Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [31]
In the very broadest terms, the main tendencies of Muslim response to British colonialism can be divided into three: that stemming from or related to Shah Waliullah and his preaching of religious renewal and resistance; that epitomized by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817 – 98); and that of the mass of the Muslim population, including the local rural elites.
These latter basically got on with their lives and with extracting whatever benefits they could from British rule (notably, in northern Punjab, in the form of military service and settlement in the new canal colonies), while at the same time being subject to occasional waves of unrest when fears as to the safety of their Muslim identity were aroused. Local factors also sometimes produced armed revolts by specific Muslim groups – chiefly in the Pathan areas, but also in the 1920s on the part of the Moplahs of the Carnatic in southern India, and in the 1940s on the part of the Hurs, religious followers of the Pir Pagaro, a hereditary saint in Sindh.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was a Mughal aristocrat who sided with the British in 1857, though he also bitterly criticized their policies. Although himself a deeply religious man, Sir Syed advocated the need for Indian Muslims to collaborate with the British, and to learn the ways of Western modernity in order to develop as a people and compete successfully with the ascendant Hindus. Sir Syed founded what he intended to be ‘the Muslim Cambridge’, the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, at Aligarh – another of those key Muslim institutions now left behind in India.
In 1888, Sir Syed laid down the basic principle on which Pakistan was created – though without at that stage dreaming of territorial separation. He stated that ‘India is inhabited by two different nations’, which would inevitably struggle for power if the British left:
Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations – the Mohammadan and the Hindu – could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable.6
The founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and his closest associates, therefore stood in the direct tradition of Sir Syed; a tradition which saw the Muslims of the subcontinent as a kind of nationality defined by language (Urdu) and religiously influenced culture, rather than by religion as such. The priority given to fear of the Hindus naturally inclined this tradition to oppose the Hindu-led Indian independence movement, and to ally with the British against it.
In Pakistan, this tradition of nationalist modernization has been followed by two of Pakistan’s military leaders, Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf, and by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Ayub could also be seen to have replaced Britain with America as the Muslims’ inevitable (if unfortunate) ally in their struggle with ‘Hindu’ India.
In a vaguer sense, Sir Syed’s programme of broadly Western modernization remains the ideology of the Pakistani civil service and of the educated wealthy classes – though their commitment actually to do much about this is another matter. Some members of this tradition decided in 1947 to throw in their lot with India rather than Pakistan, and are now to be found scattered through the worlds of Indian politics, administration, the universities and especially the arts.
Under British rule, the Islamist tradition of Shah Waliullah naturally opposed collaboration with the British and stood for anti-colonial resistance – though, given the realities of British power, this was inevitably mostly by peaceful means. This led to the paradoxical result that some of the most fervent proponents of jihad – like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888 – 1958) – were also advocates of close co-operation with Hindu Indian nationalists against British