Jinnah and the Quest for Muslim Identity By Akbar Ahmed
The understanding of why Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted Pakistan, the nation he created, is crucial to an understanding of the nature of South Asian politics even today. Like other fathers of the nation - Washington for the USA, Lenin for the former Soviet Union, Mao for Communist China and Khomeini for Islamic Iran -- Jinnah is central to Pakistan. Indeed his impress was probably greater as he actually created a country that did not exist.
Yet almost half a century after his death Jinnah remains ‘enigmatic’ and ‘inscrutable’ (Ian Talbot, ‘Jinnah and the making of Pakistan’, History Today, February, 1984). The power of popular Indian and British journalism and the audio-visual media ensure that Jinnah continues to be cast as the villain of the drama of the last days of the Raj, the man who shattered the unity of India. This has become the agreed version of history. Attenborough’s fim, Gandhi, shot through a romantic Raj haze, ensured that millions and millions of people came away with the impression that Jinnah created Pakistan because he was jealous of Gandhi and a villain at heart.
Jinnah’s negative and inaccurate portrayal in the film was not surprising. The film was dedicated to Nehru and Mountbatten, Jinnah’s adversaries, and approved of by Nehru’s daughter, the then prime minister of India. Demonising Jinnah or reducing him to caricature is a spectacular failure in explaining not only one of the major players in the drama of India in the first half of this century but also the aspirations of the Muslims of South Asia.
Jinnah defies easy analysis even in Pakistan. Given his enormous prestige, each political party attempts to appropriate him. Islamists (notably from the time of General Zia’s regime in the 1980s) paint out Jinnah’s genuine humanism, universal tolerance and affection for English culture concentrating entirely on his more ‘Islamic’ statements. Secularists point to his Savile Row suits and English lifestyle and conveniently overlook Jinnah’s unambiguous championing of the Muslim cause and identification with Muslim identify from the mid-1930s.
What continues to baffle people is the conversion of Jinnah from a liberal, Anglicised, seemingly secular politician, whose proudest title was Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity and whose early political life was spent fighting for a united India, to the champion of an exclusive Muslim identity. It is one of the most intriguing yet least explored areas of modern South Asian history.
In exploring it I do not suggest a Damascene conversion in Jinnah. 1 shall, however, point to the cultural and political changes taking place around him, and personally within him, after 1920 which help to explain the conversion. In December that year his position is clearly expressed in a conversation with Durga Das, a prominent writer, after rejecting Gandhi’s non-co-operation call:
“Well, young man - I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics. I part company with the Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria. Politics is a gentleman’s game” (Razi Wasti, `The Genius of Jinnah’, in The Friday Times, Lahore, March 17-23, 1994 ).
Yet just over a decade later Jinnah would have changed his position.
Although some of the developments which explain Jinnah’s conversion (and that of other Muslims as well) and the eventual, creation of Pakistan do not relate directly to Jinnah, they assisted in creating a cultural and political climate which influenced his decision. First, the Anglicised, liberal, humanist politics based on a few wealthy individuals which prevailed until the First World War had become obsolete. A different kind of politics drawing in the masses began to take shape which would sharpen communal confrontation.
The vacuum formed by the deaths within a few years of each other of Gokhale, Mehta and Tilak, influential figures of the earlier kind of politics, was filled spectacularly by Gandhi after he captured the Congress in 1920 (the year Tilak died). The most dramatic manifestation of the new mass politics was Gandhi himself who directly appealed to those previously neglected - the villagers, the untouchables, the poor. It was a radical strategy and would lead to freedom from the British. The colonial masters would never again be able fully to take the initiative or be entirely in control.
Secondly, the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1918 led to significant political shifts in British India. The emphasis moved from urban based politicians to those backed by large rural populations, from the United Provinces and Bombay to the Punjab and Bengal in terms of Muslim politics. New groups began to emerge with long-reaching consequences for political leadership.
The Arains, traditionally lower-class Punjabi agricultarists, emerged socially and economically to articulate their demands and identity in specifically Islamic terms. In time they would be ardent supports of Jinnah and the Pakistan Movement. One of them - General Zia-ul-Haq - would become president of Pakistan. Without the Punjab, the biggest and most powerful province of Pakistan, there would have been no Pakistan.
