Elaborate Argument, Elusive Premise

Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion, Pakistan as a Political Idea, Harvard University

Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013, pp vii + 278, $ 21.95 (ISBN 978-0-674-
07267-1)

Once considered the expression of unshakable bonds, the “nation” was in the 1980s
reconstructed in the scholarly literature as an “imagined” entity, an artefact of human
invention and social engineering. Scholarship on the nation flourished in the years
that followed, throwing up within a mere matter of two decades, perhaps greater
insights than had accumulated in the entire scientific and literary corpus of the
preceding two centuries. Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Anthony Smith were
some of the key figures in this new wave of scholarship on the nation. The term
“imagined communities” was itself the invention of Benedict Anderson, who also
theorised that the century following the French Revolution had created certain
“modular forms” of nationalism that provided prototypes for nations newly emerging
from colonialism to choose from.

There was a gap in this theoretical edifice that Partha Chatterjee identified rather
acutely: if all modular forms were available off-the-shelf, what possibly would be left
to the imagination of the post-colonial society in constructing its nationalist doctrine?
That indeed is a point to seriously consider. Every colonial society sought a renewal
and reimagination of long submerged cultural identities to push back against the
stigma of conquest and the tutelary role assumed by colonial masters. Subjects of
colonialism, cast as immature and all too prone to mess up their lives without the
enlightened guidance of the west, had to evolve a counter-narrative. And this came
in part from a nationalism of ideals which sought to recreate a golden age of the
distant past.

A nationalism of ideals was incipient in the early days of the French revolution, but
this inclusive model based on an expansive view of the rights of man soon lapsed
into a narrower, identity-based ideology. This was a mutation effected in the crucible
of conflict, particularly in the effort by neighbouring states – which spoke an alien
tongue and were under various kinds of despotic rule – to restore the ancien regime.
In the struggle to defend the Republic, the French linguistic identity came to be
strongly associated with the values that the Revolution gave voice to.
If “identity” and “values” were among the modular forms on which nationalist
ideologies were moulded, colonial societies seemed to oscillate wildly and
indecisively between the two. Inherited ideologies of enlightened despotism and
clientelism were eagerly revived by colonial elites in their effort to push back against
the condescension of the European powers. But these ideologies were inconsistent
with the mass political nature of nationalism as a doctrine and held little appeal for
those who saw themselves as the victims of oppressive traditions. Identity also
seemed an elusive concept, always limiting the reach of the nationalist appeal when
the purpose was to extend it. Surendranath Banerjea, among the early campaigners
for Indian nationalism for instance, put it with apposite though unintended irony in his
memoirs published in 1925, oscillating between a view of the nation in the greater
context of India even as he narrowed his focus of action to the smaller domain of
Bengal. This was while paying tribute to the inspirational value Giuseppe Mazzini’s
efforts in unifying the nation-state of Italy: “Mazzini had taught Italian unity. We
wanted Indian unity. Mazzini had worked through the young. I wanted the young men
of Bengal to realise their potentialities and to qualify themselves to work for the
salvation of their country, but upon lines instinct with the spirit of constitutionalism.”

Alongside the value of constitutionalism, there is also a rather confused notion of

identity being upheld here. Indian unity is the state of ideal anticipation, but it is one
that is pitched rather narrowly, solely to the youth of Banerjea’s home province of
Bengal. Republican egalitarianism being obviously a rather difficult choice for the
elites of highly stratified and unequal societies, “identity” emerged as the main
foundation of nationalist consolidation, only to run into the problems of multiple and
divided identities and contentious reconstructions of the past. These were no mere
abstract difficulties since they influenced all debates over power-sharing within the
colonial order, with spaces in the local administration being the first to be conceded
by the imperial powers and factions contesting for a toehold within these.

Just as there was no single nationalist doctrine that drove the diverse anti-colonial
movements, there was no invariant model of political struggle either. Mass agitation,
civil disobedience, moderate mendicancy, armed struggle all played their roles. And
nationalist doctrines were often embellished with the promise of an egalitarian,
socialist political order. But except in rare instances, the euphoria of liberation was
followed quickly by the weakening of elite consensus within and absorption into a
new global order of dependence.

There was a conspicuous exception. As Edward Said has famously said, the
emergence of Israel flew in the face of this history, in being the revival and
reaffirmation of the great wave of colonial conquest that began with Columbus’
landing on the American continent a full three-and-a-half centuries before. In the
annals of decolonisation, Israel truly is unique since it is the only case of a colonial
power signing over territory to an ethno-religious community on grounds of primordial
ownership, in the process rendering the real owners of the land into a dispossessed
people. It was a settler colonialism emerging in the age of decolonisation.

