Economic and Political Weekly August 11, 20073300

Perspectives

PERVEZ HOODBHOY

What did Quaid-e-AzamMohammed Ali Jinnah, thefounder of Pakistan, want for

the country he was destined to create in1947? Surely I cannot say anything newon this venerable and much-discussedhistorical subject; the experts know muchmore. But, as we approach Pakistan’s 60thanniversary, the matter of Jinnah and theIslamic state is still a hot one. It is con-founded both by the wishful thinking ofmy well-meaning liberal friends, as wellas the conveniences invented at differenttimes by Pakistan’s military, political, andreligious establishments. Therefore, itseems to me that objectivity, honesty, andclarity are still desperately needed if weare to clean out old cobwebs and chart anew course for the future of our country.

What is Pakistan all about? For decades,Pakistani school children have grown uplearning a linguistically flawed (but catchy)rhetorical question sung together with itsanswer: Pakistan ka matlab kya? La illahaillala! (What is the meaning of Pakistan?There is no god but Allah!). They havebeen told that Pakistan’s raison d’etre wasthe creation of an Islamic state where thesharia must reign supreme.

Surely this has had its effect. A recentsurvey by the website World PublicOpinion.Org (April 24, 2007) found that 54per cent of Pakistanis wanted strict appli-cation of the sharia while 25 per centwanted it in some more diluted form.Totalling 79 per cent, this was the largestpercentage in the four countries surveyed(Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia).1

But was sentiment for sharia and theIslamic state strong in 1947 among thosewho fought for Pakistan?

Jinnah’s thoughts inevitably enter theargument. This, of course, does not neces-sarily mean that Pakistan was, or is,obligated to become the fulfilment of hisvision. Pakistan is much more than Jinnahand it will eventually go in the directionthat its people want it to go. But it certainlyis of the greatest intellectual and historicalinterest to ask two key questions:(a) Did Jinnah want Pakistan to be a Muslimmajority state where individuals, whetherMuslim or otherwise, would be free to livetheir lives more or less as they do incountries in the rest of the world?Or,(b) Did Jinnah want an Islamic state? And,if so, what was his understanding of sucha state?

These have always been loaded ques-tions with various sides making excellentarguments for their own purposes. But itis time to stop cherry-picking and, instead,scrutinise the totality of Jinnah’s wordsand actions. Else, at the end of the daywe shall end up merely reaffirming ourexisting preferences and prejudices.2

Secularist or Theocrat?

To be sure, a dispassionate examinationof Jinnah’s positions has been unusual inPakistan because of the ideological needsof the state. Truth was an immediatecasualty when Zia-ul-Haq brought his newIslamic vision of Pakistan in 1979. Imme-diately thereafter, Jinnah had to be entirelyresurrected and reconstructed as an Is-lamic – rather than Muslim – leader.

This task challenged even the best ofspin-masters. As perhaps the mostwesternised political leader in IndianMuslim history, Jinnah was culturally andsocially far more at ease with the high

society of cosmopolitan Bombay andmetropolitan London than with those whohe led and represented. His Urdu wasbarely understandable. Nor were his cu-linary tastes quite those of strict Muslims.But the authorities of Pakistan Televisiontook this, as so much else, in their stride.So, in the 1980s, a steady stream of pro-found pieties emanated from a stern,sherwani-clad man who filled televisionscreens across the country. Gone were hiselegant suits from Savile Row, as was anyreference to his marriage with a Parsiwoman. Jinnah had miraculously morphedinto a deep-thinking Islamic scholar.