Thirdly, Muslims responded to the punishment of the vanquished Turks and humbling of the Caliphate/Khilafat (from the Islamic notion of the Caliph; the head of the Ottoman empire) at the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 with what became known as the Khilafat movement. The Khilafat was abolished in Turkey by the Turks themselves wishing for a modern identity. The Muslims of India, however, saw this as yet another British plot to undermine Islam and protested. Their leaders advised them to march out of British India and migrate to Afghanistan and other Muslim countries as a protest. Gandhi championed the Khilafat movement but Jinnah, though sympathetic to the Turks, was not convinced. The movement caused a flutter of excitement in the community but also great hardships and in the end led to nowhere. The movement illustrated that the Muslims of India were leaderless and devoid of a viable objective, Jinnah and the idea of Pakistan would give them both in the next decade.
Fourthly, Hindu fundamentalist organizations came into being in the 1920s with a specific in-built bias against the minorities (especially Muslims). Hindu communalism would grow rapidly from the 1920s onwards. Leaders like Hedgewar were angry at the Khilafat movement which, to them, expressed Muslim disloyalty to India. The 1923 major Hindu-Muslim riot in Nagpur was not the first of its kind but it helped to start organized and regular communal rioting.
Nagpur was followed by the setting up of the RSS (Rashtriya Seva Sangh) Organization, a Hindu fundamentalist party, which in time would influence parties like the (BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). Physical exercises, cabalistic oath ceremonies, flags, secret funds and disciplined cadres soon characterized it. A militant Hindu philosophy motivated the RSS. A member of this group would assassinate Gandhi for being too sympathetic to the Muslims.
How Islamic was the founder of Pakistan- Akbar Ahmed offers a radical reassessment of his life and motives - and the forces that propelled his change of course.
Gowalkar who followed Hedgewar to become one of the major ideologues of this form of Hinduism, compared the situation of the Muslims of India to the Jews in Germany in We or our Nationhood Defined (1938). If, he argued, the German Jews could be exterminated by Hitler so could the Indian Muslims by the Hindus. Hitler’s attempt at ‘purity’ was a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by, he wrote. Jinnah, living in Bombay, the main RSS center, understood and commented on the implications of treating Muslims ‘like Jews in Germany’.
The idea of dividing India (into a Muslim and Hindu part) was sacrilege to many Hindus: it was the vivisection of Mother India. The continuing fury at Pakistan - and the Muslims of India, who arc accused of being its sympathisers - challenges directly the Congress concept of a secular Indian nationalism, embodied by Nehru, and dominant for the first decades after independence. It explains the horrific recent riots in which Muslims were killed and their property destroyed. The very meaning of communal riot commented Indian scholars, change into something very like genocide with official connivance.
The fulmination came with the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in December1992 and mass scale riots all over India in which thousands of Muslims would lose their lives. The extraordinarily harsh ongoing repression of the Muslims of Kashmir with over half a million Indian troops involved in rape, murder and the most blatant violations of human rights (documented by Indian and international agencies) may be seen in this light.
Since the 1920s, therefore, those Hindus who wished to preserve Hinduism as peaceful, universal and non-violent, faced a growing challenge within their own house. This internal crisis informed an increasingly bitter confrontation which reached a climax in the 1990s. Figures like Gandhi and Nehru, in retrospect, are openly criticized ; they were too soft on the minorities (especially the Muslims); they ultimately betrayed Hinduism for advocating a secular India.
Jinnah recognized that while Hindu leaders like Gandhi and Nehru were not enemies of the Muslims (on the death of the former he would say the Muslims of India had lost their best friend) Hindu extremists would make life difficult if not impossible for Muslims. He voiced Muslim sentiment, alarmed at the growing Hindu communalism when be declared that British Raj would be succeeded by Hindu or Ram Raj. Jinnah’s prediction would echo in the slogan of the BJP, a party that commands 119 seat in parliament.
Fifthly, it was becoming clear in the 1920s that the British would be sharing power with Indians, sooner rather than later. The Congress was emerging as the authentic voice of India after Gandhi gave it fresh confidence through his high media profile and wide, popular appeal. It was already planning for a strongly centralized India. Its leadership - which would take India to independence - was beginning to fall into place. Gandhi the saintly politician, the personification of renascent India; Nehru, the cultivated, charismatic spokesman for, and one of the main figures of, the Congress; Patel, the committed Hindu nationalist, always a strong contender for Nehru’s position; Azad, the scholarly and gentle Muslim presence in the Congress (Muslims like Jinnah dismissed Congress Muslims; to Jinnah, Azad was a mere ‘showboy’).
