By Danish Khan for TwoCircles.net
Faisal Devji’s latest book ‘Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a political idea’ offers a fresh perspective to the Pakistan movement by linking it to the creation of Israel. In doing so, Devji takes us through some of the less explored themes like the collaborative and competitive politics of Ambedkar and Jinnah and the role of the Bombay’s Muslim merchants. The book carries forth the larger argument of Pakistan and Israel being based on ideas and social contracts rather than blood, history and soil.
Danish Khan had earlier reviewed the book
What made you write Muslim Zion?
While important work has been done by scholars on the Pakistan Movement, I was tired of narratives about that attributed it entirely to the instrumentality of pre-constituted “interests”, leaving out the ideas brought about by this politics altogether. The focus on interests, moreover, takes colonial India for granted as the site of this politics. What I try do in my book, then, is to suggest both that ideas were crucial in the making of Muslim politics, and that their world of reference was not confined to the British raj.
Do you think the creation of Israel would have stirred the same kind of passion among the Muslims as the Khilafat movement if the Partition had not taken place?
The Khilafat Movement represented India’s first serious effort to make her voice heard in the international arena. In this sense it must be seen as succeeding Gandhi’s struggle in South Africa, which attempted to address the equally international issue of the rights of Indian migrants and labourers in the empire. By the time of Partition, these imperial and international movements had given way to purely national ones on the one hand, and purely communist ones on the other. The Pan-Islamic or Pan-Asian, to say nothing of anarchist, mobilizations of the past had sunk into insignificance. If India had not been partitioned, she would no doubt have raised her voice against Israel’s creation in a much more effective way, but unlike the Khilafat, it would have been in support of a national rather than religious cause.
You argue that the international or non-national characteristics of Zionism and Muslim nationalism (factors contributing to creation of Israel and Pakistan) bring them together among other variables. Does this denote that much remains to be explored regarding the birth of Pakistan especially in terms of global happenings rather than only domestic politics?
The problem with so much Pakistani historiography is that it is held prisoner by a small number of stereotyped and unproductive questions. Did Jinnah want Pakistan or not? Was it meant to be a secular or religious state? Who was responsible for Partition? Apart from being unanswerable, these questions are all highly legalistic, presuming to hold someone accountable, in a positive as much as negative way, for historical events. Such narratives betray their colonial inheritance, and one of my purposes in writing this book was to think about how we might look at the Pakistan Movement differently. There are many ways in which this shift in perspective can be accomplished, but the one that interested me was to internationalize the debate.
Would it be correct to say that groups like the Jamiat ul Ulema Hind too subscribed to the non-national or international characteristic of Muslim nationalism but with a different conception?
The Jamiat was not unusual in possessing an ambiguous vision of nationalism. For by the time the Second World War had begun, there was a general loss of faith in old-fashioned nation-states, which had been as unable as earlier monarchies to prevent another world war. The expansion of imperial power in the international order that emerged following the First World War, and the fate of minorities in the new states that came into being after it, also led to a widespread disillusionment with nationalism that was expressed most eloquently by men like Tagore and Iqbal. The Jamiat’s critique of nationalism was targeted at the Pakistan Movement, which was seen as turning Muslims into a national rather than religious group, whereas an undivided India would be made up of inter-related religious and other groups whose identities would remain non-national.
Why do you think the early Muslim League members from Bombay who made huge donations to the League remain largely unexplored?
The historiography on Pakistan continues to be obsessed by North Indian and to some degree Punjabi Muslims, with Bengalis, Sindhis, etc. routinely left out. This is because every historian wants to play to a narrative cliche and draw some kind of connection between the loss of Muslim empire in the north, the rise of an Urdu-speaking intelligentsia there, and the founding of the Muslim League. Instead of focussing on the “neglected” regions and ethnicities of what became Pakistan, however, I decided to mount an internal critique of this narrative by looking more closely at the merchants of Bombay who were crucial in funding the League from the very beginning, and from whose ranks Jinnah came. I was also interested in the role of sectarian minorities like the Shia in League politics. Both these groups deserve much more historical scholarship than has been spent on them.
You have mentioned the two kinds of political strategies that the Muslims in British India could deploy – as a minority and as nation. Were these categories really distinct or did they overlap as well?
The curious thing about political strategies in this period is how ambivalent they often were, as if the categories that had to be deployed, including nation, majority and minority were recognized as describing Indian realities rather badly. And yet these received categories had to be used, if institutional politics both within India and internationally were to be possible. Both Iqbal and Jinnah, in their very different ways, were vocal in criticizing the categories of modern European politics, with Muslim politicians from early in the twentieth century seeking to undo or at least avoid them. For a while, during the 1930s, it seemed as if it would be possible to dismantle the terms majority and minority for Hindus as well as Muslims, given the great and multiple diversities of Indian populations, but it was not to be.