Secular jinnah and pakistan free download

One of the most famous books in Pakistan, the late Chief Justice Muhammad Munir's From Jinnah to Zia has finally received the ultimate rebuttal from a British-born Asian - using only one piece of evidence. Saleena Karim tells the story of how a point of curiosity - based on little more than an issue of grammar - led her to the startling discovery that a quote used by Munir and attributed to Jinnah is in fact a fake.

Furthermore this quote has also been used by a number of Pakistani professional writers and scholars, none of whom have thought to check the original transcript of the interview Munir supposedly quoted from. Over twenty-five years after the release of From Jinnah to Zia, the author shows us how much damage the 'Munir quote' has done - not only in terms of twisting the facts of history, but now in exposing the intellectual dishonesty of Pakistani scholarship.

Saleena Karim names those who have quoted Munir, as well as discussing the other myths about the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and sets the record straight. Political biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, , statesman and founder of Pakistan. Mohammad Ali Jinnah has been both celebrated and reviled for his role in the Partition of India, and the controversies surrounding his actions have only increased in the seven decades and more since his death.

Ishtiaq Ahmed places Jinnah's actions under intense scrutiny to ascertain the Quaid-i-Azam's successes and failures and the meaning and significance of his legacy. Using a wealth of contemporary records and archival material, Dr Ahmed traces Jinnah's journey from Indian nationalist to Muslim communitarian, and from a Muslim nationalist to, finally, Pakistan's all-powerful head of state.

How did the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity become the inflexible votary of the two-nation theory? Did Jinnah envision Pakistan as a theocratic state?

What was his position on Gandhi and federalism? Asking these crucial questions against the backdrop of the turbulent struggle against colonialism, this book is a path-breaking examination of one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Political biography of Mahomed Ali Jinnah, , prime minister of Pakistan.

Was Jinnah the sole driving force behind the Partition of India? Or was he a champion of Islam who stood for a new Islamic renaissance? Quite appropriately Jinnah had quoted the example of Great Britain where Protestants had long persecuted Catholics but had ultimately come to see themselves as one nation, Protestant and Catholic.

The myth of Pakistan being founded in the name of Islam, thus, is a sham and the more we insist on it the more we will prove it a white lie. The kind of terrible violence that England went through in those days is not unknown to a common Pakistani in It is not for nothing that Jinnah had referred to the Protestant- Catholic conflict of this era in his landmark 11th August speech while emphasizing religious toleration and neutrality of the state I daresay secularism.

Unfortunately Pakistan has become quite what England was under King Henry. Just like Henry used religion to either achieve personal or political ends, our callous elite, resembling the latter day King Henry in the age of senility, too makes unabashed use of religion.

Barelvis are played against Deobandis and Ahle-Hadith, what to say of sectarian and religious minorities. Just as reformers and traditionalists argued over whether the images and intercession of Jesu Jesus Mary and the saints was allowed, Pakistani religious debaters argue over whether going to Mazars is alright or not. Is this our reformation to be followed by a renaissance?

Who knows but I suppose there is no harm in taking such flights of fancy. Be that as it may we have to live in the here and now. That Pakistan is going through a defining phase is undisputed. It is only if we put our faith in our democracy and allow elections to take place and enough cycles of democracy pass, will we actually begin to define Pakistan in a way that would redeem us in history.

The coming elections will decisive in the sense that they would determine whether Pakistanis are willing to allow democracy to work or not. Such a defeat will be a reminder to whoever is in the saddle next that there is no mightier sword than the sword of public opinion that the people have forged in this country primarily through their own effort and their faith in democracy.

Jinnah was well aware of this fact. His famous reference to Protestant Catholic conflict in England was poignant. Unfortunately when one points out that Jinnah was secular, i. That he wanted a state without any kinds of religious qualification for high office is a fact of history.

That he wanted the state to be impartial towards religious beliefs of individuals is a fact. It cannot be undone by his references to religion few and far between where too he emphasized that Islam did not believe in an ecclesiastical state and the only way forward was democracy. Historically English idea of secularism is instructive because it has never sought to directly challenge religious authority and its form but has made religious authority irrelevant.

Henry therefore dissolved the link between the Churches in England and Rome and declared himself the head of the Church of England instead of the Pope.