An interesting consequence of thisdeliberate state-organised obfuscation wasthat many Pakistani liberals concludedthat the truth must have been the veryopposite. They insisted that, in fact, Jinnahhad envisioned Pakistan as a secular, butMuslim majority, country. As proof, theypointed to two of his oft-quoted speechesthat suggest a secular outlook. Deliveredjust before, and after, Partition, these hadbeen slyly concealed from the public mediaduring the Zia years:

You are free; you are free to go to yourtemples, you are free to go to your mosquesor to any other place of worship in thisState of Pakistan. You may belong to anyreligion or caste or creed – that has nothingto do with the business of the State… Youwill find that in course of time Hinduswould cease to be Hindus and Muslimswould cease to be Muslims, not in thereligious sense, because that is the per-sonal faith of each individual, but in thepolitical sense as citizens of the State(Address to the First Constituent Assem-bly, August 11, 1947).3

Similarly, Jinnah had indeed come outforcefully against theocracy:

“Pakistan is not going to be a theocraticstate to be ruled by priests with a divinemission. We have many non-Muslims –Hindus, Christians and Parsis – but theyare all Pakistanis. They will enjoy thesame rights and privileges as any othercitizens and will play their rightful partin the affairs of Pakistan” (Broadcast Ad-dress to the people of the United Statesof America, February 1948).4

These speeches unequivocally demon-strate Jinnah’s strong sense of justice andsecular leanings at a personal level. They

Jinnah and the Islamic State:Setting the Record StraightWhat was Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s position on the contentiousissue of secularism in Pakistan? What was his stand on Pakistan asan Islamic state? What legacy did he leave for the citizens of hiscountry on a question with which they continue to grapple?

Economic and Political Weekly August 11, 2007 3301

also show his preference for secularismover theocracy in one important sense ofthe word: a secular state is necessarilyneutral in matters of religion and neithersupports nor opposes any particular set ofreligious beliefs or practices. Proponentsinsist – and rightly so in my opinion – thata secular state is about creating a levelplaying field for all beliefs and religionsand not about denigrating or suppressingany of them.

But let us not jump the gun. Secularismis just as much about the nature of law asit is about the state treating all religionsequally. As a philosophy, secularism isfundamentally a post-Enlightenment beliefthat all laws governing human activitiesand decisions should be based upon theconcept of reasonableness, not upon theorders of some alleged divine authority.Secular laws are devised by humans ac-cording to their perception of society’sneeds. And because needs change accord-ing to times and circumstances, the lawsin a secular society must necessarily changefrom time to time rather than being givenonce and for all.

It is a fact that Jinnah never called forPakistan to be a secular state – not publicly,at least. Jinnah’s statements from the 1930sonwards do not contain a single occur-rence of the word “secular”, although mywell-meaning liberal friends are, of course,free to indulge their fantasies if they sowant. It is reputed that Jinnah privatelypledged (to an American diplomat) thatPakistan would be a “secular state” (usingthese words). But, as a statesman andpolitician, he had a different line. Evenwhen confronted by journalists, he wouldavoid giving a straight answer. For ex-ample, consider the following extract fromhis July 15, 1947 press conference:5

When asked whether Pakistan would bea secular or theocratic state, Jinnah re-torted that “You are asking me a questionthat is absurd. I do not know what a theo-cratic state means.”

When another journalist suggested thatthe questioner meant a state run by‘maulanas’, Jinnah retorted, “What about[a] government run by Pundits inHindustan?”

Jinnah continued to hedge: “Then itseems to me that what I have already saidis like throwing water on duck’s back(laughter). When you talk of democracy,I am afraid you have not studied Islam. Welearned democracy thirteen centuries ago.”

If secularism is about the nature of law,a study of Jinnah’s attempts to counter the

anti-League propaganda in the North-WestFrontier Province (NWFP) – where theLeague and also specifically Jinnah wereaccused (though not by Khan AbdulGhaffar Khan, to whom the quote that willfollow is addressed) of being “un-Islamic”– does cast a shadow of doubt on howsecular Jinnah’s politics was. In a press state-ment made by Jinnah where he condemnedKhan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s resolutionfor a free Pathan state, he said:

The Khan brothers…have raised anotherpoisonous cry that the PCA (PakistanConstituent Assembly) will disregard thefundamental principles of the Shari’ah andQur’anic laws. This, again, is absolutelyuntrue. More than thirteen centuries havegone by…we have not only been proud ofour great and Holy Book, the Qur’an, butwe have adhered to all these fundamentalsall these ages, and now this cry has beenraised…[that] we cannot be trusted.6