Zionism was the doctrine that birthed the Israeli state. And that had a beginning in
European anti-Semitism and the resistance of fundamentalist zealots to the
processes of assimilation that otherwise seemed the natural destiny of the Jewish
people in rapidly developing European societies. This tension fed into the rivalry
between imperialist powers leading that archetypal anti-Semite Lord Balfour’s
promise to the Zionist lobby of a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine. This was as
much to rid western Europe of the troublesome influence of the community, as to
shore up British geopolitical advantage on the eastern banks of the Mediterranean.

Faisal Devji unfolds another narrative, which casts the state of Pakistan in close
ideological kinship with the Zionist state and indeed, puts the whole programme for a
Muslim “homeland” within the geography of “India” – as it then was -- in close
consanguinity with Zionism. Zion is used here to “to name a political form in which
nationality is defined by the rejection of an old land for a new, thus attenuating the
historical role that blood and soil play in the language of Old World nationalism”.

It is an interesting narrative even if it begins with a counter-intuitive premise. A

distinctly “Muslim” politics in colonial India begins with the Aligarh school and its
founder, Syed Ahmed Khan. Traditional sources of Muslim power had eroded and
then decisively been banished in the mass killings that followed the 1857 uprising. A
new “nationalist” discourse was emerging couched equally in primordial belonging in
the Hindu faith and the emulation of western values and mores, where those of the
Muslim faith lagged. Syed Khan responded, as Devji records, by fighting “against the
kind of majority rule he feared (and)... by stressing the importance of regional arenas
and crosscutting identities based on rank rather than religion”. He warned against
any dalliance with the emerging Indian National Congress, which he branded a
“Bengali” party undeserving of the loyalty of the Muslim and even the north Indian
Hindu. Devji tends to view Syed Khan’s locutions as suggestive of a deeper
ideological agenda. Viewed in context though, as with Surendranath Banerjea’s
stirring call to the youth of Bengal to forge a new spirit of Indian unity, they would
seem neither devious nor quixotic, merely a fairly typical response to an ideological
milieu where notions of “national identity” were still fluid.

Though Syed Khan soon gave up his effort to cement a new solidarity among the
northern Indian elites, he remained focused on the north, reluctant to bring the more
well-endowed and resourceful Muslim elites from southern and western India into his
political platform. That had to await his passing from the scene, when the new
leadership with notables like the Aga Khan on board, enlarged the platform.

The entry of the Muslim notables from the south and west injected much needed
economic capital into the movement and introduced an elite, as also a sectarian,
dimension. Mostly of the Shia faith, like the Aga Khan, the princely rulers of
Jahangirabad and Mahmudabad, and the small trading strata that had sprung up in
the port cities of the raj, these leaders imported their sensibility of being a minority
within the Islamic fold into the larger practice of politics. This phase in the evolution
of Muslim politics also involved a briefly lived effort to define a global community
without firm territorial anchorage, under the benign oversight of the British empire. It
was an extravagant vision that the Aga Khan put forward as the First World War
drew to a close, which saw India as part of a wider geopolitical expanse “not
bounded by the vast triangle of the Himalayas on the north and the Indian Ocean
and Bay of Bengal on either side down to Adam’s bridge”. Such an aggregation, the
Aga Khan declared could well be called the “South Asiatic Federation”, with India as
its “pivot and centre”. This larger federation in the Aga Khan’s vision could be
promoted by British sponsored Indian colonisation of German East Africa (current
day Rwanda, Burundi and the mainland part of Tanzania) which had been yielded to
a League of Nations mandate under the victor’s justice imposed at the end of the
First World War.
Devji points out that this was a vision with a strongly “commercial and indeed
capitalist focus”, situating the Shia aristocracy in a nodal position within a widely
spread network of trade and accumulation under the British empire, but allowing
other denominations their space. It resonated strongly with the Zionist advocacy for a
zone of Jewish settlement within the Ottoman empire, which proceeded in petitions
presented before the Ottoman Sultan and energetic lobbying with the European
powers who were his prospective conquerors.

