Pakistan: A Hard Country (10 page)

Because of their radical fundamentalism and Arabian links, Syed Ahmed, his fol owers and descendants were given a name by the British which also has profound echoes in the present day: that of ‘Wahabi’, after the ferociously puritanical fundamentalist movement founded by Muhammad Abdul Wahab in Arabia in the late eighteenth century, and adopted by the House of Saud as their religion. As with the attribution of ‘Wahabism’ to the Taleban today, this was only partly accurate. Shah Waliul ah had studied in Arabia, in part under teachers who taught Wahab; but his teaching and that of his descendants differed from Wahabism in significant respects.

However, the Wahabis’ capture and savage purging of Mecca and Medina (including the destruction of ‘heretical’ shrines and even that of the Prophet himself) had made them a name that was useful for both supporters and opponents of jihad: supporters because of their reputation for courage and religious rigour, enemies because of their reputation for barbarism and their ferocious attacks on Muslims from other traditions. As in South Asia and the former Soviet Union today, the term ‘Wahabi’ therefore came to be thrown about with abandon to describe a variety of supporters of jihad and advocates of fundamentalist reform of Islam. Al the same, those fighting against the Taleban and Al Qaeda today would do wel to remember that, though new movements in themselves, they have roots going back hundreds of years in Arabia and South Asia, and 180 years among the Pathan tribes.

The critical moment in the Muslim response to British rule came with the great revolt of 1857, known to the British as ‘the Indian Mutiny’. This revolt itself stemmed in part from the British abolition the previous year of Awadh, the last major semi-independent Muslim state in north India.

In Lucknow, mutinous soldiers proclaimed the restoration of the Awadh monarchy, and, in Delhi, they made the last Mughal emperor their figurehead. Across much of north India, radical Muslim clerics preached jihad against the British.

In consequence, although a great many Hindus took part in the revolt, the British identified Muslims as the principal force behind it, and British repression fel especial y heavily on Muslims and Muslim institutions. The two greatest Muslim cities of north India, Delhi and Lucknow, were ferociously sacked and largely destroyed by the British army and its Punjabi auxiliaries, with many of their leading citizens kil ed. The last vestiges of the Mughal empire were wound up, and many Muslims dismissed from the British service.

In the decades fol owing the revolt, the Muslim elites, as the former ruling class of much of India, suffered especial y from changes introduced by the new British administration which replaced the East India Company. English replaced Persian as the language of administration, and English-language universities increasingly replaced traditional Muslim centres of education.

Intentional y or unintentional y, British rule also came to favour the Hindu upper castes above the old Muslim elites. Hindus moved with greater ease into the British educational institutions, and hence came to dominate the lower ranks of the civil service. The growth of Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Karachi as commercial entrepôts favoured the Hindu trading castes. Most disastrously of al , the gradual introduction of representative institutions from the 1880s on revealed just how heavily Muslims were outnumbered by Hindus across most of India.

Muslim responses to these chal enges continue to shape the Pakistani state, and Pakistani public debate of today. Some of the responses centred on secular education and mobilization, some on different forms of religious renewal. Different movements – or the same movements at different times – emphasized competition with Hindus, or cooperation with them against British rule. As for the idea of a separate Muslim state in South Asia, this emerged only at the very end of British rule, and in a very ambiguous form. However, whatever approach they adopted, the vast majority of Muslims who became political y engaged did so in separate organizations from the Hindus.

In the early days of the Indian Congress, some of its more radical Hindu leaders opposed Muslim membership.

In the very broadest terms, the main tendencies of Muslim response to British colonialism can be divided into three: that stemming from or related to Shah Waliul ah and his preaching of religious renewal and resistance; that epitomized by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817 – 98); and that of the mass of the Muslim population, including the local rural elites.

These latter basical y got on with their lives and with extracting whatever benefits they could from British rule (notably, in northern Punjab, in the form of military service and settlement in the new canal colonies), while at the same time being subject to occasional waves of unrest when fears as to the safety of their Muslim identity were aroused. Local factors also sometimes produced armed revolts by specific Muslim groups – chiefly in the Pathan areas, but also in the 1920s on the part of the Moplahs of the Carnatic in southern India, and in the 1940s on the part of the Hurs, religious fol owers of the Pir Pagaro, a hereditary saint in Sindh.

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was a Mughal aristocrat who sided with the British in 1857, though he also bitterly criticized their policies. Although himself a deeply religious man, Sir Syed advocated the need for Indian Muslims to col aborate with the British, and to learn the ways of Western modernity in order to develop as a people and compete successful y with the ascendant Hindus. Sir Syed founded what he intended to be ‘the Muslim Cambridge’, the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental Col ege, at Aligarh – another of those key Muslim institutions now left behind in India.

In 1888, Sir Syed laid down the basic principle on which Pakistan was created – though without at that stage dreaming of territorial separation. He stated that ‘India is inhabited by two different nations’, which would inevitably struggle for power if the British left: Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations – the Mohammadan and the Hindu – could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable.6

The founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and his closest associates, therefore stood in the direct tradition of Sir Syed; a tradition which saw the Muslims of the subcontinent as a kind of nationality defined by language (Urdu) and religiously influenced culture, rather than by religion as such. The priority given to fear of the Hindus natural y inclined this tradition to oppose the Hindu-led Indian independence movement, and to al y with the British against it.

In Pakistan, this tradition of nationalist modernization has been fol owed by two of Pakistan’s military leaders, Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf, and by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Ayub could also be seen to have replaced Britain with America as the Muslims’ inevitable (if unfortunate) al y in their struggle with ‘Hindu’ India.

