Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2013. xlii, 295 pp. US$27.95, cloth . ISBN 978-0-19-906014-6.
Mary Louise Becker was an American scholar-diplomat who, it appears, dedicated much of her life, and a vast amount of intellectual energy, to enhancing the understanding of what Pakistan was, or indeed is, about. Her interest in what has at times been called “the most bizarre country in the world” led her to an intense examination of the concepts of nationalism and of leadership, and how these interacted with each other, finding fruition in the creation of one of the world’s largest nation-states. The book is actually meant to be a study of the Muslim League in the first four decades of its existence, but this leads naturally into an analysis of the leadership of the Quaid-e-Azam (meaning “the great leader”) Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the intensity of whose ideas, the depth of whose commitments, and the persistence of whose unrelenting endeavours changed the map and the politics of the region and the world. By 1940, when the Muslim League adopted what is called the Pakistan Resolution in Lahore, Jinnah was the party’s undisputed leader.
Born Mahomedali Jinnahbhai in Karachi in 1876, he changed it to a simpler and more anglicized Mohammed Ali Jinnah while in England. Jinnah lived just over seven decades, and died in 1948, not far from where he was born, in Pakistan, in a country he did more than most others to create. Discussing his life, Becker quotes Professor Stanley Wolpert’s slightly hagiographic summary: “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation state. Mohammed Ali Jinnah did all three”(xxii). Intensely secular in lifestyle, habits and behaviour, and deeply fond of most things English, Jinnah used the Western political idiom of the nation-state, and carried forward with incredible passion and against great odds, that the Muslims of India were a separate nation. He gave ideological battle to towering personalities like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, shrugged off the unfriendliness of the British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, often rode roughshod over opposition in his own camp, and managed to carve out a new country, one for his co-religionists, the Muslims of India. Becker attributes “incorruptibility” and “bravery” to him, and writes that he was a “lone figure,” he also had “an air of mystery around him”(192). In her words, he was also a “superb showman,” a quality essential to moving masses.
But Jinnah also made mistakes, serious ones, which came to light only two and a half decades following his death; their seeds, however, were sown in his lifetime. One of those was his failure to gauge the sentiments of a large segment of the subcontinental Muslim population, the East Bengali Muslims, who ironically were the great champions of his goal of the creation of Pakistan. Jinnah was unable to foresee the power of language, in addition to religion, as a force of nationalism, and his preference for Urdu over Bengali as the national lingua franca of Pakistan deeply offended the Bengalis, who constituted the majority of the nation’s citizenry. Secondly, his tendency to concentrate all powers in himself failed to lay the foundations of a democratic tradition in Pakistan, which not only led to the bloody separation of Bangladesh in 1971, but to a huge political instability that marks that country’s politics today. These fall outside the purview of the scope of Becker’s work, but nonetheless merit mention, as the causes of these upheavals were to be found in the time-period that the author covered, i.e., 1906 to 1947.
The book is an interesting study of nationalism, which Becker describes as “an infinitely complex, dynamic and emotional phenomenon most accurately considered by subjective rather than objective criteria”(xiv). She goes on to define a nation as being “not based upon what outsiders determine, but upon what a specific group of people feels and believes itself to be”(xiv). The author also discusses how three principal and necessary ingredients were present during the rise of Pakistan: “an integrated community possessing distinctive and group characteristics; a particular set of circumstances under which the community would respond to the call of nationalism; and the national leadership which has coordinated the first two to produce a self-conscious nation seeking an independent political existence in a national state”(vii). The book tells the story of how all these conditions were brought together.
The author narrates the tale in a manner reflecting deep research. Becker recounts the gradual rise in Muslim consciousness through the “Muslim Renaissance in India” (leading personalities were Nawab Abdul Latif, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan of the Aligarh Movement fame, Chirag Ali, Nawab Mohsinul Mulk, and the poet Shibli Nomani); the establishment of the All India Muslim League on 30 December 1906 in Dhaka (present-day Bangladesh) under the stewardship of Nawab Sir Salimullah, the Aga Khan et al.; the conflict between the League and the Indian National Congress; Jinnah’s shift in role from the “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” to being the champion of Muslim separatism, cheered on by the philosopher Sir Mohammed Iqbal and leading to the nascence of the “promised land” (Pakistan) for the Muslims. Certain minor errors, however, seem to have crept into the volume. On page 41 for instance, Pherozeshah Mehta, a Congress leader, is described as a “moderate Hindu,” when in reality he was a Parsi, a distinctly different religious persuasion. Another issue that editorial tightening should have addressed is the confusing impression an unwary reader may face in thinking that “the Honourable Syed Amir Ali” (69) and Amir Ali (53) are two different persons, when actually, they are the same (author of The Spirit of Islam).
In contemporary times, great interest should be expected in a work such as this, for the following reason: The creation of Pakistan was the product of the Westphalian logic of sovereign states for separate nations, albeit in a non-Western milieu; this can be perceived as an acceptable counter-narrative to the current Islamist notion, espoused by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) of a single Islamic ‘caliphate’ spanning across many nation-states with Muslim-majority populations.The author, Mary Louise Becker is sadly no longer with us, having passed on in 2012 at the age of 84, but her scholarship marks an important and still relevant contribution to the literature on nationalism.
Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
National University of Singapore, Singapore