The myth that is circulating in WhatsApp messages is as under:
Allama Muhammad Asad, a Polish-Austrian Jewish convert to Islam (original name Leopold Weiss), was tasked to make an Islamic constitution by none other than Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who also apparently formed a department called the ‘Directorate of Reconstruction of Islamic Thought’.
Jinnah had nothing to do with this department, which was apparently formed under the auspices of the Punjab government in Lahore.
Had it been Jinnah’s idea, it would have been housed in Karachi under the federal government, since the claim is that it was tasked with the making of an Islamic constitution.
The whole claim falls apart when we consider the facts. Jinnah had no idea who Allama Asad was. He never corresponded with him and he certainly had no inkling of Directorate of Reconstruction of Islamic Thought, which may or may not have existed in Lahore. There is no primary source record to show otherwise.
The corollary of this claim is that Asad was the “first citizen” of Pakistan.
Jinnah had no idea who Allama Asad was. He never corresponded with him and he certainly had no inkling of the Directorate of Reconstruction of Islamic Thought, which may or may not have existed in Lahore.
What the “first citizen” means is unclear. The sponsors of this myth also claim that Jinnah himself issued Leopold Weiss the passport on August 14, 1947. This is a figment of an overactive and down right sinister imagination. It is laughable to imagine Governor General of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, issued a passport to someone whom he had quite evidently never met or spoken to.
Allama Asad never claimed to have known Jinnah. In fact, he could see the obvious differences between his and Jinnah’s (or Iqbal’s) vision.
Dr Martin Kramer, a historian from the Tel Aviv university, states: “Pakistan, he later said, did not work out as Iqbal and he had hoped it would. The new state had been ‘an historical necessity’, and without it, ‘Muslims would have been submerged in the much more developed and intellectually and economically stronger Hindu society’. But ‘unfortunately it did not quite develop in the way we wanted it to. Iqbal’s vision of Pakistan was quite different to that of Mohammed Ali Jinnah [1876-1948, first governor-general of Pakistan], who did not in the beginning want a separation'. Pakistan became a state for Muslims, but its secular founders put aside its mission as an Islamic state.”
Every decade the Islamists in Pakistan invent a new myth. The Allama Asad myth is the latest in a long line of such myths which finds its origins in Jamaat-e-Islami’s propaganda to under play its own anti-Pakistan role during the closing years of the Raj. The decade before they claimed that Jinnah had asked Hassan Al Banna of the Ikhwan ul Muslimeen to send certain persons to help him Islamise Pakistan. It is laughable because the only correspondence between Jinnah and the Islamist leader is one where Jinnah refused to lend his name to an association that Hassan Al Banna had formed in Egypt.
There is absolutely no request for support from the Ikhwan leader. Besides if Jinnah wanted to Islamise Pakistan, he had some of the finest religious scholars available in the subcontinent.
As a minority Shia, Jinnah understood the kind of division such an attempt would cause. He had made it absolutely clear to Raja of Mahmudabad that Pakistan would not be an Islamic state. This is Raja of Mahmudabad’s own testimony and there were very few people who could claim to be Jinnah’s confidant. Raja of Mahmudabad was one of them.
The Allama Asad myth is the latest in a long line of such myths which finds its origins in Jamaat-e-Islami’s propaganda to under play its own anti-Pakistan role during the closing years of the Raj.
It is instructive to read what he said. The Raja had started the conversation by saying that since the Lahore Resolution had been passed earlier in 1940, if and when Pakistan was formed, it was undoubtedly to be an Islamic state with Sunna and Sharia as its bedrock. “Jinnah went red in the face and asked Raja of Mahmudabad whether he had taken leave of his senses? Did he realize that there are over seventy sects and differences of opinion regarding the Islamic faith, and if what the Raja was suggesting was to be followed, the consequences would be a struggle of religious opinion from the very inception of the state leading to its very dissolution. Jinnah banged his hands on the table and said: We shall not be an Islamic State but a Liberal Democratic Muslim State.”
By a Muslim state he meant a Muslim majority state. Jinnah believed that theocracy itself was alien to Islam and therefore the ideal Muslim state could only be a liberal democracy.
That has not stopped certain quarters from inventing these myths. Perhaps the biggest myth was the so-called ‘Laboratory of Islam’ quote attributed to Jinnah supposedly on January 12, 1948, at Islamia College Peshawar. Unfortunately for the people who thought up this quote, Jinnah was in Karachi then. Again this fails the fact check because there is no primary source evidence for this quote anywhere in Jinnah’s speeches and statements.
Of course Jinnah had a modernist understanding of Islam, and he believed that Islamic principles of equality, fraternity and justice for all mankind were applicable to the modern world. He said as much in his speech to the State Bank of Pakistan but did he want a constitutional role for faith? He was very clear that Pakistan would not be a theocracy to be run by priests with a divine mission.
Unfortunately priests with a divine mission have been given the driving seat for most of our history. The mythmaking is employed by them to justify their theocratic ambitions because otherwise Jinnah is an inconvenient founding father for a theocratic state. Had it been up to our theocrats, they would have jettisoned him altogether.