SIR Syed Ahmad Khan

Sir Syed’s legacy

MUHAMMAD ALI MUSOFER

SIR Syed Ahmad Khan, a prominent 19th-century Muslim scholar, thinker and reformer of the Indian subcontinent, is vastly admired for his sharp observation of the challenges that faced his society. He is also appreciated for his daring intellectual and pragmatic response to the challenges of the time.

                                   

He has written diversely; however, his advocacy for modern/science education and his bold steps to reinterpret Islamic thought are considered his most prominent legacy. Yet it appears that these legacies have not received due attention as today, the Muslim societies of South Asia are facing the same challenges that Sir Syed highlighted over a century ago.

Despite having a traditional educational background, Sir Syed realised that the landscape of knowledge was being reshaped due to rapid developments in science and technology. He was convinced that without a scientific approach, no society would be able to contribute to knowledge in the contemporary world. He urged Muslims of the subcontinent to learn science and new languages in order to keep pace with the world. He not only tried to convince Muslims to get a modern education, he also took practical steps by establishing schools, colleges and a university.

Sir Syed was aware that scientific thinking/development required a rational approach. He was of the view that the traditional way of thinking would not help Muslims enter the arena of modern knowledge. He therefore urged them to develop a rational approach to scientific knowledge. He took bold steps to realign Islamic thought with science by highlighting rational aspects of Islamic teaching and history.

To revive this aspect of Islamic thought, he attempted to link and build on the rational traditions of the Mutazila and other Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. To highlight the importance of rational thinking, Syed Ahmad Khan wrote extensively in Urdu and his exegesis of the Holy Quran is viewed as one of the prominent examples of rational interpretation of scripture in the modern age.

To align Muslim religious thought and scientific knowledge, Sir Syed asserted that scientific knowledge did not contradict religion. He stressed that there were two realms of knowledge: the ‘word of God’ (scripture) and the ‘work of God’ (the universe). The holy scriptures are the word of God and are understood through theology and religious practice. The universe is the work of God that is explored and understood through scientific knowledge. Hence, he emphasised that scientific knowledge is as important as religious knowledge to understand the mysteries of God’s creation.

Today, it is observed that the Muslim societies of South Asia are facing the same challenges as they were in the 19th century. Lack of education and a narrow religious worldview are still amongst our daunting problems. In Pakistan, Sir Syed is viewed as one of the important leaders of independence. However, education has never been the priority of successive governments and today, we face huge challenges in educating the younger generation in Pakistan; for example, the country is said to have the second highest number of out-of-school children.

In our educational institutions, Sir Syed is discussed as an independence hero through superficial discussions on his life. His original work and thoughts are hardly taught even at the university level, therefore, very few are aware of his original works.

Sir Syed’s rational approach to faith faced huge opposition from the ulema of his time. Today, strong sentiments are still found that undermine a rational approach to religion. Hence, lack of ratio­nal thinking and the narrow interpretation of faith leads to religious intolerance.

Looking at the challenges of Mus­lim societies like Pakistan, Sir Syed’s thoughts and prescriptions still seem relevant to deal with the gigantic educational and social challenges. In this regard, conscious steps are needed to be taken at multiple levels.

First, at the government level Sir Syed’s thoughts need to be reflected in polices of education and social contract. Serious steps need to be taken to educate people about his thoughts through different sources such as reprinting his books and conducting serious research on the scholar’s works and thoughts. Second, Sir Syed’s thoughts need to be introduced at educational institutions by teaching his original works. Furthermore, the media should play a role in promoting the rational thoughts/works of Sir Syed in order to highlight the intellectual tradition of Muslims.

In sum, Sir Syed — being a thinker and reformist — had unique views about the issues facing his society. Today, Muslim societies as in Pakistan are facing huge challenges in educating the new generation and dealing with religious intolerance and polarisation. The powerful intellectual and practical legacies of Sir Syed can be instrumental in dealing with these issues by making them part of the state’s policies and society’s practices.

