Islamization of Jinnah.

[Porus]

1.The simple question is: if Jinnah was a secularist then why would he spearhead a movement for the creation of a separate home for the Muslims? Here we ought to be careful in understanding the meaning and manifestations of secularism which was initiated by European free thinkers in the 19th century as a political philosophy.
2.Of course Jinnah believed in democracy;and he showed us that it is well enshrined in the spirit of Islam.

Both islamists and secularists can extract enough material from his speeches to convince the gullible awaam that he had envisioned a secular or islamic state, therefore we have neverending debates between Zarvans and Azlans. His followers would say that he used religion just to achieve his goal, once the goal was achieved he tried to replace his Shwerwani/Shalwar suits with his old Savile Row suits, but it was already too late.

 

[M. Sarmad]

all they come up with is 11 August speech and refute everything else as "nothing".

It is not the case my friend . What you need to understand is :

This speech was not made by the Quaid-i-Azam at a press conference nor in any reception given in his honour; but was the official proclamation of the policy of the new State, made in its Constituent Assembly, in the presence of the members who were expected to draw the constitution for the Islamic State of Pakistan and to define the fundamental rights of her people.

This was not the only time when Jinnah expressed his secular vision explicitly , but surely the most "relevant" one . That is why it is quoted again and again

Both islamists and secularists can extract enough material from his speeches to convince the gullible awaam that he had envisioned a secular or islamic state, therefore we have neverending debates between Zarvans and Azlans. His followers would say that he used religion just to achieve his goal, once the goal was achieved he tried to replace his Shwerwani/Shalwar suits with his old Savile Row suits, but it was already too late.

Your personal opinion , All you say is mere rhetoric !!

 

[Leader]

It is not the case my friend . What you need to understand is :

This speech was not made by the Quaid-i-Azam at a press conference nor in any reception given in his honour; but was the official proclamation of the policy of the new State, made in its Constituent Assembly, in the presence of the members who were expected to draw the constitution for the Islamic State of Pakistan and to define the fundamental rights of her people.

This is not the only time Jinnah expressed his secular vision , but surely is the most relevant one . That is why it is quoted again and again




Your personal opinion , All you say is mere rhetoric !!

So? there he could have said it, the constitution of Pakistan will be secular in nature, or was he running out of words?

but the fact is he did meant it, like I said he meant for the Islamic state to revive itself to its past glory, under which everyone was free to go to their churches and places of worship.

 

[M. Sarmad]

So? there he could have said it, the constitution of Pakistan will be secular in nature, or was he running out of words?
but the fact is he did meant it

So ? When you also agree that he meant it (a secular constitution) , then what is the argument about ? (Argument for the sake of argument only ???)

like I said he meant for the Islamic state to revive itself to its past glory, under which everyone was free to go to their churches and places of worship.

No my friend . We have a serious problem here . Unlike what Jinnah said in his speech , Muslims and Non Muslims were never equal citizens of the Islamic state as a fundamental principle ( in glorious past ) !!

 

[Leader]

So ? When you also agree that he meant it (a secular constitution) , then what is the argument about ? (Argument for the sake of argument only ???)




No my friend . We have a serious problem here . Unlike what Jinnah said in his speech , Muslims and Non Muslims were never equal citizens of the Islamic state as a fundamental principle ( in glorious past ) !!

where are and where will they be? in theory only, as I said before, and also I mentioned in previous posts that apart from other considerations, religion is an important social institution and will be included in deciding factors of the fate of the country..how important is upto the people's inclination.. England like David Cameron said is a Christian Nation and so will remain her decisions..

secondly, Jinnah didnt say that the State will be secular. its friction of your imagination that he meant differently, while he propagating differently along..its equal to leveling accusation that he was fooling around in public, while he had something different in his mind...

you know the problem with you type and mullah is that both are dishonest to the information at their disposal.. just be honest and open..

