Quaid-e-Azam M.A. Jinnah's Vision: Islamic or Secular Pakistan?

[Riaz Haq]

An ongoing debate about the vision of Pakistan's founder flares up every year around Christmas time which coincides with Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's birthday. It is centered on one key question: Did the Quaid want an Islamic state or a secular one?

Islamic or Secular Pakistan?

Here are a couple of excerpts from Quaid-e-Azam's speeches given at different times which are often cited in this "Islamic vs Secular Pakistan" debate:

"You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State"

“Who am I to give you a constitution? The prophet of Islam had given us a constitution 1,300 years ago. We have to simply follow and implement it, and based on it we have to establish in our state Islam’s great system of governance.”

The secularists insist that the first excerpt from the Quaid's speech of August 11, 1947 to the constituent assembly should be accepted as his true vision for a secular Pakistan. The Islamists vehemently disagree and cite the second excerpt in which the Quaid talked about the fact that "prophet of Islam had given us a constitution 1,300 years ago" and we must implement it.

Misaq-e-Madina: 

The question is: Do the two speech excerpts conflict or support each other? On the surface, the Quaid's speeches appear to send conflicting messages. However, a deeper examination of Misaq-e-Madina (Charter of Medina), Islam's first constitution approved by Prophet Muhammad (SAW), suggests the Quaid's speeches are consistent with each other and conform to the original Islamic constitution.

Here's the opening line of Misaq-e-Madina:

"This is a document from Muhammad the Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace), governing relations between the Believers i.e. Muslims of Quraysh and Yathrib and those who followed them and worked hard with them. They form one nation -- Ummah."

It clearly says that all citizens of "Yathrib" (ancient name of Madina), regardless of  their tribe or religion, are part of one nation--"Ummah". So the word "Ummah" here does not exclude non-Muslims.

Further into the "Misaq" document, it says: "No Jew will be wronged for being a Jew.

The enemies of the Jews who follow us will not be helped. If anyone attacks anyone who is a party to this Pact the other must come to his help."

The Mesaq assures equal protection to all citizens of Madina, including non-Muslim tribes which agreed to it. The contents of Misaq-e-Madina, Islam's first constitution approved by Prophet Mohammad 1400 years ago, appear to have inspired Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah vision of Pakistan where people of all religions and nationalities live in harmony with equal rights and protections under the law.

Two-Nation-Theory:

Some might now ask what was the need for the Two-Nation-Theory given the above vision of the Quaid? The Quaid's search for Pakistan as an independent state for Muslims was inspired to give India's minority Muslims better opportunities to grow and prosper. While it's true that Pakistan has not lived up to the Quaid's expectations, it is also true that, in spite of all their problems, Muslims in Pakistan are still much better off  than their counterparts in India.

An Indian government commission headed by former Indian Chief Justice Rajendar Sachar confirms that Muslims are the new untouchables in caste-ridden and communal India. Indian Muslims suffer heavy discrimination in almost every field from  education and housing to jobs.  Their incarceration rates are also much higher than their Hindu counterparts.

According to Sachar Commission report, Muslims are now worse off than the Dalit caste, or those called untouchables. Some 52% of Muslim men are unemployed, compared with 47% of Dalit men. Among Muslim women, 91% are unemployed, compared with 77% of Dalit women. Almost half of Muslims over the age of 46 ca not read or write. While making up 11% of the population, Muslims account for 40% of India’s prison population. Meanwhile, they hold less than 5% of government jobs.

Those who say that the Two-Nation-Theory died with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 are wrong. They need to be reminded that the Lahore Resolution on March 23, 1940, in fact called for two "independent states", not "state" in Muslim majority areas of India in the north east and the north west. The other fact to remember is that Bangladesh did not choose to merge with India after separation from Pakistan.

Here's a video discussion on this and other current subjects:

http://vimeo.com/82796819



Jinnah’s birthday, Bangladesh Independence, Abdul Qadir Molla hangi... from WBT TV on Vimeo.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Jaswant Lauds Jinnah

Are Muslims Better Off in Jinnah's Pakistan?

Comparing Pakistan and Bangladesh

Is This a 1971 moment in Pakistan's History?

Is Pakistan Too Big to Fail?

Global Firepower

Jinnah's Pakistan Booms Amidst Doom and Gloom

Quaid-e-Azam M.A. Jinnah's Vision of Pakistan

India Wins Freedom by Maulana Azad

Ayesha Jalal Taking On Pakistan's Hero

The Poor Neighbor by William Dalrymple

Iqbal and Jinnah

[Riaz Haq]

Here's an announcement of Jewish professor speaking on how Muslims have helped Jews for centuries before the occupation of Palestine:

David J. Wasserstein, a professor of Jewish History at Vanderbilt University, will lecture on “How Islam Saved the Jews” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 24, at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

The free, public lecture will take place at UAB’s Volker Hall, Lecture Room A, 1670 University Blvd. The event is co-sponsored by the UAB Department of History and the Birmingham Islamic Society.

"It's a chance for Jews and Muslims who are now often at odds politically to reflect on our glorious historical past and for a moment forget about our political differences, and work on future peace," said Ashfaq Taufique, president of the Birmingham Islamic Society.

Wasserstein will discuss how the spread of Islam after Muslims conquered Mecca in 630 A.D. led to a thriving Muslim culture that also allowed a thriving Jewish subculture, until about 1300 A.D.

"Within a century of the death of Mohammad, in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and beyond," Wasserstein wrote in The Jewish Chronicle. "Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence. Their fortunes changed in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic and cultural terms - all for the better."

If not for the Muslim conquests, Jewish culture might have died out, Wasserstein believes.