The writer is a freelance contributor with an interest in cultures and religion.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2015

Danial Latifi

Smokers’ Corner: The mysterious ideologue on Jinnah’s left

NADEEM F. PA

                                       

Till the early 1940s, the All India Muslim League (AIML) was still far from being the sole political representative of India’s Muslims. The Muslims of the region — who constituted about 20 per cent of India’s population at the time — were being represented by various political parties and outfits. Till 1945 the AIML was just one of these parties.

Other parties in this regard were the centre-right Unionist Party and right-wing religious outfits such as the Muttahida Majlis-i-Ahrar, the Jamiat Ulema Hind; the radical Khaksar; and, to the a certain extent, the Jamaat-i-Islami (that was formed in 1941).

Other than these, a number of Muslims were also supporters and members of the Indian National Congress (INC), and the left-wing Pakhtun nationalist organisation (in the former NWFP), the Khudai Khidmatgar.

Ever since 1940, the AIML (led by the refined lawyer and politician, Mohammad Ali Jinnah), had increasingly pushed for the idea of creating a separate nation-state for the Muslims of India, carved out from the Muslim-majority areas of the region.

The party saw the INC as a Hindu-dominated entity that would (in post-colonial India) usurp the political and economic interests of the region’s Muslims.

But till 1944 the AIML had only managed to attract the attention of certain sections of urban Muslim youth in North India and East Bengal.

The party’s increasing focus on propagating a separate Muslim state was entirely rejected by the INC and even by various Muslim outfits including the Unionist Party, the Khudai Khidmatgar as well as by the Islamic parties.

The first to really warm up to AIML’s idea of a separate Muslim country — apart from certain sections of North India’s urban bourgeoisie — was the Muslim majority region of East Bengal.

But the AIML was aware of the fact that to truly become the largest Muslim party in India, it will have to make inroads into another important Muslim-majority region: the Punjab province.

The AIML was extremely weak here. The province was the bastion of the Unionist Party that was a centre-right outfit being led by members of Punjab’s Muslim landed elite and also had the support of the region’s Hindu and Sikh populations.

The Unionists were also being backed by the British colonialists. The INC was strong here among the province’s Hindus, and there was also a party representing the Sikh population of Punjab (Akali Dal).

The Unionist Party was Punjab’s largest Muslim party; but in many rural areas of the province, radical Islamic outfits such as the Majlis-i-Ahrar too enjoyed support.

The AIML had performed dismally in the two elections that were held in the Punjab in the 1930s. Desperate to bag widespread support for the AIML in the province, Jinnah agreed to a suggestion made to him by Mumtaz Daultana — a leading member of the party in the province.

Daultana recommended that certain sympathetic Muslim ideologues belonging to the Communist Party of India (CPI) be brought into the AIML fold. The CPI had exhibited support for the AIML and saw the party as being revolutionary and anti-colonial (as opposed to communal); and that it was more in a position to carry out radical reforms and policies compared to the INC that the CPI termed as being ‘counter-revolutionary.’

Investigating CPI’s thesis in this regard is not the purpose of this piece.

Nevertheless, according to Daultana, the CPI men had the experience and the skills to organise AIML in the Punjab and successfully disseminate its message and appeal.

In 1944, after getting the go-ahead from Jinnah, Daultana brought in a few CPI ideologues that immediately joined the AIML in the Punjab.

One of them was a slightly-built but intense and high-strung lawyer called Danial Latifi.

Latifi was born in Lahore and travelled to Oxford University in England to study law. After returning to India, he joined the CPI. He was one of the most vocal members of the CPI who advocated that the party support AIML. In 1944 he resigned from the CPI and joined the AIML.

A committed Marxist and socialist ideologue, Latifi urged AIML to draft a strong message that could immediately get the attention of Muslims in Punjab. As a result, Daultana asked him to author the party’s manifesto.

Latifi did that. The manifesto was approved by Jinnah in 1944. It’s a remarkable piece of writing in which Latifi tries to tackle claims made by the INC and the Unionists as well as by the Islamic parties that were opposing the League.

In this pursuit Latifi married ideas of bourgeoisie Muslim economic advancement (through meritocracy) to Mohammad Iqbal’s idea of ‘spiritual democracy’.