Muslims complained that Congress sensing power in the 1920s, was becoming arrogant. It dismissed their demands, ignored their sense of insecurity, and preferred to speak on their behalf. Many Muslims felt that they would become second-class citizens with not only their religion but also their culture under threat. For instance, the Urdu language, generally though not exclusively associated with Muslims, was increasingly the target of groups like the RSS as being `foreign’. In time its script would be changed and in many places it would cease to be taught altogether.
Finally, and from a personal point of view, while the India Jinnah knew and loved was changing so dramatically after 1920, Jinnh’s own life was also changing. He was over forty years old, the age Muslims, following the tradition of the Prophet, believe is a turning point in life. His married life had turned sour in the 1920s, though in a rare exhibition of public emotion Jinnah wept like a child as his wife was buried following her death in 1929.
Still a successful lawyer, he withdrew the next year to London. Here he led a quiet and comfortable life in Hampstead. An English chauffeur drove his Bentley to chambers in the city. He had retreated from an active role in political life in India.
But many Muslims in India, becoming aware of the mounting threat they faced without a leader of stature in the changing political climate, appealed to him to return. Some, like Liaqat, who would become Pakistan’s first prime minister, and the great poet, Allama Iqbal, visited him in London with the invitation. By accepting the leadership of the Muslim League and returning to India in 1934 he crossed the Rubicon.
Jinnah’s family life was over and this essentially private man now poured his energy and his commitment into championing the Muslims. It led him to the quest for Muslim identity and destiny, the embodiment of which would be Pakistan. Within a decade from the poor showing in 1937 of his party, the Muslim League, the demand for Pakistan would become an irresistible flood.
Although there were compelling factors in the 1920s for Muslims to think of their identity and their future, the idea of India divided into two nations, Hindu and Muslim, had been around, however ill-defined, for half a century. The great poets and scholars of Muslim India - Sir Sayycd, Hali, Iqbal - reflected on the themes of loss of power, crisis of identity and the idea of a separate Muslim nation. In Jinnah the Muslim intellectuals had found their leader. Iqbal summed it up in one of the several letters he wrote to ‘the only Muslim in India today to whom the community has a right to look to for safe guidance through the storm which is coming’.
The reasons discussed above, some directly, others indirectly, explain Jinnah’s conversion. Jinnah soon discovered he had inherited the leadership of diverse Muslim groups spread over a continent with only a loose link through Islam. They did not have a common language, dress, political organization, or territory that they could call their own. Even their Islam was divided into sects which often fought with each other.
Jinnah’s achievement was to create in the 1930s the modern Muslim persona, one which would represent a modern Muslim nation and reflect its spirit while providing identity and unity. It heralded the dawn of modern Muslim mass politics, of political images and symbols. It was based on a common language, Urdu, common clothes, a common notion of identity and sense of destiny. Nothing like this had been attempted since the Arabs entered India through Sindh in the eighth century with their non-Indian language, Arabic.
Jinnah was not parochial in this exercise. Urdu was not his mother tongue nor was the national dress he selected part of his own culture. He took the sherwani (black knee-length coat) from north India, the shalwar (baggy pyjamas) from the people of the Indus (now Pakistan), the kurta (muslin shirt) from Delhi and along the Ganges and the karakuli cap from the north (promptly named the ‘Jinnah cap’ by his followers).
The photographs of the time tell us much. Take the historic photograph recording the arrival of Jinnah on the soil of an independent Pakistan in August 1947. It shows him, as he is stepping out of the plane, wearing the sherwani, shalwar and karakuli . With that one gesture he stamped the idea of the national dress on the new nation. It is still the official dress of Pakistan.
