Daily Times: Jinnah’s idea of Islam was of social justice and equality and never of narrow-minded interpretations by the orthodoxy
- Yasser Latif Hamdani
- January 13, 2014
- Comment
He then claims erroneously that Selena Karim’s Secular Jinnah: What The Nation Does Not Know is his source. Perhaps he should read his source more carefully. Selena Karim questions a quote that Justice Munir had stated in his book Jinnah to Zia, not the Munir Report. This was not about the August 11 speech but Jinnah’s interview with Doon Campbell. The actual quote, which is much longer — which Selena refers to — in fact is even more clearly secular in the real sense of the word. How that becomes relevant to Orya Maqbool Jan’s claim that Jinnah never spoke on August 11 can only be explained when one sees how desperate Orya Maqbool Jan is now having been exposed rather badly.
One wonders what it is about the August 11 speech that bothers people like Orya Maqbool Jan that they would go to such lengths in denying the existence of a speech that really cannot be denied. The issue is obviously of the content. It is too fine for the philistines. Here we have our Quaid-e-Azam, the founding father of Pakistan, the largest Muslim majority state at the time, saying that the religion of a citizen should not matter to the state and indeed going even further and saying that, if this policy is followed, in due course of time, the political distinctions between Hindus and Muslims would cease to exist. To Jinnah’s mind, the question of ‘secular’ versus ‘Islamic’ did not even arise. The issue between Hindus and Muslims was a political question to him. He was schooled in the British tradition and there secularism and religion were never mutually exclusive. Toleration and equality of citizenship were the ideals to be achieved with progress and maturity.
Categories: Asia