According to the manifesto, the League would promote policies that would benefit and encourage the enterprising economic spirit of the Muslim middle-classes, and at the same time protect the Muslim masses from the oppression of the Hindu, Muslim and British Colonial elites.

Latifi also expressed the League’s idea of a separate Muslim state as an organ that would eventually transcend and resolve religious differences in the region, because a Muslim-majority state (or a state constructed by a minority community in India) was inherently more equipped to appreciate religious plurality, harmony and diversity than a state dominated by a large Hindu majority.

Furthermore, Latifi envisaged the League’s idea of the state as something that had a soul. According to him the state (under the League) “will be the alter-ego of the national being and in good time the two would merge to form an ordered and conflict-free society …”

Latifi’s manifesto was put in the forefront of AIML’s campaign during the 1946 provincial election in the Punjab. Latifi used CPI’s contacts in the province’s student and peasant communities and this helped AIML to successfully organise its own organs within these communities. The influential Muslim spiritual leaders (pirs) of the province quickly fell in line, abandoning the Unionist Party.

On the eve of the 1946 election, AIML had been dramatically turned into a robust and populist party that went on to defeat the Unionists. It won 73 seats. Unionists could only win 20.

This victory finally propelled the party into becoming India’s largest Muslim outfit and eventually helped it carve out a separate Muslim country called Pakistan (1947).

Ironically, Latifi, who was one of the architects of this victory and a passionate supporter of Pakistan’s creation, did not move to the new country. He was constantly asked why, but he always refused to answer this question.

Latifi was a good friend of famous Indian writer, Khushwat Singh. In fact, one of the main characters in Singh’s celebrated novel about India’s partition (1956’s Train to Pakistan) is entirely based on Latifi.

Singh described Latifi to be a man who ate very little but who was always absorbed by his own thoughts and just could not stop talking about Marxism!

Latifi married a Syrian Christian woman and after Pakistan’s creation he remained in India and began to study Islamic law. He quit politics and became a prominent lawyer representing trade unionists, leftist activists and working-class Muslims.

After his first wife passed away, he married Pakeezah Begum — a descendant of the last Moghul emperor.

Latifi passed away in 2000 at the age of 83. Most in the know claim that he never visited Pakistan. But none of them seem to know why.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 24th, 2015

Abdullah Haroon

Leader with vision 

by sHARIF AL MUJAHID

AMONG the All-India Muslim League’s (AIML) second-cadre leadership, Abdullah Haroon, who died on April 27, 1942, has a prominent position. What sets him apart is his role in conceptualising Pakistan as it came to be embodied in the Lahore Resolution (1940). To quote Reginald Coupland, Haroon was “the only Muslim politician of any standing who had so far [till early 1939] taken a public part in the constitutional discussion” on the Pakistan proposal. Thus, though he did not live long enough to see his “dream” materialise, he is reckoned among Pakistan’s founding fathers.

By late 1938, when he seriously launched his campaign to popularise the Pakistan idea, Haroon had been in politics and in public focus for some 25 years. Along with political activities, Haroon had helped to build institutions in the education, health and social welfare sectors that would make groups and communities become self-contained and self-sustaining. Cosmopolitan in outlook and approach, he reached out beyond the parameters of Sindh, to help sustain worthy causes. His philanthropy extended to the entire subcontinent and the Middle East.

Haroon’s politics were ancillary to his human resource development campaign. And once securely established in business, which he was by the late 1890s, he became increasingly involved with civic activities in Karachi. Later, he became proactive in the major political organisations — the Indian National Congress (1917), the All-India Khilafat Committee (1919-29), Sind Provincial Political Conference (1920-30s), the All-Parties Con­fe­rence (1928), the All-Parties Muslim Confere­nce (1930-34), the Azad Sindh Conference (1930), and the Muslim League (1937).

His electoral defeat in 1937 caused him to wind up the Sind United Party that he had established with Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto in 1936 to take part in provincial elections. While Bhutto opted for a safe sanctuary in Bombay, Haroon chose to face the music. He decided to take part, once again, in all-India politics — a decision at once momentous and fateful.