 

[M. Sarmad]

....secondly, Jinnah didnt say that the State will be secular. its friction of your imagination that he meant differently, while he propagating differently along..its equal to leveling accusation that he was fooling around in public, while he had something different in his mind...

..you know the problem with you type and mullah is that both are dishonest to the information at their disposal.. just be honest and open..

No my friend , I am not being dishonest . Just that truth is bitter sometimes and it hurts a lot . Anyways I am not here to preach something . I have my own understanding of the matter and I am here to discuss things , not to impose my pov . But from the other side , it has been rhetoric and name calling only (so far) and no genuine attempt has been made by anyone to refute my claim (academically)

 

[M. Sarmad]

Ambedkar, Jinnah and Muslim nationalism

There is a tendency amongst Pakistanis to rationalise the creation of Pakistan on religious grounds. Historically, there is no such correlation between Pakistan and Islam, other than the fact that Muslim identity itself had emerged from conversion of a great mass of people in South Asia to Islam

• Yasser Latif Hamdani
• March 10, 2014

Dr B R Ambedkar’s classic text Annihilation of Caste has been republished with an introduction by Arundhati Roy. The introduction by Roy maps out the tense and often acrimonious relationship between Dr B R Ambedkar and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. DrAmbedkar — arguably the father of India’s constitution — was a giant in his own right and perhaps the most underrated historical figure yet. As Roy points out, this great hero of the Dalits and scheduled castes did not even get a walk-on role in the Oscar winning film Gandhi. Now Roy’s magnificent introduction to the great doctor (he was a doctor of law from Columbia University) has reignited the debate on what Gandhi and Ambedkar said and did back in the 1940s. It is a tragedy that Ambedkar’s struggle is ignored by the world at large because, in just the sheer numbers alone, his civil rights movement dwarfs that of Martin Luther King Jr or Nelson Mandela.

Yet there is a reason why Pakistan ought to celebrate this great man as well. I was first introduced to Dr Ambedkar’s writings some 15 years ago in college through his work Pakistan or Partition of India, which was first published in 1940 and then republished again in 1942 and 1944. Since then, I have marvelled at how ignorant Pakistan’s historians and authors are of this text, which to date contains the most cogent articulation of the idea behind Pakistan. This book, Pakistan or Partition of India, was recommended to Gandhi by Jinnah himself during their unsuccessful talks in 1944.

There is a tendency amongst our writers to now look back and say that the two-nation theory was the antithesis of secularism but in the 1940s at least it was forwarded by two men, Ambedkar and Jinnah, who were perhaps the most secular-minded politicians in South Asia. In the chapter ‘A nation calling for a home’, Ambedkar eloquently explains, “Thus, the things that divide are far more vital than the things which unite. In depending upon certain common features of Hindu and Mahomedan social life, in relying upon common language, common race and common country, the Hindu is mistaking what is accidental and superficial for what is essential and fundamental. The political and religious antagonisms divide the Hindus and the Musalmans far more deeply than the so-called common things are able to bind them together...The Muslims have developed a ‘will to live as a nation’. For them nature has found a territory, which they can occupy and make it a state as well as a cultural home for the new-born Muslim nation. Given these favourable conditions, there should be no wonder, if the Muslims say that they are not content to occupy the position which the French choose to occupy in Canada or the English choose to occupy in South Africa, and that they shall have a national home which they can call their own.”

Yet it would be a terrible reduction of the complexity of Ambedkar’s argument to suggest that he was suggesting an irrevocable partition of India. In Chapter 15 of the book, ‘Who can decide’, Ambedkar sets down, as the great jurist that he was, the draft of the Government of India (Preliminary Provisions) Act, which laid down the best solution to the communal question, leading to either an amicable divorce or a gradual integration of Hindus and Muslims. I do not think many historians have paid any real attention to this remarkable draft legislation because it contained within it the germs of the Cabinet Mission Plan, which ultimately the Muslim League accepted and which could have averted partition. However, Ambedkar’s plan was better. It seems therefore that Ambedkar played a great role in influencing Jinnah’s ideas on a communal settlement.