"The political unity brought by the new Islamic world-empire did not last, but it created a vast Islamic world civilization, similar to the older Christian civilization that it replaced," Wasserstein wrote in The Jewish Chronicle. "Within this huge area, Jews lived and enjoyed broadly similar status and rights everywhere. They could move around, maintain contacts, and develop their identity as Jews. A great new expansion of trade from the ninth century onwards brought the Spanish Jews - like the Muslims - into touch with the Jews and the Muslims even of India."

Wasserstein has written several books, including “The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings, Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002-1086” and “The Caliphate in the West; An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula” and he co-authored “The Legend of the Septuagint, From Classical Antiquity to Today.”...

http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2014/04/jewish_scholar_lectures_...

[Riaz Haq]

Muhammad Sculpture Inside Supreme Court a Gesture of Goodwill

Perched above the press seating area inside the U.S. Supreme Court chamber is a marble image of Prophet Muhammad.

Sculpted in a frieze, the Muhammad statue carries a sword and the Quran and stands in the company of more than a dozen other “great lawgivers of history.” They range from Moses to Confucius to Napoleon to John Marshall, some of whom appear in an accompanying frieze along the south side of the room.

In a week in which the right to mock – or even depict the Prophet Muhammad – became the focus of world-wide debate, the Supreme Court sculpture of the prophet of Islam has drawn little notice. That wasn’t always the case. Back in the 1990s, a controversy erupted that culminated with calls by some Islamic leaders to sandblast the statue’s face off the chamber wall.

Islam strongly discourages depictions of Muhammad. And in 1997, some Muslim leaders called on the Supreme Court to remove the image inside the chamber.

According to a Washington Post article at the time, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other Muslim groups wrote to the court urging that the statue’s face be sandblasted. Then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist refused, issuing a letter that said it would be “unlawful to remove or in any way injure an architectural feature in the Supreme Court building.”

The “controversy was generally laid to rest, in part through a fatwa” authored by Sheikh Taha Jaber al-Alwani, an influential Islamic scholar, according to a 2009 article in Hamline University’s Journal of Law and Religion.

The Islamic legal opinion written by Mr. al-Alwani concludes:

What I have seen in the Supreme Courtroom deserves nothing but appreciation and gratitude from American Muslims. This is a positive gesture toward Islam made by the architect and other architectural decision-makers of the highest Court in America. God willing, it will help ameliorate some of the unfortunate misinformation that has surrounded Islam and Muslims in this country.

In a culture whose literary heritage is replete with disdainful images of the Prophet Muhammad . . . it is comforting to note that those in the highest Court in the United States were able to surmount these prejudices, and display his image among those of the greatest lawgivers in human history. Isn’t that effort a noble gesture that deserves from us, who believe in him as the Prophet and Messenger, every encouragement, esteem, and gratitude instead of disapproval, condemnation, and outrage?

An information sheet published by the Supreme Court’s curator office said the 80-year-old statue is “a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor, Adolph Weinman, to honor Muhammad and it bears no resemblance to Muhammad.”

Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Law Blog on Wednesday that he now considers the matter closed.

While his group’s demands weren’t met back then, he said he gives the late chief justice credit for agreeing to correct a Supreme Court brochure that had misidentified Muhammad as the “founder of Islam” rather than a prophet.

“We appreciate the Supreme Court’s effort to acknowledge the contribution of Prophet Muhammad in law-giving in history,” Mr. Awad said. “To us, it’s behind us.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/01/14/muhammad-sculpture-inside-supre...

[Riaz Haq]

“Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”

― Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan 

https://books.google.com/books?id=d0PqPAAACAAJ&dq=Stanley+Wolpe... 

[Riaz Haq]

SMOKERS’ CORNER: CREATING PSEUDOHISTORY
Nadeem F. ParachaUpdated January 26, 2020Facebook Count


https://www.dawn.com/news/1530114/smokers-corner-creating-pseudohis...

“...historian and author Dr Yaqoob Khan Bangash argues in his essay for the June 5, 2016 issue of Political Economy, that latter-day ‘leftists’ who censure the resolution are largely unfamiliar with the idea of Islam held by the founders of Pakistan.

He writes that this idea was radically different from the one held by ‘Islamists’ from the 1970s onward. He gave the example of how Mian Iftikharuddin, a staunch secularist and socialist, defended the Objectives Resolution when it came under attack in the assembly by non-Muslim members.

Like Jinnah, Iftikharuddin described Islam as a ‘progressive and democratic faith’ which, when applied politically, would benefit Pakistan’s ‘Muslim and Hindu have-nots.’
...
PM Liaquat Ali Khan insisted that the resolution was opposed to theocratic rule and was greatly mindful of minority rights, Islamic scholar Abul Ala Maududi was not amused.

The Objectives Resolution was a preamble of Pakistan’s first constitution passed in 1956 and then again of the 1973 constitution. But Burki points out that the 1956 constitution was not even half as ‘Islamic’ as the 1973 one. This is because, as some commentators have noted, the meaning of Islam in the political context began to dramatically mutate from the mid-1970s, becoming more populist and then stringent (compared to what it was in the 1950s and 1960s).”

[Riaz Haq]

How Pakistan was envisaged -


Quaid e Azam M.A Jinnah quotes:

These are gems plz Circulate widely, folks!

1. “No nation can ever be worthy of its existence that cannot take its women along with the men... It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.”

2. “You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”

3. “Do not forget that the armed forces are the servants of the people. You do not make national policy; it is we, the civilians, who decide these issues and it is your duty to carry out these tasks with which you are entrusted.”

4.“ Corruption and bribery are like poison and a horrible disease which need to be put down with an iron hand “