The emerging political scenario was obviously unchartered and unpredictable, yet he was determined to canalise the minuscule Sindhi political elite towards playing its due part in all-India politics. He had the foresight to look at the problems of Sindh through an all-India prism, and to establish organic linkages between Sindh and the larger pan-Indian Muslim community, and mainstream Muslim politics, encompassed by AIML.

He, therefore, joined the Muslim League in 1937, established contacts and rapport with its top leadership at Lucknow in October 1937, and organised it at various tiers in the province. To a point, assisted by Shaikh Abdul Majid and Pir Ali Muhammad Rashidi, he was able to successfully organise the First Sind Provincial Muslim League Conference in Karachi, early in October 1938.

In terms of the themes and the participants’ standing, it was an all-India moot, except for it nomenclature. Presided over by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, it saw the participation of a galaxy of Muslim leaders drawn from the NWFP to Hyderabad Deccan, from Bombay to Bengal. Indeed, it read like a who’s who of Muslim India at the time.

Here, Haroon, who headed the Reception Committee, called the shots. His welcome address, which set the tone for the conference, was quite radical: it was in favour of an ideological goal. Without adequate safeguards for the minorities, said Haroon, the Muslims would have no option but “to seek their salvation in their own way in an independent federation of Muslim states”. He warned that, “We have nearly arrived at the parting of the ways and … it will be impossible to save India from being divided into Hindu India and Muslim India, both placed under separate federation.” This was indeed radical stuff.

Interestingly, the main resolution at the conference was cast in Abdullah Haroon’s mould. Though watered down in the Subjects Committee deliberations as Jinnah was not in favour of revealing much before the Muslims were organised and public opinion was galvanised, the resolution had nevertheless enough clout to warrant attention.

Briefly stated, the concept of separate Muslim nationhood was spelled out not only in a political way but also on an intellectual plane, laying down in categorical terms the ideological basics and the basis of that nationhood. Never before had the Hindus and Muslims been officially pronounced by the League as two separate nations. It called for “the political self-determination of the two nations known as Hindus and Muslims”. This explains why Coupland had singled out Haroon as having made a significant contribution, leading to the demand for partition.

In perspective, then, the resolution sought to break new ground; it was truly epochal. Indeed, it represented the penultimate step to, and prepared the ground for, the adoption of the Lahore Resolution by the AIML in March 1940. And herein lies the significance of Haji Abdullah Haroon as a trendsetter.

The writer is HEC Distinguished National Professor.

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2015

Fatima Jinnah

Fatima Jinnah: A sister’s sorrow

By Nadeem F. Paracha

                          

One of the most fascinating characters in the initial saga of the painful birth of Pakistan is Fatima Jinnah, the frail-looking, graceful but gritty sister of the founder of the nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. She was a passionate political worker, a determined activist for women’s rights and a qualified dental surgeon to boot.

After receiving a degree (in dentistry) from the University of Calcutta in 1914, she became a close counsellor and a trusted confidant of her brother. She enthusiastically backed her brother when (in the 1940s) he finally decided to manoeuvre his party, the All India Muslim League (AIML), towards a more polemical position on the question of the future of India’s Muslims.

The move consequently helped the AIML evolve into a mass-based party (among India’s Muslims). After the tense 1946 election in the Punjab where the party finally managed to reverse the electoral fortunes of the Indian Congress Party, certain Congress-backed confessional Muslim groups and the Unionist Party, AIML suddenly became the main engine behind what would later come to be known as the Pakistan Movement.

Miss Jinnah worked tirelessly for the movement and was able to win respect and recognition within and outside the AIML. However, after the movement was able to achieve a separate Muslim country in 1947, Miss Jinnah’s existence as a Pakistani was wrought with disappointments, disillusionment and eventual isolation.

Much has been speculated about her life as a Pakistani between 1947 and 1967 (the year she passed away).

But one of the best and most authentic accounts of her disappointments arrived in the shape of a book that she wrote in 1955 (My Brother) but which was published 32 years later in 1987!

Even though her status was immediately elevated to that of being a patriotic heroine after the creation of Pakistan, why did it take so long for her book to be available for public consumption?