We can see here that Jinnah is evasiveabout what place Islamic law would havein the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. Herefers repeatedly to the “fundamentals”of the sharia and Qur’anic law, withoutever specifying what those fundamentalsare and where Pakistan’s constitution woulddepart from other “non-fundamental”aspects of Islamic law. On close obser-vation, Jinnah’s concluding words fromthe above quote are interesting. He lamentsthat the Khan brothers of the Frontierhave raised a cry that the Muslim Leaguecannot be trusted. Trusted to do whatexactly? Could one interpret this as Jinnah’sappeal to the Pathans to “trust” that hewould enforce the sharia in Pakistan? Whatis certain is that there is plenty of ambi-guity in this statement (and there are manyothers like it) – and that Jinnah consciously

seeks to articulate and protect this ambi-guity.

On the other hand, in a much lessambiguous statement, part of the samepress statement from which the above quoteis taken, Jinnah stated: “I want the Muslimsof the Frontier Province clearly to under-stand that they are Muslims first and Pathansafterwards…”7

According to the Pakistani scholar IshtiaqAhmad, there is even support for the shariato be found in a few of Jinnah’s pronounce-ments, like when he promised the Pir ofManki Sharif to enforce in exchange for thePir’s support to the Muslim League in the1946 elections.8 At the same time, there wasdissatisfaction in places within the Leagueranks because of Jinnah’s refusal to supportthe establishment of sharia in Pakistan.9

While it is absolutely true that Jinnahwas emphatic that Hindus and Muslimscould not live together as one nation, heleft a legacy of ambiguity on what hewanted Pakistan to be.

Analysing Ambiguity

Why did a man known for his integrityfight shy of expressing his beliefs openlyand forthrightly? The answer lies in thepolitical reality of building a coalition ofzamindars, pirs, and parts of the IndianMuslim elite. Had Jinnah campaigned fora liberal, secular Pakistan – and that tooin competition with the secular IndianNational Congress under the leadership ofJawaharlal Nehru – he would have cer-tainly lost the leadership of the PakistanMovement. So, Jinnah opted for ambi-guity, hoping that:(a) People in his Muslim League wouldnot notice his lifestyle too much,

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Economic and Political Weekly August 11, 20073302

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(b) That the contribution he was makingto the welfare of Muslims – by helpinglevel the playing field – would dominateeverything else,(c) That a liberal, secular Pakistan wouldone day follow once the messy businessof Partition was over with, and it wasunnecessary to raise the issue ofsecularism now.

Jinnah has often been accused of beingcommunitarian. But ironically, as the lateEqbal Ahmad was wont to point out, it wasJinnah, then a Congress leader, who hadwarned against the spiritualisation ofIndian politics. Jinnah was adamantlyopposed to the use by Gandhi of religioussymbols in politics. He was right. A deeplydivisive view of the world naturallyemerged once the terms of discourse shiftedin this way. And as India approachedindependence, leaders of sectarian out-look and sentiments such as SardarVallabbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasadgained commanding positions in theCongress.

But I have yet to address the secondquestion raised earlier. Jinnah alluded manytimes to an Islamic state. For example, in

a broadcast address to the people of theUS in February 1948 (ironically, the samespeech of which a portion was quotedearlier in this essay as an example of Jinnahcoming out forcefully against theocracy),Jinnah described Pakistan as “the premierIslamic State”.10 Given who he was, whatcould he have really meant?

Jinnah was a lawyer par excellence andan adept leader of men, but he never claimedto be a scholar of Islam. In fact, he knewno Arabic or Persian. He wrote no bookor treatise, and his speeches do not suggestany real familiarity with Islamic history orjurisprudence. When he spoke on theIslamic state he made no specific referenceto the Hadith, or to the works of classicalMuslim scholars. Maybe it was just as wellfor this difficult matter.

