The Genesis of Pakistan

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A chapter from The Oxford History of India by Vincent A. Smith.

The Genesis of Pakistan

Before 1930 the word Pakistan had not been heard of; in 1940 it was adopted by the Muslim League as its official aim; in 1947 it appeared as a new state containing more than 70 million people. Clearly such a rapid growth leading to such spectacular success must have sprung from roots deeper than purely political motives and stretching far beyond the twenties of the twentieth century. According to the 1941 census the Muslims of India then numbered some 92 millions or 24 per cent of a total population of 389 millions. These became the ‘100 millions’ of propaganda, which represented, however an accurate enough total in the general propaganda figure of ‘400 millions’. The Muslims thus constituted one in four of the total population. They were easily the largest minority in the country, and in fact the only one, except for the Sikhs in the Punjab, to be politically important. In their own eyes they were not a minority at all, but a separate ‘nation’, and it is this fact which may serve as a first clue to an understanding of the Pakistan movement.

The Muslims of India have always regarded themselves as separate from the rest of the people, though they have not always rejected the title of Indian. The Pakistan movement threw the cloak of Western nationalism over the Islamic conception of a separate culture and so converted a cultural and religious entity into a separatist political force. To understand how this could come about among a group of diverse racial origin, speaking many languages and geographically scattered, it is necessary to delve into the distant past. The first Muslims to enter India in force were the Arabs of Muhammad bin Kasim who conquered Sind in A.D. 712. From that time onwards Sind became gradually predominantly Muslim. The next step was the Ghaznavid conquest of the Punjab by Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century. The Punjab also, in the course of centuries became a mainly Muslim area though the Hindus (and later the Sikhs) continued to be a much more significant element in the population than in Sind. Kashmir was occupied in 1400, and also adopted Islam except for the small though significant group of Kashmiri Brahmans.

The great irruption of Islam into the main body of India followed the defeat of Prithvi Raj at Thanesar in 1192 and the capture of Delhi by Muhammad Ghori. Within twenty years the Muslim Turks had reached the Bay of Bengal and in little more than a century had penetrated as far as Madura in the extreme south. From that time forward until 1760 they were the dominant force in India. During four of the five and a half centuries northern India was ruled by two Muslim empires; the Deccan as far as the Kistna was under Muslim control from the early fourteenth century and twice the whole sub-continent was virtually united under a single raj.

It was in these circumstances that one-quarter of the population became Muslim. That population was, however, by no means homogeneous. The first element was the immigrant, Arab, Turk, Pathan, Afghan, Persian, who in groups or tribes or in single families seeking their fortunes, settled in the country. Many of the Muslim of the old Panjab, Sind, and frontier regions belonged to tribal groups. Some such, like the Rohillas in the early eighteenth century in Rohilkhund, or the Sayyids of Barha, settled further down country, but there is no evidence of large-scale Muslim folk movements like those of the Sakas, the Kushans, or the Huns, or the early Aryan-speaking peoples themselves. In the main the Indian Muslims were of Indian origin. Many individual families throughout the period came in from Persia and central Asia, attracted by opportunities of service and honour. The ancestors of the Nizam entered in this way in the seventeenth century, as did those of the Nawab Wazirs of Oudh. Mirza Najaf Khan, the last great Mughal minister under Shah Alam, was a late case of an immigrant rising to distinction. Some families still reveal their origin by their names, like the Bokharis. The Turanian and Iranian factions were a feature of Mughul political life.

The next element among the Muslims arose from intermarriage. The Muslim rule of India east of the Sutlej was at first that of an army of occupation. Officers and men sought wives and contracted unions, and thus a population of mixed racial origin grew up all over India. Unlike the later Anglo-Indians they never dissociated themselves from the country of their domicile; religion rather than racial feeling was the force that bound them together. It is probably from this class that most the later Muslim leadership had come. The third element of the Muslim community, and by far the largest, was the result of conversion. Some of this was forcible, but we must beware of placing too much emphasis on this undoubted practice. Some Muslim chroniclers gloried in it with the probable exaggeration of enthusiasm. It occurred in quantity only during campaigns before the Hindus were generally recognized to be, like Christians and Jews, ‘the people of a book’, and then chiefly in the early rather than the later part of the period. There were no doubt individual cases of conversion by pressure throughout this long period. After forcible conversions came conversions from interest or hope of reward. There was a steady trickle of breakaways from the upper Hindu ranks for the sake of advancement in the Muslim state as well as from conviction or both. Khan Jahan, the minister of Firoz Shah, was an example of this type. Most took Muslim names, but some, like the Muslim Puris, retained their old family names.