The answer to this can be found in some of the contents of the book. In it she laments how her brother was quickly ‘betrayed’ by even some of his closest comrades who had worked with him during the Pakistan Movement.

Jinnah had assumed the role of Pakistan’s first Governor General in 1947. But he faced his first surprise when, after his famous Aug 11 address to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly (in which he declared his vision of Pakistan being a progressive Muslim majority state), the bureaucracy of the time (pressed by Muslim League’s leading members), asked the country’s nascent print media and radio to only publish and broadcast an edited version of Jinnah’s speech.

According to Miss Jinnah’s book, her brother, who had been suffering from tuberculosis throughout the later stages of his struggle for Pakistan, began to lose his health more rapidly after 1947. In her mind this was due to the disappointments and the sense of betrayal he felt at the hands of some of his closest comrades.

Miss Jinnah seemed particularly bitter towards Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was perhaps Jinnah’s closest colleague in the Muslim League.

She wrote that her brother told her that many of his former colleagues were coming to meet him only to determine how much life there was left in him, implying that they were most probably waiting for him to quietly perish.

In her book Miss Jinnah also laments how heartlessly her brother was picked up and put in an ambulance (to be taken to a hospital) and how the ambulance broke down in the middle of the road. Jinnah expired on Sept 11, 1948.

There might have been pressure from the government in disallowing Miss Jinnah to publish her book in 1955, but there is also ample evidence suggesting that it was Miss Jinnah herself who hesitated to get the book published. Pakistan was just eight years old and Liaquat Ali Khan had been assassinated in 1951.

Author and intellectual Khaled Ahmed, in his 2001 book, Pakistan Behind the Ideological Mask quotes celebrated lawyer, Sharifuddin Pirzada (who was a secretary to Jinnah), in saying that when Miss Jinnah appeared on Radio Pakistan to announce her brother’s death, the state-owned radio channel’s director-general, Z A. Bokhari, got a call from a government official asking him to switch off Miss Jinnah’s speech the moment she began criticising the government’s heartless attitude towards the founder of the country and how he was left to die in an old ambulance.

She became a virtual recluse after Jinnah’s death, until in 1965 when she was pulled out of her self-imposed political retirement to challenge Field Martial Ayub Khan in a Presidential election.

Khan had imposed Pakistan’s first Martial Law in 1958 and had enjoyed significant popularity during the early years of his regime.

However, by 1965 his popularity had begun to dwindle a bit and his Presidential candidature was challenged by the Combined Opposition Parties (COP) — a group made up of certain left-wing parties (that were opposed to his staunchly capitalist policies) and right-wing religious outfits (that opposed the ‘secular’ disposition of his regime).

COP sprang a surprise when it convinced Miss Jinnah to become its candidate for the election. She initially hesitated, but then agreed.

Khan was expecting to sweep the election, but not any more. Though he did go on to win, Miss Jinnah defeated him in two of Pakistan’s largest cities, Karachi and Dhaka. She also won in Hyderabad and narrowly lost in Peshawar.

COP accused the regime of electoral malpractice, but Miss Jinnah once again decided to retire to a life of a recluse.

Her last meeting with a noted politician was with Z.A. Bhutto when he was eased out (as Foreign Minister) from the Ayub regime after he had disagreed with the President on his peace pact with India after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war.

According to Stanley Wolpert (in his book Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan), soon after he was pushed into political oblivion by Ayub in 1966, Bhutto, whose house was close to Miss Jinnah’s (in Karachi), walked to her house and asked for her advice and guidance over a cup of tea.

She sounded disillusioned and told Bhutto: ‘I told you not to trust him (Ayub).’

A year later, she passed away at the age of 71 on July 9, 1967. The government announced her passing due to a heart-attack but to this day a number of politicians, and even Jinnah’s nephew Akber Pirbhai, insist that she was murdered.

She was 71 and is buried beside her brother’s grave in his impressive mausoleum in Karachi. Ironically, Liaquat Ali Khan too is buried there.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 4th, 2014

Abdul Jabbar Khairi and Abdul Sattar Khairi

Khairis demanded Muslim homeland in 1917

By Saad R. Khairi 

KHAIRI brothers` contribution to the freedom movement largely remains unknown. They were the first to plead at an international organisation for India`s partition as far back as 1917 when World War I was still raging.

