SETH Abdullah Haroon, whose death anniversary is being observed today, was a multi-faceted personality, but most eminently a leader of outstanding merit.

He is also remembered as a successful business magnate, an entrepreneur, a committee man, an organiser, a philanthropist and the founder of several educational, religious and social institutions. In the last four years of his life (1938-42), he came to occupy a front seat in Muslim India’s politics.

All through the mid-1930s, he worked phenomenally for the merger of the All India Muslim Conference (f. 1929), an umbrella organisation of which he was the president in 1935, with the All-India Muslim League (AIML). Thus he hoped to bring solidarity in Muslim ranks. Abdullah Haroon’s insight into Indian politics was remarkable. He was one of the few men with the vision and imagination to see the problems of Sindhi Muslims in an all-India context and establish linkages between the Sindhi component and the pan-Indian Muslim community. The only other Sindhi leader who shared this honour with him was Sheikh Abdul Majid. Not only in the provincial context but also in the regional context, Abdullah Haroon’s impact on all-India politics was immense and impressive.

Indeed, in the region now constituting Pakistan, his contacts with all-India leaders and his involvement in all-India Muslim politics were only next to Mian Muhammad Shafi (d.1931). Abdullah Haroon was president of at least six all-India conferences and bodies. However, his role in the AIML from 1937 onwards surpassed all his other contributions in his entire political career. In that year, he undertook the Herculean task of organising the League in Sindh.

In 1938, he masterminded the First Sindh Provincial Muslim League Conference at Karachi, with himself as chairman of the reception committee. In 1939, he was elected president of the Sindh Provincial Muslim League and also became chairman of AIML’s foreign sub-committee. In 1940, he was nominated member of the AIML working committee. In 1941, he presided over the Punjab Muslim Students Conference at Lyallpur (now Faisalabad). The same year he secured the Manzilgah mosque in Sukkur on behalf of the Muslim League.

His contributions to the Muslim cause are many. But his most notable achievement was organising the First Sindh Provincial Muslim League Conference on October 8-10, 1938. This gave a direction to the course of Indian Muslim politics. Though a provincial moot, it was not only presided over by Jinnah, but also attracted a galaxy of Muslim leaders. The list almost read like a who’s who of Muslim India at the time.

Nor were the topics discussed or the decisions taken confined to Sindh. Haroon’s welcome address set the tone for the conference — it was radical and militant and commended an ideological goal. Unless adequate safeguards and protection for minorities were duly provided, declared Haroon, the Muslims would have no alternative but “to seek their salvation in their own way in an independent federation of Muslim states”.

He drew a parallel with Czechoslovakia which had been partitioned to provide safeguards to the Sudeten Germans, and warned that the same could take place in India if the majority community persisted in its ‘present course’. He added, “We have nearly arrived at the parting of the ways and until and unless this problem is solved to the satisfaction of all, it will be impossible to save India from being divided into Hindu India and Muslim India, both placed under a separate federation.”

This was indeed radical stuff. No one had spoken from the League’s platform in such a strong vein before. In contrast, Jinnah, who spoke next, was characteristically mild and moderate. Yet he could not help getting infected by Haroon’s tone and tenor. At two different places, he also referred, albeit vaguely, to the Sudeten German case, warning the Congress to ‘mark, learn and inwardly digest’ the lessons provided by that case.

The main resolution adopted at the conference carried the stamp of Abdullah Haroon’s political thought. Though diluted in the subjects committee deliberations on the insistence of Jinnah himself, who was characteristically cautious about not showing his hand prematurely before the Muslims were fully mobilised and public opinion galvanised behind an ideological goal, the resolution yet retained enough of its clout to become a trendsetter and to warrant attention.

For one thing, it put forth a common position by the Muslim leadership in the majority and minority provinces. The Lucknow (1937) League had lambasted the Congress for its anti-Muslim conduct in the Hindu provinces. Along with it, the Sindh Conference also focused on the Congress’ machinations in the Muslim provinces, ‘to render the power of the Muslim majorities ineffective and impotent’ in these provinces.

This confluence of interests of the Muslim majority and minority provinces represents a milestone in evolving a common goal for the entire Muslim community and towards enunciating the concept of Muslim nationhood. The resolution argued the case of separate Muslim nationhood, not merely in political and immediate terms, but on an intellectual plane spelling out its basics and basis. Equally significant, for the first time the Hindus and Muslims were not only officially pronounced as two distinct ‘nations’, but also ‘political self-determination’ for them and a scheme enabling Muslims to attain ‘full independence’ was recommended. In historical perspective, therefore, this resolution became the precursor of the Lahore resolution of 1940.

Between this conference and the Lahore session (1940), Abdullah Haroon made by far the most significant contribution in popularising the ideal of a separate state for Muslims. He chaired the foreign and domestic subcommittee of the AIML, which produced a series of working papers and literature, and corresponded extensively with prominent Muslim leaders throughout the subcontinent.

To quote R. Coupland, who studied the constitutional problem in the early 1940s, Abdullah Haroon was “the only Muslim politician of any standing who had so far taken a public part in the constitutional discussion”. And the subcommittee which he headed prepared a comprehensive report which became the basis of the Lahore resolution.