That is a superficial parallel between Zionism and the Pakistan project. But in the
inter-war years, Zionist was transformed into an agency of colonisation with explicit
British protection. And even when Britain backed away from active patronage
because of the violent animosities unleashed among the native Palestinian
population, the Zionist project became a favoured child of the German regime,
anxious to see a recalcitrant people banished from its shores. Pakistan as a project
though remained inchoate, the name itself originating in a metaphysical ramble by a
Muslim scholar at Cambridge University. And in its clearest articulation, Pakistan
remained through the 1930s and well beyond, no more ambitious a programme than
a claim for an Indian federation in which the Muslim majority provinces would enjoy
power devolved in exactly the same measure as the others. The shifting and
uncertain geography of the demand was the tribute the Pakistan movement had to
pay to the centres of rich Islamic efflorescence in the sub-continent, where Muslims
happened to be in a minority.

Separate electorates was the unique, though provisional solution worked out, first by
imperial decree and then by mutual agreement between the stalwart Congressman
Bal Gangadhar Tilak and his Muslim League counterpart Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It
remained, in Devji’s account, an inadequate answer to the urgent questions of
identity that Muslim politics faced, forcing it into the mould of a minority and denying
it the broader extra-territorial solidarity it sought.

It was evident in the Aga Khan’s conception of a “South Asian Federation”, that the
search for a Muslim identity was driving the political agenda in a direction quite
remote from the conventional understanding of the nation-state. Within the narrowly
constructed India with “her many sectarian differences”, the Aga Khan held a
“unilateral form of free government .. impossible.” If the larger grouping of the
morrow were to be taken into account, then the idea of a centralised and unitary
government would seem “still more hopelessly impracticable”.

This early vision of the future shape of government for India, Devji says, resonates
strongly with the Muslim League’s later political platform which resisted any
centralised structure of administration. It also was consistent with the posture of the
Aligarh school that “India’s minority question could only be resolved in an imperial
landscape, where such numerical categories of political identity might become
irrelevant.” The accelerated pace of the empire’s disintegration however, made that
an infeasible option. From then on, “minority” became an inadequate category for the
politics of Muslim identity; it craved recognition as a distinct nationality.

It is a complex story that Devji unfolds, but certain elisions render it an argument of
seeming convenience. Omitted for instance, is Jinnah’s Delhi declaration of 1927
which offered an end to the separate electorate if certain demands of special
significance to Muslim politics were granted: the extension of the constitutional
reforms to the North-West Frontier and the recognition of Sindh as a province within
the raj. It was a reasonable offer by any criterion which the Congress leadership
engaged with in some seriousness, but finally failed to respond to because of the
Hindu nationalist strain within. Devji similarly rationalises the Congress refusal to
allow the Muslim League a part in the provincial governments that took office in
1936, since that would supposedly have created an unmanageable fragmentation of
the representative system. That is an argument he deploys to justify Congress
resistance to the 1932 Communal Award too. But he fails to address the related
point: that the Muslim League was by no means alone in insisting that the Congress
did not enjoy a monopoly in representing the Indian nation. And he avoids a serious
engagement with the rather shoddy record of the Congress provincial governments
of the 1930s, averting his gaze from the policies of social reaction and communal
provocation that drove a deep wedge between Hindu and Muslim, transforming the
tenuous electoral fortunes of the League within a decade into virtually an absolute
dominance over the communal vote.

In dealing with the finished products of Pakistan and Israel which emerged within a
few months of each other, Devji looks at the analogous role of religion in the two
sovereign states: serving “not merely to qualify the national life of .. citizens”, but
indeed, defining nationality “outside the state, with all the world’s Jews and all the
subcontinent’s Muslims capable of becoming its citizens”. It really must be asked if
this was really the ideological vision that drove the Pakistan project, and indeed even
if it was, if the final outcome matched the conception. More plausible in the light of
current historical knowledge, is the inference that the final outcome of the Pakistan
project bore all the scars of a botched negotiation with an implacable adversary.
Large-scale population transfers to begin with, were not part of the bargain on either
side, though it became a fact when tensions over-determined by political rivalries at
the global level exploded in insensate violence. Even so, as Vazira F.-Y. Zamindar
has shown in a notable 2007 work on partition, the authorities in Pakistan strove
hard to keep the economically influential Hindus in the province of Sindh and in
particular the city of Karachi from emigrating. The insistence by the Indian political
leadership that the Hindus of Sindh should be evacuated to safety in territory under
their sovereignty was seen on the Pakistan side as a crude attempt to “sabotage” the
very existence of the newly created state. And then as the violence subsided and
newly transferred communities sundered from their patrimony remained homeless in
Karachi, bitterness mounted against the authorities for the seeming anxiety to protect
influential Hindus rather than reward their sacrifice.*