Their subsequent struggle for freedom took them to many lands, where they worked for the ideals in which they believed. They faced hardships abroad, were arrested at home and persecuted in many ways but never wavered.

It was at a conference of the Socialist International at Stockholm in 1917 that Abdul Jabbar Khairi and Abdul Sattar Khairi submitted a written proposal to the forum and called for independent status for Muslim states `destroyed by the British`. They named these `states` as Oudh (called United Province during the colonial period and now Uttra Pradesh in India), Sindh, Karnatak, Mysore and Delhi.

It would, of course, be unrealistic to expect the Khairi brothers to have jumped in time and demanded India`s partition something that would be onthe agenda of the Muslim League `under Jinnah`s leadership in 1940. But a study of pages 407-08 of the record of the conference should leave us in no doubt that the two brothers had presented to an international conference the idea in embryonic form of the subcontinent`s partition.

More than three decades later, in 1941 to be specific, when the Congress press was attacking the Pakistan idea and ridiculing it, Abdul Sattar Khairi, the younger brother then in prison in India, wrote a letter to Camille Haysmans, secretary general of the Socialist International, seeking his support. Since Khairi didn`t know Haysmans`s address, he sent the letter to Clement Attlee, then in Winston Churchill`s war cabinet, who forwarded it to Haysmans. In his reply via Attlee, the Socialist leader said he remembered `vividly` that the Khairis had demanded India`s partition in 1917.

Belonging to the Bani Makhzoom tribe of Mecca, the Khairis had come to India during Emperor Shah Jahan`s reign with the avowed aim of giving religious education to Mughal royalty a job they performed till 1857 when the British exiled the last Mughal emperor to Rangoon.

Educated at Delhi and Aligarh, theKhairi brothers later left for Baghdad on the way to Beirut and took admission to the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut) where the junior Khairi did his M.A. while the elder brother did a PhD. The elderKhairi later acquired a dozen degrees of doctorate from various European universities.

Lebanon and Palestine, even though still part of the Ottoman empire, had their educational scene dominated by Western, mostly British and French, missionary activity. In 1908 there were 30,000 students in French and British schools, though there were some American and German institutions also.

The Khairi brothers opened Lebanon`sfirst madressah, called Madressa-iHindia, which later became a college and one of its students, Saeb Salam, became one of independent Lebanon`s major political figures.

In 1915, with the Ottoman empire atwar, the Khairi brothers went to Constantinople and launched the city`s first Urdu weekly, Akhovat, using the metal-type technology. With Turkey`s defeat in sight, the Khairi brothers left for Sweden via Russia and met Lenin, who gave them a fur-lined coat each and volunteered the statement that Communist Russia would soon come to India`s help and liberate it. The end of the Great War found them in Germany, where they earned a living by writing,lecturing and translations, because they were fluent in German, English, French, Turkish and Arabic. Even though Germany was in chaos and the Nazis were a rising force, the average German welcomed them because of their antiBritish sentiments. The brothers also converted some Germans to Islam. They included Dr Joseph Goebbels`s sister, whose Muslim name was Nayyar.

Another German woman became Muslim, given the name Fatima, and married Khairi junior.

After refusing to let the Khairi brothers return to India, the British government finally allowed Khairi junior to come home, but made clear there was no guarantee action would not be taken against him for wartime propaganda for the enemy. Abdul Sattar Khairi finally returned to India and started teaching German and French at Aligarh. Jabbar Khairi, however, was still a persona non grata with the British and was not allowed to return. Living in London, he asked Attlee to raise a question in the Commons as to why if he were such a dangerous person he was free in England but was not allowed to return to India. The government finally agreed to let him return.

Meanwhile, Sattar Khairi plungedinto politics, joined the Muslim League, became the chief of Aligarh ML, started a magazine called Spirit of the Times, whose editor was Fatima, and declared at the League`s Patna session in 1938 that the Muslims of India were not a community but a nation. He rose to become a member of the All-India Muslim League Council. However, the Second World War broke out, and Sattar Khairi was arrested and sent to prison in Jhansi and later Dehradun. Fatima, being a European, was sent to one of the camps in Nainital. At Dehradun he discussed politics and, in the evening, played badminton with fellow prisoners, among them Jawaharlal Nehru.

