Pervez Hoodbhoy's book on Pakistan

Pakistani scholar and activist Pervez Hoodbhoy is a man on a mission. Although Hoodbhoy is a nuclear physicist, his quest for rationalism has taken him to expand the boundaries of scholarship in social sciences. He is the author of innumerable books, and his latest offering is Pakistan: Origins, Identity and Future.     

From unraveling the finer threads of historical connects, to deep diving into the future of Pakistan, readers will find the book not just enlightening on the bonds that deeply tie India and Pakistan together but a cautionary tale of a political catastrophe by a religious state.

For decades now Hoodbhoy has spoken about the atrocities on minorities in Pakistan, be it Hindus, Ahmadis, Shias, or Hazaras. He is also that rare voice who is known globally for forensically examining the relationship between Islamic societies and science.  

The book is expansive, ambitious in scope, and examines issues and individuals that have either been ignored or misrepresented by scholars and historians in Pakistan. It is a lucid account which gives a generous overview of the historiography, thus ensuring that it will appeal to both general and serious readers. As Christophe Jaffrelot rightly says in the introduction the book does not belong to any established genre.  

 

Hoodbhoy proclaims that the two-nation theory is the placenta of Pakistan’s birth, which must be now thrown away as the child is born. Unfortunately, the Pakistani state insists on retaining it. His analysis focuses on examining what prevented Muslims from being competitive instead of the usual tropes of discrimination and Hindu domination. 

 

The book is divided into five parts. In the first part, Hoodbhoy explores the period when religious identities were fuzzy and traces the various processes by which they solidified and sharpened. The different responses by the Hindus and Muslims to the challenges to modernity is a key theme of the first part. The second part is devoted to the founder of the Aligarh Muslim University, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal and M A Jinnah. The contradictions in the lives of the trinity of Pakistan’s founding figures and their positions and attitudes on important questions is an attempt to rescue them from the cottage industry of hagiographies that have come up especially for Iqbal and Jinnah.

 

The third part is about the years just after Partition and deploying the term "angularities" passionately dissects the problem areas of East Pakistan and Balochistan. The part that became Bangladesh was restless even when Jinnah was alive – on a visit to Dhaka in March 1948 he said that Urdu alone would be the language of the state of Pakistan, completely  disregarding Bengali sensibilities. The fourth part takes forward the discussions from the earlier three parts to answer questions that are intimately linked to the way Pakistan finds itself today. This is Hoodbhoy’s lament as to why the military continues to have the upper hand, real democracy remains subjugated and the harm caused to the Pakistani society if they choose to identify themselves with invaders of the last millennium.       

 

The last part posits what the future holds for Pakistan and how the political establishment can come together to improve the state. As said earlier, this is a book very ambitious in its scope, and sixteen chapters spread over 400 pages is a long read tackling some foundational issues. The demand or idea for Pakistan has been traced from the “rapidly decaying North Indian Urdu-speaking Muslim elite” who were called Muhajirs after they migrated to Pakistan from India. It is believed that a large section of Muhajirs further migrated from Pakistan to Europe and America. But in the years after Partition, they had a formidable presence in Karachi and lapped up important posts in the newly established state.

 

“In Pakistan the Muhajirs, together with Punjabis, quickly acquired hegemonic control over native populations. The army was largely Punjabi with some Pakhtuns and Muhajirs, while the bureaucracy was a mixture of Punjabis and Muhajirs. In later decades Pakhtuns and Sindhis asserted themselves more and more leading to a sense of embattlement among Muhajirs and formation of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). Today the MQM is a shell of what it was in the 1990’s and Muhajir influence has waned across the board” he tells me. 

 

And so has the popularity of Sir Syed who established AMU from where a large section of those who went to Pakistan were educated. Although Sir Syed remains a recognisable face the Pakistani establishment has now stopped giving him the importance he received earlier. His call to reinterpret Islamic theology in the light of science was problematic in his own time, and it has remained even today. In 2013, a book titled Sir Syed Ahmed Khan ka asli roop (The real face of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan) was published in Lahore which has contributions from Islamic clerics attacking the reformer who died in 1898.

 

Another figure that finds hardly any mention in Pakistan is Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Hoodbhoy includes him in his book as one of the key figures who opposed Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan. “Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was by far the most powerful Muslim voice against the creation of Pakistan. No state should be defined by religion, he argued. For Jinnah, Azad was a turncoat Muslim who had ganged up with Hindus and he thus disparagingly referred to Azad as Congress’s show boy,” says Hoodbhoy. Interestingly, Azad himself had the ambition to become the undisputed leader of Indian Muslims, which he quietly gave up, having turned towards secularism after coming under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi.

 

“Azad passionately argued against the Two Nation Theory pointing to centuries of mostly peaceful Hindu-Muslim coexistence. He was remarkably prescient in pointing out that were Partition to happen, the Muslims left behind in India would discover that they had become mere aliens and foreigners in their own land. Backward industrially, educationally and economically, they would surely be left at the mercy of what, he said, would become “an unadulterated Hindu raj”.  His prediction that Pakistan would ultimately break up was made long before 1971,” says Hoodbhoy.

 

As In the book, Hoodbhoy reminds us that the army in Pakistan has resolved to keep the country in a state of mind just short of war, I ask him about the significance of Nawaz Sharif returning to Pakistan. He tells me that the return signifies another round of hybrid rule that lies ahead. “The welcoming crowds were moderately large at his Lahore jalsa but it was well known that promises of biryani and cash was why they had assembled. The kind of spontaneous enthusiasm seen at PTI events was clearly lacking and Nawaz does not inspire Pakistan's young people. That might be a small matter - with the establishment solidly behind him for now Nawaz’s 4^th term as prime minister is, as the Americans say, a slam dunk.”

 

So what happens to Imran Khan? “Imran Khan, whose popularity far exceeds Nawaz’s, is in the boondocks with most of his former allies having deserted him. Some have created new parties with the deep state’s blessing. Ironically the laws enacted during his rule to suppress the opposition have come back to bite him. His political future seems to be over. But who knows? Politics in Pakistan is notoriously unpredictable and few could have imagined that Nawaz Sharif could ever have made a comeback,” he tells me. But according to Hoodbhoy, Sharif does not have a credible plan to prevent Pakistan’s economy from sliding down yet further.

 

Hoodbhoy describes Imran Khan’s regime as seeking to turn Pakistan into a replica of Medina state; Pervez Musharraf was for enlightened moderation; Ziaul Haq stood for Islamization and Zulfiqar Bhutto for vengeance against India. In this context, he feels one of the key questions to watch out for would be whether Sharif would again make overtures to India for regional peace.