The Pakistani state’s thinking also began to transform after the country lost its eastern wing in 1971. Pan-Islamist ideas and the word “ummah” became a lot more common in the post-1971 state narrative, mainly to offset the creeping paranoia that Islam alone could not keep an ethnically diverse Pakistan together.
The perception that there was an ummah and Pakistan was an important part of it was bolstered when Pakistan was made the launching pad for an armed ‘jihad’ against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul.
Saudi Arabia (along with the US) became the largest donor of financial and military aid to Pakistan during this period. Their reasons were geopolitical in nature but, of course, Saudi Arabia and Pakistani dictator Gen Zia explained the endeavour as a jihad by the ummah against the godless Soviet Union. What’s more, it also gave Zia the excuse to start defining himself as ‘Mard-i-Momin’.
Former senator Rabbani is right in saying that this bubble has burst — especially when the Saudi monarchy is making some unprecedented political and social moves to change the geopolitical and ideological complexion of the Kingdom. Pakistan, on the other hand, is left lamenting that it was made a proxy of the Arabs when they needed to enhance their political clout in the Muslim world through the ummah narrative.
Fact is, the roots of the idea of an ummah run even deeper than when the populist Z.A. Bhutto regime first floated the idea in 1974 to get close to oil-rich Arab monarchies. According to historian Dr Mubarak Ali and celebrated sociologist Hamza Alvi, in the 19th century, when the already depleted Muslim rule in India completely collapsed, many Muslims became aware of their minority status vis à vis the Hindus.
In his 2011 book Pakistan In Search of Identity, Dr Ali writes that this is when some members of the fading Muslim elite began to claim that the Muslims of India were a part of the larger Muslim universe, the ummah. In a 1997 essay “Ironies of History”, Alvi explains that the idea of the ummah was proliferated among India’s Muslims by 19th-century pan-Islamists, many of whom had the backing of the last remaining caliphs of the Ottoman Empire.
Interestingly, according to Christopher Jaffrelot’s The Pakistan Paradox, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, actually discouraged the whole idea of the ummah because he believed it diluted his idea of forming a concrete Indian Muslim identity.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, too, aired similar concerns when he refused to join the Khilafat Movement (1919-24) led by pan-Islamists and the ulema.
Yet, some 25 years after Pakistan’s birth, the state reinstated the idea of the ummah. Just as this idea had emerged in the 19th century to appease Indian Muslims who had suddenly became conscious of their minority status, in the 1970s, the shock of losing East Pakistan because of ethnic divisions, reinvigorated the same idea to (albeit artificially) lift Pakistan from its South Asian roots and place it at the core of the larger Muslim world.
This diluted Pakistan’s identity and the manner in which it described itself as a Muslim majority state. It began looking for validation from Arab monarchs to the extent of sometimes changing the way its South Asian Muslim ancestors had practised their faith for centuries, and adopting the behaviourisms of rich Arabs. It is time to refigure Pakistani nationhood in the context of its rich South Asian heritage, especially now that India is digging exactly the kind of hole that we once dug and then fell into.
Published in Dawn, EOS, September 8th, 2019