Released in the winter of 1944, Sattar Khairi died a few months later. Deeply religious, he hated mullahs and willed that his last rites should be performed by someone else. So Dr Ziauddin led his funeral prayer and he was buried in Aligarh.

Senior Jabbar took no part in politics after return to India and spent most of his time in his library that contained thousands of books in many languages.

He didn`t marry. Among his frequent visitors was Maulana Maudoodi. Despite his wish to come to Pakistan, Jabbar Khairi couldn`t make it, since he was not willing to part with his books. He died in Delhi in 1955.

This is an unpublished article written by the late Saad R. Khairi, a scion of the Khairi family. He belonged to Pakistan`s diplomatic service. 

Published in Dawn, Supplement Independence Day, August 14th, 2014

Ghulam Ahmed Parvez

The rise and fall of a spiritual rebel

By Nadeem F. Paracha

As a young man, Ghulam Ahmed Parvez would frequently wonder: why is the unvarying practice of Islamic rituals by Muslims not creating more upright men?

He would repeatedly ask why all this ritualism isn’t creating the kind of a society that Islam’s holy book talks about.

He would often be advised by his worried elders to keep his inquires to himself. But Parvez continued to study the Quran and other Islamic literature under various religious scholars to look for answers to all that was perturbing him. He then went on to bag a Master’s degree from the Punjab University in 1934.

Ghulam Ahmed Parvez was now on his way to becoming one of the most well-informed and prolific Islamic scholars in South Asia. When he migrated to Pakistan in 1947, he rapidly rose to become a prominent figure on the rationalist sides of the Islamic discourse in the country.

Consequently, he also became a controversial thinker who would often clash with the traditionalists and the so-called obscurantists until the early 1980s when he finally slipped into a state of disillusionment and self-doubt, passing away as a broken old scholar in 1985.

In the 1930s, after mastering the works of some of Islam’s leading scholars and texts, Parvez moved towards studying the faith’s esoteric strains, such as Sufism.

He also managed to strike a friendship with famous poet and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal, and took him as a mentor.

His relationship with Iqbal helped the young Parvez come into contact with Muhammad Ali Jinnah —­­ the future founder of Pakistan.

Impressed by the young man’s intellectual energy and prowess, Jinnah asked Parvez to edit an Urdu weekly, Tulu-i-Islam — a magazine Jinnah’s All India Muslim League had begun to use to fend off the attacks Jinnah and his comrades would face from orthodox clerics and anti-Jinnah Islamic parties who accused him of being a ‘fake Muslim’.

In one of his editorials, Parvez claimed that Islam (unlike other monolithic faiths) was not supposed to be an organised religion. He maintained that Islam’s holy book is a philosophy that goes beyond rituals and that anything practised or believed by Muslims that was outside the holy book was a fabrication.

According to Parvez, a majority of Muslim traditions were concocted by forces who wanted to portray the faith as being amoral and violent.

Parvez had become a prominent ‘Quranist’ — someone who rejects any Islamic text that was not part of the Quran.

Understandably the orthodox clergy and scholarship labelled him as a ‘heretic’, but Jinnah insisted that Parvez was to be the one to edit Tulu-i-Islam.

One of the first cover features to appear in the magazine (under Parvez) was titled, ‘Mullahs have hijacked Islam.’ In it Parvez lambasted conservative Islamic parties and the clergy as being ‘agents of rich men’ and the enemies of the well-being and enlightenment of common Muslims.

After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Parvez became part of the Muslim League government but retired in 1956 to concentrate on his scholarly work.

In 1961 Parvez created an uproar of sorts in the ranks of the orthodox Islamic scholars when he attempted to popularise the saying of the Muslim prayers (namaz) in Urdu, a language he said most Pakistanis understood (unlike Arabic).