But the largest class of conversions were certainly voluntary and came from the lower levels of Hindu society. To this phenomenon must be attributed the mass conversion of eastern Bengal whether we ascribe it to relief on the part of a Buddhist peasantry at deliverance from Brahman oppression or the straight conversion of a virtually animistic countryside. Such conversion were not confined to eastern Bengal, but occurred all over the country. In general they were from the lower classes, because Islam could offer to these people a hope and a status denied them in the Hindu system. But the existence of Muslim Rajputs shows that in the north-west it occurred in the upper strata of society as well. These conversions were not procured by kings or soldiers and introduced a new factor into the building up of the Muslim community. This factor is the Sufi movement. Sufi saints or pirs were present in the Panjab in the eleventh century and they soon followed the armies farther into India in the thirteenth. Many of them were men of great learning, but they were guides to the good life as well as scholars and poets who had their murids or disciples. Some like Kh. Muin-ud-din Chishti of Ajmer and Kh. Nizam-ud-din Aulia of Delhi settled near cities where their tombs became shrines and centres of devotion and proselytism. Others lived in groups in khanqahs or monasteries, the traces of which are numerous in old Muslim cities. These people were in general aloof from the courts and the orthodox ulema of the colleges; they appealed direct to the people and were the evangelists as well as the spiritual preceptors of Islam. They are often thought of as forming a bridge of understanding with the Hindu bakhti movement, with their emphasis on the inner life and the unity of all believers in the one God. Kabir, the Muslim weaver who preached the unity of religions and became the founder of a Hindu sect, is an example of this. But an even more important aspect of their work was the propagation of Islam among the Indian people. The Sufis, rather than kings, warriors, or adventurers, were responsible for the bulk of the Muslims in the sub-continent. And they as a class, for all the eclecticism of some of them, were responsible for the sense of separateness and sense of mission which tended to bind together people of the most diverse racial and social origin into a cultural and religious unity.

We thus find in the eighteenth century a large Muslim community scattered throughout India. It possessed a large aristocracy of office and landholders, a small middle class of professional men and government servants, and a large proletariat of agriculturists and artisans. The smallness of the middle class was due to Hindu competition on the one hand and the fact that for Muslims of talent under a Muslim regime the ladder of promotion led quickly upwards to the higher appointments. The eighteenth century was a time of stress for the community. Their political dominion collapsed, and with it went their hold on the chief offices of state. The British monopolized (from the time of Cornwallis) these offices for themselves, leaving the upper classes to jostle for subordinate posts with Hindus, or else to stand aloof in pride and poverty. Soon western education was added as another and unacceptable condition for office. Immigration from the north-west came to an end, except from among the untutored Afghans. The decline of Islam in its homeland reduced the value of such contacts as remained, thus depriving Indian Islam of the spiritual and cultural streams which had so long nourished it. Islam in India was politically depressed and culturally isolated. With the weakening of these Islamic impulses Hindu practices and social customs, like the worship of saints’ tombs and caste customs, already well established, became more widespread. It became difficult to tell whether some groups were more Muslim or Hindu in their outlook. The widespread resumption of rent-free lands and the ruin of the Bengal weaving industry further depressed the community.

It was in this condition of political eclipse and cultural depression that Indian Islam was confronted with the challenge of the West. At first bad seemed to grow worse, for while the Muslims stood aloof, the Hindus took advantage of the new western education, thus securing a lead in the new world and the administration which they never lost. The Munity made things worse, for in spite of its Hindu origin the Muslims were thought to have revealed their disloyalty to and hatred of the new regime. But the Muslims were too numerous and too vigorous to be absorbed or permanently reduced to insignificance. The first movements of revival came from within and may be described as those of internal renewal or purification. These were amongst the body of the people. Then came a movement among the leaders in tardy response to western influences. It was the Pakistan movement which finally welded these two together into a national movement comparable to that of the Indian Congress.

