Muslim historiography during the colonial period

The shaping of the discourse on the Indian past during the nineteenth century has been the focus of numerous studies. Javed Majeed's work traces the imprint of utilitarian ideas on the world views of colonial historians and administrators involved in the production of knowledge about India.Footnote ¹¹ The initial corpus of writing was mostly produced by Company officers, administrators, and military men. The input of the ‘native informant’ also played an important role. Despite the existence of English texts on Indian history from the late eighteenth century onwards, it was the highly influential The History of British India penned by James Mill and published in 1817 that set the tone for a framework of Indian history which periodized the past along communal lines of Hindu and Muslim. In summary, it can be said that the dominant narrative about India's past conceived of it along religious lines, with Hindus and Muslims as two fixed, unchanging, and essentially mutually antagonistic communities. This was, in part, a result of an Orientalist understanding of Indian society as divided and defined along religious lines which had been grafted onto fixed legal identities and served as the ideological bases for a communal rendering of the past. Elliot and Dawson's The History of India as Told by its Own Historians (1867–1877) was a selection of texts from ‘original’ Persian sources which portrayed the Indian past as riddled with conflict and violence, and the arrival of British in India as ushering in an era of peace, stability, and rule of law. There was no nuanced reading of the text or an attempt made to distinguish between the ‘modern academic’ modes of history writing and the historical chronicles written during the pre-modern period. The ‘factual details’ given in these texts were taken at face value. The authors claimed authenticity for their work as it was based on ‘original Persian sources’ and neutrality for themselves as historians since they were distanced from the local scene with its varied communal interests and conflicts. This claim to authenticity and neutrality, undergirded by the power of the empire, shaped a historical discourse that reflected the hierarchy of prevalent power relations.

According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the cult of ‘scientific history’ began in India in the 1880s amid public ‘enthusiasm for history’, an expression used by Rabindranath Tagore in an essay he wrote in 1899.Footnote ¹² But long before the spread of academic history writing, traditional modes of history writing or recounting the past were popular as well. While both modes of historical writing contested the power claims of authenticity and neutrality of Orientalists, they did so differently, with varied results. One of the best-known examples from the late nineteenth century is Bankim Chandra's work and his clarion call: ‘We have no history. We must have a history!’ This agenda for Indian historiography was not simply to write a factual or chronological account. As Sudipta Kaviraj has commented, such a fact-based narration of the past already existed, but not as an empowering discourse written by Indians or Bengalis themselves in which they were not relegated to a lower civilizational rank. So, what Bankim Chandra aspired to was not history in the ontological sense, ‘but the narrative account which would put some significant order into them’.Footnote ¹³ Such a writing of history becomes a political act—a struggle for subjectivity. In Partha Chatterjee's words, ‘in this mode of recalling the past, the power to represent oneself is nothing other than political power itself’.Footnote ¹⁴ The writing of ‘authentic’ history free of biases, therefore, became the agenda of many academic historians of India from the very beginning. It became an even bigger concern in the post-colonial period when it was thought that, with the lapse of colonial authority and the possibility of patronage of favourable histories projecting a certain positive direction in history, an alternative, more authentic, and unbiased historical discourse could be shaped.

The agenda for Indian historiography, starting from the nineteenth century, was not always aimed at claiming political subjectivity for all Indians. Nor were academic—or even non-academic—works of history the only medium of representing the past. In fact, the kind of empowering discourse sought was largely possible through what Kaviraj calls imaginative history, and the most popular medium for it was literature. As the textual analysis of various Bengali writers shows, these attempts at reclaiming political power through representation did not imagine ‘the Muslim’ in a positive light in its narrativist schemata. Many such works of Bengali literature of the nineteenth century, as discussed by Kaviraj and Chatterjee, portray Muslims as outsiders and as a destructive force in Indian civilization.

Parallel to these historical and fictional works by Hindu writers is the growth of modern historiography among Muslim writers. Aslam Syed's work gives an account of the beginnings of historical works written by Muslims during the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵ In the aftermath of 1857, the works of such authors as Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Maulwi Chiragh Ali, and Syed Ameer Ali showed an interest in Muslim history in general rather than its Indian component. For Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Indian history was significant only insofar as it could be used to show Muslim loyalty towards British rule. In his other works, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, like Chiragh Ali and Ameer Ali, was mainly concerned with the idea of reform in Muslim society. These authors wrote on various themes related to Islamic history—including Hadith studies, scholasticism, and jurisprudence—to argue for a modernist interpretation of Islam so as to bring about its conformity with the dictates of changing political and intellectual environments. Of the historians of this period, Maulwi Zaka Ullah (1832–1910) stands out as a prolific author who wrote a voluminous history of India. Inspired by Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Zaka Ullah too had a reformist streak and an unflinching loyalty to British rule. In his multi-volume Tarikh-i-Hindustan, Ullah was all praise for the virtues of British rule but he was also alert to the need to point out the prejudices of European writers against Islam in general and Muslim rule in India in particular.Footnote ¹⁶ This description of historical writings of Muslim authors during the late nineteenth century tallies with Peter Hardy's observation that ‘the interests of the western-influenced Muslim intelligentsia in South Asia before the nineteen-twenties were more Islamic than Indian and more religious than historical’.Footnote ¹⁷ This trend is further reflected in such examples as Altaf Husain Hali's (1837–1914) poetic lament over the plight of Muslims and the histories and biographies written by Shibli Numani.

Among those who developed academic writing in Urdu, Shibli Numani (1857–1914) is the most important. He was educated in traditional modes of learning but acquired expertise in languages and modern disciplines through his own efforts. After a long association with Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh College (established by Khan), Numani changed his orientation and opened his own institution—the Nadwatul Ulama. It was designed to offer modern as well as traditional modes of knowledge.

Numani was among the earliest Rankeans of India. He believed in the ideas of quellenkritik, objectivity, and a dispassionate study of history. Based on these principles, he wrote biographies of leading Muslim luminaries of yesteryear, including jurists, scientists, and military conquerors. His magnum opus was a multi-volume biography of Prophet Muhammad. During his lifetime, he would only finish the first two volumes and the rest were completed by his able successor Sayyid Suleman Nadwi (1884–1953). But the volumes Numani wrote were extremely important as they laid down the conceptual basis for the selection and sifting of historical material for writing about the life and ideas of Prophet Muhammad. It was, therefore, an attempt to combine modern academic standards of historical scrutiny with reverence for the persona of the Prophet, as expressed in the traditional hagiographical sources of information about him. Just as some of the fictional and non-fictional works about the Indian past glorify the pre-Muslim period of Indian civilization, the dominant trend in Muslim historiography was set mainly by Numani as one of nostalgia for a glorious Muslim past, its political expanse over large parts of the globe, and achievements in the fields of sciences and literature.

