Daily Times

A little more than 90 years ago, the Governor of Bombay, Lord Willingdon, invited a leading lawyer-politician and his wife to dinner. The lawyer’s wife wore a strapless backless dress, which had been tailored on the boldest fashions of the day. The Governor’s wife, Lady Willingdon, insisted that the bearer bring her a shawl to cover her bare skin, which she found most improper. Incensed, the lawyer said that if his wife were feeling cold, she would ask for a wrap herself and then immediately left the dinner table.

The lawyer of course was none other than Mohammed Ali Jinnah, our founding father, but these facts are deliberately kept from our people. Instead, our people are brought up on a diet of shame and honour, inextricably linked to women.

The result is that a Station House Officer (SHO) — instead of fighting crime — feels that it is his duty to tell a respectable woman that she is a ‘loose woman’ for wearing a sleeveless shirt. A few days after the famous Nairang incident, this writer happened to visit NADRA for renewal of his National Identity Card (NIC), wearing knee-length shorts, only to be told that it was not allowed. When asked for a notification, the guard quickly pronounced me “beghairat” (shameless) and physically attacked me along with another guard. Apparently, my knee-length shorts were more obscene than the Punjabi film posters in the vicinity. I wonder what the aforesaid SHO and NADRA guards make of Quaid-e-Azam’s defence of his wife’s ‘indecent dress’? (In all fairness I must point out that the NADRA chairman, a rare enlightened man in the corridors of our bureaucracy, took the strictest notice of this issue and has since suspended those responsible.)

Unfortunately, quoting Jinnah is bound to get you branded ‘intellectually barren liberal’ on ‘foreign payroll’ as one respected journalist put it in his column.

He had taken as a personal insult the idea that liberals only quote Jinnah’s August 11th speech (though there are about 30 odd speeches by Jinnah that say the same thing, though perhaps less eloquently) to try and prove that Jinnah wanted a secular state. A plethora of quotes out of context are then produced to prove that Jinnah said different things at different times. One favourite it seems is Jinnah’s speech to the bar association in Karachi on Eid Milad-un-Nabi where a single line is quoted from the speech out of context to prove that Jinnah promised the enforcement of shariah in Pakistan. When one reads the complete speech, one realises that the Quaid is actually saying that nothing in Islam stops us from making a constitution that promises equality, justice and fair play for all citizens of Pakistan without distinction of religion.

Then there is the so-called letter of Pir of Manki Sharif. In the said letter, Jinnah promises the continuation of shariah for personal affairs of the Muslim community, i.e. personal law. The Shariat Act of 1937 is still on the books in secular India. Somehow these inferences that are being drawn by our mullahs and Jinnah-hating self-proclaimed intellectuals from selective quotes are supposed to trump Jinnah’s clear pronouncement as the President of the Constituent Assembly at the initiation of the constitution-making process. The speech, given immediately after Congress leader Kiran Shankar Roy’s speech asking Jinnah to clarify whether Pakistan would be a secular state or not, states very clearly that the new state would be completely impartial and neutral to a person’s religion, which is to be the personal faith of an individual. The speech calls for fusion of all communities into one Pakistani nation and for making religious identity irrelevant through cooperation and working together for a common goal. These are broadly the contours of a secular not religious state.

So what was — one might ask — the need for a separate state for Muslims? First of all, for Jinnah the idea that Muslims and Hindus had been unable to forge a common Indian identity was a matter of great regret. As the only political leader to be called the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, Jinnah had tried for 33 odd years to effect a settlement between Hindus and Muslims but his efforts were foiled by people on both sides. Unable to achieve his cherished goal of Hindu-Muslim unity on mutually acceptable terms in a United India, Jinnah pinned his hopes on the Muslim majority to be generous in Pakistan and bring about a common secular Pakistani identity in “due course of time”. Here he miscalculated for the Muslim majority in Pakistan has proved to be brutish and cannibalistic.

The point is that Pakistan was envisaged as and ought to be a secular state. To this end Jinnah becomes a very important marker and the only credible master signifier. It is Jinnah alone who stands — from beyond the grave — in the way of Muslim majoritarianism just as he had stood against Hindu majoritarianism in United India. When the MMA-led government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa tried to ban western dress, ANP legislators, no great admirers of Jinnah, used Jinnah’s portrait as their shield. So in order to ensure that Pakistan becomes a humanistic, liberal and inclusive democracy, we will first have to reclaim Jinnah — the real Jinnah who stood for civil liberties, minorities’ rights and equality for all. Or you can try to do it your way and fail.

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