The first of these movements can be traced to Shah Wali-ullah of Delhi (1703-62), described as one of the greatest theologians of Muslim India. He translated the Quran into Persian, while two of his sons added an Urdu version. He began a movement for reform which was carried on by his son Shah Abdul Aziz. In the hands of his disciple Sayyid Ahmad of Bareilly, who was influenced by Wahabi ideas from Arabia, this became the militant ‘Wahabi’ movement of the early nineteenth century, with its headquarters at Patna. India was regarded as dar-ul-harb, or a land of war, since it was under infidel rule. Sayyid Ahmad’s efforts, however, were directed against the Sikhs, as being the chief Muslim oppressors of the day. He established himself in the Swat valley where he waged a jihad or holy war until his death in battle with the Sikhs in1831. Two parallel movements in lower India were led by Sheikh Karamat Ali of Jaunpur, another disciple of Shah Abdul Aziz, and Haji Shariat-ullah of Faridpur. The later was involved in agrarian agitation, but on the whole the two movements were peaceful. They were actively propagandist and did much to purify and strengthen east Indian Islam. Karamat Ali’s work has been thus described:

For forty years he moved up and down the elaborate river systems of eastern Bengal in a flotilla of small boats, carrying the message of Islamic regeneration and reform from the Nagas of Assam to the inhabitants of Sandip and other islands in the Bay of Bengal. His flotilla of country craft was like a travelling college. One boat was the residence of his family, another was reserved for the students and disciples accompanying him, while the third was for dars and lectures and prayers.

Mention should also be made of the Ahmadiya sect founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1838-1908) with its headquarters at Qadian in the Panjab. It gathered a numerous following in the Panjab and was notable for organization and missionary activity, both in India and abroad, including England. But its founders claim to prophethood and to the function of completing or adding to the Muslim revelation caused the sect to be considered heretical by the main body of Muslims. It has been notable for the distinction of some of its adherents, rather than for its influence on the development of Indian Islam as a whole.

 

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The response of Indian Islam to the west came not from the Muslim princes who showed a curious imperviousness to Western thought while they toyed with European trinkets or adopted superficial European manners. Furniture, wines, and uniforms were the limit of their interest. The first concrete move came from Sayyid Ahmad Khan of Delhi. He was born in 1817 and took service under the British in 1837, rising to the rank of subordinate judge. He remained loyal in the Munity and published an influential essay on its causes. Sayyid Ahmad came of an aristocratic family of central Asian origin; his combination of oriental with western learning fitted him to be an interpreter between the conservative East and the encroaching West; his forceful character enabled him to impress his ideas on his people while his sterling integrity was proof against calumny. He visited England in 1869 and retired from service in 1876. In 1878 he became a member of the Governor-General’s Legislative Council and was knighted in 1888. He died in 1898, the acknowledged grand old man of Indian Islam. The Sayyid was convinced that the Indian Muslims must make terms with the West, both politically and culturally. He considered that the tolerance and security of the British regime entitled it to be included in the Dar-ul-Islam or region of peace. The British regime having been accepted as in the providence of God, Muslims should win British approval by active loyalty. Otherwise they would be out-distanced in the race for governmental favor by the Hindus, as had already happened in the case of education. A modern education, indeed, was the sine qua non of the community’s progress, and the Sayyid therefore became a champion of western knowledge, which should not be inconsistent with the tenants of Islam. The fruit of this advocacy was the opening of the Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875, with its British principals and staff, its residential system, its mosque and religious instruction, its balance of eastern and western learning. In 1920 the college became the Aligarh Muslim University. Aligarh both enabled the talented young Muslim to compete on terms with the Hindu for government service and in public life, and gave him a dynamic which his community seemed to have lost.