Jinnah was making several points through his clothes: he was creating a modern Muslim identity while at the same time speaking for all the Muslims, not just for one particular group. Any other Muslim leader in contrast looked local or rooted in his particular area or group. He was also signaling that the Muslim dress was in opposition to that worn by Gandhi, Nehru and the Hindus - the Gandhi cap, the dhoti, the Nehru jacket and so on. Muslims were rejecting Hindu identity and in doing so underlining their own. But by continuing to use his elegant English suits often, as depicted in official pictures, with a karakulli he was suggesting that this was the identity of a Muslim proud of his past and yet at ease with the present part of Eastern as well as Western traditions.
When asked whether he was a Shia or a Sunni he countered with the question: what was the holy Prophet- This was radical thinking for Muslim society divided not only by sect but also caste and ethnicity. Once again, he was insisting that Muslims remain united on one platform. Although he was moving inexorably towards an increasingly Muslim identity in the 1930s, Jinnah did not abandon his earlier broad mindedness and humanism (on the death of Gokhale he had confessed he was struck with ‘sorrow and grief’). Dr Patel, his doctor, was a non-Muslim; the only man who knew and kept the most important political secret of India, that Jinnah was a dying man and, at the moment of his greatest triumph - the creation of Pakistan - had only months lo live.
Even after the creation of Pakistan Jinnah selected British officers on his personal staff and for key appointment like the commander-in-chief of the army and governors of the provinces. Jinnah’s attitude to non-Muslims was summed up in a visit he made to the Regimental Mess of the Royal Scots. The Commanding Officer toasted the king and then, breaking tradition, toasted Jinnah who was attending dinner in the mess. The commanding officer rose to say: `Your Excellency, it is such an honor to have you with us that I am going to break tradition. We consider ourselves good fighters; we consider you to be a good fighter also’. Also moved, Jinnah replied: ‘I shall never forget the British who have stayed in Pakistan to help us begin our work.’
Jinnah’s statements in Karachi, once Pakistan was achieved. about the minorities (whether Muslims in India or Hindus in Pakistan) are a significant indicator of his ideas on the subject: ‘I am going to constitute myself the Protector-General of the Hindu minority in Pakistan’.
Accustomed as we are to reading about benighted contemporary Asian leaders, Jinnah is surprisingly modern. All the major issues of our times - women’s rights, human rights, minority rights, upholding the Constitution and the rule of law were espoused by him with passion. His financial and moral integrity was acknowledged even by his adversaries (nothing could purchase him, not even the offer of the job of the first prime minister of India, made by both Mountbatten and Gandhi, if he gave up his idea of Pakistan).
Jinnah’s modern personality incurs the wrath of Muslims like Kalim Siddiqui (who called him one of the ‘stooges of imperialism’ in the Guardian May 9th, 1992) and the Hiz-b-ahreer (who term him ‘The Collaborator’ on their posters). For them Jinnah is too influenced by the West and not Islamic enough. The fact that he created the largest Muslims nation on earth is ignored. They demand a pure theocratic Islamic state in opposition to a corrupt and decadent West.
Jinnah unequivocally did not want a theocratic state, one run by mullahs but he aimed nonetheless for a modern Muslim state, one inspired by Muslim history and fired by a sense of Muslim destiny. When his enthusiastic admirers addressed him as Maulana Jinnah he put them down saying ‘I am not a maulana, just Mr. Jinnah’. In the other direction, when the British government offered him a knighthood he also refused saying he preferred to be plain Mr. Jinnah.
Notwithstanding the Muslim extremists, Jinnah’s statements after his conversion to the Muslim cause like `I shall never allow Muslims to become slaves of Hindus’ became a battle cry, a philosophical utterance and a call for political action. It would find an immediate echo in Muslims throughout the length and breadth of’ India. It would explain why in spite of all the orthodox Muslim propaganda against him - that he was not sufficiently a practising Muslim, that he could not even say his prayers properly in Arabic, that his actions were unIslamic, that he could not speak Urdu, the language he claimed was the national language of the Muslims, Jinnah came to be acknowledged by his followers in India before 1947 and in Pakistan after its creation as the Quaid-i-Azam, the great leader, towering and supreme over everyone. He not only created the largest Muslim nation in the world but also became the first Asian head of state in postcolonial history.
(ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Professor Akbar Ahmed, former Pakistan High Commissioner in the UK, is Visiting Professor, Princeton University and Stewart Fellow in the Humanities Council. He originated and completed the “Jinnah Quartet” which included the feature film “Jinnah”.)