The first quarter of the twentieth century is significant not just because of political mobilization and organization in the name of Indian nationalism, but also because of the widespread practice, with an accompanying sense of urgency, of the writing of academic Indian history by Indians themselves as a means of acquiring political subjectivity. Two factors seemed to have contributed towards this impetus of history writing: first, the Report of the Royal Commission on Public Records published in 1914 asked the Government of India to manage the archival records in their possession and take measures for its use by researchers.Footnote ¹⁸ As a result of this change in policy in the case of Punjab, for example, H. L. O. Garrett, a professor of history from Government College Lahore was hired to arrange the records and catalogue them properly. Secondly, the post-First World War period coincided with the setting up of academic chairs and departments in England, as well as in India, for the teaching of Indian history. The first postgraduate department for the study of modern and medieval history was established at the University of Calcutta in 1919, followed by other universities in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ¹⁹ During this same period, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, became the preferred destination for Indian students desirous of doing doctoral research on Indian history.Footnote ²⁰ The volumes of the Cambridge History of India also appeared between 1922 and 1938; written mostly by British scholars and administrators, this development was one of the main reasons why Indians felt the need to acquire expertise in scientific methods of historical research so as to write their own history. The topics picked by this new breed of historians were varied as well. Medieval history or pre-Muslim Indian civilization were not the only focus of historians as—in the age of popular mobilizations for Indian freedom—they were becoming increasingly interested in such themes as the economic exploitation of colonialism and the Indian war of independence in 1857.

As well as the classical Orientalist works of Elphinston, Elliot, Stanley Poole, William Irvine, and Henry Beveridge, ‘modern’ academic historians such as W. H. Moreland and Vincent Smith who wrote about the history of India also emerged. Among Indians, the likes of Jadunath Sarkar, Ishwari Prasad, and C. Vaidiya became prolific contributors to the field of Indian history. As pointed out by Hardy, the parameters of academic history in India during the early part of the twentieth century were now set by these historians. Muslim historians were relatively new entrants to the field. It became a lasting concern for them to challenge the historical works written by English and Hindu writers, levelling accusations about its bias and its perpetuation of misinformation about Muslim rule in India. The best example of this can be seen in the form of Jadunath Sarkar's critical writings about the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb which were meticulously researched and presented in an academic format. This theme of British and Hindu bias—especially against Aurangzeb—was repeatedly echoed in various conferences held and monographs written after 1947 in which the alleged prejudices of the British and the Hindus were pointed out and historians were urged to produce ‘authentic histories’.

The trend of writing ‘authentic histories’, free of bias and prejudice about Muslim rule in India and its civilizational contribution, had started well before it acquired an added political dimension in the 1940s. Given the prevalent dominance of certain historical ideas, Muslim authors were reactive to the discourse already set. For example, they had to focus on such figures as Mehmud of Ghazni and events such as the destruction of the Hindu temple at Somnath, or Mughal kings and their policies, especially towards Sikh Gurus. Hardy is, therefore, right to point out that the interest of Muslim historians in the past was not purely academic.Footnote ²¹ Modern Muslim historiography was, as Hardy calls it, a form of Islamic apologetic. Examples of such historians and their works include Dr Muhammad Nazim's The Life and Times of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (1931), Zahir ud-din Faruki's Aurangzeb and His Times (1935), and Professor S. M. Jaffar's The Mughal Empire from Babur to Aurangzeb (1936),Footnote ²² along with the works of Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi and Sheikh Muhammad Ikram. There were certain exceptions as well, such as Muhammad Habib's Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznin (1927), which does not glorify Mehmud of Ghazna or try to put a spin on his successive invasions of India. K. M. Ashraf, who resorted to a Marxist approach to understand the policies of Mughal rulers in India, was another exception.

From this brief description of Muslim historiography in the first half of the twentieth century it emerges that history as an academic discipline had become an important source for defining Muslim identity and projecting an image of the Muslim community in a favourable light. This required developing a historical narrative which, without compromising on the idea of imaginative history as an empowering discourse, could paint Muslim rule in terms of conformity to modern-day principles of rights and religious tolerance. But with the passage of the Lahore Resolution in March 1940 and the demand for the creation of a separate state of Pakistan, history had to serve an added function for South Asian Muslims: it had to provide the historical basis for a distinct Muslim community that justified the argument for its separation from the rest of India's religious communities. Faisal Devji has argued that the concept of nation, as developed by Jinnah, especially after March 1940, was simply a negation of the minority without any positive content of its own. According to him, Jinnah's approach was purely legal as he sought a new contractual arrangement between Hindus and Muslims, set free from the burden of the past. This is because, in Devji's reading of Jinnah's various statements, Hindus and Muslims were intimately tied in history, and hence the ‘reason why he [i.e. Jinnah] wanted to free the Muslim nation from its own past’.Footnote ²³ This understanding of Jinnah's idea of history, coupled with the fact that the idea of Pakistan was based on a negation of rootedness in blood and soil, leads Devji to conclude that the idea of Pakistan was ahistorical. As this section has shown, by the mid-twentieth century there was already a rich historiographical tradition that focused on the history of the Muslim community in India which had invariably enriched the content of Muslim identarian politics as well.Footnote ²⁴ The limitations of Devji's argument lies in his lack of recognition of the prevalent discourses about the idea of ‘Muslim history’ in India.Footnote ²⁵ Also, Devji insists on reading Jinnah's statements about the past as an acknowledgement of the overlap between or intertwining of Hindus and Muslims in history, rather than as a conscious effort on Jinnah's part to invoke this past as an idiom of conflict so as to support his case for a separate state, and that of distinctness in matters of culture, traditions, religious beliefs, and practices to claim separate nationhood.

Writing history in Pakistan

The demand for Pakistan, articulated politically, was based on a historical narrative that was built around the centrality of the Muslim community in India and its distinctness in terms of religious beliefs, cultural traits, and historical traditions. History was, therefore, central to the idea of Pakistan and its importance was not lost upon the government and the intelligentsia of the newly created state. Also, in the case of Pakistan the newness of statehood was more pronounced. It was because India's nomenclature and civilization had been known globally for centuries. Pakistan was simply a new term coined by a Cambridge-based Indian Muslim student Chaudhry Rehmat Ali in the 1930s which went on to become a rallying cry for those espousing an independent homeland in the Muslim-majority areas of the northwest and northeast of India. This difference between India and Pakistan was not lost upon the leaders of the new state immediately after 1947 and led to ‘PR stunts’ aimed at projecting Pakistan as a distinct and new nation-state with a rich civilization and history dating back to antiquity. This task of introducing Pakistan and its rich civilization to the world was performed by historians as well.

In the early years of Pakistan's existence, members of the cabinet included Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi (usually referred to as I. H. Qureshi). Educated at St Stephens and with a doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge, Qureshi established himself as an accomplished scholar with the publication of his works on the administrative structure of the Delhi sultanate and the Mughal empire. He had an excellent command of the Persian language and was thoroughly conversant with Indo-Muslim literary and cultural traditions. Another important figure in those years was Sheikh Muhammad Ikram (most often referred to as S. M. Ikram) who was an officer in the Indian civil service. Though not trained as a historian, Ikram had a similar knowledge of Persian and an appreciation for its literary and cultural legacy in the region. Many other historians, educated and trained at the Aligarh Muslim University and foreign institutions of higher learning, also came to settle in Pakistan. This includes Zawar Hussain Zaidi, Riaz-ul-Islam, and others. But the role played and influence exercised by Qureshi and Ikram were more pronounced because of their closeness to those in the circle of power who made decisions.