In a vaguer sense, Sir Syed’s programme of broadly Western modernization remains the ideology of the Pakistani civil service and of the educated wealthy classes – though their commitment actual y to do much about this is another matter. Some members of this tradition decided in 1947 to throw in their lot with India rather than Pakistan, and are now to be found scattered through the worlds of Indian politics, administration, the universities and especial y the arts.

Under British rule, the Islamist tradition of Shah Waliul ah natural y opposed col aboration with the British and stood for anticolonial resistance – though, given the realities of British power, this was inevitably mostly by peaceful means. This led to the paradoxical result that some of the most fervent proponents of jihad – like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888 – 1958) – were also advocates of close cooperation with Hindu Indian nationalists against British rule (Azad ended as an Indian National Congress leader and independent India’s first Minister of Education). This tradition therefore opposed the partition of India and the creation of a separate Pakistani state, in part because they were attached to the idea of a universal Muslim Ummah and opposed any move to divide it further along national lines.

It is entirely logical therefore that Pakistan’s largest Islamist party, the Jamaat Islami, should have opposed the creation of Pakistan in the name of loyalty to the Ummah; and today should be especial y committed to Muslim causes in the wider world, including the ‘jihads’ in Palestine, Chechnya and Kashmir – also in the name of defending the universal Ummah, rather than narrow Pakistani national interests.

President Musharraf, by contrast, explicitly condemned this approach in his speeches after 9/11, emphasizing the need for Pakistanis to put Pakistan first.

THE GENESIS OF PAKISTAN

The last generation of British rule saw two Muslim mass political movements in South Asia, the Muslim League and the Khilafat movement. The Muslim League, founded in 1906 and heavily influenced by Sir Syed’s tradition, began as an elite movement to defend Muslim interests, extract concessions from the British, and either oppose or cooperate with the Indian National Congress as tactical advantage dictated. It only became a true mass movement in the last years of British rule.

Though founded in Dhaka, in what is now Bangladesh, by far the strongest support of the Muslim League was in the heartland of Muslim Urdu-speaking culture, in the United Provinces between Delhi and Al ahabad (now the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh). A key moment in its foundation came in 1900 when the British agreed that Hindi (Hindustani in the ‘Hindu’ Devanagari script) should be placed on an equal footing with Urdu (Hindustani in the ‘Muslim’ Arabic script) as an official language, with the clear implication that given Hindu numerical preponderance, Urdu would eventual y be edged out of government altogether.

The other great Muslim movement under British rule was much more in the tradition of Shah Waliul ah, being both explicitly religious and much more radical. This was the Khilafat (Caliphate) movement, from 1919 to 1924, one of whose leaders was Maulana A. K. Azad, mentioned above. This took place in al iance with the Indian National Congress, now led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and was the chief Muslim aspect of the unrest which gripped India after the end of the First World War. However, as its name suggests, the formal catalyst of the movement was a purely Muslim one, and reflected al egiance to no South Asian cause, but to the universal Ummah.

South Asian Muslims ral ied behind the movement in protest against the impending abolition of the Caliphate, or titular leadership of the Muslim world, which the Ottoman sultans had claimed. The Caliphate issue became the ral ying cry for protest against the British and French subjugation of the entire Middle East and destruction of the last Muslim great power, as wel as of course against British colonial rule in India, and a range of local Muslim grievances. The Jamaat and other Islamist groups in Pakistan today see their hostility to the US today as directly descended from this Islamist anticolonial tradition. As Mahatma Gandhi himself wrote in 1922:

The great majority of Hindus and Muslims have joined the [anti-British] struggle believing it to be religious. The masses have come in because they want to save the khilafat and the cow.

Deprive the Mussulman of the hope of helping the khilafat, and he wil shun the Congress. Tel the Hindu he cannot save the cow if he joins the Congress and he wil , to a man, leave it.7

The Khilafat movement was led by two clerics, the brothers Maulana Mohamad Ali Jauhar and Maulana Shaukat Ali, and generated a wave of religious enthusiasm among South Asian Muslims. For that reason it was disliked by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who stood in Sir Syed Ahmed’s tradition of tactical cooperation with the British, and to whom religious fanaticism was deeply antipathetic. So great was this religious enthusiasm that in 1920 some 20,000 Indian Muslims attempted to emigrate to Afghanistan, as the last independent Muslim state left standing in the region. They were eventual y expel ed by the Afghan authorities after having been robbed of many of their possessions – not the first or the last time that the hopes of South Asian Islamists concerning the Afghans have been disappointed.

The rhetoric of the Khilafat movement was heavily influenced by that of jihad, and the movement’s violent edge led to increasing tension with Gandhi and the Congress. The movement final y col apsed in the face of British repression, and the Caliphate was eventual y abolished not by the colonial powers but by Kemal Ataturk and the new Turkish secular republic.

The mass religious enthusiasm which powered the Khilafat movement eventual y flowed into the very different strategy of the Muslim League, led in the 1920s by Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877 – 1938) and from 1936 by Jinnah. A radical y simplified account of League strategy in these years would be that it involved selective cooperation with the Congress to put pressure on the British to grant more extensive powers of legislation and self-government to India and the Indian provinces, and selective cooperation with the British to limit Congress’s power and ensure Muslims a guaranteed share of the new legislatures and governments.

The idea of creating a separate state for Muslims in South Asia came only very late. It was first raised by Iqbal in 1930 – and he stil envisaged that this state would be part of a wider Indian Confederation. Shortly afterwards, the name ‘Pakistan’ was coined for this proposed state. The so-cal ed ‘Two Nation Theory’ had in a way been implicit in Muslim League ideology from the beginning. This theory holds that Indian Hindus and Muslims have the characteristics of two different ethno-cultural nations. As the example of Lebanon, Northern Ireland and other countries where what are in effect different nations live in one country under a set of arrangements for coexistence, this does not however necessarily dictate territorial separation.