Criterion-quarterly.com: By Yasser Latif Hamdani[1]

Abstract

(The vague concept of South Asian Muslim nationalism has proved to be an inadequate unifier.  Pakistan’s inability to learn from the mistakes made by the Congress Party led to the ultimate dissolution of the erstwhile Union which included the Eastern wing. Given that after 1971, there were more South Asian Muslims outside Pakistani borders (as in Bangladesh and India) than inside it, the Pakistani establishment was forced to seek Islamic ideology as a possible replacement to South Asian Muslim nationalism as the basis of the state. Had Pakistan focused on understanding the complex nature of events that had resulted in its creation, it would have been much easier to understand and appreciate the vision laid down by Mohammad Ali Jinnah on August 11, 1947. – Author)

K K Aziz’s most important contribution to the study of the genesis of Pakistan comes in his incredible study of why, how and when Muslims in British India began to see themselves as a nation and where the aspiration for a separate Muslim state arose. His works are eye-opening for those who wish to limit the idea of Pakistan and its practical execution to the All India Muslim League (AIML) and the negotiations between Jinnah and his erstwhile comrades in the Congress. It becomes apparent that the belated conversion of the Muslim League and Mr. Jinnah to the idea of Pakistan was the final phase of an idea that was in the offing for at least half a century if not more. Most other monumental works on partition are merely works on Jinnah and the AIML’s politics from 1937-1947 essentially and therefore leave out the innate instincts by which men like Chaudhry Rahmat Ali and Mian Kifayet Ali were guided and which took root amongst Muslims of present day Pakistan. They fail to see the significance of why Dr. Iqbal and no other national Muslim leader spoke of a consolidated national state for Muslims within or outside India in 1930 and that this nationalism itself was borne out of the urban middle class Muslims in regions that were Muslim majority.

It is true that many are now allergic to the acceptance of a nationalism based on group identity which may include religion, however, throughout history we see that religious differences have been a major driving force behind those vague notions we call “national aspirations”. The truth is, all nationalism based on group identity is the same; whether based on language, race or religion. Humanity has to reach a post-nationalist phase for the next step in its evolution but there is no distinction between the various ideologies of exclusion. Religion has in the nationalist phase played an important role in even the most secular of national identities.  It was, for instance, because of the inability of Muslim rulers of the multicultural Ottoman Empire to fuse their identity with their Non-Muslim subjects that Turkey and Greece are two different states instead of one. Countless examples can be quoted as well from the History of Europe where the concept of the nation state originated.  Pakistan’s idea, however, was unique in the sense that it appeared in the 1930s – long after the demise of the Mughal Empire in India.  In this sense, it was not the emergence of a modern class of patriotic officers and operatives within the old Muslim imperial structure, as was the case in Turkey, but rather the emergence of a modern middle class amongst the Muslim community no longer in power who sought a Muslim homeland for themselves.

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