I started to read Faisal Devji’s 2013 book Muslim Zion in a cafe in Lahore where the Palestinian flag dominated one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. I would look up at it every now and then when I was most frustrated by Devji’s feeble arguments that Pakistan was the Israel of the Muslim world and the Indian subcontinent.

While I can hardly claim to have come to the book unbiased (I did not of course believe Pakistan to be a Muslim Israel), I did think that Devji’s book would have at least left me a little perplexed at some of the similarities between Pakistan and Israel or persuaded me somewhat that it wasn’t so clearcut.

Unfortunately, Devji writes as well as he thinks, which is to say not very well at all, and so neither of those things happened.

‘Muslim Zion’

The notion that Pakistan was a ‘Muslim Zion’ was popularised by Devji and is premised on the argument that Pakistan and Israel share a braided history — that they both sought to create a promised land based on religion in a strange neighbourhood surrounded by foes. Most recently, in the Munk Debate for 2024, guffawing British critic Douglas Murray also proposed a likeness between Pakistan and Israel, arguing that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism as nobody would dare suggest that Pakistan be abolished or that it has no right to be a state. According to Devji, “Pakistan and Israel both emerged from situations in which minority populations dispersed across vast subcontinents sought to escape the majorities whose persecution they rightly or wrongly feared”.

The Grand Canyon-sized crater in Devji’s argument is one that anyone with any basic reading of South Asian history could point out to you — we were already here.

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Zafrulla Khan, Pakistan’s finest diplomat, and international lawyer, pointed out the fallacies of this argument to the UN General Assembly when analogies were made between the Jews in Palestine and the Muslims in India. He highlighted that Muslims were an integral part of the population. In contrast, European Jews had been artificially shipped into Palestine — a foreign country they had no ties to — to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the local Arab population.

Gandhi supported this argument when he said that the “Muslim population is a population of converts … all descendants of Indian-born people”. We were indigenous to the land, a land we sought to partition to escape a British Raj giving way to a Hindu Raj, which we cleft with the assent of both.

Pakistan had become independent with the consent of the Hindu majority, hard-won but won in the end, negotiated without bloodshed, and it had only been formed in areas where Muslims were in the majority, with the maharajas, nawabs, and nizams of every princely state choosing which country to join — Kashmir remaining a notable exception to this. Pakistan’s consistent position even in 1948 was that if the Palestinians were to consent to partition, they would also vote in favour of the plan to part the territory. But Palestinians refused to consent on the basis that the Jews had been in a minority everywhere except in Jaffa, one out of 14 subdistricts at the time and had been settled into the land to drive them out of it.

Devji’s argument that Indian Muslims came to Pakistan from great distances, “to become the Ashkenazis of their new homeland”, is incredibly disingenuous, and should by that token also apply to Hindus and Sikhs who moved to India. What is axed from Devji’s narrative is that Partition gave every family the choice to leave or to stay, a choice open to all, and availed by many.

The decision to move was never to be conquerors in a country they’d just liberated.

A crumbling analogy

They say that in the slippery slope of analogies, you must never ski right to the bottom. Unfortunately, Devji slaloms exactly there and then stays for an uncomfortably long time. The threads he attempts to weave together to create his frayed tapestry of an argument include that Urdu was made the language of Pakistan despite it not being any of its people’s mother tongue which is akin to Hebrew being chosen as Israel’s national language — that is, it being an attempt to unify a nation and create a new nationality which wasn’t there.

While this argument can be debated in its own right, it seems to ignore entirely Devji’s main thesis. For if Pakistan really was the Muslim Zion with no historical connection to the land, premised on religion as a unifying basis, wouldn’t we have picked Arabic as our national language?

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Perhaps an indication of how weak Devji’s arguments are is the fact that he deems it worth pointing out very early in his book that Jinnah’s library contained ‘more books on the problems of European Jewry than on any Muslim people or country’ and he also highlights repeatedly that the Muslim League’s acolytes frequently compared themselves to the minorities in Europe and the Jews scattered around the world. The fly in the milk of this argument is that minorities fighting for their right to a homeland are bound to highlight the plight of other persecuted minorities.

Indeed, the Muslim League seems to have mentioned the partition of Ireland far more when discussing how to make a nation out of a multitude of scattered Muslims. Also, despite these comparisons between the Muslims in India to the Jews in Europe, Pakistan consistently took a strong stance in favour of Palestine at the United Nations and constantly rebuffed Israel’s attempts to get Pakistan to recognise it as a state.

I was most incredulous with Devji’s argument though when he started to explore a strange point unique in its ridiculousness. He argues that Jinnah was the “Satan of the Pakistan movement” [I am quoting this verbatim], pointing out that Congress had ‘always seen Jinnah as being possessed of demonic qualities’. He comments on his ‘satanic solitude’, his ‘dangerously demonic style’, and his ‘satanic character’ which ‘made him quite different from and indeed more devilish than the Devil himself.’

The smoking gun for this is apparently supplied by virtue of Jinnah’s arrogance as well as a speech in which Jinnah said that he “would be the ally of even the Devil if need be in the interest of Muslims”. Further proof is found, as per Devji, in the fact that Allama Iqbal had already made satan a heroic figure in his popular poetry which apparently represented “a new kind of political ideal for a free-floating and self-possessed nation that rejected its grounding in nature or history”.