In the 1930s, modern Turkey’s founder, Kamal Atta Turk, had already attempted to introduce prayers and the call for prayer (aazan/baang) in Turkish. Parvez wanted to repeat the experiment in Pakistan with Urdu.

Though Parvez’s idea was initially supported by the Ayub Khan regime (1958-69), the government soon backed out when Parvez was vehemently attacked by conservative religious parties and scholars.

Undeterred by the criticism that was being continuously hurled towards him by religious parties and conservative Islamic scholars, Parvez kept emphasising and propagating his views through a number of books and lectures.

In the 1960s when a group of young leftist intellectuals led by Hanif Ramay was working on an ideological project to merge socialism with the Quranic concepts of justice and equality, the group incorporated a number of ideas that were first aired by Ghulam Ahmed Parvez.

The group would go on to join the PPP in 1967 and the resultant project would emerge as ‘Islamic Socialism.’

Throughout his career, Parvez not only managed to invite the wrath of the conservatives from within Pakistan, but also in various other Muslim countries.

For example, in the mid-1970s his books were banned in various Arab states — especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia, countries that were (and still are) ruled by monarchies belonging to the more rigid strands of the faith.

Parvez responded to the bans by accusing the Arab monarchies of behaving like ancient Muslim kings who had used ‘fabricated religious traditions’ to justify their rule, subjugate the people and demonise their opponents.

By then Parvez had even begun to upset some of his supporters as well. Though the conservative Islamic scholars had continued to lambast him for ‘undermining the institution of Islamic tradition,’ and the clergy, a few progressive Islamic scholars began to complain that his writing style was coarse and that he was too much in favour of using his interpretations of Islamic scriptures to create a leftist political ideology.

Parvez’s ‘leftist’ stage lasted till about the late 1970s in which he continued to insist that religious rituals and laws based on ‘non-Quranic traditions’ were contrary to the revolutionary as well as the rational spirit of Islam’s holy book.

If one continues to study Parvez’s writings beyond those that he wrote prior to the mid-1970s, one is bound to notice that some time from the late 1970s onwards his views had already begun to move away from his Islamic interpretations of leftist ideologies.

Interestingly, a detailed 1979 essay that I managed to glance through some two years ago (that did not carry a by-line), actually accused Parvez of being ‘pro-West’ (because he had suggested that modern-day (Western) scientists were closer to the holy book’s emphasis of enquiry and progress than the ulema and the clerics).

Though he was still being hailed by many labour unions as a pro-workers’ Islamic scholar, he was, however, attacked with shoes in 1978 during a lecture that he was delivering at a function organised by the Mughalpura Railway Workers Union.

Some of his supporters suggested that his move towards becoming ‘pro-West’ and ‘pro-capitalism’ provoked the attack, but a report in Urdu daily, Nawa-i-Waqt, quoted some of the participants claiming that the attack was engineered by his conservative opponents.

Though by now, the Machiavellian and reactionary General Ziaul Haq had become the new ruler of Pakistan (after toppling Z.A. Bhutto’s regime in July 1977), he resisted the demands of Parvez’s right-wing opponents to declare him and his followers heretics.

Maybe Zia had already sensed that Parvez was getting old and posed no threat to his ‘Islamisation’ project?

In the early 1980s, when Parvez entered the 80th year of his life, he began to rediscover the Sufism that he had first studied in the 1930s.

In 1983, he dropped out from the mainstream and decided to visit Makkah to perform Haj. And did that by refusing to wear any footwear whatsoever throughout the trip. He roamed the streets of Madina barefooted and alone.

In spite of the fact that the Zia regime discouraged book-stores from selling his books and Parvez was now too old to give lectures, his previous lectures began appearing on audio-cassettes.

But Parvez was slipping into depression and disillusionment. Not only due to the political triumph of the obscurantists he had battled for over four decades, but perhaps also due to the ultimate failure of his own hectic intellectual project that desired the creation of a progressive and socialist Muslim society based on the egalitarian concepts of the holy book and modern scientific thinking.

In 1985, suffering from self-doubt, disillusionment and intellectual exhaustion, Parvez quietly died at the age of 83. The news of his death was only briefly reported in the press.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 21st, 2014

Shabbir Ahmad Usmani