by NADEEM FAROOQ PARACHA
“Iqbal set out to create a self-actualised Muslim collective that would come into being through the dialectic process between reason and revelation, science and tradition, physics and metaphysics”
In 1918, when the First World War was coming to an end, the already depleted Ottoman Empire was facing defeat and rebellions. The Ottomans, headquartered in Istanbul, had sided with Germany in the hope that their empire would be able to restore its rule over at least some of the territories that it began to lose from the 19th century onwards. But the Ottoman armies were routed by allied forces led by the British. When the British facilitated Arab tribes in Arabia to rise up against the Ottomans, Dr Ansari, a member of the All India Muslim League (AIML) invited some ulema to an AIML session in Delhi. The ulema agreed to attend.
But not all AIML leaders were so thrilled by this. For example, an AIML leader Choudhry Khaliquzzaman feared that the party’s program would be overshadowed by the emotion of ‘jihad’ being popularised by the ulema and the Pan-Islamists. He warned Dr Ansari of the dangers of Islamising politics. But Khaliquzzaman was unable to keep AIML from joining the ‘Khilafat Movement’(Caliphate Movement) that aspired to dissuade the British from dismantling the Ottoman caliphate. Once Khilafat became a powerful symbol in the minds of India’s Muslims, the ‘modernist’ leadership of the AIML was marginalised. The ulama, as the custodians of religion, came forward to lead the Muslims of India. According to the Pakistani historian Mubarak Ali, many Muslim leaders who had started their political careers as moderates, were won over by the ulema and became ‘maulanas with beards.’
However, men such as the barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah who had once been a member of Indian National Congress (INC) before joining the AIML, took Khlaiquzzam’s line. In 1919, when the INC leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was planning to bolster the Khilafat Movement with INC’s own anti-British programme, Jinnah wrote to Gandhi warning him that the movement would unleash religious passions and that the Hindus and Muslims would lose the political and economic gains that they had negotiated with the British.
The Friday Times for more