Illustration by Abro
Illustration by Abro

Eunice Goes, a professor of politics at Richmond University and an expert on British politics wrote in an essay that “intellectuals help politicians make sense of the world.” She added that intellectuals also facilitate political parties in developing ideas and narratives that are consistent with their ideological traditions and political goals. 

On numerous occasions intellectuals have been at the centre of the policy/ideology-building process of parties in Europe and the US. Goes writes that politicians rely on intellectuals to perform the task of “rediscovering and reinventing ideological traditions of their parties in a way that addresses contemporary problems.”

This has been a frequent tradition in South Asia as well. Before Partition, mainstream Indian and Muslim nationalist parties in India had intellectuals in prominent positions. The Indian National Congress (INC) carried within it a variety of intellectuals. Some were socialists, some were democrats and some were even Hindu nationalists and conservative Muslim thinkers. They all worked to build a cohesive ideological model of Indian nationalism which could appeal to a wide range of Indians.

India’s mainstream Muslim party, the All India Muslim League (AIML), followed suit and recruited an assortment of thinkers and scholars. Though much of AIML’s ideological crux was moulded from the writings of intellectuals such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the poet-philosopher Iqbal, both were dead by the time AIML went into the all-important 1946 elections. These elections were to decide the AIML’s existential traction among the large Muslim minority of India.


Politicians sans intellectuals cannot construct nor effectively communicate a sagacious rationale for reforming muddled misunderstandings of faith born out of ill-formed ideological experiments of the past


AIML was not only being attacked by secular and Hindu-Indian nationalists and the Muslim scholars of the INC, it was also being dubbed as an ‘elitist party of fake Muslims’ by firebrand Islamic thinkers associated with various Islamic parties such as the Majlis-i-Ahrar, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam Hind, and to a certain extent, by the Jamaat-i-Islami.

To attract the attention of a wide range of Muslims from across classes, political dispositions, sects and sub-sects, and to turn the two strands of ‘modernist Islam’ constructed by the likes of Sir Syed and Iqbal into a populist credo, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the chief of the AIML, brought in intellectuals from opposing poles of the conventional ideological divide.

For example, on the one end, the Marxist ideologue Danial Latifi was recruited to author AIML’s manifesto. On the other end, Islamic theologian and scholar Shabir Ahmad Usmani was inducted to confront the diatribes of the anti-Jinnah ulema and clerics.

The idea was to give momentum to a more populist strand of modern Muslim nationalism which stood at the centre but liberally borrowed elements from ideologies of the right and the left. The AIML had begun this process even before the 1946 election, when the progressive Islamic scholar Ghulam Ahmad Parvez became the editor of the pro-AIML journal, Tulu-i-Islam. On the pages of this journal, Parvez used the writings of Iqbal and Sir Syed and verses from the Quran to explain AIML’s Muslim nationalism as a progressive and modern endeavor.


Z.A. Bhutto’s left-leaning PPP too was studded with intellectuals. Bhutto brought in radical Marxist and socialist thinkers from the left, scholarly moderate democrats, and some ‘progressive’ Islamic scholars from the right to help the party’s socialist programme navigate its way through the outcries of the religious parties and emerge as a populist, all-encompassing ideological entity.


The tradition of having intellectuals in the party did not end after the creation of Pakistan. For example, during the 1953 anti-Ahmadiyya movement in the Punjab, the Muslim League government sanctioned the writing of a pamphlet by liberal Islamic scholar, Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakim. Titled Iqbal Aur Mullah (Iqbal and The Mullahs), the pamphlet tore into the ideas of Muslim clerics, calling them the antithesis of the ‘enlightened Islam’ of the likes of Sir Syed, Iqbal and Jinnah. Armed with this pamphlet, which was distributed free of cost in the Punjab, the government — with the help of the military — crushed the movement.

Pakistan’s first military ruler Ayub Khan (1958-69) had Ghulam Ahmad Parvez and the liberal Islamic scholar Dr Fazalur Rehman Malik as close advisers. Fazal headed the government-backed Central Institute of Islamic Research (CIIR) which provided the regime the academic grub with which Ayub plumped his idea of Muslim modernism.

When in 1964 the religious parties became aggressive towards Ayub’s polices (calling them secular), the CIIR came up with the intellectual rationale which helped Ayub vindicate his ban on the time’s leading religious outfit, the Jamaat-i-Islami. Though the ban was overturned by the Supreme Court, Ayub’s scholars had managed to find for him an intellectual way to fend off a thorny crisis.

Z.A. Bhutto’s left-leaning PPP too was studded with intellectuals. Bhutto brought in radical Marxist and socialist thinkers from the left, scholarly moderate democrats, and some ‘progressive’ Islamic scholars from the right to help the party’s socialist programme navigate its way through the outcries of the religious parties and emerge as a populist, all-encompassing ideological entity.

The tradition of having intellectuals in the party has lasted in the PPP, though their influence has continued to recede. Even the intransigent Gen Zia dictatorship (1977-88) banked heavily on the works of two religious intellectuals. He used their writings to construct his idea of a theological regime and state. These two were the prolific Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi, and the elusive author and jihad theorist, Brigadier-General S.K. Malik. Another military ruler, Parvez Musharraf (1999-2008), utilised the scholarly efforts of the rationalist Islamic scholar Javed Ahmad Ghamdi to turn his regime’s liberal maxim ‘enlightened moderation’ into a doctrine of sorts.

Jinnah’s Muslim League broke into many factions after Pakistan’s creation. All of its factions lost the League’s intellectual tradition, except Ayub’s Convention Muslim League. In a country such as Pakistan there are always deep-seated tensions and tussles between those who see the creation of Pakistan as an evolutionary project of progressive Muslim democracy, and those who see it as a radical experiment towards a theological entity. The major political parties (and the military establishment) need to interact with and utilise intellectuals, now more than ever.

When Pakistan was being ravaged by extremist violence and militancy by outfits that were using religious symbolism and rhetoric, the political parties and the military did not seem to have a clue about how to coherently rationalise a response in a country muddled by so many versions of Islam, with each version claiming to be the correct one.

A terror attack on a school and the persuasive ways of former COAS Gen Raheel finally elicited a response from the country’s civil and military leadership. But what about the non-military aspects of the response? One of the reasons why the ruling PML-N and the opposition parties have failed to figure out how exactly to go about implementing the radical social and theological reforms mentioned in the National Action Plan (NAP) is that these parties do not have intellectuals in their midst anymore. Having just politicians within their ranks, they can’t construct and then effectively communicate a well-thought-out rationale to initiate the reforms which may go against the many muddled understandings of the faith born from the ill-formed ideological experiments of yore.

After the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, the Z.A. Bhutto regime in 1973 held a large conference in which historians and scholars were invited to thrash out a new cohesive meaning of Pakistani nationhood. Indeed, this meaning largely mutated into becoming something rather reactive, but it did provide an important existentialist narrative to a shattered nation.

The PML-N government today should call for a similar conference. At the conference politicians and personnel of the military-establishment should sit with historians, intellectuals and religious and secular scholars to debate and formulate a new idea of Pakistani nationhood. This new idea should be strictly moulded from a narrative which describes the Pakistani nation as an enterprising lot which is inherently moderate and attuned to eschew the extremes which have kept the country locked in a violent state of limbo and inertia.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 8th, 2017

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