In thus advancing the cause of a Muslim homeland at a critical stage, Abdullah Haroon carved for himself a niche in history as one of the founding fathers of Pakistan, although he did not live long enough to see his dream come true in 1947. n

The writer is HEC Distinguished National Professor, and co-editor, Unesco’s History of Humanity, Vol. VI.

smujahid107@hotmail.com

I HAVE had the occasion from time to time to visit Christian churches and Jewish synagogues and witness their services. The preachers and their sermons are as ‘run of the mill’ as those of most of our khatibs. But outside of regular prayer they can be convivial.

The Christian wedding (a sacrament unlike our marriage), with men in formal wear and women in flowing robes, the ceremonial, and the vows the bride and the groom exchange (‘love, cherish, and honour until death do us part’) is charming.

The other day I witnessed a baptismal. Shenaya, my friend Cecil Joseph’s granddaughter, was to be baptised. Baptism is essentially washing (or bathing) of a person’s body with water in one of various ways in the expectation, among others, that the exercise will purify him and admit him into the community of believers. In one form or another, the practice seems to have been in vogue even before the advent of Christianity. John the Baptist, who was already a prophet when Jesus was born, baptised folks in his vicinity and is believed to have baptised Jesus by dipping his entire body in the Jordan river. Jesus himself and/or his disciples also baptised people.

In most Christian churches baptism is mainly an initiation ceremony. But some theologians maintain that it also assures the subject grace and salvation. Opinions vary as to the time in one’s life by which baptism must be done. More often than not, it happens while one is an infant. Some churches maintain that age is irrelevant to its performance. Constantine, the Roman emperor who accepted Christianity and did much to promote it, is said to have deferred his own baptism until he was close to death and no longer capable of committing any more sins.

In early Christianity, the preferred method was to dip the subject’s entire body in a flowing river or stream and then pull it up. (But shorter procedures may have been permissible even then, for reportedly one of the apostles once baptised nearly 3,000 persons in Jerusalem in the space of a day.) Later, it was deemed satisfactory to stand the person concerned in a body of water (river, stream, lake, pond or even a tub) with part of his body under water and then to pour water on his upper body. Still later, simply washing or bathing of the entire body began to be considered enough. While all of these modes are still permissible, washing of the subject’s head, or even mere sprinkling of water on it, is considered good enough.

In our own subcontinent it is customary among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs to wash or bathe the newborn baby. But it is to clean him up simply because he comes out soiled and needs cleansing. It has nothing to do with initiation or purification in any otherworldly sense. Muslims have their own initiation practice, which is to have someone say the azan (call to prayer) in the baby’s ear. That is the Muslim way of admitting the baby into the community. Another custom is to shave the baby’s head in the hope that her/his new hair will come out thicker and dense. This practice has more to do with cosmetics than spirituality.

Let us now return to Shenaya’s baptism. A pastor from the Anglican church (called the Church of Pakistan) held her, nicely wrapped up in a pink blanket and sound asleep, in his arms while another sprinkled ‘holy’ water on her head and then read her a hymn. All of this was preceded and followed by some prayer and readings from the New Testament. Psalms taken from the Bible were read and the priests and the congregation chanted devotional songs. Some of them were in English but I was pleasantly surprised to find that several had been composed in Urdu and Punjabi.

The congregation consisted of about 100 men and women, most of them relatives of the baby’s grandparents. They appeared to be middle-class people, probably professionals, government and corporate employees and skilled workers, I had been under the impression that many Christian women in this country wore western clothes. That turned out to be wrong. I saw a few women wearing saris and blouses, but most of them wore shalwar and kameez. I could not tell how fancy or expensive they were but they all looked pretty nice to me. A few of the men wore native clothing but most of them, as many of the rest of us, wore pants and jackets.

Hardly any of them spoke English. They spoke Punjabi with a sprinkling of Urdu. They were all Punjabi-looking: medium of height and build, lighter shades of brown skin, straight features (no hooked and only a few flat noses). Only a few had names that were entirely western. In a few cases, part of the name was western (Christian) but in many the entire name (first and last) was the same as Muslim names (Farsi or Arabic words or indigenous last names indicating ethnic origins such as Rajput or Jat among others). In sum, they are ethnically, linguistically, and culturally our own people. They differ from us only in the matter of doctrine concerning the status of Jesus.

But it is a terrible shame that many Pakistani Muslims, unlike Muslims of some Arab countries, do not treat Christians (or for that matter, Hindus), especially those in rural areas, as their people. This in spite of the fact that our religion and theirs proceed from the same antecedents. Violating the injunctions of Islam and our Constitution, the aforementioned Muslims mistreat and victimise our Christian citizens in all kind of ways when fanaticism and blind passion seize them.

A commentary in this newspaper (April 20) tells us of a group of Muslim militants accusing a fellow worker in a factory, a Hindu young man, of blasphemy and beating him to death while other workers, supervisors and guards watched silently and did nothing to stop this brutality. Likewise, the larger Muslim community, including the professors of Islamic doctrine, stays virtually silent when these atrocities are committed against our Christian people There can be little doubt that our claims of commitment to Islamic virtue and our professions of tolerance and regard for minority rights are false.

The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is currently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.

anwarsyed@cox.net