Daily Times

Every once in a while a new book on Pakistani history is published on Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s success at rallying a broad segment of Indian Muslims in support of his vision for the post-Partition political arrangement between Muslims and other communities of British India. And I am none the wiser because of this strand of scholarship, historian Ali Raza said on Thursday.

He was responding to a question posed to all four panellists at the launch of Muslims Against Muslim League at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Raza, an assistant professor of history at LUMS, said he was more interested in learning about the ways in which the idea of Pakistan was being envisioned on the ground by ordinary Muslim men and women.

Earlier, Ammar Ali Jan, a historian from Punjab University, highlighted that regardless of his personal beliefs Jinnah was able to maintain a critical distance from all aspects of religious life that had led to internal divisions within the Muslim community. This, he contended, enabled Jinnah to appeal to a broad segment of Indian Muslims. “Many of us in Pakistan still don’t know about the sect Jinnah came from. No other leader may have been able to form a cabinet [in Pakistan after British withdrawal] with representation of Ahmadis, Parsis, and Hindus in it,” he said.

While Jinnah remained careful to not make too many public statements on religion, in private he was quite unambiguous. Or so it would seem from panellist Tahir Kamran’s reference to an exchange of letters between Jinnah and Raja Sahib of Mahmoodabad

While Jinnah remained careful to not make too many public statements on religion before Partition, in private he was quite unambiguous. Or so it would seem from the example quoted by another panellist Tahir Kamran, the dean of Government College University’s School of Humanities.

Kamran shared with the gathering an exchange of letters between Jinnah and Raja Sahib of Mahmoodabad where the former had in a rather decisive tone told off the latter for suggesting that Islamic scriptures would provide the basis for Pakistan’s constitution.

Earlier, all four panellists discussed their contributions to the edited volume. The discussion started with the moderator Ali Usman Qasmi, one of the editors of the book, mentioning that the idea of the book originated from his conversations with Tahir Kamran at the University of Cambridge on Muslims thinkers and activists whose ideas of nationhood and whose contributions to the anti-colonial politics in British Indian had been ignored in the nationalist discourse in South Asia. “Debates on Pakistan’s creation do not take into account the voices of these Muslims,” Qasmi said, the dominant nationalist discourse in South Asia is concerned mostly with the Muslim nationalism of the All India Muslim League (AIML) and the composite nationalism of Indian National Congress.

Newal Osman, a historian teaching at Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, highlighted that her chapter in the book was on the Jinnah-Sikandar Pact signed a year after the 1937 elections in which AIML suffered a miserable defeat in the Punjab at the hands of the Unionists led by Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan. She said that the concept of Muslim identity in the writings of unionists like Sikandar pointed to a schizophrenic experience originating from the specific location of these politicians. Referring to Hayat’s federal schemes, she said that the unionist leader identified with the Muslim community at the national level but also wanted to retain provincial autonomy in the Punjab where he and others like were part of the cross-communal group of agricultural landholding elite.

Before Kamran’s talk on Chaudhry Rahmat Ali – best known from official history textbooks for having come up with the name of Pakistan – Qasmi shared an anecdote from his visit to Dhaka for a guest lecture, saying that no one in his audience during the lecture had known about Rahmat Ali. “Perhaps, it has to do with the fact that there was no B in the name he [Rahmat Ali] suggested for the country,” he said.

Kamran mentioned that Rahmat Ali was not very fond of Jinnah’s political positions and could best be understood as a pan-Islamist – a distinctly modern strand of Muslim political thought that influenced many in the Indian Muslim literary at that time.

Later, Ammar Jan delineated factors he said could be identified in most major political projects – nationalist or Islamist – in the post World War I era in non-European and colonised regions. On the relationship of these political actors with time, he said the devastation brought about by the war at a global level collapsed the prestige of Europe in the eyes of many of its Indian subjects at that time. There was an overwhelming feeling among these actors that a historical era had ended and a beginning was needed. It was in this context that these actors turned away from the electoral institutions Britain was establishing in the regions and towards alternative forms of popular sovereignty. With the collapse of Europe’s prestige, the desire for material progress [associated with European modernity] also started appearing suspect to these actors who, instead, resorted to disciplining themselves and teaching themselves to desire differently. This, Jan said, explains the emphasis laid by these actors and their movements on building institutions like ashrams, study circles, etc. He said there was also a tendency to celebrate violent conflict that could be elicited from the lives and works of Shaukat Usmani, a founding member of the Communist Party of India. In Usmani and others thoughts, violent conflict is seen as the only way for individuals to confront the demons of their past.

Ali Raza’s talk was on Mian Iftikharuddin, a leftist was also associated with the AIML. Raza said that for many leftists in the 1940s the support for Pakistan flowed from their position on the conflict between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Supporting Muslim nationalism was a way to ensure a united front against fascism, he said. Raza stressed that it was important to pay attention to the emptiness of words like freedom or azadi. “Communists filled this vessel with their own understanding of the notion of azadi,” he said. The disillusionment among the communists’ ranks that followed soon after the formal grant of independence was a common theme in most post-colonial thought, he added.

Published in Daily Times, October 13^th 2017.