Jinnah and the Islamic State – Setting the Record Straight

Ref Yasser Latif Hamdani #244

[Jogindranath Mandal's appointment as a law minister indicates one of the two things below:

1. Either Jinnah did not intend to Islamise the laws or else he would have chosen an Islamic scholar to head the law ministry but he didn't. He chose a Hindu.

or

2. Jinnah believed even qualified Non-muslims could interpret and vet bills trying to introduce Islamic law.

Given that Mandal was a lawyer and not a scholar of Islam or Islamic laws (unlike say the Parsi D F Mulla) ... it can be said that it was not a decision made because Jinnah thought Mandal was the best suited scholar for Islam even if Hindu... Remember Mandal was before this chosen to represent the Muslims at the interim government in United India by Jinnah.


Add to this the fact that during all Powerful Jinnah's government, not a single piece of legislation was enacted that sought to Islamise Pakistan... we can safely conclude that Jinnah's choice of Mandal as the law minister was a strong message sent to his followers.]

Yasser, dear boy, Jogendra Nath Mondal was a prototype of what Pakistan is today: a condom which is to be discarded after its usefulness is over.

Don't read anything more than that into Jinnah-bhai's use of Mondal.

And Jinnah-bhai did NOT appoint Mondal to represent the Muslims at the interim government in United India. Jinnah-bhai, failing in his claim that only he represented all the Muslims and that Congress had no right to appoint Muslim members of the Interim Government even if they were members of the Congress (particularly IF they were members of the Congress) then claimed that he was the representative of the Backward Castes too and to prove that gave up one valuable Muslim League appointment to install Mondal in the government.

When Mondal realized exactly what he was up against in the real world of Pakistan, he figured being a Backward Caste person India at least guaranteed him his life whereas being a non-Muslim in Pakistan deprived him of even this basic right and decided to return to India.

Do not attempt to whitewash the genocidal crimes of one of the guiltiest criminals of the modern world.

The greatest facilitator of the feudals and the colonials was MAJ who using the excuse of Muslims of India, using them as scapegoats and killing over a million of them, worked to protect the landed aristocracy of West Pakistan from the rural uprisings in India that were capitalized by Gandhi. ZAB was the one that challenged those feudal elite for the first time ever representing the rural masses.

With all respect and appreciation for Qaaide Aazam, I wonder why should he be taken as the final authority. He did his job as a leader, but he was not the last prophet. Whatever might have been his views, he has to be measured by the yardstick and on the touchstone of the Quran and Hadeeth. In fact he was not the Qaaide Aazam (the paramount leader), he was a Qaaid. Qaaide Aazam is none bu Muhammad PBUH.

ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF PAKISTAN (Just the name)

Please do not get fooled by the name. The name is there to fool only the non-english speaking and illiterate mullahs and pro talibans in the Pakland.

Regardless of what one calls Pakistan, it is certainly secular in nature. Pakistan is free-er than USA and India combined.

This is why:

1) One is free to do the five pillars of Islam and even preach the religion.

2) Alcohol is available through the permit shops.

3) Prostitution is rampant.

4) Jirga and sardari system is also rampant, basically running a parallel legal system.

5) One is free to do honor killings

6) One can marry his daughter or sister to Quran.

7) You can even give your daughter or sister to your enemy if for some reason you have committed murder and now you are shitting in your shalwar and trying to save your life.

8) Build your house anywhere you like on anyone’s land.

9) Want to keep a weapon, no problem, keep any thing you want. Stingers are also available if you got the dough.

10) Bribes are now the law of the land.

11) Instead of hiring a lawyer, you can hire a judge thus making sure you get the outcome you want out of a case.

12) If you are fed up with the interest based system, no problem, we have profit and loss sharing accounts available.

13) Like to have more than one wife, you are free to have up to four at a time.

So why is Hoodbhoy is still caught up with this discussion about Islamic Pakistan or Secular Pakistan is beyond my comprehension. We are by any means SECULAR and beyond. In fact we should start calling Pakistan THE SECUALR COUNTRY in the world.

Asfand Siddiqui
Sacramento CA

Re: # 341

montolives

You are right that I have not read much either about Gandhi or Jinnah. As a young boy I had seen Jinnah very close by so much so that I could have touched him, but I had got too overwhelmed by his transcendent personality to do so. In fact I never saw another leader like him all my life. As regards opposition against him and the Pakistan movement by the so called Islamists who can know better than my generation.

