Editor’s note: Recently, a review of Faisal Devji’s groundbreaking work Muslim Zion was published in the Pakistani media. We are publishing his response which not only addresses the book review but expands and elevates the key arguments made in that study.
I was bemused to see that Dawn ran a review of my book, Muslim Zion, on the 10th of September, despite it having been published nearly a decade ago. At the time, it had received an entirely positive and even superlative review in the same newspaper, while it is now condemned in quite personal terms as being ridiculous and incoherent. As an author, I can nevertheless only be gratified by the attention the book continues to elicit, though I am surprised by the reviewer Ayesha Malik’s inability or unwillingness to describe my argument. Instead, she fixes on some illustrative points without explaining why I make them. But more on that later.
This renewal of interest in Muslim Zion is due to the current war in Gaza, which has made any comparison of Pakistan and Israel unacceptable. It doesn’t strike Malik that using the Palestinian cause to promote Pakistani nationalism instrumentalises it. Her argument is that Zionism and Muslim nationalism are not alike. But the book, as I point out repeatedly in it, is not a comparison of Pakistan and Israel. It is about different forms of nationalism, with India following the romantic tradition of historical rootedness in blood and soil while Pakistan follows the Enlightenment one based on the idea of an ungrounded and self-possessed nation. One is not better or worse than the other.
Romantic nationalism tends to characterise European states, and Enlightenment nationalism New World ones. Israel is only one example of the latter's return to the Old World and was preceded by others of varied political leanings including Liberia and Afrikaner South Africa. But Pakistan’s founding was almost simultaneous with Israel’s and even provided a precedent for the latter in the UN. The Zion I refer to in my title is not Zionism, but a Protestant idea about constructing a new kind of society envisioned as a return to some kind of pure and often religious origin. This vision of making oneself a new homeland was then deployed all over the Americas, Africa, and Australasia in colonial and settler societies. The key challenge here is not to be fixated by Israel but think beyond it.
How to explain the reviewer’s obsessive rhetoric, if not as betraying a fundamental anxiety? Having stated she has nothing against religion defining nationality, after all, Malik has already acknowledged the similarity between Pakistan and Israel. This she must disavow by attributing it to my book. She argues instead that unlike Jews in Palestine, Muslims were already a demographic majority in Pakistan. Malik’s reading of Muslim Zion was so cursory that its recognition of this elementary fact escaped her notice. But it is also an irrelevant fact, since historians of South Asia know the impetus for and leadership of the Muslim League came not from these majority populations (or only very late and after partition was inevitable) but from Muslim minorities in India.
The book, as I point out repeatedly in it, is not a comparison of Pakistan and Israel. It is about different forms of nationalism, with India following the romantic tradition of historical rootedness in blood and soil while Pakistan follows the Enlightenment one based on the idea of an ungrounded and self-possessed nation. One is not better or worse than the other
Pakistan can be described as a Muslim Zion because it was created outside the territory it eventually came to occupy and with little regard for its histories and cultures. Indeed, Bengal is the only part of the erstwhile Pakistan in which the League had any real experience of rule and long-standing popular support. But even here, as Andrew Sartori points out in his book Liberalism in Empire, support for the Pakistan movement was premised upon the migration of Muslim settlers into East Bengal and Assam. It was only once this logic of settlement was stymied by the imperial state that it was diverted into the struggle for Pakistan as a new version of a Muslim settler society—precisely a Muslim Zion.
In another example of the reviewer’s inability to grasp my argument, it is claimed that Ireland, more than Israel, was a reference point for the League. But I had also dealt with this reference in Muslim Zion. Unlike Congress it largely and logically supported not the Catholic majority colonised by Britain but the Protestant minority in Northern Ireland who wanted to remain under British rule. But why stop at Ireland? The Sudetenland was also a positive reference for the League as I point out in the book, supported as it was by Nazi Germany in the name of protecting the German minority from a Czechoslovak majority. These references were important because they involved minorities like India’s Muslims which sought to become majorities in their own states by migration as much as redrawing boundaries.
As my book demonstrates in detail, the League represented an Enlightenment form of nationalism because did not rely upon some immemorial attachment to the land and its culture, which is why its conception of Pakistan was so geographically varied and unsettled until the end. Think of Choudhry Rehmat Ali's geographically dispersed vision of a 'continent of Dinia' or Jinnah's Pakistan formed in two separate pieces and ideally including the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as well. It is only Pakistan’s non-Muslim minorities and its provincial identities that subscribe to historically and territorially coherent visions of belonging, which may explain why both are so routinely suppressed there. It is also where the comparison with Palestine has some meaning.
At the national level, there clearly exists no blood-and-soil nationalism but a potentially and eventually – if not inevitably – ideological one, manifested in the making of Pakistan into the world’s first Islamic republic. I say not inevitably because an ideological conception of nationality can also be a communist one, and indeed, both Iqbal and the modernists as well as Islamists who came after him drew heavily upon the Soviet example when repudiating blood-and-soil forms of identity as small-minded and idolatrous when compared with the universality of an ideological one. The inflationary use of the word 'ideological' (nazariyati) to describe Muslim nationalism is evident in many if not all the new state's foundational debates and documents.
Malik’s review abounds in mis-readings. She suggests that Partition meant minorities were free to stay or leave British India’s successor states, as if there was no forced displacement or emigration driven by fear. She claims that if Muslims can be said to have wanted a Zion so can Hindus and Sikhs, forgetting the latter wanted to inherit a state not found one. And she berates me for describing Jinnah as satanic without saying why I did so. Iqbal had celebrated the devil as a symbol of individuality, a status he occupies in Islamic and European literary tradition. Jinnah represented such an individuality politically. He repudiated in his person the representative character meant to define nations. Jinnah was not a man of the masses or some generic Muslim but as self-possessed as the nation he founded.
But what marks the review above all is the irony of its effort to distinguish Pakistan from Israel and align it with the Palestinian cause. This is to erase the inconvenient fact that the Islamic republic also possesses a history of ignoring and sometimes even killing Palestinians. It stretches from the Pakistani army and Zia-ul-Haq himself participating in Jordan's massacre of Palestinians and expulsion of the PLO after the 1967 war to the situation today, when pro-Palestinian demonstrations are not permitted in Pakistan due to Saudi and possibly American pressure. There are more demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the war than there are in the whole of Pakistan. Is this fact also one my reviewer wants to disavow by attacking Muslim Zion in the name of a Pakistani nationalism whitewashed by the Palestinian cause?