It needs to be pointed out that even though some of the leading historians were, at times, part of state-sponsored projects to write Pakistan's history, it does not necessarily follow that all their academic works were produced at the behest of the state. This is especially true for Qureshi and Ikram who provided the intellectual rigour for the shaping of a historical discourse about Pakistan and the history of the Muslim community in India. In doing so, Qureshi and Ikram were not always following official dictates, though the academic works they produced were always ideological in content and, hence, co-opted for statist purposes. They were largely following their own intellectual pursuits as well and genuinely believed in the distinctness of the Muslim community, its religio-cultural exclusivity, and the inevitability of Pakistan. It is, therefore, necessary to examine their works as they provide insights into the master narrative and the way it has been replicated in such statist projects as textbooks. It is difficult to judge whether their works became the source of the ‘master narrative’ based solely on their scholarly credentials and the depth of their academic work, without referring to the fact that they were part of the closely knit circle of power in Pakistan during its early years of independence.

One of the earliest examples of ‘presenting’ Pakistan to the world as a modern nation-state with an ancient past is the book written by the famous archaeologist R. E. M. Wheeler. The title of his book says it all—5000 Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline. Wheeler explained the significance of the title in his introduction: ‘The title of this book is a wilful paradox but contains a fundamental truth. Pakistan is a new Islamic state but is, nevertheless, like its older neighbours, a product of historical processes of which Islam itself is only the most recent and emphatic.’Footnote ²⁶ Other similar projects were sponsored and published in the 1950s. This includes the volume edited by S. M. Ikram and Percival Spear, The Cultural Heritage of Pakistan.Footnote ²⁷ Ikram mentions in the acknowledgements that this book was originally planned by the Department of Advertising, Films and Publications of the Government of Pakistan. It has chapters on Pakistan's archaeology, architecture, painting, music, regional literature, and spiritual heritage. I. H. Qureshi's The Pakistani Way of Life was part of the ‘Way of Life Series . . . prepared under the auspices of the International Studies Conference, on the request and with the financial assistance of U.N.E.S.C.O.’.Footnote ²⁸ It also sheds light on Pakistan's antiquity and the ‘modern’ aspects of its life and culture.

Immediately after the creation of Pakistan on 17 August 1947, an article by Abdullah Qureshi appeared in a newspaper in which he emphasized the need to revise the history curriculum. Qureshi talked about the biases of both Hindu and British historians who, according to him, had purposefully maligned the reputation of Muslim rulers and undermined their achievements. Since the examiners in the universities were mostly Hindus, said Qureshi, Muslims had no option but to abuse their Muslim heroes to score higher marks.Footnote ²⁹ Coinciding with these demands for a focus on Muslim history was the setting up of a professional historians’ forum—the Pakistan Historical Society—and its annual All Pakistan History Conference. Convened by S. Moinul Haq for the first time in 1951, it continued to be held for many decades.Footnote ³⁰ Though it lost its significance in later decades, in the 1950s it was accorded a lot of importance. The proceedings of the conference were covered on the front pages of the major English dailies and leading Pakistani politicians delivered keynote addresses at its meetings. This includes Khawaja Nazim-ud-Din who inaugurated the first conference while he was the governor general of Pakistan. I. I. Chundrigar, the governor of Punjab at that time, delivered the keynote address at its second annual meeting. The first president of Pakistan Iskandar Mirza also addressed its annual meeting in 1956.

The Pakistan Historical Society, through its annual conferences and research publications, promoted the writing of history through the lens of ‘Islamic ideology’. At the first conference, for example, held in 1951, there were only two sessions: the first on Islamic history and the second on the history of the subcontinent, along with an exhibition of Islamic art and artefacts. In his keynote address at the first All Pakistan History Conference, Nazim-ud-Din reiterated the problem of historical distortions. The history written and taught at schools and colleges to Muslim students during the colonial period, he said, either ignored Islamic history or presented it in a biased manner with the result that ‘[t]heir hearts were empty of any feelings of pride in the achievements of their ancestors because they were ignorant of them’.Footnote ³¹

The main task for Pakistani historians was, therefore, to produce an authentic and authoritative account of Muslim history in the region and of the circumstances leading to the establishment of Pakistan. To this end, the annual conference passed resolutions to seek funds from the central government. In 1952, Fazlur Rahman, Pakistan's education minister, set up a board of historians ‘to prepare an authentic History of the Freedom Movement of Muslims in the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent covering the period from the death of Emperor Awrangzeb in 1707 to the establishment of Pakistan in 1947’.Footnote ³² It was to be chaired by Dr Mahmud Husain, minister for Kashmir affairs, and its members included I. H. Qureshi, minister for refugees and rehabilitation; Professor A. B. A. Haleem, vice-chancellor of Karachi University, and Sayyid Suleman Nadwi. The committee thus constituted was noted in the official gazette as well. The bias in favour of a North Indian Muslim aristocratic and intellectual elite in the membership of the committee is evident. After Nadwi's untimely death in 1953, the board was reconstituted to include S. M. Ikram; M. B. Ashraf who, like Ikram, was also an officer from Pakistan's civil service; Dr A. Halim, professor of history at the University of Dhaka, and Dr Muhammad Nazim.Footnote ³³ The first volume in the planned series was published in 1957. By the time the second volume appeared in 1960, the project had been wrapped up. Subsequent volumes were published under the auspices of the Pakistan Historical Society from 1970 onwards.Footnote ³⁴

Even before the publication of the first volume in this series, another work—produced under official tutelage and commissioned specifically for the purposes of writing an ‘authentic’ history of the subcontinent—was published in 1955. A Short History of Hind-Pakistan was produced by the Pakistan History Board which comprised Mahmud Husain, I. H. Qureshi, A. B. A. Haleem, A. Halim, M. B. Ahmad (an officer of Pakistan's civil service), and S. Moinul Haq. Contributors included A. Halim, A. H. Dani, Riazul Islam, S. M. Jaffar, S. M. Ikram, S. Moinul Haq, M. H. Siddiqi, and R. E. M. Wheeler, among others. In his foreword to the book, Rahman re-emphasized the importance of history—or the rewriting of history—for the nation-building project, especially where society was being raised based on an ideology.Footnote ³⁵

This book was, therefore, the first specimen of a master narrative of history which has since been reproduced, with some revisions, in Pakistan in officially sponsored histories, biographies, and textbooks, and promoted through the availability of selective information in the archives, libraries, and institutes of cultural and historical research. It focuses on all the issues that have been relevant to the shaping of a Muslim identity in the twentieth century. This involves such questions as: what is the history of Islam in India? What have Islam as a religion and Muslims as a civilizational force contributed to Indian society and religion? How do we evaluate the role of Muslim monarchs in the region? Is it possible to ‘own’ the history of the pre-modern era as a period of glorious achievements for nation-building purposes while adjusting it to the requirements of the modern state?

