Daily Times

This is in response to Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed’s piece on 3 January 2018. I had made up my mind not to respond to his articles but there were startling inaccuracies in his piece, which need a response.

The first inaccuracy is his claim that Kemalist Turkey separated religion and state in 1924. This is historically untrue because in October 1923 when the great Ataturk, in my opinion one of the greatest figures in world history, declared Turkey a Republic, the constitution proclaimed that the religion of the state would be Islam. This was amended in 1928 and secularism was formally introduced into the Turkish constitution. The introduction of a state religion in 1923 had been a matter of political necessity as Ataturk later explained in his six days speech in 1928. The Lausanne Convention for Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed on January 30th 1923, that Ataturk had managed to negotiate defined religion as ethnicity for the basis of an exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. It provided for a simultaneous expulsion of Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey and Muslims in Greece to either country. Religion in this case superseded ethnicity and language. The Muslims who moved eastwards into Turkey did not speak Turkish but were recognised as Turks by the Turkish leaders. Similarly, Greek Orthodox Christians who moved to Greece were Turkish speakers and spoke little or no Greek. Dr BR Ambedkar, who was one of the finest constitutional lawyers of the subcontinent and the spirit behind India’s constitution of 1950 (not 1949 as claimed by Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed), cited the Lausanne Convention as a precedent in his exposition of the Muslim League’s case for Pakistan in his classic “Pakistan or Partition of India”.

In several letters, Gandhi routinely preached to both Jinnah and his equally modern wife Ruttie to give up their western ways, a proposition that was personally unacceptable to both. Contrary to the popular Pakistani view, Jinnah too respected Gandhi till the very end but found his preaching and moralising distasteful

Ataturk in the early days of the Turkish Republic was thus forced to rely on the idea of Muslim solidarity not just to accommodate these refugees but also the Muslim Kurds who spoke Kurdish. Accordingly, the mosques were directed to read out Khutbahs for Jumma prayers in the name of the Turkish Republic. Even after Turkey was formally declared a secular state in 1928, there were several compromises that the Republic had to make for consolidation. In 1932, through a parliamentary act, 200,000 Greek Orthodox Christians left in Turkey, protected under reciprocal provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne 1923, which followed the Lausanne Convention, were barred from 30 professions including medicine, law, tailoring, real estate and carpentering. This was done to economically empower the Turks who it was rightly felt had been left behind economically. Greek population in Turkey saw a steady decline especially after riots and pogroms in the 1950s against them. Today less than 2000 of them survive in Turkey and have faced discrimination be it under secular Kemalist governments or the more Islamic oriented ones. There was even a special tax levied against non-Muslims reminiscent of Jizya in Turkey. All this is contrary to Kemal Ataturk’s broader vision for Turkey as a modern secular state but even he was forced to go along with some of these measures at the time.

However, for his services in modernising Turkey and thereby opening new vistas in the collective Muslim political imagination, Kemal Ataturk was universally admired by secular Muslim modernists everywhere and especially in the subcontinent. Jinnah himself had read the book Grey Wolf by HC Armstrong during his time at Hampstead in the 1930s and his biographers speculate that it in no small way contributed to his decision to return to India and take up the cause of Indian Muslims. In 1938, while eulogising Ataturk on his death, Jinnah described him as ‘the greatest Musalman of the age’ and an example for Indian Muslims. Muslim League was then instructed to observe Kemal Day to commemorate Ataturk’s great legacy. The major difference between the two men was of varying models of inspiration. Kemal Ataturk studied closely and adopted the French ideal of secularism that had inspired the young Turks before him. Jinnah’s idea of a secular democracy was essentially British in nature, and thus far more accommodating both of religious sentiment as well as religious and ethnic minorities. Hence in his August 11 speech, Jinnah delved in some detail into Great Britain and its history of Protestant and Catholic conflict. Even though Pakistan departed from that vision starting with the Objectives Resolution, one must point out that Pakistan’s first two constitutions did not have a state religion.  Under the Constitution of 1956, the office of the prime minister was open to non-Muslims.

Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed has provided the reference for Gandhi’s quote about Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA) and Hazrat Omar (RA). Gandhi left behind an extraordinary large body of writing and I acknowledge that I may have overlooked the said quote. In the 1920s, Gandhi had alarmed most of the secular Indian nationalists, including Jinnah, CR Das and even Motilal Nehru, when he began referring to Hindu concepts like Ram Rajya and texts to mobilise the masses. Even Jawaharlal Nehru complained about it in his writings, even though he later merrily went along with it taking on the prefix Pandit with his own name. Simultaneously, Gandhi also encouraged Muslims religious divines to take on Muslim community leadership, further alarming Jinnah, who feared marginalisation of secular and liberal Muslims like himself. While Gandhi had great regard for Jinnah personally, it is clear that Gandhi was quite uncomfortable with Jinnah’s westernised lifestyle and secular modernity. In several letters, Gandhi routinely preached to both Jinnah and his equally modern wife Ruttie to give up their western ways, a proposition that was personally unacceptable to both. Contrary to the popular Pakistani view, Jinnah too respected Gandhi till the very end but found his preaching and moralising distasteful. It is a strange irony that while Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed criticises Jinnah for his references to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and Islam during the Pakistan Movement, he cites approvingly Gandhi’s reference to Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA) and Hazrat Omar (RA) as examples of secularism. He also makes excuses for Gandhi’s use of the term ‘Ram Rajya’. Gandhi was a great man but he was not without valid criticisms. The most scathing critique of Gandhi has come not from any Muslim but from the Dalit leader Dr BR Ambedkar who considered him nothing less than blue-blooded Hindu revivalist.

Finally, I am surprised that Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed continues to repeat the same old Majlis-e-Ahrar myths against a marginalised community like the Ahmadis, who extended wholehearted support for the Pakistan Movement. Zafrullah Khan did not pray behind Shabbir Ahmad Osmani because the latter considered him a non-Muslim. For those of us who have friends in the Ahmadi community know very well that Ahmadis do pray in funeral prayers for non-Ahmadis. Indeed I have seen several Ahmadi friends do it on several occasions. Some have even prayed in congregations that do not otherwise consider them Muslims. In the end, it is a personal choice. Contrary to the picture Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed is attempting to paint here, the Ahmadi leadership of the time, including their Imam Bashiruddin Mahmud as well Zafrullah Khan, considered Jinnah as one of the greatest Muslims of the 20th century. Now Ishtiaq Ahmed has also attributed to Mujib-ur-Rahman, a well respected advocate of the Supreme Court and a prolific author, an absolute falsehood. Contrary to Ishtiaq Ahmed’s insinuation calculated to get him into legal trouble, Mujib sahib’s reference to Islam, if at all he made such a reference, could not be sectarian in nature. I am still unable to understand what relevance do Ahmadis or their beliefs about a secular state have to the Objectives’ Resolution.

The writer is a practising lawyer. He blogs at http://globallegalforum.blogspot.com and his twitter handle is @therealylh

Published in Daily Times, January 6^th 2018.