance for Pakistan, it has real and potentially chilling applications in Modi’s India because much of the UP Muslim community that forms the basis of Dhulipala’s research is still intact. After all, he points out that Muslims of the Muslim minority provinces had raised the flag of Pakistan knowingly and that their post-independence repudiation of the League was based merely on political expediency. In other words, 170 million Muslims of India are to be seen as votaries of an Islamic order based on the early Islamic period.Do not be surprised if the Modi government in Delhi now confers greatest honours on MrDhulipala.
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The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com
Read original post here: Perspective: Defining Pakistan | Yasser Latif Hamdani
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