The first, most noticeable, thing about this book is its title, which uses the term ‘Hind-Pakistan’ instead of ‘South Asia’ or ‘sub-continent’. This reflected a concern on the part of the Pakistani intelligentsia which, after giving up on the heartland of ‘high culture’ of Muslim civilization in North India in exchange for an independent homeland, still extended civilizational claims to the region through the use of such terms. In many ways, this book follows the pattern set by historical works written during the colonial period. It starts off with a chapter on the geography of the region and its relevance to the course of historical events which had unfolded since antiquity. This is followed by chapters on the pre-historic period, Indus valley civilization, Aryan invasion, Greeks, Mauryas, Guptas, and so on. There is even a separate chapter on the ‘Neo-Hinduism’ of the South and the dynasties of Cholas, Pallavas, and Chalukyas.

It does not try to skip over the ‘Hindu part’ of the history nor to hide it under the broad cover of Aryan history. It describes the Vedas, the Mahabharta, and the Gita in general terms without any negative criticism and it does not gloss over the cultural achievements of the pre-Muslim period. About the Gupta period, for example, it says: ‘The Gupta Age marked the culmination of ancient Indian culture. It was a period of great development in art, sciences and literature, as well as in contacts with the outside world.’Footnote ³⁶ It does, however, refer to the caste system and devotes a chapter to Buddhism and Jainism, described as a revolt against this rigid classification and oppression.

The book's appraisal of Islam and Muslim rulers is almost uncritical. This can be seen from its description of figures like Mehmud of Ghazna and Aurangzeb, and the defence, or even glorification, of some of their actions, which had become contentious since the advent of academic historical research in India. The book describes the Somnath expedition of the eleventh century as ‘an outstanding military feat in the annals of Islam’ whose success ‘sent a thrill of joy through the Islamic world’, with the Caliph responding with delight by conferring the title of sultan upon Mehmud.Footnote ³⁷ The book could easily have described the event of Somnath without eulogizing it, but it deliberately adds descriptions of appreciation in line with the idea of a distinct Muslim identity or Muslim nationalism as established by the two-nation theory. In his presidential address on the historic occasion of the Lahore resolution in March 1940, Jinnah is reported to have said: ‘It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans (Muslims) derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, different heroes, and different episodes. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other and, likewise, their victories and defeats overlap.’Footnote ³⁸ Mehmud's invasion and victory is the best example of such a historical conflict between heroes and villains.

The egalitarian spirit of Islam and the liberatory role it played is juxtaposed with an essentialized description of Hinduism as an oppressive religion. The Hindus in the Sultanate period, the book claims, were treated justly and even generously.Footnote ³⁹ This tallies with another requirement of the post-colonial state envisaged in Pakistan during the period and highlighted on numerous occasions in speeches and articles by its education minister Fazlur Rehman—the need to safeguard minority rights within the framework of an Islamic state. But, at the same time, this vision sets limits on the rights of minorities and their rule or influence in a Muslim-dominated state. Therefore, the rule of Akbar—where non-Muslims enjoyed coveted positions and attempts were made to efface differences between Muslim and Hindu subjects of the emperor—did not serve as the role model for the determination of minority rights in Pakistan. Akbar's ‘religious policy’ was either not invoked in debates relating to minority rights in the speeches made by the main ideologues of the Pakistani intelligentsia, or it was outright criticized and held responsible for Muslim political decline in the textbooks and research works written under official patronage. The tone for this trend was set by this book, which describes Akbar's actions as a deviation from orthodoxy under the influence of spiritual ideas prevailing at the time (such as the Bhakti movement). His renunciation of the project of Din-i-Ilahi, which was an attempt to bring the various religious elements in the Mughal kingdom closer to each other, and its failure, led the authors of the book to conclude that ‘in spite of all these efforts the two nations—Hindus and Muslims—never merged into one’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Since Pakistan was overwhelmingly a Muslim-majority state, it was no longer considered necessary to accord respect to different religions or religious personalities other than that of Islam. Also, since Pakistani nationhood was being shaped exclusively around the centrality of Islam and detachment from Indian territory, the classical Hindu texts and its revered figures did not fit into a historical narrative that explained the history of Pakistan and its nation. Therefore, in a departure from the tradition set during the colonial period in which Shri Ram, Prophet Muhammad, and Sikh Gurus were to be mentioned with due respect, A Short History of Hind-Pakistan takes a different stance on the issue of conflict between the Mughal rulers and the Sikh Gurus. About the episode of the brutal killing of Guru Tegh Bahadur under Aurangzeb, the book says:

But this writ-of-the-state argument could not be made so explicitly when it came to the regions and the heroes of present-day Pakistan. Khushhal Khan Khatak was an obvious example. He was one of the rebels—other than Sikhs and Marathas—against whom Aurangzeb had fought a protracted battle. The narrative about rebellion is non-committal in making a value judgement about the actions of the emperor or even of the rebel chief. It simply concludes by saying: ‘The Khatak chief, Khushhal Khan, however, continued the war single-handed for some time. In the end he was captured by the Mughals as a result of his betrayal by his own son.’Footnote ⁴² This clearly shows an attempt on the part of historians to present a model of a modern Islamic state: fair (not equal) treatment of minorities, patronage of arts and culture, and the rule of law as shown by the justification of the killing of a Guru as well as a Muslim rebel. Such an idea about the state resonates in the assessment of the rule and character of Aurangzeb as well. The book says:

The book is largely uncritical in its coverage of the British period. While it talks about various religious and cultural movements, not a single labour movement nor peasant uprising is mentioned. This became typical of the textbooks and historical works produced in Pakistan at this time as they tended to focus almost exclusively on the evolution of a Muslim community during the colonial period. Like other books that followed, A Short History of Hind-Pakistan is more anti-Hindu in tone than anti-British or anti-colonial.

The book suggested that British rule and ideas influenced and transformed Hinduism alone:

It then gave the examples of Brahmo Samaj, Prarthana Samaj, Arya Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, and the Harijan movement. The Muslim reform movements mentioned in the book are mainly pre-colonial (such as Shah Wali Ullah) or pre-1857 (such as the Faraizi movement of Bengal). Only Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Aligarh movement is mentioned and described as an attempt to encourage Muslims to adopt English education in order to secure government jobs and escape the economic woes that had befallen them in the wake of the 1857 revolt.

Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi as the ideologue of Pakistani history

The Pakistan Historical Society and its annual conference, despite the official patronage it received during the early 1950s, did not become the most influential forum to shape the discourse of history in Pakistan. A lasting impact was made by Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, not just because of his scholarly credentials, but also because of his proximity to policymakers and power elites. Qureshi served as a minister during the 1950s and later as chairperson of government institutes and vice-chancellor of Karachi University.

Qureshi started publishing his works prior to 1947.Footnote ⁴⁵ He was a trained historian who was interested in political, social, and religious history. His idea was to furnish a historically thorough account of the history of the Muslim community in the subcontinent and the battles it had to fight to sustain its power, as well as identity, within a diverse and heterogeneous society. Muslims in the subcontinent were the focus of his attention and Islam, for him, was a set of sociopolitical, not just religious, ideals that shaped the world views of Muslims. The historical narrative thus constructed by Qureshi traced the linear development of political events in which successive generations of rulers, scholars, Sufis, and the masses were shown to be striving towards the socio-political and religious development of the Muslim community. The far end of this linear progression culminated in the establishment of the Muslim homeland of Pakistan, where the egalitarian socio-economic order under sovereign political authority was actualized.

