Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [32]
It is entirely logical therefore that Pakistan’s largest Islamist party, the Jamaat Islami, should have opposed the creation of Pakistan in the name of loyalty to the Ummah; and today should be especially committed to Muslim causes in the wider world, including the ‘jihads’ in Palestine, Chechnya and Kashmir – also in the name of defending the universal Ummah, rather than narrow Pakistani national interests. President Musharraf, by contrast, explicitly condemned this approach in his speeches after 9/11, emphasizing the need for Pakistanis to put Pakistan first.
THE GENESIS OF PAKISTAN
The last generation of British rule saw two Muslim mass political movements in South Asia, the Muslim League and the Khilafat movement. The Muslim League, founded in 1906 and heavily influenced by Sir Syed’s tradition, began as an elite movement to defend Muslim interests, extract concessions from the British, and either oppose or co-operate with the Indian National Congress as tactical advantage dictated. It only became a true mass movement in the last years of British rule.
Though founded in Dhaka, in what is now Bangladesh, by far the strongest support of the Muslim League was in the heartland of Muslim Urdu-speaking culture, in the United Provinces between Delhi and Allahabad (now the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh). A key moment in its foundation came in 1900 when the British agreed that Hindi (Hindustani in the ‘Hindu’ Devanagari script) should be placed on an equal footing with Urdu (Hindustani in the ‘Muslim’ Arabic script) as an official language, with the clear implication that given Hindu numerical preponderance, Urdu would eventually be edged out of government altogether.
The other great Muslim movement under British rule was much more in the tradition of Shah Waliullah, being both explicitly religious and much more radical. This was the Khilafat (Caliphate) movement, from 1919 to 1924, one of whose leaders was Maulana A. K. Azad, mentioned above. This took place in alliance with the Indian National Congress, now led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and was the chief Muslim aspect of the unrest which gripped India after the end of the First World War. However, as its name suggests, the formal catalyst of the movement was a purely Muslim one, and reflected allegiance to no South Asian cause, but to the universal Ummah.
South Asian Muslims rallied behind the movement in protest against the impending abolition of the Caliphate, or titular leadership of the Muslim world, which the Ottoman sultans had claimed. The Caliphate issue became the rallying cry for protest against the British and French subjugation of the entire Middle East and destruction of the last Muslim great power, as well as of course against British colonial rule in India, and a range of local Muslim grievances. The Jamaat and other Islamist groups in Pakistan today see their hostility to the US today as directly descended from this Islamist anti-colonial tradition. As Mahatma Gandhi himself wrote in 1922:
The great majority of Hindus and Muslims have joined the [anti-British] struggle believing it to be religious. The masses have come in because they want to save the khilafat and the cow. Deprive the Mussulman of the hope of helping the khilafat, and he will shun the Congress. Tell the Hindu he cannot save the cow if he joins the Congress and he will, to a man, leave it.7
The Khilafat movement was led by two clerics, the brothers Maulana Mohamad Ali Jauhar and Maulana Shaukat Ali, and generated a wave of religious enthusiasm among South Asian Muslims. For that reason it was disliked by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who stood in Sir Syed Ahmed’s tradition of tactical co-operation with the British, and to whom religious