Jinnah often used the terms “MuslimState”, “Islamic State” and sometimessimply “State”. But those were used loosely,interchangeably, and imprecisely although,one must say, the choice of terms was notentirely random. Much depended on theaudience to be addressed. For instance,in a press statement on July 31, 1947addressed to the Tribal Areas, Jinnah

said: “The Government of Pakistan has nodesire whatsoever to interfere in any waywith the traditional independence of theTribal Areas. On the contrary, we feel asa Muslim State [emphasis added], we canalways rely on [the] active support andsympathy of the tribes”.11

At the conclusion of this statement,Jinnah chose to use the term “Islamic State”:

In the end, I would appeal to all the dif-ferent elements in the Frontier Provinceand in the Tribal Areas to forget pastdisputes and differences and join handswith the government of Pakistan in settingup a truly democratic Islamic State.12

He used similar terminology – referringto Pakistan as a “Muslim State” – in astatement of assurance to the people ofBaluchistan.13 But, in another press state-ment (which was not addressed to anyspecific audience) about the question ofminorities in Pakistan, which appearedtwo days before the one quoted above,Jinnah urged people to “make the buildingof Pakistan, as one of the greatest Statesin the world, successful.”14

Ayesha Jalal cautions against usingJinnah’s references to the sharia or the

Economic and Political Weekly August 11, 2007 3303

Islamic state in piecemeal fashion. Shesays that they need to be placed within theproper historical context while paying keenattention to what Jinnah, the man and thevisionary, really stood for:

He was from first to last a constitutionalistwho had argued at the time of the debateon the Child Marriage Restraint Act of1930 that if there was a clash between aso-called religious and public morality,then morality had to prevail, mullah or nomullah. There was no change in this basicoutlook even as he made tactical adjust-ments in his later years to accommodatenew political exigencies. When asked todiscuss the future constitutional frame-work for the Muslim homeland he wasdemanding, he insisted that it would be upto the people of Pakistan to decide whatsort of a state they wanted even though hehad no doubt that their choice would befor a moderate, democratic and forward-looking state.15

Throughout history, the nature of theIslamic state has been sharply contentious.The Holy Qur’an, the source of all author-ity for Muslims, does not speak of anIslamic state. Pre-Islamic Arabia had nostate and Prophet Mohammed createdthe Medina state after ‘Misaq-e-Medina’,an accord with various Jewish and pagantribes. But there was no written law, muchless a constitution. There was no taxationsystem nor any police or army, no conceptof territorial governance or defence. Eachtribe followed its own customs and tradi-tions. There were inter-tribal wars and alladult tribals took part in defending one’stribal interests. The only law prevalent wasthat of ‘qisas’, i e, retaliation.

Lacking specific guidance from the HolyBook, Islamic scholars have created theirown understandings of what an Islamicstate should be. Abul Hasan al-Mawardi(974-1058), a scholar in service of theAbbasid rulers and one of Islam’s firstpolitical theorists, justifies the need for areligious state and writes of “A leaderthrough whom he [Allah] provided forthe deputyship of the Prophet”, meaninga caliph who would be god’s vice-regenton earth. Agreeing on al-Mawardi’s needto unite state and religion, the ideologicalfounder of the Jamaat-i-Islami, MaulanaAbul Ala Maudoodi, conceptualisedyet another vision of an Islamic statenearly 900 years later. The head of sucha state, he said, should be a pious Muslimmale who would Islamise the nation andmake better Muslims of his subjects.Sovereignty would lie with Allah, not the

people, said Maudoodi. He insisted thatsecularism was the enemy of the Islamicstate, as were people like Jinnah and otherswho he regarded as creatures of westernculture. During the 1940s, Maudoodi re-ferred to Jinnah in speeches as “Kafir-e-Azam” (the great unbeliever) and to theidea of Pakistan as “Na-Pakistan” (landof filth).

On the other side of the divide, al-Mawardi’s connection between state andreligion is refuted by other Islamic schol-ars, such as the greatest Muslim historianand social anthropologist of all times, IbnKhaldun:16

Some wrongly assume the imamate to be thepillars of the state. It is one of the generalpublic interests. The people are delegatedto take care of it. If it were one of the pillarsof faith, it would be something like prayer,and Muhammad would have appointed arepresentative, exactly as he appointed AbuBakr to represent him in prayer.

