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While the subject of normalisation with the Zionist ethnostate surfaces periodically in Pakistan, its resurrection in the wake of Trump’s orb-lit visit to Saudi Arabia in 2107, has manifested a new energy. Secular, pro-Zionist liberals eager to overturn Pakistan’s non-recognition of Israel rejoiced at Trump’s initiation of a process that would culminate in the Abraham Accords of 2020. Instituting full diplomatic ties between various Arab states and Israel, the Accords removed the so-termed ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ as the impediment to regional amity, conjuring visions of shimmering economic corridors, AI powered vistas of security collaboration, and other spin-offs all premised on sidelining Palestine, and accelerating Kemalism’s encroachment in the polity.
For Pakistani Zionists, the case was closed – if the Arabs can, why can’t we?
Pakistan’s inclusion in this Abrahamic entente was, however, stymied by Prime Minister Imran Khan who, after his election in 2018, predicated any such moves on a just resolution of the Palestine issue. Khan’s commitment to Palestine is viewed in Pakistan as one of the factors in his overthrow by the military junta in 2022 especially since the coalition celebrating his ouster was also the leading advocate of normalisation. Although the coalition’s voluble advocacy of normalisation has ebbed somewhat amidst the genocide in Gaza, it remains intact, and conjugates the regime’s repression of pro-Palestine protests.
Palestine, Muslimness, and coloniality
In this piece, I counterpose the push for normalisation in Pakistan by recalling the iteration of Palestine in the country’s independence movement as recorded in the statements of the founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the political party spearheading the struggle, the All-India Muslim League (established in 1906). I locate Palestine within the arc of Muslim politics as it unfolds within India’s larger anti-colonial struggle, modulating from Jinnah’s legal-constitutional attempts to secure representation and protection for the Muslim minority within an undivided political unit to the demand for a separate state, Pakistan. I suggest that Jinnah’s unwavering support for Palestine, besides constituting a profound act of political solidarity, is also a symbolic and epistemological marker of Pakistan’s significance as an anticolonial venture linking Muslimness with state formation in post caliphal times. This venture renders Pakistan’s founding rationale a transgression of Westphalian, but ultimately enlightenment algorithms that posit facile notions of secularity as the sole determinant of statehood. Its explication defaults to the enlightenment’s colonially inscribed notion of ‘religion’ or its corollary, ‘religious nationalism’ as self-evident categories, tumbling into an epistemological morass that can only apprehend Pakistan as Israel’s ‘ideological twin’ (Tharoor 2014) or- more unfathomably still – a Muslim Zion (Devji 2013).
In contrast, a decolonial reading freed from the enlightenment’s conceptual straitjacket reveals Jinnah’s validation of Muslimness and his rejection of Zionism as co-constitutive of statehood rather than a conflictual marker of it. Instead of paving the way to a Muslim Zion, Jinnah’s conception impresses the dissimilarity in the political projects seeding the two states. Viewed through a decolonial lens, Jinnah’s articulation of Muslimness gathers meaning as an emancipatory ontology of anticolonialism that is the antithesis rather than the analogue of Zionism.
For heuristic purposes, I parse the iteration of Palestine in the Indian Muslim lexicon into two phases: one dating from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the early 1930s; the other from this point to Jinnah’s death and the creation of Israel in 1948.
The local in an Ummatic frame
The first phase inscribes Palestine as an element in the evolving discourse of Muslim self-determination. Shaped by what to Indian Muslims is a chain of catastrophe, the discourse pins Balfour to the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, the establishment of the British mandate in former Ottoman domains, and anxieties over the Caliphate’s survival, prompting a surge of activism. Almost two decades before Jinnah raised the demand for Pakistan, the discourse affirms the imbrication of local anticolonial and global Ummatic struggles.