For Sir Sayyid was not concerned with material things only. His movement was one of general reform. It was inspired by the thought that the Muslims of India were a separate people or nation who must not be absorbed within Hinduism, and that the essence of Islam was consistent with the best that the West had to offer. He was, in fact, a Muslim modernist appealing to general principles outside the scope of the four recognized schools of theology. He accepted the mission of the Prophet and God’s revelation in the Quran. But he claimed that Reason was also an attribute of God and Nature his handywork. The Quran and Islam might therefore be interpreted on the basis of reason to meet modern needs and problems. The achievements of the West, so far as they rested on reason, might thus be welcomed and assimilated. He laid particular stress upon science, as being the characteristic feature of western progress. His first institution at Aligarh was a scientific society. In pressing this point of view he was much helped by the existence of the strong Greek tradition in Islamic thought, and by the common Judaic background which western Christianity shared with Islam. Thus fortified, the Sayyid conducted a campaign on two fronts, against the isolationist conservative Muslims on the one hand and European critics on the other. This tended to replace backward-looking by forward-looking views and to restore the shaken confidence of those in close contact with western thought.

These ideas attracted distinguished supporters, who came to be known collectively as the Aligarh school. Among them may be mentioned two men nurtured in the pre-Munity renaissance at the Delhi college, Maulvi Nazir Ahmad and Maulvi Zaka-ullah, the poets Altaf Husain Hali and Maulvi Shibli Naumani, the scholar Khuda Baksh, and the educationist Yusuf Ali. The work of Sayyid Amir Ali, though in general accord, had a slant of its own. His Spirit of Islam was the best apologetic of Islam for the non-Muslim which had appeared, while his History of the Saracens was a tonic for the Muslims themselves. He emphasized the personality of the Prophet and so introduced what may be described as prophetic hero-worship. But though emphasizing the value of tradition, he was also a reformer, advocating women’s education. His insistence on the glories of historical Islam provided a starting-point for the leaders of the Khilafat movement and a link between them and the westernized liberals.

Sayyid Ahmad’s programme was admirably suited to the position of Indian Islam in the Victorian world. It made possible the assimilation of elements of a culture which then seemed irresistible; it provided for gradual political progress at a time when that seemed to be the only sort of progress possible. With the advent of the twentieth century conditions changed. Something more dynamic than reason in the religious sphere was needed, and something more radical than advisory councils as a political programme. Europe itself was changing with the development of industrialism; the old Islamic world was threatened and trying to save itself by pan-Islamic Caliphate ideas. In India itself came the first signs of the transfer of power to Indian hands, with the ultimate prospect of a Hindu government. The collapse of Turkey before the Balkan states in 1912 and then during the First World War made Europe appear to many for a time as again the enemy of Islam. It was this which gave strength to the Khilafat movement in the postwar years. The overriding need, as it seemed, to defend Islam, justified the Hindu alliance then contracted. The revival of Turkey in 1922 and her emergence as a secularist state reassured the liberals while removing the whole basis of the conservative programme. From that time on the Hindu majority, personified in the enigmatic figure of Gandhi, seemed to be the main threat to a separate Muslim existence. But there could be no return to the days of the Sayyid. Indian Islam needed a more dynamic creed and a larger vision and found it in the writings of Sir Muhammad Iqbal.

Iqbal wrote mainly in Persian and only produced one work in English. His theme was the all-embracing sufficiency of Islam as expressing a dynamic spirit of struggle for spiritual freedom. Islam was not merely a valid religion to be compared favourably with others; it was the root and branch of all religious experience. It was not a fixed and precious deposit to be treasured with the zeal of the antiquarian, but a living principle of action which could give purpose and remake worlds. Europe was enmeshed in its greed for wealth and lust for power. It was for Islam to create true values and to assert man’s mastery of nature by constant struggle. It was Nietszche in an Islamic setting. Iqbal’s teaching provided the young Muslim generation with a view which out-moderned the moderns, but which yet seemed distinctive and Islamic. Sayyid Ahmad Khan gave Indian Islam a sense of separate existence; Iqbal a sense of separate destiny.