Qureshi was clear in his concept of using history for the purposes of nation building. The political contingency of strategic interests further impacted on his approach towards history. As Pakistan was a signatory to the American-led Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), which included member states from Southeast Asia, Qureshi moulded his writings accordingly, for example, for an audience in Thailand. In a lecture series sponsored by SEATO, Qureshi talked about Buddhism's rich legacy in Pakistan. He said:

Qureshi used the opportunity to talk about oppressive Brahmanical forms of Hinduism which made it difficult for Buddhist culture and religion to survive, and the points of congruence between Islam and Buddhism as a result of which Buddhists either voluntarily converted to Islam or simply enjoyed the benefits of a more peaceful life under tolerant Muslim rulers.

Qureshi did not have any qualms about using history for ideological purposes, which we see clearly laid out in his address to the annual history conference as well. It is not merely through geographical proximity, he said, that a feeling of oneness is created: it is history that makes nations. If the historical triumphs or failures of one group create opposite feelings in another group, the historical project of moulding people into one nation cannot be accomplished. This was evident, he said, from the recent experience of Hindus and Muslims and their mutual contestations regarding the events and interpretations of history. Therefore, it was important ‘to instil a sense of a common past among a people if it is to be moulded into a well-integrated nation with loyalties seated within the deepest recesses of the heart. This process need not be a falsification of history; it can be its discovery.’Footnote ⁴⁷ It is with this vision and motive that Qureshi penned his most important work, The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (610–1947), which was first published in 1962. It was written during his visiting professorship at Columbia University after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1954 of which he was a member and a cabinet minister.Footnote ⁴⁸

Qureshi achieves the objective of national cohesion by writing about the historical evolution of the Muslim community in the subcontinent and its organic unity. Such a conceptualization required putting Muslims outside the frame of Indian society and its religious and cultural traditions. In all of Qureshi's writings, therefore, Islam is depicted as foreign to India, with Muslims needing to be constantly vigilant about their distinct identity and struggling against any attempt towards assimilation. This is evident from the title of the very first chapter of his book—‘Islam enters the subcontinent’. This is followed by the second chapter ‘Islam gains a foothold in the North-West’, and the third chapter entitled ‘Islam spreads into other areas’.Footnote ⁴⁹

As pointed out, Qureshi's histories had two main concerns: the externality of Islam in the subcontinent and Muslim consciousness of this fact from the very beginning. The rest were mere details about how the Muslim communities organized themselves in various regions during different time periods, always striving to maintain a distinct identity. As Satish Chandra has rightly pointed out, the idea of the essentially foreign nature of Indo-Muslim culture and the emphasis on a distinctive Muslim character as the only way of saving the community from absorption into Hinduism led ‘Qureshi to the conclusion that Islam in the Indian context could survive only by maintaining the political domination of the Muslims over the Hindus’. For Qureshi, ‘the entire history of the Muslims in India is viewed as merely a prelude to the establishment of Pakistan. This is “determinism” with a vengeance.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, such a historical narrative inevitably served the agenda of history writing for a post-colonial nation-state seeking a historical basis for the continuous existence of a united nation and sense of a distinct national identity.

The processes whereby such unity came into existence are located by Qureshi in two forces: religion and a centralized political authority—the twin cardinal principles that were being developed as the basis of a Pakistani identity and nationalism. Such unity, claimed Qureshi, was inherent to the very structure of Islam. This was because Islam enjoined performance of certain rituals upon its believers. This requirement found an expression in the organization of the community and the state which made the establishment of the state a canonical necessity and not just a matter of political expediency.Footnote ⁵¹ Other than the inevitability of organizing a Muslim community under the authority of the state, another distinguishing feature was the essential unity of this community superseding any linguistic or regional biases. This feature was even more pronounced in case of the Muslims in the subcontinent who ‘had only one name for their community prior to the establishment of Pakistan and that was “Muslims”’.Footnote ⁵² Whenever they had to refer to themselves as distinct from the Muslims of other lands, they called themselves ‘Muslims of India’ rather than choosing the appellation ‘Indian Muslims’.Footnote ⁵³ Later in the book, Qureshi observes:

In this way, Qureshi—while emphasizing historically continuous ‘Muslimness’—also argues for its rootedness in its subcontinental habitat to conciliate it with the borders of the modern nation-state of Pakistan. This distinction between the wider Muslim world and the Muslim subcontinent had to be constantly adjusted in Qureshi's text to differentiate the pan-Islamic ideals of Ummah and the compulsions of a nation-state.

Other than the cementing factor of Islam, Qureshi was not averse to emphasizing the role played by the fear and anxiety that Muslims felt as a minority community. This served two purposes in his text. First, it clearly explained the rationale for the creation of Pakistan as a definitive solution to allay the minority anxiety of the Muslim community. Second, it helped him to view the problem of Akbar's legacy of Hindu-Muslim rapprochement as detrimental since the minority rule of Muslims required constant vigilance—especially of their communitarian boundaries—which Akbar's conciliatory measures were trying to efface. This second purpose requires greater description as it revolves around the methodology whereby, according to Qureshi, Muslims had been able to survive as a minority while maintaining their individuality.

In Qureshi's understanding, Hinduism had sponge-like characteristics that were its best defence mechanism as it enabled it to absorb influences thus ensuring its survival when circumstances changed, without altering its essence. Muslims, on the other hand, were committed to preserving their individuality. It was the interplay between these two antagonistic instincts, says Qureshi, that marked the Hindu-Muslim relationship in the subcontinent in a major way.Footnote ⁵⁵ Qureshi describes the dialectics of this interaction by using the concepts of heterodoxy and orthodoxy.

Qureshi equates the term heterodoxy with what he saw as certain ‘deviant’ forms of Sufism. I say deviant because, according to Qureshi, major Sufi orders were observant of Islamic beliefs and practices. In tracing the origins of mystic practices, Qureshi notes that early Sufis made no effort to develop a theoretical doctrinal basis as theirs was a practical and not a theoretical creed. The later mystics, however, tried to rationalize their experience, which marked the beginning of difficulties since ‘in its essence mystic experience is incapable of discussion and can be expressed only through symbols’.Footnote ⁵⁶ But the major cause for ‘heresy’ was the Sufi emphasis on the spirit rather than the form of religion; this released the burden of attachment to any particular religious ideal by treating all religions on par with one other. This was why some of the ‘heterodox Sufis’ believed in metamorphosis, incarnation, and pure immanence, while the ‘orthodox school of Sufism’ tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to oppose them and contest these ideas.Footnote ⁵⁷ While such ideas threatened to dilute the communitarian boundaries at the popular level, as when they received imperial patronage under Akbar, they became an existential threat for the sustainability of a distinct Muslim community. It was in these circumstances that the figure of Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi emerged and deservedly took the title of mujaddid or revivalist of faith as he successfully countered the philosophical and theological challenge of Monism.Footnote ⁵⁸

The threat of heterodoxy was revived with the emergence of Dara Shikoh as the favourite contender for the Mughal throne. In fact, the threat posed by Dara Shikoh was greater as he was, unlike Akbar, a competent scholar with a systematic thought pattern.Footnote ⁵⁹ The orthodoxy, therefore, pinned all its hope on Aurangzeb. But even with such a devotional ruler, to enthrone orthodoxy in the position from which it had been dislodged was not possible as dissenting elements had become too powerful. Such a ‘simple matter’ as the ‘demolition of a few unauthorized temples’ and the reimposition of jizya merely created an illusion of the revival of orthodoxy. The abortive attempts at the revival of orthodoxy and its reinstatement to a position of authority exposed the moral crisis of the state, eventually leading to the disintegration of the empire. Qureshi observes:

If heterodoxy, in Qureshi's work, was equated with certain forms of Sufism which he considered as lacking in rigid observance of Islam's doctrinal purity, orthodoxy, as can be inferred from the statement quoted above, represented not only the internal consistency of the Muslim community but also the tenacity of its political authority. If certain groups of Sufis represented heterodoxy, orthodoxy could be identified with Shariat-observant Sufis and ulema who, in Qureshi's assessment, played a vital role in building up a Muslim community in India and ensured its distinct identity.