I will read your article at leisure. Meanwhile I would like you to read an interesting article by Ehjaz Haider which appeared in the Daily Times a few days back:

"THE OTHER COLUMN: Not enough — Ejaz Haider
What does one do when an entire people decide to become grumpy or Thornapplesque. It is difficult to send millions on a vacation, except perhaps to Antarctica; they can’t all be sent to shrinks either

Growing up, life was simple.

Bhutto Sahib had emerged as a Messiah, Punjabi cinema was trying to be erotic and failing only because of lousy production and the size of heroines, people generally considered it bad form to blow themselves up, the Ahmadiyya were still Muslims and bootleggers were unheard of.

In other words, God was in His Heaven and all was right with this country and we didn’t need a Browning to tell us this.

This was also the time when we were confident of being Muslim. In any case, it was easy enough to be one. It didn’t prevent us from smiling, laughing and enjoying all that makes life worth living. The elders would pray for us while we did our own thing; the chidings, when they came, were begotten of affection, and we all said our little prayers at night to a benign and understanding God while smoking on the sly, truanting and generally being naughty.

Then at some point we decided that we were not Muslim-enough, a vexing thought that has since snowballed into an avalanche under which we all lie buried and asphyxiated.

One doesn’t need to be a shrink to know how debilitating the feeling of inadequacy can be. If we are supposed to be Muslim but aren’t Muslim-enough, it must make us irritable and mad.

Indeed, the feeling of not being anything-enough can be killing as Brutus Thornapple, the born loser, will tell anyone. My personal favourite is the one in which Thornapple is on a shrink’s couch and the shrink asks: “So, you think you suffer from feelings of inadequacy. How severe would you say they are?”

Thornapple replies: “They’re so severe... Even my inferiority complex is inadequate!”

Not being enough-anything no one wants to be. Women who think they are not endowed-enough want to change that and are, in most cases, prepared to go through much trouble and pain. For what: to be enough, adequate.

From the emails I get despite all the firewalls and filters, it seems to me that even men have been afflicted with the I-ain’t-adequate syndrome. There are ways and means to enhance the sense of manhood and from the traffic of unwanted mail it appears there is a market for this fraud. Clearly, some men are prepared to take all sorts of risks to become man-enough, adequate. The mind boggles.

But imagine. If the feeling of being not-enough in the secular — by which I mean biological — domain can make people accept so much risk and absorb so much pain, what might man not be capable of doing unto himself and others if he were struck by the thought one day, as we seem to have been, that he is not Muslim-enough?

Such then has been our plight. Add to this the fact that every time we think we are now Muslim-enough, someone stands up and warns, “Damned be him who says enough!”

Such a one is also normally a gentleman who has taken it upon himself to tell us that all our troubles are owed to our remaining inadequate and because there is not enough Islam in this land. If empirical evidence is anything to go by, and by this I mean the legislation, the increased and increasing pieties, the number of mosques and seminaries, the rhetoric, the extremism and a host of other indicators, then I would take the presumption of saying that at no time in this land has there been more Islam than there is now and I include the period right up to the time of Mohammad bin Qasim to which our history textbooks retrace the Two-Nation theory.

And yet, we contest our quantification of how much Islam there already is and how much more of it is needed, an exercise whose absurdity reminds me of the two Sardars on a motorbike fighting for the window seat.

It seems like we have reached a point where God is either not in Heaven or all is not right with us. Since I am not aware of the current position of the Lord, I suspect the trouble is more imminent than transcendent which, translated into plain English means all’s not right with us.

In normal life when someone is agitated or frustrated or unhappy with the state of affairs, we advise him to relax, go on a vacation, let his hair down and so on. But what does one do when an entire people decide to become grumpy or Thornapplesque. It is difficult to send millions on a vacation, except of the kind that was available to people in the former Soviet Union; neither can millions be sent to shrinks. What to do?

It’s a tough one. Those who have brought us to this pass insist that we are suffering because we are inadequate; but the more we try to be adequate the more inadequate we become. The equation is insoluble. Small wonder that some of us have decided to blow themselves and others up than to live with such a great feeling of inadequacy.

Life, downhill, is not simple anymore.

Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk"

"The way to hell is paved with good intentions" as GBS had said.

Teshah,

Then you've obviously not read much about Jinnah. Jinnah was for 30 years completely committed to Hindu Muslim Unity.
He was more interested in British giving India to Indians than Gandhi ever was. Please read my article here:http://pakistaniat.com/2006/12/25/pakistan-jinnah-legislative-career/

I hope you know Gandhi was a loyal British recruiter and was probably planted to give British an excuse not to give responsible dominion status to India in 1925.