I have no idea what this means or what Devji is trying to say. He apparently is unfamiliar with the fact that many strands of Islamic thought believe that satan himself will be forgiven on the last day, but a theological debate is unnecessary. I did wonder what the editors at Harvard University Press were doing when they reviewed these histrionics. Would they have been as open to declarations that Churchill, Roosevelt, or Gandhi were satanic figures? How did this make it through a simple peer review?

Uncomfortable parallels

It is all the more annoying then, that some uncomfortable parallels do exist between Israel and Pakistan, though they are not found in Devji’s inelegant prose. Rephael Stern has written about how Israel, shortly after becoming a state in 1948, transplanted Pakistani law into its books to expropriate Palestinian property similar to the way Pakistan had to take over non-Muslim property left behind following Partition. Israeli legal advisers had urged the use of Pakistani laws as ‘first-rate international precedent’ which was used by their Transfer Committee in the 1950s with one adviser stating that the ‘birth pangs’ of both countries were the same.

While the laws were transplanted, they were meant to address very different issues. Pakistan had initially saved the properties of evacuating non-Muslims so that they could be returned to them, believing that ‘evacuees’ would return after the violence wrought by Partition subsided. But after realising that we had nowhere to home the swathes of Muslims entering the country after the slicing of the subcontinent, the Pakistani state had given their property over to the Muslims arriving from India. While initially, the law claimed that any leaving Hindus or Sikhs could return to the country and reclaim their property, given how cash-strapped and resource-ridden we were, Pakistan quickly took that property over and gave it instead to Muslim arrivals.

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Israel studied these laws to expropriate the property of the 700,000 Palestinians they had ethnically cleansed from the land during the nakba of 1948 but took it further. The Pakistani law didn’t apply to movable property, while Israel’s did, allowing them to seize money from the bank accounts of Palestinians.

The critical point of departure between the purpose of these transplanted laws was that Israel used Pakistani laws against the Palestinian people with the aim to dispossess them and settle their own. Ironically, India was to later study Israel’s laws (not knowing they were based on Pakistani laws) to similarly provide homes for those who had fled to India during Partition.

While the same laws were imposed, the aims were very different — India and Pakistan intended to house those who had fled to their countries after a consensual Partition, whereas Israel enacted those laws to exile Palestinians from their homes and ensure they could never return.

Parting of the people

Liberal wisdom dictates that states created for a religious minority are a bad idea, with the prime reason for this being that no state based on religion can ever then protect its religious minorities. But I disagree.

Out of the many reasons for which states may be formed, along political, ethnic, or cultural lines, religion is as good a reason as any to forge a homeland. Our faith is the best explanation we have for the tragedy that is life. It seems only natural that we should choose to build our nations along the tenets of our shared belief. I have no issue with a Muslim or Jewish state, and in fact, the Jewish desire for their own country is one I have utmost sympathy for. But a nation cannot be trojan horsed into the international community through the displacement and dispossession of another people.

Over the years, the map of Palestine has turned into a photo negative of itself with settlers claiming nativity taking over the land, ink blot by ink blot, while the Arab world remains imperial petrol stations looking on. I do wonder though whether now the Partition of the Indian subcontinent could offer a useful parallel for Palestine. Jinnah, while a former ambassador for Hindu-Muslim unity, seems to have come to the anguished conclusion that Pakistan was an unfortunate necessity as both peoples were too different to live together.

The poet, W. H. Auden, mocked Cyril Radcliffe’s role in light of this when he arrived in India in 1947:

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,

Having never set eyes on this land he was called to Partition

Between two peoples fanatically at odds,

With their different diets and incompatible gods.

When asked whether he believed the difference between Bengali Hindus and Muslims to be greater than that between Muslim Pathans and Sindhis, Jinnah argued that ‘the fundamentals’ were common to all Muslims as they believed in one God, equality of man, and human brotherhood.

The core basis upon which Jinnah believed Hindus and Muslims were antithetical was the fact that Hinduism distinguished due to caste which is the foundation of its religious and social system, whereas Islam was based on equality of man. He was supported in this view by other Hindus, including Rao Bahadar M. C. Rajah, a leader of the ‘Untouchables’, who said: “I admire Mr Jinnah and feel grateful to him because, in advocating the cause of the Muslims, he is championing the claims of all classes who stand the danger of being crushed under the steam roller of a [caste-] Hindu majority.”

Jinnah intended for Pakistan to be based on the principles of Islam — of equality of man, and freedom for minorities. Pakistan is currently falling far short of that. It should not be inconceivable, in such an Islamic state, to have a Hindu, Jewish or Christian President, who espouses those same values. Just like a Jewish or Christian state could have a Muslim president who shares their values, which Abrahamic faiths largely do.

It was the continued discussion of a one- or two-state solution for Palestine and Israel which brought me to that café clutching Muslim Zion. Unlike Auden’s poem about the Indian subcontinent, Israelis and Palestinians don’t have different diets nor incompatible gods, yet they remain fanatically at odds. While many decry a two-state solution as something Israel would never allow, leading to the Israeli taunt that one ‘might as well call for a Palestinian state on the moon’, a one-state solution among these warring peoples seems all the more difficult to achieve.

Edward Said believed that both Palestinians and Jews had the right to live in Zion and were ‘condemned to live there together’. But I wonder then whether perhaps the Solomonic model of our Partition should be followed, with Palestine instead becoming our doppelgänger. Two states, side by side, independent, free, and equal sovereigns.

After all, is it not itself the worst form of idolatry, for two monotheistic faiths to fight over the holy land?

Header illustration by Abro/ EOS