The master narrative in the 1960s

By the late 1950s, after the imposition of martial law, Qureshi had been approached by the military regime to help draft a new education policy. He therefore returned to Pakistan where he quickly became involved in various projects seeking the transformation of Pakistan into a ‘modern Islamic state’ that fitted the vision of General Ayub Khan, the military ruler of Pakistan. Ayub Khan's decade-long rule saw many major reforms being undertaken. Like any other strict disciplinarian from a military background, Ayub Khan had a vision of authority and power that emanated from the centre. Such centralized authority required a singular idea of nationhood as well. To materialize it, the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) was established to initiate major reforms, invite proposals, and set up commissions to probe issues relating to education, curriculum, national language, and script, among other things.Footnote ⁶¹ In January 1965, a committee comprising eminent historians was constituted. They were to serve as the editorial board that would be responsible for the writing of an authoritative account of the history of Pakistan. Unlike A History of Hind-Pakistan, this venture was to receive direct official support and was meant to be a more rigorous academic work for students as well as scholars. Members of the committee included S. M. Sharif, I. H. Qureshi, S. M. Ikram, A. R. Mallick, A. H. Dani, Abdur Rashid, Waheed-uz-Zaman, and Muniruddin Chughtai, among several others. A Short History of Pakistan was published by the University of Karachi and comprised four volumes, with I. H. Qureshi serving as its general editor. Each volume was to be written by a different author or group of authors. To ensure internal consistency in the text, the committee developed a conceptual note.

The name of the cabinet file containing these proposals is revealing and self-explanatory: ‘Compilation of Books on (i) the need for a strong centre and (ii) the history of Muslims in East Pakistan’. This was in line with Ayub Khan's vision of the centralization of authority through the promotion of a sense of national unity.

In the committee discussions, the members noted that since the book was going to be brief—just 650 pages long—the emphasis would be on the present-day regions of Pakistan. Other parts of the subcontinent were not to warrant detailed coverage. For example, in the case of South India, the committee suggested that attention should only be paid to Muslim settlements and dynasties ‘whose achievements in the field of culture contributed to the mainstream of the Culture and Civilisation of the people of Pakistan’.Footnote ⁶² In the name of making history contemporaneous with regional and world developments, it was suggested that ‘emphasis should be laid on the contiguous countries to the North West and in case of East Pakistan the role of that part of Pakistan in the South territories as a bridge between India and South East Asia’.Footnote ⁶³

The main task before the committee was to establish the history of Pakistan as distinct from that of India. Recent historical works, the committee said, ‘deal with the history of the sub-continent as one unit and treat the history of Pakistan as having branched off from the main stream of historical developments in the area. [The] [h]istory of Pakistan, thereby, is relegated to a position of secondary importance and is in the process dwarfed.’Footnote ⁶⁴ This marks the beginning of the process whereby the use of the term ‘Indo-Pakistan subcontinent’ or ‘Hind-Pak’ was discouraged, although this was not stated explicitly by the committee. The vision underlying this change was that only by disengaging from the subcontinent could Pakistan have a history distinct from that of India or a narrative that was not centred on India. This was why the committee, in its guidelines for authors, made suggestions such as emphasizing the importance of Mehmud's attempts to ‘incorporate the Punjab into his kingdom with a definite purpose’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Mehmud's empire did not extend far into areas of post-1947 India, but the fact that a major chunk of territory of present-day Pakistan was tied up with a dynasty based in present-day Afghanistan meant that a disconnect with the history and geography of India could be argued for. In a similar vein, the process of the expansion of power or invading armies—whether of Muslims or non-Muslims—was to be explained as a movement from the northwest or northeast to other parts of India. The conquest of India was to be interpreted ‘as the eastward expansion of West Pakistan and the westward expansion of East Pakistan’.Footnote ⁶⁶ For example, the Indus valley civilization, Aryan invasion, and the ancient great kingdoms started from the northwest and ultimately made their influence felt in the east as well. Similarly, it was from East Pakistan that the kingdom of Sasanka and the rulers of the Pala and Sena dynasty moved to North India to conquer the upper Gangetic valley.Footnote ⁶⁷ This showed the thrust of movement from northwest and northeast, that is, West and East Pakistan rather than India, thus establishing the importance of a region that comprised Pakistan as the centre of historical developments in South Asia rather than tying it (in a subordinated manner) to the history of India or the Indian-subcontinent. However, it was not just Islam but non-Muslim invaders as well that served the purpose of showing the timeless territorial integrity of West and East Pakistan, their congruity of purpose, and distinctness from the landmass of India. Thus, state precedes nation, even though the Pakistan movement was projected by Muslim League ideologues as the realization of statehood by Muslims which had always existed as a separate nation.

The new narrative proposed by the committee envisaged East and West Pakistan as sharing the same historical timeline and serving as centres of activity that influenced developments taking place in India. Temporally synchronized and geographically significant, militaries from these regions were to be shown as moving towards India in a pincer movement. India, in this way, becomes a site of invasion and conquest where East and West Pakistan intersected thereby bringing about a national unity of these two regions. This is how the Indian empire of the Muslims was to be explained—as a joint effort by East and West Pakistan. To further strengthen the argument for national unity, the need for centralized authority was to be emphasized by describing ‘the role of a strong Central Government in giving unity to the Muslim nation, maintaining its power and prestige throughout its history. . .’.Footnote ⁶⁸

The deliberations of this editorial board resulted in the publication of A Short History of Pakistan in 1967. The first volume—‘Pre-Muslim period’—was written by Ahmad Hasan Dani. The Muslim period was divided between the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals in two separate volumes: ‘Muslim rule under the sultans’ written by M. Kabir and ‘The Mughul empire’ by Sh. Abdur Rashid. The final volume—‘Alien rule and the rise of Muslim nationalism’—was written by M. A. Rahim, Munir-ud-Din Chughtai, Waheed-uz-Zaman, and Abdul Hamid.