Early in 1948, with peace and some measure of order restored, several of the
Muslim families that had fled in panic in partition’s wake, began returning, seeking
the homes they had abandoned in the truncated nation of India. This occasioned
some concern, and an official effort by the police in the main centres of refugee
return, such as Delhi, to monitor their number. In July 1948, the Government of India
unilaterally promulgated the Influx from Pakistan (Control) Ordinance putting in place
a permit system for returning migrants. By now clearly unable to live up to its billing
as the homeland for all those of the Muslim faith, Pakistan retaliated with the
Pakistan (Control of Entry) Ordinance in October 1948.

These ordinances remained in force till 1952, when they were replaced by a formal
system of passports and visas. If the parallel between the Jewish claim to Palestine

*
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories,
Penguin (Viking), (First published: Columbia University Press), 2007.
and the South Asian Muslim’s putative destiny to find his place in history in Pakistan
is to hold, there should at the minimum, be some equivalent of the aliyah or right to
return in force, which makes every member of world Jewry a potential citizen of
Israel. And the plain fact is that there isn’t. Pakistan ceased to harbour that conceit
from the very moment of its birth.

Devji puts forward a number of parallels between Zionism and the founding ideology
of Pakistan, some of which he admits may be far-fetched. There are some moreover,
which seem to verge on the facile. Take this for instance: “Both Muslim and Jewish
states survive with the rhetorical fear of being divided or altogether extinguished by
their enemies. Yet when the time comes for either to abandon a portion of its
territory, it does so without any apparent crisis of nationality. This is true whether we
look at Israel’s attempts to trade land for peace, of which the return to Egypt of the
Sinai was the most spectacular example, or to Pakistan’s loss of more than half its
population and nearly as much territory with the independence of Bangladesh in
1971”.

This conflation of Israel’s opportunistic U.S.-brokered handover of the Sinai to Egypt

– which left both sides richer in aid receipts from their superpower sponsor – into the
traumatic vivisection of a nation that was itself created as an implausible amalgam of
geographically separated and widely disparate halves, would clearly be dismissed on
sight by anybody with the least familiarity with history. In fact, Pakistan’s desperate
effort to restore national morale by pivoting towards a role in the geopolitics of the
global Islam may well have begun with that traumatic vivisection, with the fateful
results that are evident today.

To say that Devji fails to make a convincing case on his central thesis is not to deny
the many insights he has to offer on the ideological foundations of Pakistan. We
learn for instance of Mohammad Iqbal and his abstract longing for an emulation of
the prophet’s renunciation of his homeland, seen as a necessary part of the quest for
all that is righteous and noble. There is a fascinating reconstruction of Iqbal’s
correspondence with Jawaharlal Nehru where he tackles the political principle of a
separation between church and state in terms of the metaphysical dualism, alien to
his faith, of spirit and matter.
Iqbal earned a degree of suspicion from otherwise devoted adherents over his
willingness to use the images and themes of the Shia in his advocacy of an Islamic
revival. This for Devji was an acknowledgment by Iqbal – born into the Sunni sect –
“of the fundamentally Shia character of modern Islam as a category”. That inference
is likely to be contentious. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the Shia
liturgy was more easily adapted to the florid rituals of modern nationalism than the
spare and austere practices of the Sunni sect.

Devji takes the uncomfortable coexistence – now tending to mutual recoil -- between
mainstream Islam and the Shia sect, not to mention the greater heterodoxy of the
Ahmadiyas, as an element in the existential crises that have since beset Pakistan,
part of the great unravelling of a nationalist project that was unviable from its very
conception. These questions have had several manifestations in the past, other than
the violence that currently besets the nation and Devji draws attention back to the
litigation in the 1960s over the sectarian affiliation of Qaid-e-Azam Jinnah,
occasioned by the death intestate of his sister Fatima.

Devji’s book is intricately constructed, taking one on a tour through the world of
Voltairean drama, which in a sense represented the Enlightenment sensibility
towards the cultural legacy of Islam, switching within paragraphs to the German
romantic ideology of Hegel, and rounding off the discussion with the mysticism of an
Iqbal, the cultural excavations of an Ameer Ali and the robust and intransigent
politics of a Jinnah. It is a fascinating journey that begins from a counter-intuitive
premise. And at its final destination that premise remains as elusive as at its
beginning.