And Jinnah's Two Nation Theory- if you can call it that since it was hardly his- a theory aiming at consociationalism- has nothing to do with the extremist Islamists. Remember they were his biggest opponents calling him Kafir-e-Azam and Pakistan "Kafiristan".

Re: # 336

montolives

He may be, but he was interested more in his TNT than in 'Quit India' by the British. In cosequence; what happened as a result of all this was a carnage unprecedented in history; first, in 1947 and again in 1971.

The history of Pakistan
can be summed up in a single line:
'Jinnah's English created Pakistan and his ill-advised and undemocratic insistence on Urdu to be treated as a national language broke it'.

Where we stand today: the 'TNT', a political weapon for advocating Partition of India used by Jinnah, is being used by the extremists to day as a murderous weapon to kill people indiscriminately all over the world.

So, what had started with Gandhi's 'Aahinsa' (Non-violence) and Jinnah's TNT has brought us virtually to the brink of a war against civilization.

May God help us!

Regards

to partition each and every village of India i.e creating Pakistn in every village and town of India.

I already said that Jinnah talked abt population exchange.
Either Jinnah must be a moron or it must be u.

Re: # 334

I've already responded to this Folio.

There was really no locus standi for the Congress to insist on the partition of Punjab and Bengal and if it did , every province of India should have similarly partitioned.

Re: # 335

Dear Teshah,

If you look at the time line, Jinnah was on the scene way before Gandhi.

Re: # 325
Montolives

Thank you for your generous remarks about me. 'Man aanum kih man daanam' (I am what I know I am). All else is a myth. Gandhi was a myth and Jinnah was a myth. All passing shows. 'Rahe naam Allah ka'. 'Saancha naam uska, baaqi sab jhoot'.

I belong to the generation which saw all this passing show in the history of the subcontinent in their conscious lives. We saw the majestic power of the British Imperialism when dogs and Indians were not allowed in railway restaurants. It was that 'Dhoti Badshah' Gandhi who dared to stand up against that disgraceful position to which the Indians had been submissively subjected to by the awe of the British Raj. It was he who restored the dignity of the Indians and gave them courage to rise up against the imperialism. Jinnah came later on the scene and served as a good and sincere lawyer for the Muslim community of India. Later on he was also disappointed with the way Pakistan was actually established. In my view it would have been better if Pakistan, an unprecedented new State, was established via the Cabinet Plan.

Btw, I would suggest you to read Gandhi's book 'My experiment with the truth' wherein he himself talks humorously about his 'Mahatamai' also, which according to him was thrust upon him.

OK, lemme put it this way:

U keep saying the permanent majority in India has right to oppress the permanent minority but when it came to the Pakistan provinces the permanent majority had unfettered rights to eff the minorities.

Is that what u want to say?......how can u speak from both sides, bratha?

1937 to 1946 Muslim League's share increased and the Congress' share decreased...

in Pak provinces, thanks 2 vicious communal propaganda. That's correct.

U keep saying the permanent majority in Pak provinces had unfettered right to oppress the permanent minority but when it came to the whole of India, the Golden Rule need to to be set aside.

Is that what u want to say?......how can u speak from both sides, bratha?

Mian Folio,

This is a pathetic argument. The Congress electorate was based on the same franchise. By questioning the credentials of the electorate, you are challenging Congress' representative status more ... Congress by that logic was as unrepresentative as any other party.

Of the electorate... Muslim League won 87% of the vote. So what is your point?

And besides...as the electorate expanded from 1937 to 1946 Muslim League's share increased and the Congress' share decreased...

All evidence points towards this trend. So please atleast try and get your arguments straight.

Manto,

How can an electorate of less than 13% who votes a party i.e Muslim League can decide the fate of more than 90% of the people? You think this is the democratic principle?

You mean that ML has unfettered right to treat the unwilling 47%+ Muslims who haven't voted for ML as sheep?

Rubbish, even to propose such idea!

Granted ur victorious ML as the arbiter of justice then why the same was not conceded in NWFP where the elected Congress govt was in power?

This is typical Muslim bania (Jinnah) mentality i.e always seeking 17 annas for a rupee.

As for ALL the districts going to Pakistan, Jinnah had proposed migration of Muslims from other parts of India and migration of non-Muslims to Hindustan. U think Jinnah was stupid or lacked commonsense?

It's Jinnah and his pocketborough i.e Muslim League that was cynical.