As the general editor of the book, I. H. Qureshi theorized the issues about the possibility of writing a history of Pakistan. He asked whether it was possible to sufficiently disentangle the history of Pakistan from the history of India. His assessment was that for certain periods of history it was possible to do so, while for other periods, events had such regional and localized impact that for proper contextualization an understanding of developments taking place within the larger area was required.Footnote ⁶⁹ This stood in stark contrast with Qureshi's earlier works, already discussed in this article, in which his entire focus was on tracing the historical roots of Muslim identity through the developments taking place in the ‘high culture’ zone of Muslim aristocracy in North India. But he seemed to persist in his understanding of Muslims as outsiders in India, as he distinguished between the history of India and Muslims as the arbiters of India's history. Qureshi was himself aware of the controversy generated by such an approach. He further added:

This discontinuance of the established historical tradition of approaching Muslim history within the category of the Indo-Pak sub-continent (barr-i-saghir Pak wa Hind) posed a serious intellectual question for Qureshi as he himself had been a practitioner of this tradition. In line with the guidelines set by the regime of Ayub Khan, he had to emphasize the importance of the present-day regions of Pakistan as the source of many historical developments that took place within the wider region. For those historical events that could not be explained within this framework, Qureshi uses the metaphor of the history of ‘this land and these people’ as a stream ‘which sometimes flows by itself and sometimes it commingles its waters with other streams’. But this stream was never lost, he writes. Since Islam alone could not have given this historical narrative the much-needed antiquity and continuity required by a nation-state, Qureshi talks about the unity of the regions of Pakistan as having ‘existed, by whatever names they might have been known before the present country of Pakistan came into existence’.Footnote ⁷¹ This is, as cited above, an indirect reference to non-Muslim invaders from the northwest and northeast.

The historic origins of Pakistan, the maintenance of its geographical boundaries, the distinctiveness of its cultural milieu, and its influence on the history of ‘India’ (rather than the other way around) serves as the central, connecting theme in all four volumes of this book, which covers the period from the Stone Age to the end of British rule in 1947. This required a major theoretical revisioning of the overall way of writing history, which was deliberated on by the committee and outlined by Qureshi in his introduction. The focus of these deliberations mainly affected the pre-Muslim era. This is because the period of Muslim rule had already been laid down by Qureshi's work, and the debate on issues such as Mehmud's invasion of Somnath, the excesses of Akbar's policy of accommodation, and Aurangzeb's status as a great Muslim king had been incorporated within the historical narrative surrounding the history of Muslim identity and its link with the establishment of Pakistan in modern times. The pre-Muslim ancient period, however, required a more nuanced change to be made. It meant dealing with sacred Hindu texts as the sources of historical information, the idea of greater India, and an overall cultural and philosophical ‘golden age’ which had existed prior to the advent of Muslim rule.

The first volume by A. H. Dani on the pre-Muslim period uses geography to emphasize the antiquity and distinctiveness of Pakistan. It refers to Pakistan as comprising two main geographic zones—the Indus Valley at the western end and the Padma delta (the eastern branch of the Ganges) and the Meghna (the main offshoot of the Brahmaputra) at the eastern end of the subcontinent. Dani argues that these geographical zones had simply acquired a new name—Pakistan—which was coined during the struggle for a homeland by Muslims that would enable them to develop their own cultural traditions based on the Islamic way of life.Footnote ⁷² This, in itself, was a major departure from the established practice (especially in textbooks) of outlining the geography of the entire region, from the Hindukush to the Himalayas and the Ganges to the Narmada River and further south. It was a natural outcome of the deliberate decision taken by Pakistani historians to cut off from ‘India’ both temporally and spatially.

Dani distinguishes between Muslim and Hindu concepts of geography. According to him, unlike the Hindus, whose horizons were limited to the boundaries of their homeland, the Muslim concept of geography was influenced by their being a part of the ‘moving masses’ of Eurasia. This gave them a vitality and a spirit which, in turn, ‘released forces that gave unity to this subcontinent from the Indus to the Padma-Meghna delta and ushered in an era that permanently linked local history with that of the ever moving masses of Asia’.Footnote ⁷³ He referred to the vast landmass of ‘South Asia’ as extending from the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. This, he says, was never united under one political power and always exhibited a range of heterogeneity along cultural, racial, and linguistic lines. Having established diversity and a lack of unified authority as central to the historic features of South Asia, Dani seeks homogeneity through the influence of Muslims in this region. He credits them for having kept their particular cultural heritage alive, which ‘has come down to us, and it is in this cultural heritage that the solidarity of the Muslims in Pakistan is firmly rooted’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Dani uses the terms Vedic, Aryan, and Brahmanical to discuss the religious literature of the period. Unlike Buddhism and Jainism, which is mentioned by name and their origin and founding figures discussed in some detail, there is no such account with the title ‘Hinduism’. According to Dani: ‘This ancient cultural heritage has for long been associated, rightly or wrongly, with the name of a people called the Aryans who were able to win for themselves an influential position in the subcontinent. The Muslims were the first to give the name “Hindu” to the traditions of this culture. The word is derived from “Hind” which is a phonetic variation of “Sind.”’Footnote ⁷⁵ This helped to solve the problem of avoiding ‘Hindu’ scriptures while, at the same time, establishing once again the influence of ‘Pakistan’ over ancient ‘India’ rather than the other way around.

The last section of Dani's volume is titled ‘Common culture’. While accepting numerous societal changes that had taken place in the ancient period, Dani talks about the formation of a common heritage leading to a common culture. He refers to Buddhism's concept of non-violence and many other moral precepts, such as reverence for the pippal tree and the monkey, linga worship, and the sacredness of the bull. This meant that Hinduism had ‘strayed far away from the Aryan beliefs and it became a compendium of widely differing practices’. Even for the pre-Muslim ancient period, Dani was eager to emphasize the historical unity of present-day Pakistan while, at the same time, being careful not to credit ‘Hinduism’ with this unity but instead to the assortment of religious views to which Aryan beliefs had succumbed. In addition, says Dani, it was not through this common culture that the concept of common nationhood had emerged.Footnote ⁷⁶ He compares it with the Christian culture of Europe which, according to him, had failed to create a continent-wide nationhood. Towards the end of the first volume, such a conceptualization of the region's history and the commonality of values, but lack of national unity, sets the scene for the successive volumes to credit Islam with bringing unity and centralized authority to a region that had always been a distinct entity in the large landmass of South Asia.

It must be pointed out that the dominance of a state-backed master narrative does not imply its complete hegemony. This is especially true for the period from the 1960s onwards when various leftist scholars and activists challenged the dominant historical narrative in their works. As well as the more well-known name of Hamza Alvi, this includes such scholars as Sibt-i-Hasan whose numerous works on history and civilization, written from an ‘orthodox’ Marxist viewpoint, continue to be popular. Other examples in later decades include scholars such as Ali Abbas Jalalpuri and Zahid Chaudhry. An interesting example is that of Ibn-i-Insha's satirical parody of Urdu textbooks titled Urdu ki Aakhri Kitab in which he mocks the historical tales about Mehmud of Ghazna's invasions and Aurangzeb's piety, among other themes.