Ambedkar and Jinnah had been natural allies. As men of the law and as leaders of groups outside the upper caste milieu of Hindudom, they saw each other as the great resistance to what they felt was caste Hindu domination. When the Congress quit government in 1939, Ambedkar joined Jinnah in celebrating the day of deliverance along with Periyar E V Ramasamy Naicker of the Dravidian movement. Ambedkar, Jinnah and Naicker formed a formidable trio against what they perceived to be caste Hindu domination that Congress and its Hindu Mahasabha allies were hell bent on imposing on India. It may also be pointed out that Ambedkar was never an uncritical ally of Jinnah. He criticised Jinnah, publicly and privately, wherever and whenever he felt Jinnah was making a mistake and Jinnah took it uncharacteristically. It was a relationship of peers and very few leaders could claim that kind of relationship with the Quaid-e-Azam.

There is a tendency amongst Pakistanis to rationalise (or criticise) the creation of Pakistan on religious grounds. Historically, there is no such correlation between Pakistan and Islam, other than of course the fact that Muslim identity itself had emerged from conversion of a great mass of people in South Asia to Islam and the demarcation that it gave them. The real anxiety was economic and political — an anxiety that Jinnah shared with his Dalit and Dravidian allies. It was for this reason that Jinnah nominated Jogindranath Mandal, a follower of Ambedkar, to represent Muslims in the interim government of India and later appointed him minister of law in the Pakistan government. Unfortunately, Jinnah’s lieutenants treated Mandal shabbily after Jinnah’s demise and the man left Pakistan broken hearted. A couple of years ago, Lahore’s city district government decided to name an underpass after Pakistan’s first law minister. It seems that they have since changed their decision.

Credit must be given however to the Congress Party in India, which, after 1947, sought out Ambedkar, despite his antipathy to Gandhi, and tasked him with the making of the Indian constitution, which he did with great skill, a living testament to the brilliant mind that Ambedkar was.

Ambedkar, Jinnah and Muslim nationalism

 

[Cherokee]

To sum it up , this debate is headed nowhere . Everybody has his/her own view of Jinnah which can be justified by "one of his speeches" .

It is an endless cycle of arguments and counter arguments .

 

[M. Sarmad]

To sum it up , this debate is headed nowhere . Everybody has his/her own view of Jinnah which can be justified by "one of his speeches" .

It is an endless cycle of arguments and counter arguments .

None of his speeches prove that Jinnah was a Islamist . He was a liberal Muslim and believed in a modern and progressive Pakistan which would be secular (and he thought that the idea of having a secular state did not contradict with Islamic teachings). Jinnah`s understanding of Islam was very unorthodox , that is why Mullahs declared him to be an apostate .

 

[Cherokee]

None of his speeches prove that Jinnah was a Islamist . He was a liberal Muslim and believed in a modern and progressive Pakistan which would be secular (and he thought that the idea of having a secular state did not contradict with Islamic teachings). Jinnah`s understanding of Islam was very unorthodox , that is why Mullahs declared him to be apostate .

Ok , lets say i agree with you , can you convince a single resident mullah on this forum of this . It has been decades since they went senile . They will not stop even short of cursing Ataturk which , if you have been on this forum long , caused a lot of bad blood between turkish and pakistani members for some time .

 

[M. Sarmad]

Ok , lets say i agree with you , can you convince a single resident mullah on this forum of this . It has been decades since they went senile .

A person with an ability to convince some one or get convinced by logic/facts can not be termed as "Mullah" !! Teaching algebra to a brainless zombie may be easier than educating a Mullah ...

 

[ajpirzada]

here is what i wrote earlier:



Solving the puzzle: The clue lies with Iqbal, not Jinnah!