Responding to the tableau of catastrophe, the Muslim League condemned the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and decried the British military occupation of Jerusalem (Pirzada 1969: 442). It called for an end to non-Muslim control of Palestine, and threatened to end conscription in the British army if the Caliphate were endangered (Pirzada 1969: 537, 562). Anxieties over the Caliphate’s future in a post-Ottoman context crystallised in the Khilafat movement (1919-1922) led by the Ali brothers, pivotal figures in the Muslim League, and dedicated to its preservation. Although the movement dissipated before Mustafa Kemal’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924, the League maintained its opposition to British imperial machinations in West Asia.
Palestine’s salience at this moment cannot be identified primarily with Jinnah but is more accurately ascribed to the Muslim League as a collective. Dating to the early 1900s, Jinnah’s political career began as an adjunct to his legal practice upon his return to Mumbai from London. In the charged political milieu of Indian politics, his primary objective was forging Hindu-Muslim unity against British rule; thus, he joined the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress (established 1885) in 1906, the Muslim League in 1913, and held key positions in the Imperial Legislative Council as well as the All-India Home Rule League. In 1920, however he quit Congress following a dispute with Gandhi, and concentrated his political energies on the League.
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Upholding Muslimness, resisting Zionism
The second phase from 1934 heralds the most intense period in Jinnah’s and the Muslim’s League’s struggle for Pakistan, allied to Jinnah’s forceful interventions on Palestine. Following a brief hiatus in London, Jinnah returned to India that year prompted by appeals from Indian Muslims including the poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal that he rejoin the fray, and lead the Muslim League in earnest. Iqbal had already delivered his iconic Allahabad address at the Muslim League’s 1930 session in which he elucidated the two-nation theory enshrining the rationale for a sovereign Pakistan. Defining Muslims as a distinct nation deserving independent statehood, Iqbal stated,
It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity – by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal – has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India(Iqbal 1930).
The encounter between Iqbal and Jinnah during the 1930s has elicited much comment. A common theme in the discussion is Iqbal’s growing influence on Jinnah as exemplified in his frequent citations of Iqbal’s poetry, the increased recourse to an Islamicate lexicon, and most significantly, the incorporation of the two-nation theory in the Lahore Resolution of March 1940. Calling for an autonomous union of the Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest and east of British India, and legal protections for Muslim minorities elsewhere, the Resolution re-instantiated Iqbal’s imaginary as a realisable goal.
Significantly, Jinnah’s heightened preoccupation with Palestine occurs against the backdrop of such formative shifts in the independence struggle, his rise to undisputed leadership of the League, and a new vehemence in the unfolding Zionist settler colonial project. As such Jinnah’s anti-Zionism forms a continuum with his struggle against the British empire and the Hindu dominated Indian Congress.
Jinnah’s and the League’s endeavours for Palestine during this period took several forms-attempted or actual engagement with the British colonial officials including the Viceroy, recurrent iterations of the Palestine issue in League sessions, the despatch of emissaries to key international conferences, the commemoration of days honouring Palestine, a protracted dialogue with key Palestinian figures, notably the Mufti of Jerusalem, appeals to other Muslim leaders to support Palestine, and press interviews with local and foreign news agencies.
Jinnah contra the Nakba
A small sample of Jinnah’s recorded statements on Palestine during this period indexes his profound disquiet:
May I now turn and refer to the question of Palestine? It has moved the Mussalmans all over India most deeply. The whole policy of the British Government has been a betrayal of the Arabs, from its very inception…. If given effect…, [the partition of Palestine] must … lead to the complete ruination and destruction of every legitimate aspiration of the Arabs in their homeland…But who created this situation? It has been … brought about sedulously by … British statesmen (Jinnah 1937 cited in Pirzada 2007: 245).
I know how deeply Muslim feelings have been stirred over the issue of Palestine. [They] will not shirk from any sacrifice … to help the Arabs … in the fight for their national freedom…the Arabs have been treated shamelessly — men who fighting for the freedom of their country, have been described as gangsters, and subjected to all forms of repression. For defending their homelands, they are being put down at the point of the bayonet… subjected to monstrous injustices…propped up by British Imperialism (Jinnah 1938 cited in Pirzada 2007: 278).
