A friend sent me an email today which I need to reproduce for the benefit of readers.
LAHORE: This is with reference to Nadir Hassan’s article of December 30 titled “Same as it ever was”. A friend sent me an email today which I need to reproduce for the benefit of readers:
The posture adopted by minority communities, especially when they begin to sense chauvinism towards them, naturally tends to reflect resilience. This resilience is not ego-generated, but rather a self-preservation reflex. In the history of nations, too, it is the chauvinistic attitudes of the majority that has, more often than not, contributed to political divisions. The terms ‘Islamic state’ and ‘Muslim state’ should not be mutually confused. I do not believe Jinnah ever, for even a moment, envisaged an ‘Islamic state’, a state “to be ruled by priests with a divine mission”, a possibility he himself ruled out.
His concept and understanding of the ‘Muslim state’ was quite similar to the nature of the Turkish state, as modelled by Ataturk. He clearly had in mind a secular and modern state, in which statecraft and religion would not be allowed to mingle. Yes, that state was intended to be comprised of the Muslim-majority states of India and this intention took its final shape after the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946.
Jinnah was a class in himself, an institution, if I may say. His presidential address was about the best will he could possibly have left behind. The Objectives Resolution of 1948 tragically changed the course of the nation he founded. Subsequent leaderships shared neither his integrity, nor his wisdom. That is why we are where we are today.
Yasser Latif Hamadani
Published in The Express Tribune, January 2nd, 2011.