The precipitation of this rich solution of thought and feeling into the crystals of a political movement required an external catalyst, and this was provided by fear. Sayyid Ahmad Khan gave the community a new sense of justification and a new line of conduct; he also made possible a new sense of security by pointing the way to a reconciliation with the ruling power. But the sense of separateness from others involved an immediate reaction to any suggestion of commingling or absorption in a plural society. The British might rule, for they showed no sign of interfering with Islam; that was the basis of the Sayyid’s confidence in them. But would a hypothetical Hindu government do the same? As soon as the Congress was formed in 1885 the Sayyid took alarm. Majority Indian rule for him meant Hindu rule, and Hindu rule meant the risk of cultural absorption. He had already declined to support Amir Ali’s ‘National Muhammadan Association’ in Calcutta in 1877 as tending to subversive activity. Only a small group, particularly in Bombay, supported the congress to become the nucleus of the later nationalist Muslims.

The Muslims in general watched the growth of Congress from a distance and stood aloof from its controversies with Lord Curzon. But having allowed it to become dominantly Hindu in character through their abstention, they took alarm at the first signs of concessions to its demands. From this sprang the deputation to Lond Minto in 1906, let by the Agha Khan, which demanded separate electorates for Muslims in any representative system which might be introduced. At the same time they did what the Sayyid had frowned upon during his life by forming the All-India Muslim League. The Morley-Minto reforms with their separate electorates for Muslim landholders, and their retention of irresponsible power by the British, satisfied them for the time so far as India was concerned. But almost immediately the Muslims took alarm at the misfortunes of Turkey and there followed the Khilafat movement. Pan-Islamic sentiment overbore the nascent local Muslim nationalism and antipathy to British Turkish policy local fear of Hindu rule. The outward expressions of this emotional upheaval were the Lucknow Pact of 1916 with the Congress which recognized separate electorates, and the alliance with Congress in Gandhi’s non-co-operation movement. The passing of this storm left the Muslims as a whole disillusioned and fearful for their future while leaving a fresh sediment of Muslims on the Congress shore. These included many Westernized Muslims who took a secularist view on the lines of Ataturk as to the place of Islam in the state. The most distinguished of these was Mohammad Ali Jinnah of Bombay, who had been a member of Congress for many years and now held the balance of power in the Legislative Assembly as leader of the Independent party.

The working of the Montford reforms tended to increase these fears. They were expressed in a rising tempo of communal riots and increasingly bitter exchanges between the party leaders. The Ali brothers swung round from the preaching of Hindu fraternalism to the championship of Muslim rights. But the community remained divided and perplexed. In 1927 the League split on the question of the Simon Commission, uniting in 1929 in the All-India Muslim Conference. Mr. Jinnah retired in1931. Only in the Panjab were the Muslims active and confident under the determined leadership of Sir Fazl-i-Husain, whose icy and resolute character was reminiscent of the Irish Parnell. The constitutional discussions which began with the appointment of the Simon Commission at the end of 1927 increased Muslim fears, for it soon became clear that a further instalment of power would be given to responsible ministers, and that full self-government was now above the horizon of development. Heightened apprehension quickened the urge to unity and also the search for a practical policy. The search for unity led to the reorganization of the League under Mr. Jinnah in 1934, whose emergence from political retirement in this capacity was itself a sign of the times. The search for a positive programme led in two directions. The first was that of safeguards. During the constitutional discussions of the early thirties there was a renewed insistence upon communal representation, not only in the constituencies, but also in the government service. Muslims welcomed federation as giving provinces more freedom and thus tending to safeguard Muslims in their majority areas. They sought to reduce the scope of the Centre as much as possible. The second direction was towards autonomy in the Muslim majority areas.in 1930 Iqbal suggested the union of the Frontier Province, Baluchistan, Sind, and Kashmir as a Muslim state within a federation. This proved to be a creative idea which germinated during the early thirties to burst into vigorous life with the advent of the new reforms. The idealist Choudhri Rahmat Ali developed this conception at Cambridge, where he inspired a group of young Muslims and invented the term Pakistan in 1933. His ideas seemed visionary at the time, but within seven years they had been turned into a practical programme by the future Qaid-i-Azam with the new name as its slogan or banner. The ideology of Iqbal, the visions of Rahmat Ali, and the fears of Muslims were thus united by the practical genius of Jinnah to bind Muslims together as never before during the British period and lead to effect an act of political creation.

 

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Its a big article to read.