Nationalism is a subjective exercise in collective self-definition. Professor of history Sikandar Hayat’s new book, A Leadership Odyssey: Muslim Separatism and the Achievement of the Separate State of Pakistan, offers a powerful explanation for why Pakistan was created, and how that outcome was one of several legitimate ones available.

As a biographical study of six eminent Muslim leaders — Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III, Syed Ameer Ali, Maulana Mohamed Ali, Allama Muhammad Iqbal and Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah — the book is a rich historical account of the intellectual and political struggles through which they went.

The central thesis that Hayat pursues is that Muslim separatism and the demand for Pakistan were primarily political programmes aimed at resuscitating the declining secular fortunes of South Asian Muslims. An ambiguously framed Islamic identity that avoided sectarian or traditionalist markers served as an instrument of generating political consciousness and welding many South Asian Muslims into a credal nation.

The intellectual and political struggles that Hayat examines revolved around three major problems. The first was the encounter between Islam and modernity and the need to develop a competitive synthesis of the two. The second problem was the introduction of nationalism into the South Asian environment and the challenge that posed to both religion and socio-cultural norms and identities. And the third was an interrogation of the meaning of democracy and representation in South Asia, as the British opened the door to parliamentary government in their Indian colony.

For Sir Syed Ahmed Khan — in many ways the inventor of the Indian Muslim identity — the British conquest of India was a wake-up call. Western civilisation had harnessed unprecedented power from science and humanism, and had overthrown local rulers in most of the world. If the Muslims were to ever reclaim their position, they would have to make peace with the Enlightenment and embrace modern education.

A historian’s latest work is one that deserves to be read by everyone interested in finding the intellectual and political roots of Pakistan

It was this central realisation, held to a greater or lesser degree by Muslim modernists, that would lead them to seek the revival of Islam’s power in South Asia. Muslim separatism, and later the Pakistan movement, were, from this perspective, attempts to provide a modern form to Islam while retaining its distinct standing as an ideology and a way of life.

Agreeing on the need for modern education was difficult enough, and many Muslims rejected Sir Syed’s position on this matter. But nationalism was, in some ways, a more serious intellectual challenge to grapple with. This was because the traditional European template of ethnic-territorial or linguistic nationalism placed severe limits on the ability of Indians to resist colonial rule and demand an alternative way forward. There were just too many different communities on the basis of race, tribe, region and language to allow for such a framing to work in South Asia.

The mainstream Hindu response to this problem was to argue that all communities should be treated equally and be considered as part of a composite Indian nation. This idea had tremendous appeal for many modernist Muslims, including Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam. Hayat explains how Muslim leaders repeatedly sought accommodation within the framework of composite Indian nationalism as a large and significant minority that was also a majority in parts of South Asia.

This accommodation was important because, even where the Muslim and Hindu leaders agreed on the need for a united front to advance India towards self-government, they had serious disagreements about the nature of democratic representation. Muslim leaders, from Sir Syed to Jinnah, clearly saw that South Asian society was diverse and communal. This meant that, unlike relatively homogenous societies such as France or England, India had many different significant minorities.

Caste Hindus were comfortable with one-person-one-vote as that would entrench them as a permanent majority at the all-India level, and in most of the provinces. Jinnah was so committed to the idea of extra representation and safeguards for minorities that, in the Lucknow Pact of 1916, he was prepared to reduce the statutory majorities of Muslims in Bengal and Punjab in exchange for more Muslim representation in areas where they were in a minority.

While Jinnah has been criticised for this, his stance was logically consistent: communal majorities, whether Muslim or Hindu, needed to be restrained in order to make the idea of a composite Indian nation work. Without such safeguards, composite Indian nationalism would be a ruse to establish majoritarian Hindu rule.

Ultimately, as Hayat explains, all attempts at a compromise failed. The Indian National Congress came to imagine itself the sole representative party and dismissed the Lucknow Pact via the Nehru Report, drafted in 1928 by a committee chaired by Motilal Nehru.

The problem of minorities was deemed a contrivance of British divide-and-rule strategy, and Congress leaders spent the last two decades before 1947 torpedoing every attempt at reconciliation with the Muslims. They were perhaps convinced that once the British were gone, the Congress would inherit a vast, centralised Raj and be able to use a combination of its political popularity amongst the majority community and coercive machinery to impose a constitutional settlement of its choice.

With the onset of the Second World War in 1939, the end of the British Raj was in sight. And this development convinced the leadership of the Muslim League to outline their plan for the creation of more than one successor state in March 1940 — a plan that was dubbed the Pakistan Resolution by its communal opponents. As the demand for Pakistan gained traction, Congress intransigence hardened and imperial Brexit loomed, the stage was set for the violent rupture of the summer of 1947.

Hayat’s A Leadership Odyssey is a fine history of the growth of the idea of Pakistan. It helps ground Muslim separatism and the Pakistan Movement in the modernist framework of its leading advocates. It also helps rehabilitate the memory of leaders other than Allama Muhammad Iqbal and Jinnah through insightful chapters on Sir Syed, Syed Ameer Ali, and the Aga Khan.

Hayat has produced a work that deserves to be read by everyone interested in finding the intellectual and political roots of Pakistan.g

The reviewer is most recently the author of The State During the British Raj: Imperial Governance in South Asia, 1700-1947 and tweets @IlhanNiaz

A Leadership Odyssey: Muslim Separatism and the Achievement of the Separate State
of Pakistan
By Sikandar Hayat
Oxford University Press, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9697340132
340pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 22nd, 2021