In this King Henry was supported by reformists who had been inspired by Martin Luther and John Calvin who had long spoken against Papal ways and called for a reform of the Church. This was followed by a continuous religious war between the reformists and the Papists.

Much of this conflict finds an echo in our own sectarian conflict that continues to spiral out of control. The next generation saw John Locke theorize on what the true ends of a government ought to be.

John Locke was inspired by the Christian tradition and is yet hailed the father of modern secular society. America was settled primarily by puritans who founded theocracies. One religious thinker, Roger Williams, was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for having radical religious views including a curious belief that Jesus is to send a new apostle to renew the Church. For this he was charged with heresy and sedition in and subsequently exiled.

He went on to found the colony of Rhode Island. There he organized the colony on three principles: 1. Separatism from the Church of England 2. Religious freedom and 3. Separation of church and state. This essentially was the beginning of American secularism.

Unfortunately a number of our young people, blissfully ignorant of history, having caught onto certain buzz words but never having investigated the ideas in the first place only serve to discredit the idea. The fact of the matter is that a fractured religious society like ours needs secularism to survive and thrive. This is what Jinnah wanted and this why some of us continue to quote the grand old man to bolster our case for a secular democratic Pakistan. Is Secularism incompatible with Islam?

Ever since, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the Khilafat and separated Church from state, a great debate has raged in the Islamic world. Perhaps no where is it more intensely debated than in Pakistan. The debate is whether the concept of the separation of church from state acceptable to Islamic discourse. There are obviously two camps, one which believes that yes it is and the other one which believes that such a concept is alien to the Islamic understanding of politics.

The structure of Islam as a religio-political system no doubt does permit such a view. Hence to him and most of his comrades, Islam in no way was a limitation, and even when some tried to make it a limitation, Jinnah was quick to shoot it down, by declaring any and all theocratic moorings to be an anti-thesis of the egalitarian and progressive spirit of the Islamic ideals.

But whose idea is more logical? Does Islam really stand for a progressive egalitarian and secular political order, or does it favor a theocratic form of government? In my opinion the secular Muslims by avoiding this debate have in my opinion left the field wide open for the Mullah who has floated weird and obnoxious ideas about Islam.

Others like Ibne-Warraq have through hostile criticism alienated themselves from the mass of the Muslims. If only someone was to once again call the Mullah for what he has and expose his lies. For example every Mullah and his mother in law quotes the Mesaq-e-Medina as a true Islamic constitution.

Does it really envisage the kind of theocratic state that the Mullah today wants to impose on us in the name of Islam? Amongst these sections is a specific mention of complete equality for the Jews and Pagans of Medina who formed equal part of the Ummah as per the preamble of the document.

There was no special tax or Jizya levied on them. The city-state of Medina was a federation of all the tribes residing in the Yathrib Area. Member of each tribe was to have complete rights as an equal citizen as well as obligations. Another astounding feature of this document is the nature of authority that the Prophet had over this newly formed Medinan community of Muslims, Jews and Pagans.

He was recognized as the political leader and not a spiritual one. Allegiance of the non-Muslims was nothing more than political. Prophet Muhammad PBUH as the head of the state did not derive his authority from the fact that he was the Prophet but because he was the leader of the Majority of the people in Yathrib.

Rather it was a practical political alliance designed to fulfill the collective needs of all the people who resided in the city, and nothing more. From that point onward the Medinan state closed its ranks becoming more exclusively Muslim. Whatever the political and religious reasons for these moves, they are irrelevant to this study.

Secularism with or without the justification of Islam is the requirement of the time. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state. The only other example of this tectonic shift in the Muslim world was Ataturk himself who similarly retired the Turkish nationalism based on Muslim identity in and sought to define Turkish nationalism on the basis of Turkish language and Pre-Islamic Turkish identity.

Both Jinnah and Kemal Ataturk have the unique distinction of being the founding fathers of two of the earliest Muslim nation states emerging after an era of colonialism.

Both were men to a large extent shaped and influenced by ideas that emanated from Europe and the Western civilization. Yet both imagined their states on European lines as Republics run modern principles and constitutional lines.

The difference however was in approach. Ataturk was a military man and was largely inspired by the French secular strain. Jinnah was a lawyer and parliamentarian for most of his life. Furthermore his liberalism and secularism was of a constitutional variety derived from the rich British tradition.

