History, like still water, runs deep. When one dives into it one is likely to realise that there is nothing placid about it. There is no foreseeable bottom and, the deeper one goes, the more likely you are to encounter strange creatures that you had no idea even existed.
Many
such creatures can be fascinating to some, making them feel wiser about
what lies beneath the still surface of history. But some may be
apprehensive to dive deeper so as not to disturb the serene stillness of
the surface of history that they are most comfortable with.
Take,
for instance, the decades-long and unending debate in Pakistan on what
kind of country its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted. On the one hand,
you have the religious and centre-right parties insisting that Jinnah
had conceived Pakistan as an ‘Islamic Republic’, and it was only natural
that such a republic should evolve into becoming an ‘Islamic state.’ 
Would the Objectives Resolution of 1949 have materialised had Jinnah not passed away so soon after the creation of Pakistan?
On the other hand are the ‘moderate’ and ‘liberal’
intelligentsia who counter this argument by suggesting that Jinnah had
imagined Pakistan as a country where a former minority in India would
become a majority. But according to them, Jinnah wanted the new majority
to be driven by a modern, progressive and democratic interpretation of
their faith that would eschew the notion of theocracy because
non-Muslims in the new country were to be treated as equal citizens.
Both
sides dive into history only to stop and fish out material that they
believe would best serve their version of what Jinnah wanted. They wave
speeches and quotes of the man in an unending display of one-upmanship.
And yet, if one allows oneself to dive even deeper, one is often faced
with some puzzling quotes by him.
Such as this one from a
speech Jinnah made on April 23, 1943: “I think you will bear me out
that when we passed the 1940 Lahore Resolution we had not used the word
‘Pakistan.’ Who gave us this word? The Hindus fathered this word on us
…’
What was Mr Jinnah talking about? Dive deeper and you
will be able to conclude that Jinnah was explaining the Muslims’
insistence for a separate homeland as a reaction to the idea of an
exclusive Hindu domain first aired by Hindu nationalists in the late
19th century and/or almost 60 years before the Lahore Resolution!
This
is how: The late 19th century Hindu nationalist, Nabagopal Mitra, and
early 20th century men such as Bhai Paramanand, Lal Rajpat Rai, MS
Golwalker and V. Savarkar, all described the Hindus of India as a
“national race” which would perish if the non-Hindu inhabitants of the
region are not “purified” (i.e. converted to Hinduism). They also
explained the Hindus and Muslims of India as two separate races. All
this was being propagated through books and op-ed articles years before
Jinnah and his men finally demanded a separate Muslim country.
In
his 1943 speech, Jinnah was simply pointing out the fact that it was
the Hindu nationalists who were hell-bent on pushing the Muslims of
India to form their own enclave. This, thus, puts to rest the idea that
Jinnah’s politics were ‘communal’. The communal notions had first
emanated from the other side.
Interestingly, it was an
anti-Jinnah Indian historian Dr Shamsul Islam, who exhibited how
Jinnah’s politics began being shaped as a reaction to anti-Muslim
politics first aired by Hindu nationalists. Dr Islam has reproduced
speeches, articles and pamphlets of Hindu nationalists (in this context)
in his book Revisiting the Legacy of Allah Bakhsh.
So
does this mean that, as a reaction, Jinnah was advocating an “Islamic
Republic”? Not quite. For this, one should dive deeper to investigate
how certain well-respected Islamic scholars such as the prolific Abul
Ala Maududi described Jinnah and his Pakistan Movement.
It’s a well-known fact that a number of clerics and
Islamic scholars associated with outfits such as Jamiat-i-Ulema
Islam-Hind and Majlis-i-Ahrar and those within the Indian National
Congress had staunchly opposed Jinnah. But most interesting is how
Maududi Sahib saw him because he (Maududi) became a Pakistani.
Professor
Ali Usman Qasmi in his essay on Maududi in “Muslims against the Muslim
League” quotes an article that Maududi wrote in the December 1939 issue
of Tafhim-ul-Quran. In it Maududi writes: “the whole world knows that he
[Jinnah] does not even know the basics of Islam…”
In
the February 1946 issue of the same journal, Maududi wrote that the
ulema joining Jinnah’s Muslim League will suffer the same fate as the
ulema in Turkey did at the hands of the secular Turkish nationalist
Kamal Ataturk. Maududi wrote that this was because the fate of the
Pakistan Movement “lay in the hands of those who believed in a secular
mode of politics and state.”
So, after Pakistan’s
creation, when most pro-Maududi elements began to suggest that Jinnah
wanted an “Islamic State,” were they also suggesting that a giant
scholar such as Maududi was wrong in his assessment of Jinnah and the
Muslim League? Poet, playwright and journalist, Safdar Mir, asked the
same question in one of his pieces in the January-February 1968 issue of
the progressive Urdu bi-monthly Nusrat.
Without really
answering this, admirers and followers of Maududi of ten point out that
he accepted the idea of Pakistan and migrated to the new country.
But Professor Qasmi in his essay writes that though Maududi migrated to Pakistan, he continued to be critical of Jinnah.
For
example, he criticised Jinnah’s August 11, 1947 speech to the
Constituent Assembly in which Jinnah explained that the new country
would be pluralistic and where the state will have nothing to do with a
citizen’s faith. Alluding to the speech, Maududi wrote (in
Tafhim-ul-Quran) that the founders of Pakistan were confused and
contradictory, talking about Islam through a secular lens and having
Western lifestyles. A long feature on Maududi in the September 1949
issue of Tafhim-ul-Quran claimed that when Maududi was put under house
arrest, the founder and leaders of Pakistan had “planned to form a
secular state”. The same feature alludes that it was Maududi who stopped
that from happening.
Maududi only fully entered the
country’s politics after Jinnah’s demise and after the passage of the
March 1949 Objectives Resolution which resolved to evolve Pakistan as an
Islamic Republic. Critics of the Resolution see the document as a
‘political stunt’ by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to appease the
religious parties, while others have called it a betrayal of Jinnah’s
vision of a pluralistic Muslim-majority country. They claim that it
would never have been authored had Jinnah not passed away so soon after
the creation of Pakistan. The historical evidence displayed in this
piece tends to point towards a similar deduction.
