Source/Credit: Daily Times | Pakistan
By Yasser Latif Hamdani | August 29, 2011
Jinnah’s politics is not and should not be beyond criticism but that criticism should not be based on ideological snippets cobbled together as a consequence of the state’s right wing bias post-General Zia
Ayesha Jalal, probably the finest historian that this country has produced in 64 years, said in a recent interview that the Jinnah discourse as Ahmad Ali Khalid put it in his article ‘The Jinnah discourse’ (Daily Times, August 24, 2011) makes her hopeful that Pakistan will at some point hark back to the original vision that Quaid-e-Azam gave this country. As Mr Khalid put it in his well argued piece, the reason why the impulse for secularism in Pakistan survives in Pakistan is the deep structure that Jinnah, like any founding father, forms for this country.
In a country torn apart by ethnic and religious strife, Jinnah is only important marker for a nebulous inclusive Pakistani identity. This is not something unique to us. In the US you still find the legacy of founding fathers deeply and bitterly contested even though the last of them died some 180 years ago. In India, a country far more advanced democratically, the recent debate on Anna Hazare and his attempts to clothe himself in Gandhi’s image is also the same thing. Therefore, every time one reads an article by a self-professed liberal taking all the pains to discredit Jinnah as a legitimate marker in Pakistanis’ attempt to create a more humane and inclusive society, they are only shooting themselves in the foot. Their argument is based on out of context snippets borrowed rather liberally from the ideologues that the Jamaat-e-Islami (which had bitterly opposed the creation of Pakistan) have cobbled together to make a case for an Islamic state that is distinct from anything Jinnah had in mind. I addressed this argument in some detail in a paper titled ‘Was Jinnah secular?’ available online on the blogzine Pakteahouse.net as well as my article ‘The importance of Jinnah’ (Daily Times, August 15, 2011). Needless to say — in my view — it is a completely morally and factually bankrupt argument. Jinnah did not ever say Pakistan was to be based on Islamic texts. On the contrary, Jinnah repeatedly said that Pakistan’s future government would be based on the general will of the people who would be completely sovereign regardless of religion, caste or creed. Jinnah’s Eid message in 1945, when Pakistan was by no means a certainty (only a year later Jinnah agreed to a federated three-tiered united India), cannot trump what he said and did as the father of the nation and its first governor general.
Jinnah’s references to Islam — few and far between and far too few for someone who was trying to unite a minority community defined by religion — were an attempt to endorse through religion the idea of modernity and democracy for his people in a language they understood. His references to religion were far fewer than say those of the great Kemal Ataturk of Turkey who repeatedly said that Islam was a rational religion and throughout the Turkish War of Independence used Islamic slogans, opened Turkish Grand National Assembly’s meetings with eloquent Arabic prayers for the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and declared that Islam was the national religion of the Turks. Indeed one of the first things that Ataturk did — after the declaration of the Republic in 1924 — was to introduce Islam as a state religion, something that he overturned in 1928 after addressing the Turkish parliament in a mammoth six-day address. In comparison Jinnah vetoed several attempts to introduce a state religion for Pakistan. At the height of the Pakistan Movement, in Delhi session of the Muslim League, Jinnah called the attempt by a certain section in the Muslim League to commit through resolution the future government of Pakistan to an Islamic governance based on Quran, Sunnah, hadith and the edicts of the rightly guided caliphs nothing less than censure for any Leaguer. He reaffirmed that Pakistan’s people will be sovereign in Pakistan. Unlike Shahid Ilyas’s claim (‘Basing secularism on Jinnah’, Daily Times, August 23, 2011), Jinnah did not give God the premier place in society.
Most of Jinnah’s political life, which spanned over four decades, was dedicated to the service of the people of India, Hindus and Muslims alike, and their progress. His contributions as a legislator were always progressive. He helped pass the Child Marriages Restraint Act 1929 for which he was bitterly attacked by the religious class amongst Muslims. Much of his efforts during the 1910s and 1920s were directed towards the Indianisation of the army and greater indigenous control over economic policy. He spent a considerable amount of time attempting to get the British government to recognise universal education as a basic human right. He was a long time supporter of the bill to allow inter-communal marriage, which was — without renunciation of their respective faiths — banned in British India. At another time, he warned against the misuse of the proposed 295-A (the forerunner of blasphemy law) to quell dissent. His advocacy for human rights and civil liberties — again entirely on non-communal basis — was noted and appreciated by all. It was for these reasons and more that Jinnah alone in a galaxy of political stars of the time was called the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity. His political career — beyond just words — was in practice completely secular. No biographer of Jinnah, be it in India or the west, has ever concluded otherwise.
Pakistan’s idea itself was not what has been transmitted to us — the dream of a pan-Islamic poet galvanised by a Quaid. Instead it was — as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who understood the demand for Pakistan better than anyone else, wrote in an editorial published on March 23, 1949 in Pakistan Times — an attempt to end vertical division by introducing horizontal division amongst two major peoples of the subcontinent so that they could achieve a degree of harmony and collaborate with each other as equal stakeholders in this great subcontinent. This has not come to pass and Jinnah’s politics is not and should not be beyond criticism but that criticism should not be based on ideological snippets cobbled together as a consequence of the state’s right wing bias post-General Zia. The irony is that instead of coming up with a well reasoned critique of Jinnah’s politics, self-professed liberals merely parrot the rhetorical revision Jinnah has been subjected to by the Nazaria-i-Pakistan (ideology of Pakistan) crowd.
More importantly, any attempt to enlist Islamist rhetoric to prove — always unconvincingly — that Jinnah was not secular or did not want secular Pakistan ignoring everything Jinnah did from the moment he entered active politics in 1906, is itself counterproductive, if indeed the stated goal of a rational secular state is really what these writers are sincerely wedded to. If someone mentions Jinnah as an inspiration for a secular state, it should not discourage from seeking their inspiration elsewhere. What motivation is there then for these writers to attack anyone speaking of Jinnah is only something they can answer for as Shakespeare made Mark Antony say: “What private griefs they have, alas, I know not.”
The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore. He is also a regular contributor to the Indian law website http://mylaw.net and blogs on http//globallegalforum.blogspot.com and http://pakteahouse.net. He can be reached at yasser.hamdani@gmail.com
Read original post here: The Jinnah debate —Yasser Latif Hamdani
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