The entire issue revolves around a quote attributed to Jinnah dating to a pre-partition interview. Its Parliament and Cabinet responsible to the Parliament will both be finally responsible to the electorate and the people in general without any distinction of caste, creed or sect, which will the final deciding factor with regard to the policy and program of the Government.

The minorities in Pakistan will be the citizens of Pakistan and enjoy all the rights, privileges and obligations of citizenship without any distinction of caste creed or sect. They will be treated justly and fairly. The Government will run the administration and control the legislative measures by its Parliament, and the collective conscience of the Parliament itself will be a guarantee that the minorities need not have any apprehension of any injustice being done to them.

Over and above that there will be provisions for the protection and safeguard of the minorities which in my opinion must be embodied in the constitution itself. Any lawyer, historian or political scientist will tell you that is a perfect summation of a secular democratic state. Of course Selena Karim is neither a lawyer nor a historian nor a political scientist. The book is not worth the paper it is written on.

The example that Jinnah quoted was from the history of Great Britain where religious wars between Catholics and Protestants were brought to end by a practical separation of church and state. Jinnah believed — and many of his colleagues like Zafrulla Khan agreed- that this was a vision that was compatible with Islam.

It must be remembered that Jinnah made his 11 August speech where he explicitly declared that religion would be a personal matter after Krishan Shankar Roy in his speech asked Jinnah to declare Pakistan a secular state. In what was his most important policy speech, Jinnah made no mention of Islamic principles or even God.

If Jinnah wanted an Islamic state, he certainly did not lift a finger to make that happen. Meanwhile in an article published in the Jang Newspaper, Hamid Mir repeats the same old hackneyed question: If Pakistan was supposed to be secular, why break away from secular India and secular Indian National Congress. The Muslim grievances against the Congress were precisely that it did not live up to the ideals it professed.

The gradual relegation of Urdu, which was the foremost symbol of Hindu Muslim Unity, and promotion of Hindi-Hindustani in its place was one such occasion and there were several others. If Hamid Mir feels that these grievances were not enough as a justification then he is free to question the idea of Pakistan but he has no right to distort history as he did in his article.

He went on to do precisely that when he distorted the facts of the Ilam Din case. The facts are that Jinnah did not appear in the case pro bono but for a hefty fee collected by Muslims of Punjab for defence. Ilam Din, contrary to the legend, never pleaded guilty and consequently Jinnah never asked Ilam Din to change his plea- that is a scurrilous accusation against a man who was straight as an arrow. It certainly did not mean a support for death penalty for blasphemy.

Jinnah was part of the select committee that limited the punishment for scurrilous outrages to 2 years. Even then he had warned against the misuse of Section A and wanted guarantees for genuine and academic criticisms of religion.

Could such a man have supported the killing of Rajpal? Nor was it a political stunt. Jinnah made no public pronouncements about the case but conducted it professionally, just as he had represented Phanse in the famous Bawla Case.

Nor is the idea that Jinnah's nuanced idea had not resonance with the people he was leading entirely accurate. Pakistan Movement itself was supported by people with divergent agendas. In Bengal it was the peasant nationalism. The urban left leaning intellectuals supported it because they believed that it would lead to the rise of a bourgeoisie nationalism which would then create a state where the second stage of revolution would be possible.

What is clear in all of this are the following: 1. There was never one idea of why Pakistan was being demanded.

The religious parties by and large opposed the creation of Pakistan. The leaders of the Pakistan Movement were more or less neutral towards religion and theology and did not want or envisage an expanded role for it in state.

In , Liaqat Ali Khan and other Muslim Leaguers conceded an important to point to the religious parties through the Objectives Resolution but even after the Objectives Resolution, the Constitution of Pakistan remained secular and there was no real application of it under the Government of India Act, The Constitution of Pakistan named the state an Islamic Republic and limited the office of the president to a Muslim, but beyond this was largely a secular constitution without a state religion.

In the state made another stride towards exclusivism by declaring Ahmadis to be Non-Muslim- a major step backwards. Yet it was General Zia's Islamization project that provided the teeth to exclusion and imposition of one kind of religious interpretation which ultimately changed the fabric of the society from a multireligious one to an authoritarian Islamic state.