Review of Faisal Devji. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

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Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion is an intellectual history of the political and ideological forms of argumentation and lines of reasoning that led to Pakistan’s creation. His thesis is the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth century turned both European Jews and Indian Muslims into minorities and their response was a new political form in which nationality is defined as the rejection of an old land for a new. This replaced the conventional form of belonging based on blood and inherited land with an abstract religious identity lacking historical roots and creating new settler states at the very moment of decolonisation elsewhere. Thus Devji counters the two ways in which scholars have explained Pakistan’s creation. The first is that the Muslim League’s leader - Mohammed Ali Jinnah – used Muslim nationalism as a ‘bargaining counter’ with the Indian National Congress and hence the creation of Pakistan was a failed conspiracy. The second is that Muslim nationalism was a local, bottom-up movement. Devji’s focus is on the intellectual ideas of Muslim League leaders, including Jinnah, the historian Queshi, the political theorist Liaquat, and the philosopher and poet Mohammad Iqbal. The book is not a comparative history of Muslim nationalism and Zionism although Devji’s first chapter demonstrates the links between the Zionist and Muslim League leaders and their intellectual ideas. As he explains, these ideas were formulated as the European colonial empires began to decline, when the League of Nations accepted President Wilson’s principle of self-determination and also when fascism and particularly communism was challenging the very idea of the Westphalian nation state. Against this backdrop British India’s minorities (Muslims, Untouchables, Christians and Anglo-Indians) failed to ally to counter the Hindu majority. But the Muslim nationalists’ subsequent insistence that the Indian Raj was two nations – Hindu and Muslim, rather than one which the Congress claimed – led to the creation of a new land without a cultural or national history other than inherited British institutions and Islam. As an example, Devji cites Pakistan’s adoption of Urdu as the official language although it was not native to the land of Pakistan. Devji’s argument is convincing and his conclusion is that the Muslim nationalists’ enlightened, ecumenical view of Islam as an abstract idea which would allow a functioning liberal democratic yet Islamic state was only possible when the Muslims were unified as a minority in India. Furthermore Devji highlights the importance of Shia thinkers such as the Aga Khan and the educated West Indian business class, including Jinnah, in the formulation of Pakistan. These thinkers feared domination of Islam in India by the Sunni majority, and propagated the idea of an abstract and ecumenical spirit of Islam. Devji finds that this view has been overtaken since Pakistan’s formation by a sectarian Sunni dominance which requires outward conformity to Sunni orthodoxy. Devji cites the Pakistan government’s declaration of Ahmadis as non-Muslims and the judicial investigations between 1968 and 1984 to establish Jinnah’s sectarian identity as examples of the erosion of Jinnah’s secular state. Interestingly Devji does not mention the ongoing Taliban threat to the state of Pakistan. Muslim Zion is a thought provoking book which reads easily despite the complexity of its conceptions. There is the occasional esoteric diversion such as when Voltaire’s La Fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète is quoted at length as an example of Islam and enlightenment thinking. Furthermore some of Devji’s arguments may seem counter-intuitive when viewed teleogically. As an example of the new political form prioritising ideology over territory he cites Pakistan’s willingness to give up East Pakistan in 1971 and equates it with Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai in 1979. Yet the Pakistan Army sees itself as protecting both the ideology and geography of Pakistan, including at great cost the disputed territories of Kashmir and the Siachen Glacier. Also this reviewer would have welcomed more analysis on Muslim nationalist attitudes to what would become East Pakistan and also the tribal areas of the North West Frontier (now the Federally Administered Tribal Areas) which of course were fiercely Muslim before Pakistan was created yet continue to be treated as outside of the ‘settled’ areas of Pakistan.

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