Saleena Karim in her book ‘Secular Jinnah’ (2010) attributes the usage of the term ‘Islamic socialism’ to Jinnah himself ‘as well as the early leaders of Pakistan.’ Furthermore, she states: ‘Liaquat Ali Khan considered the abolition of landlordism a necessary step towards establishing this Islamic Socialism.’ However the subsequent social and political developments lead to a constitution which clearly intended to be based in the ‘Islamic ideals’ as understood by Iqbal and Jinnah but was at the same time inconsistent. No wonder, she says, the opposition leaders of the time ‘raised some legitimate criticisms’ on the then proposed constitutional framework so as to promote their notion of ‘modern democratic state’ – the term falsely attributed to Jinnah in Justice Munir’s book ‘From Jinnah to Zia’ (1979).
Why was it then that the intentions could not result in the necessary actions required to innovate a new socio-political and economic system of governance based on the ‘Islamic ideals’ for which Pakistan was created? Part of the answer is the early death of the ideological fathers of Pakistan thus leaving an intellectual gap which was not filled. But this does not do justice with the immense significance of the question and is only a way of avoiding it by pretending to having answered it.
Jinnah had abhorred the ‘modern democratic form of Government’ in his address to the Hostel Parliament of Ismail Yusuf College (dated 1st Feb 1943) while demanding ‘a true democracy inaccordance with Islam and not a Parliamentary Government of the Western or Congress type.’ Later in the same year, Jinnah said in his Presidential address at the Muslim League’s Annual Session (dated 24th April 1943), “I have no doubt that a large body of us visualise Pakistan as a people’s government.… The constitution of Pakistan can only be framed by the millat and the people.”
The using of the words ‘large body of us’ makes it clear that ideology of Pakistan was well understood by the Leaguers’ and the notion of Jinnah’s death leaving behind an intellectual gap is overemphasised. The intellectual clarity of the ‘large body of us’ which Jinnah left behind can be depicted by their debates with the opposition during the first Constituent Assembly and unanimity on drafting of the constitution by the ‘people’s government’ in ‘accordance with Islam.’ This brings us back to the above question to which the answer, in fact, lies not with Jinnah but with Iqbal.
In one of the letter to Jinnah (dated 28th May 1937), Iqbal wrote, “The atheistic socialism of Jawaharlal is not likely to receive much response from the Muslims. The question therefore is how is it possible to solve the problem of Muslim poverty? And the whole future of the League depends on the League’s activity to solve this question.” With Iqbal’s death, all the energies of the League shifted towards manoeuvring the realities of the time so as to achieve their political objective. The league’s future was therefore only till what they had managed to answer and was destined to see its end when the time for the next question came.
While the Leaguers’ knew what they did not want for Pakistan – Secular Capitalistic Democracy of the West and Atheistic Socialist Communism of the East – they had not yet answered Iqbal’s crucial question. This is apparent from Jinnah’s address at the Opening Ceremony of State Bank of Pakistan. Jinnah categorically refuted the notion of adopting the ‘economic system of the west’ which ‘created insoluble problems for humanity’ and propagated for ‘evolving banking practices compatible with Islamic ideas of social and economic life’ and hence the term ‘Islamic socialism.’ However, nowhere in the Leaguers’ speeches does one find what these ‘practices’ or principles were except in broader terms of equality, freedom and socio-economic justice as embedded in Islam.
In fact, Jinnah had formed a Planning Committee in 1943 to chart out a five year plan for the socio-economic uplift of Pakistan. The Committee – consisting of economics, engineering and other professionals – held its first meeting in September 1944 and was advised by Jinnah in the following words: ‘Our ideals should not be capitalistic but Islamic.’ However, the Committee could not complete the second phase of its objective of focusing primarily on Pakistan specific areas due to the turn of events in the short span of time.
It is my understanding that the success of Pakistan lies in returning to completing the work initiated by Jinnah so as to find the answer to Iqbal’s question. However, it is highly unlikely to escape the shackles of both ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ in our pursuit towards reaching our destiny without having understood the Islamic socio-economic view. And for this goal of applying ‘Islamic ideals’ to create our distinct socio-economic system promising justice and mutual wellbeing, the starting point is to study their first hand application by the very person who introduced such ‘Ideals.’
Note: Quotations used have been taken from Saleena Karim’s book ‘Secular Jinnah’ (2010).

finding a Highway to HOPE: Solving the puzzle: The clue lies with Iqbal, not Jinnah!