It is clear that even if Jinnah had beena profound scholar of Islam, he would stillhave left us with a legacy of confusion.This is simply because the notion of anIslamic state is an impossibly confusedone. So, quite wisely, Jinnah makes onlyvague allusions to Islamic principles offair play and justice. For example, beforethe Sibi Darbar in 1948, he said:

Let us lay the foundations of our demo-cracy on the basis of truly Islamic idealsand principles. Our Almighty has taughtus that our decisions in the affairs of thestate shall be guided by discussion andconsultations.17

This is a popular, not a scholarly, style.Jinnah does not mention ‘jizya’ – thetithe that would have to be paid by non-Muslims living in a MaudoodianIslamic state. Nor does he touch the con-cept of the status of ‘zimmi’ (second-classcitizen) accorded to non-Muslims, ormany other critical issues that wouldconfront citizens living in a religiousstate.To conclude: I think it is pointless to seeka consensus on the nature of the statethat Jinnah wanted for Pakistan. He cer-tainly did not want a theocracy or a Talibanstate, nor one in which the non-Muslimminorities would be persecuted andharassed (as they are today). But Jinnah’sstatements at different times and circum-stances are far too widely spread out toconclude anything substantial beyondthese truths. Not being sufficiently well-versed in Islamic history or theology,Jinnah’s allusions to establishing an

Islamic state in Pakistan cannot be takenseriously. The future of Pakistan – howsecular or how Islamic it is to be – canonly be decided by the citizens of thecountry that Jinnah made.

Email: hoodbhoy@lns.mit.edu

Notes

[This essay originated from a lecture in Karachiin 2007, delivered at the invitation of the JinnahSociety in cooperation with the Oxford UniversityPress of Pakistan. The author thanks Alia Amiralifor valuable additions and researching references.]

1 World Public Opinion.Org, ‘MuslimsBelieve US Seeks to Undermine Islam’,http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/a r t i c l e s / b r m i d d l e e a s t n a f r i c a r a /346.php?nid=&id=&pnt=346

2 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, theMuslim League and the Demand for Pakistan,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985,is an exception to generally mediocrescholarship on the creation of Pakistan. It ismeticulously researched and has a brilliantand dispassionate discussion of Jinnah and hispolitics. Pakistan’s creation was accidental,she argues, and Jinnah initially used the notionof Pakistan as a political bargaining chip. Hisdemand for a separate Muslim state evolvedout of circumstances rather than ideologicalbelief, and came at a much later stage.

3 h t t p : / / w w w . p a k i s t a n . g o v . p k / Q u a i d /speech03.htm

4 h t t p : / / w w w . p a k i s t a n . g o v . p k / Q u a i d /speech25.htm

5 Jinnah Papers, Zawar Zaidi (ed), Vol III, doc#VIII.2 (in Appendix VIII), p 1005, Governmentof Pakistan, distributed and published by OUP,Pakistan, 1997.

6 ibid., Vol II, doc# 299, p 563 (quote on p 565).7 ibid.8 Ishtiaq Ahmed, ‘The Fundamentalist

Dimension in the Pakistan Movement’, TheFriday Times (Lahore), November 22, 2002.

9 In a letter to Mountbatten describingdissensions amongst the Muslim Leagueleaders, Rob Lockhart wrote: “…and some areannoyed because Jinnah said he could notestablish sharia law”, Jinnah Papers, Vol IV,doc# IV.17 (in Appendix IV), p 462.

10 h t t p : / / w w w . p a k i s t a n . g o v . p k / Q u a i d /speech25.htm

11 ibid, doc# VIII 4, p 524.12 ibid.13 This statement appeared in The Pakistan Times,

August 13, 1947, reproduced in Jinnah Papers,ibid, doc# VIII.8, p 527.

14 This statement appeared in The Pakistan Times,July 29, 1947, reproduced in the Jinnah Papers,ibid, doc# VIII.2, p 522.

15 Ayesha Jalal, private communication,August 3, 2007.

16 The Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun, translated byFranz Rosenthal, Princeton University Press,1969, p 169.

17 h t t p : / / w w w . p a k i s t a n . g o v . p k / Q u a i d /speech22.htm

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