Daily Times

My article (‘Pakistan and Israel: Study in contrasts’, Daily Times, April 14, 2014) last week provoked some very interesting reactions. One of them was by a renowned scholar who felt that I was critiquing Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion and rather poorly at that. I was aware of the existence of this book but my article was in no way related to it. I subsequently spent some time reading several chapters of the book to understand what Mr Devji proposes in it. In addition to the book, I found some extremely interesting lectures by the author where he explains the central thesis of his book. While I have read a considerable number of pages of the book and have a fairly good idea of its central thesis, I have not read the entire book. It is an extremely readable and provocative book, which is both well researched and intelligently articulated. Of special interest is the parallel he draws between the founding father Jinnah and the central character of Voltaire’s play Mahomet. Yet it is here that you begin to see that the ultimate conclusions drawn by the author are rather forced and do not naturally flow from the narration of events. For example, he asks that like Voltaire’s central character, was Jinnah toying with the idea that it is possible to fool the people for their own good? This then is belied by his own observation that Jinnah was more “devilish than the devil” because he did not “tempt” people with his demand.

Devji observes that Pakistan itself was a radical departure from the Islamic past and not its continuation because Jinnah, being a western educated lawyer who was probably an agnostic (in Devji’s view), could not be located in the majority Sunni Islamic milieu of the Indian subcontinent. So far so good, and the comparison on the face of it between the founding of Israel and Pakistan seems obvious — two national leaderships that were not religious creating homelands on the basis of religious identity. In Devji’s view, to suggest that the Pakistan demand was a bargaining counter downplays the seriousness of the demand. Israel and Pakistan, he says, together pose radically different ideas of nationhood than existing nation states, which he says are defined by territoriality and their historical past. He also states, in one of his lectures, quite disingenuously, that Zafrullah Khan’s comments distinguishing Pakistan from Israel in the United Nations (UN) on grounds that Pakistani Muslims resided historically in areas demanded in Pakistan were intellectually dishonest because it overlooked the large Muslim migration to Pakistan. Devji also claims — inaccurately — that Pakistan limits migration into Pakistan to Muslims only. A central plank in Devji’s claim is General Zia’s famous comparison between Israel and Pakistan.

In my view — as I expressed in my last article — the purported similarities between the creation of Israel and Pakistan are a case of overreaching. Pakistan was a territorial demand in so much as it asked for Muslim majority areas of India to be constituted as a federation (or a sub-federation). It was explicitly stated in this demand that there would be little or no exchange of populations and that non-Muslim minorities would be equal members of this federation. Implicit in the demand was the idea that the Muslim federation would either be an autonomous part of an overall Indian union or would have treaty relations that would preserve Indian unity while resolving the demand of Muslim majority provinces for a certain level of autonomy from the Delhi centre. At most, it only envisaged two federations, one Hindu majority and one Muslim majority, which would replace the British Indian Empire. The Muslim majority federation in any event would under this scheme contain about 35 to 40 percent non-Muslims, to be equal citizens of this new federation or state. Israel on the other hand was — much like Liberia in Africa — a question of settlement or re-settlement. Devji’s attempt to conflate the idea of migration with the idea of resettling an entire population in a different area is superficial at best. In Israel’s case, the migrated population was close to 100 percent whereas the migrant population in Pakistan as a result of partition came out to at most five percent. Nor is the idea of religion as a demarcation of difference unique to Pakistan and Israel. The dispute in Ireland is a case in point. Jinnah himself made references to the Irish case and even the term ‘Two Nation Theory’ was borrowed from the Irish ‘Two Nations Theory’. As in the case of the Irish Catholics and Protestants, the South Asian Two Nation Theory made an exclusively territorial claim, i.e. Indian Muslims are a nation and never that Muslims everywhere were a nation. In many ways this was similar to the case of Turkey where through the treaty of Lausanne, religion as ethnicity was accepted as the basic principle for the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece.

Devji is quite correct in noting Jinnah’s emphasis on a social contract and that Jinnah saw partition itself as a social contract between Hindus, Muslims and the British. Jinnah’s idea of a social contract however was premised on constitutional equality. “In due course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in a religious sense because that is the personal faith of an individual but in a political sense,” said Jinnah famously. He expected that with the partition of India, both India and Pakistan would be able to bury the idea of minority nationalisms and settle down in the future around national identities that were Indian or Pakistani. Pakistan therefore could not afford to be the Muslim Zion in South Asia because it was too big and diverse a country to lend itself to a mono-communal identity. What Devji calls an “empty idea” of Islam referring to the vagueness of Islamic principles that Jinnah referred to was actually the maximum common denominator for Indo-Muslim nationalism that led to the creation of Pakistan. As a result Devji’s contention that the Islamists, who had logically opposed the creation of Pakistan, constitute a more faithful expression of the national project of Muslim Zion, is both historically and politically untenable. Indeed the so-called national project then, has only served to weaken the country. Pakistan must be what all the people of Pakistan want it to be and not just the most significant dominant group. Pakistan can only exist through a social contract between the various groups — cultural, ethnic, religious and sectarian — in Pakistan playing their part equally and not asymmetrically. This is the basic idea around which Pakistan was demanded in the first place.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com