In the May 9, 1991 issue of The Frontier Post, veteran journalist and intellectual Ahmad Bashir wrote that just days before Mr Jinnah’s Muslim League managed to turn the demand for a separate Muslim-majority country into a living reality, Bashir  (who was in his 20s at the time) attended an important Muslim League session in Karachi. The session was chaired by Mr Jinnah himself. Bashir wrote that during the gathering, a man in the audience suddenly stood up to interrupt the proceedings and said “Jinnah Sahib, we have been promising people, ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya, laillaha illalah ...!” [What is the meaning of Pakistan? There is no God but Allah!]Most probably the man was not happy about the kind of Islam Jinnah and his comrades were discussing at the meeting. 

In his article, Bashir writes that as soon as the man stood up and said his bit, Jinnah immediately asked him to sit down. Bashir quotes Jinnah as saying, “Sit down! Neither I nor the working committee of the Muslim League have ever passed any such resolution. You might have done so to catch a few votes.” Pakistan’s former ambassador and writer, Saad Khairi, also mentions this incident in his book Jinnah Reinterpreted. 

In a July 26, 2014 article, Anwar Iqbal, US correspondent and columnist for Dawn, wrote that the aforementioned slogan (Pakistan ka matlab kya ...) was directly lifted from a poem written by an obscure poet and schoolteacher, Asghar Sodai. Sodai had penned it in his hometown, Sialkot, just before the all-important election of 1946. The 1946 election was crucial for the League. It had to win big in Muslim-majority provinces of pre-Partition India to strengthen its case and call for a separate Muslim country in the region. 

The oft-cited slogan from the Pakistan Movement was actually dismissed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah

Jamal Malik in his book Islam In South Asia and Andreas Rieck in A Beleaguered Minority write that in the Punjab the Congress Party openly patronised and funded radical clerics associated with the Islamic parties that were against the League. Both the authors add that these clerics and radicals tried to corner Jinnah from all angles, calling him a “fake Muslim”, “leader of infidels” and a “British agent.” 

Jinnah and his party’s idea of Islam was that of a progressive, inclusive, moderate, constructive and democratic faith. The roots of this strand lay in the ‘Muslim Modernism’ of 19th century scholars such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Syed Amir Ali. These men too were not very popular with the clerics.

Jamal Malik writes that whereas the League’s message in the urban areas remained consistent with its modernist Muslim ethos, the party allowed the co-option of some pro-League clerics and Islamic scholars to counter the anti-Jinnah propaganda in Punjab’s rural areas where the Muslims were under the sway of clerics and pirs. It is during this period of the 1946 election campaign that some League workers began to use the slogan, “Pakistan ka matlab kya ....”

Nevertheless, once the election was won and Pakistan became a reality, this slogan quickly vanished. It is said that Asghar Sodai was not happy with the way Jinnah had casually sidelined his words during the mentioned conference. But Sodai (who passed away in 2008) would live long enough to see the project of Jinnah’s Muslim Modernism collapse and be replaced by that other, more stringent tendency of Muslim nationalism that had emerged alongside the modernist tendency. 

By the 1940s there were clearly three distinct tendencies within Muslim nationalism that had first emerged in India in the mid-19th century. The first one was about the creation of a separate Muslim polity empowered by reason, modernity and an enterprising disposition, which would free the Muslim minority of India from the “economic and political hegemony of the Hindu majority.” The second tendency wanted to couple an empowered Muslim polity with the Indian nationalism being espoused by the Congress. The third tendency had a more theocratic outlook. It wanted to construct a Muslim nation directly driven by sharia laws. This tendency had two factions. The larger faction wanted to work towards creating such a nation within India. The other faction emerged during the 1946 election and sided with Jinnah in the hope that Pakistan would become an “Islamic state.” 

But from 1947 till the mid-1970s, this latter faction was sidelined and marginalised by the modernist Muslim project. However, after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, the modernist Muslim project began to erode and was gradually replaced by a new ideological project that was close to the idea of Muslim nationalism of the third (more theocratic) tendency. This created an opening for the once discarded line of thinking to enter the country’s evolving ideological cannon. By the 1980s, it had managed to completely overpower the modernist tendency. 

Today, the theocratic project too is in crisis. Whereas the modernist tendency was accused of being burdened by “colonial baggage” and for causing the violent 1971 departure of East Pakistan, the theocratic tendency of Muslim nationalism that replaced it is now increasingly being accused of creating a myopic, isolationist and bigoted polity and state. 

The post-1970s state and society have politically, socially and even constitutionally entrapped themselves to become hapless victims of this tendency’s many devices. This has made state and society vulnerable to constantly become hostages of exactly the line of thinking which had initially opposed Jinnah and his party’s idea of Islam and Pakistan. 

It is thus disturbing to realise that had Jinnah been alive today, not only would the angry man at the conference have been able to easily shout him down, it would be equally convenient to drag Jinnah to the courts for going against certain aspects of the this country’s constitution as it stands today.

After all, today there is a party of controversial theocrats with the words Muslim League in their party’s name, whereas there’s another one that insists that demonising minorities was what Pakistan ought to be. Then there is also a more modern outfit whose charismatic leader has no qualms of chanting Sodai’s slogan at his rallies, suggesting that this is what led Jinnah to create Pakistan. Strange days, indeed.

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 26th, 2017