Calling the proposed partition plan an ‘inherently unjust and outrageous decision’ he remarked:
there is bound to be the gravest disaster and unprecedented conflict, not only between the Arabs and the authority that would enforce the partition plan, but the entire Muslim world will revolt against such a decision which cannot be supported historically, politically or morally(Jinnah The Pakistan Times, October 25, 1947).
Appealing to US President Truman, Jinnah warned:
At this hour when the Muslim world has received a terrible shock owing to the most unfortunate decision of the United Nations Organization to enforce partition of Palestine, I would like to address to you, Mr. President, this personal appeal. [2]The decision is ultra vires of the United Nations charter and basically wrong and invalid in law. [3]Morally it is untenable. Political, historically, geographically and practically it would be impossible to enforce partition against the united resistance of the Arabs who have the full sympathy and support of over three hundred million Mussalmans and many non-Muslim countries and not only those who voted against UNO decision. [4]In the long run it will and must fail (Jinnah1947).
And in an Eid message released shortly before his death, he stated:
My Eid message to our brother Muslim States is one of friendship and goodwill. We are all passing through perilous times. The drama of power politics that is being staged in Palestine, Indonesia and Kashmir should serve an eye opener to us. It is only by putting up a united front that we can make our voice felt in the counsels of the world. Let me, therefore, appeal to you–in whatever language you may put, when the essence of my advice is boiled down, it comes to this–that every Mussalman should serve Pakistan honestly, sincerely and selflessly. (Jinnah 1948)
When Ben Gurion, approached Jinnah about establishing diplomatic relations, he did not respond.
The Enlightenment impasse
Jinnah understood Muslimness, then, as the mainspring of anticolonial justice that could and should resist a decaying colonial order and its reincarnation in the virulence of Zionism. The final Eid statement captures poignantly his aspirations to inculcate this conception in the emergent state. Given Jinnah’s mobilisation of Muslimness in an expansive anticolonial register, to conjure, as Devji does, the notion of a Muslim Zion bespeaks a studied aversion to the decolonial, and an occult fidelity to colonially sanctioned modes of analysis:
“…the abstract idea at the heart of Muslim nationalism, one created by the forcible exclusion of blood and soil in the making of a new homeland for India’s diverse and scattered Muslims” (2013:9). Perplexed by this blood-less, soil-less political configuration, Devji finds comfort in a faux relationality:
“…the Zionist movement…was simply one example of this political form, with Muslim nationalism, resulting in the founding of Pakistan … constituting …its precedent, and perhaps its closest political relation…”(ibid:3)
Lauding Devji’s arguments, Sheikh notes that Pakistan may defy nineteenth-century European nationalism, but like Israel, constitutes an ‘ideal form’ of an Enlightenment state based on ‘(the fantasy of) political consent’ (Sheikh 2015: 1). One feels for Devji and his admiring reviewers. Unable to compress Pakistan’s creation into the framework of ‘nineteenth-century European nationalism’, they venture out, albeit without vacating the enlightenment’s discursive universe. Here, they chance upon ‘religion’ as a commonsense category that will forge chimeral links between a state formed through an arduous anticolonial struggle and another birthed to reinvigorate a white supremacist, genocidal order.
Interestingly, even The Times on 15th August 1947 hinted that Pakistan’s creation had interrupted imperialist and Kemalist colonial logics:
‘…In the hour of its creation Pakistan emerges as the leading state of the Muslim World. Since the collapse of the Turkish Empire that world, which extends across the globe from Morocco to Indonesia, has not included a state whose numbers, natural resources, and place in history gave it undisputed pre-eminence. The gap is now filled. From today Karachi takes rank as a new centre of Muslim cohesion and a rallying point of Muslim thought and aspirations.’
While Pakistan may not have fulfilled its promise as an anticolonial political project, the Zionist entity has fulfilled its portents as a settler colonial ethnostate. To resist calls for normalisation then, is not to adopt a formulaic rehearsal of Jinnah’s precepts, but to appreciate his prescience in striving to rescue Muslimness from complicity in an imperial project that is now synonymous with unimaginable brutality.
نَصْرٌ مِّن اللَّهِ وَفَتْحٌ قَرِيبٌ
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