An expansive idea of Pakistan: history and historiography after 1971

The project of writing a history of the nation was an intellectually taxing task, and it also encountered a serious political challenge with the crisis of 1971 which resulted in the break-up of the state of Pakistan. Following the brutal military operation of March 1971, the situation in what was East Pakistan deteriorated considerably. Faced with an existential threat, the government made a call to discuss the situation and probe the reasons for the ongoing crisis. In September 1971, as the civil war in East Pakistan reached its peak, the Punjab Textbook Board organized a seminar in Lahore on the topic ‘The ideology of Pakistan and textbooks’. Numerous scholars and members of the intelligentsia from all over Pakistan were invited to attend. The organizers were clear: in their understanding, the prevailing situation in the country was the result of a lack of proper ideological content in school textbooks and they deliberated ways to rectify this. The main thrust of the arguments made by participants was that if pupils could be rightly guided about the ideological basis of Pakistan, as enshrined in the principles of Islam and the two-nation theory, it would help to resolve the crisis and strengthen Pakistan as a viable state. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi was among the keynote speakers on this occasion. Such was the urgency of the situation that the proceedings of the conference were published within two months of the event, even though war with India had formally started in both wings of the country in December 1971.

Realizing the gravity of the situation, which could possibly have resulted not just in the secession of East Pakistan, but also the dismemberment of West Pakistan, Qureshi offered a historical analysis that differed from the one laid down in the policy document cited above or in his other writings. Like other participants in the seminar, Qureshi started off by referring to the present crisis which, in his estimation, was a result of the ideological basis of Pakistan being ignored in school textbooks and the curriculum. He then gave a historical account of the creation of Pakistan that debunked the alternative narrative of those who ascribed economic motives to the demand for a separate state. Without naming Hamza Alvi (1921–2003), Pakistan's leading Marxist academic and social scientist, he referred to—and rejected—the latter's argument that the Muslim salariat-classes were demanding a bigger share of jobs and that capitalists were seeking to protect and expand their capital.Footnote ⁷⁷ Not only had economic determinism become redundant as an explanatory model for historical developments, said Qureshi, it also fell flat in the face of given facts which showed that Pakistan—before it was eventually created—was not considered to be an economically viable state and yet it received mass public support. He then reiterated his stated position that the driving force behind the creation of Pakistan was the preservation of a distinct Muslim identity. Neither Bhagti syncretism or nationalist slogans of the nineteenth century, nor the economic depravity of the post-1857 period and Gandhi's shrewd overtures towards the Muslims, said Qureshi, had weakened their resolve to maintain their distinct national identity.Footnote ⁷⁸ Qureshi then suddenly shifted gear and turned his attention to the dimension of the idea of Pakistan and Muslim nationalism which he had not explored elsewhere in his works. He declared Pakistan to be the biggest reflection of the subcontinent's Muslim qaum (nation) with Indian Muslims affiliated to it in a supplementary manner.Footnote ⁷⁹ This situation, he said, could be faced by any nation in the world, whether it was formed on a linguistic or ethnic basis:

Pakistani Muslims, continued Qureshi, felt a special bond of solidarity with Indian Muslims and vice versa, which was greater than the feelings that they had for other Muslims in the Islamic world. ‘Wouldn't the adoption of the concept of a greater Pakistani qaum [azeem tar Pakistani qaum] which extends beyond the borders of Pakistan help and aid in easing our domestic discords?’ This would only have more benefits for Pakistan as it would not harm the basic idea of the two-nation theory, while helping to address regional prejudices in Pakistan.Footnote ⁸¹ This effectively transformed the idea of Pakistan, couched in the terminology of Muslim nationalism, to an expansive one with irredentist connections and claims. While it can be argued that the scope for such an argument was inherent in the very construction of the idea of a distinct Muslim nationhood, as it was applicable to both Muslim majority and minority areas of India, Qureshi did not—to the best of my knowledge—express this sentiment in such explicit terms anywhere else in his vast corpus of writings. It was probably a one-off statement made in the heat of the moment. With the dissolution of Pakistan as a state looking like a real possibility, Qureshi was more eager to salvage the idea of Muslim nationalism than the state based on that idea. With this new reformulation, the idea of Muslim nationalism became expansive and universal.

This expansion looked not only eastwards but westwards as well. After briefly talking about the need to strengthen ideological bonds, Qureshi reverted to his account of the future possibilities for Pakistan and the idea of Pakistan. At present, he said, Muslims in central Asia were subjugated. But just as it was unimaginable that Pakistan would be created before it actually did happen, similar things could take place in the future: the liberation of central Asian states and their entry into an alliance with Afghanistan and Pakistan had the potential to change the course of world politics. But he also admitted to the possibility of the break-up of Pakistan and the subjugation of Muslims, which would allow India to stand guard at the entry gates of the subcontinent. It was for this purpose, he said, that the ghost of Bangladesh had been raised.Footnote ⁸² After recounting the history of the secessionist movement and separatist thought sowed in the name of culture and language, Qureshi turned his attention to similar trends in West Pakistan as well. Without naming the communists or Soviet-backed elements directly, he referred to people whose co-ideologues were responsible for subjugating the people north of Afghanistan. If such people succeeded in breaking up Pakistan, Qureshi saw two future prospects for the region. The success of Hindu imperialism (hindu shahi) would lead to these areas becoming provinces of India. The communists would then breathe a sigh of relief, said Qureshi, as they would no longer feel threatened by the prospect of Muslim revivalism in the subjugated lands north of Afghanistan. But if these regions became independent, their independence would be nominal as they would become part of a larger, grand alliance, just like other subjugated Muslims in the region.Footnote ⁸³ In either case, whether as individual nations or part of a larger one, there would be the real possibility of the extinction of distinct Muslim nationhood.

Post-1971, Qureshi's writings about the events of 1971 were mostly about the political developments and causes leading to the break-up of Pakistan. He took special note of the failure to use education to promote the cause of national harmony, eradicate ethnic- and language-based regional affiliations, and cultivate a strong historical sense of the ideational basis of Pakistan as contributing factors to the break-up of the country and the continuation of similar tendencies in its other parts.Footnote ⁸⁴ In one of his earliest speeches delivered after the break-up of Pakistan, Qureshi simply adopted a rhetorical approach rather than his usual measured tone of a professional historian. In his speech titled ‘Pakistan will continue to live’ [Pakistan Zinda Rahay Ga],Footnote ⁸⁵ Qureshi used poetic language to talk generally about such themes as the purpose of life and the value of freedom, among other things. Towards the end of this speech, however, in an emotional outburst, Qureshi adopted an even more radical approach than we find in his September 1971 speech. He did not call for a ‘greater Pakistan’ to ensure the survival of Muslim nationhood; rather, he reposed his faith in the eternal truth of Islam. It did not matter, he concluded, whether a nation lived or died, Islam would continue to live. If one nation loses the flag, another will replace it.Footnote ⁸⁶ So even though the title of the speech suggested the longevity of Pakistan, it ended with Qureshi stating his firm belief in the longevity of Islam.

An analysis of Qureshi's writings written immediately after December 1971 and in later years shows that he did not see the need for reformulating or casting afresh the idea of Pakistan. This probably had to do with the fact that a part of Pakistan had survived the existential challenge of 1971. So, as far as Qureshi was concerned, the idea was still alive and valid, and the dismemberment of Pakistan was more of a political failure and a consequence of various extraneous factors than a negation of the idea of distinct Muslim nationality itself.