 

[ajpirzada]

in the above article, you can see Jinnah using the term 'islamic ideals' and discarding 'capitalistic' and 'western' ideals. The speech in which he mentions 'you are free- you are free to go to your temples mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state... in due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to Muslims- not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state' is in no way contradictory to the islamic foundation of Pakistan to which Jinnah adhered till his very last speech which he gave at the State Bank of Pakistan.

those who are portraying Jinnah as someone having pro secular or western/capitalistic ideals for pakistan are only lying to themselves by ignoring all the categorical statements of Jinnah. These people are blindfolded by their disliking for Islam since they can only see Islam from the perspective of Mullah and fail to see beyond.

Worse of all, these people claim that it was only Jinnah who knew what should pakistan be like while the rest of the Muslim Leaguers were ignorant of the ideological foundations of pakistan and were blindly following Jinnah. As I have mentioned above in my article that this is not the case. Jinnah and other Leaguers (who survived for more than a decade after Jinnah) knew what they were after and had formed internal committees working on the socio economic strategy of pakistan based on 'Our ideals should not be capitalistic but Islamic.'

the failure lied in no one taking up the intellectual responsibility of developing socio economic strategy which was consistent with the 'islamic ideals' and away from what Jinnah called adopting the ‘economic system of the west’ which ‘created insoluble problems for humanity’ and propagated for ‘evolving banking practices compatible with Islamic ideas of social and economic life.’

 

[KingMamba]

in the above article, you can see Jinnah using the term 'islamic ideals' and discarding 'capitalistic' and 'western' ideals. The speech in which he mentions 'you are free- you are free to go to your temples mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state... in due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to Muslims- not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state' is in no way contradictory to the islamic foundation of Pakistan to which Jinnah adhered till his very last speech which he gave at the State Bank of Pakistan.

those who are portraying Jinnah as someone having pro secular or western/capitalistic ideals for pakistan are only lying to themselves by ignoring all the categorical statements of Jinnah. These people are blindfolded by their disliking for Islam since they can only see Islam from the perspective of Mullah and fail to see beyond.

Worse of all, these people claim that it was only Jinnah who knew what should pakistan be like while the rest of the Muslim Leaguers were ignorant of the ideological foundations of pakistan and were blindly following Jinnah. As I have mentioned above in my article that this is not the case. Jinnah and other Leaguers (who survived for more than a decade after Jinnah) knew what they were after and had formed internal committees working on the socio economic strategy of pakistan based on 'Our ideals should not be capitalistic but Islamic.'

the failure lied in no one taking up the intellectual responsibility of developing socio economic strategy which was consistent with the 'islamic ideals' and away from what Jinnah called adopting the ‘economic system of the west’ which ‘created insoluble problems for humanity’ and propagated for ‘evolving banking practices compatible with Islamic ideas of social and economic life.’

The bold is the key, if we accept such peoples narratives on Jinnah then Jinnah was a dude who created a country based on a religion while himself adhering to "secular" ideals in essence they make him out to be a hypocrite.

 

[ajpirzada]

now the only way out for the secularists is if they claim that secularism is basically adopting 'islamic ideals' and moving away from 'economic system of the west' while at the same time '‘evolving banking practices compatible with Islamic ideas of social and economic life.’

if this is the secularism you practice then please by all means let me know so i could put my weight behind implementing this form of secularism in Pakistan.

The bold is the key, if we accept such peoples narratives on Jinnah then Jinnah was a dude who created a country based on a religion while himself adhering to "secular" ideals in essence they make him out to be a hypocrite.

well a person is known by what he believes. And I have quoted him enough to establish what exactly he believed and wanted for pakistan.