Works of honour

The flat is being renovated, sort of, and that is a pain because some of the bookshelves must be moved, and there is all the noise and disturbing the neighbours. On the credit side, the bits that need moving are the shelves that house works that I haven’t gone through in a long time — the works on Pakistan. And so this un-shelving and then replacing has given the opportunity to handle and, therefore, reacquaint oneself with these works. Let us have a look at what is being carted around.

The first set, right at the bottom because it is rarely accessed, is the Jinnah Papers, which I regret buying. The founder of Pakistan wrote no book, but his letters have been edited by Z H Zaidi and published with help from the Pakistan government. For some reason Zaidi also includes correspondence to Jinnah, and most of it is banal. This is irritating because the Jinnah Papers volumes are very expensive.

Each volume of Gandhi’s collected works I bought for as little as Rs 25 (free online), while each volume of Jinnah’s is between Rs 2,500 and Rs 4,750. It is surprising the Pakistan government does not subsidise the publications of its founder, as India does the publications of its early leaders.

Readers who trawl through the Jinnah Papers will not find much illumination. Jinnah was not particularly well read. I translated an interview of his given to a Gujarati journal and he said his favourite work was the Count of Monte Cristo. This is an aside but it may interest the reader to know that in all of his books (which I have translated from Gujarati) Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made only one literary reference. That is the line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet about a rose by any other name smelling as sweet. There is no other indication that he has read anything.

Jinnah and Gandhi, 1944

Jinnah’s works are frustrating because he reveals little or nothing about his view of Islam, or its history or Pakistan’s future or form of government. His letters are about everyday life: motor car repairs, travel plans, statements of accounts, granting of appointments, telling people not to name their companies after him, accepting or declining invitations, a series of very brief (even curt) exchanges with Liaquat, a rejection of Bombay Bar Association’s decision to honour his 50 years at the Bar in 1947, saying that the vote was carried narrowly. 

One woman, Mrs K L Rallia Ram of 5, Masson Road, Lahore, wrote to Jinnah every other day in 1946 and 1947, alerting him to the conspiracies she was convinced Hindus, Sikhs, Communists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were plotting against him. She attached newspaper clippings in support of her theories. Zaidi has included many letters by her in the volumes. As I said, I wish I hadn’t bought the set that cost a lot of money and I wish I hadn’t wasted my time going through them. 

While there is abhorrence for Jinnah in India, Allama Muhammad Iqbal is a grey figure. He is reviled for the idea of Pakistan, but the educated North Indian loves the width and beauty of his writing. Manmohan Singh began reintroducing Iqbal to India through couplets that he delivered in Parliament’s Central Hall in the middle of his Budget speeches of 1991-1996, through which he liberalised India’s economy.

Iqbal’s great work is the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, and it is one of the world’s undiscovered classics. He wrote it in English apparently because he was worried that he would be attacked if it were published in Urdu. It is a compilation of a series of lectures he gave in the 1920s, I think the first one was in Chennai, in which he says that Islamic law is not ossified and can be made modern. His worry was that he would be lynched. Today the work is available in Urdu but I don’t think it is widely read in the Muslim world.

Iqbal’s understanding of East and West is majestic, perhaps unmatched in all India. I cannot think of many people who had as much control over the material — meaning culture, religion and its place in the modern world — as Iqbal did. And his defence of religion in the opening lecture is the best I have ever read, and would be an excellent response to recent books by rationalists Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Many Muslims love the militant poetry of Iqbal, and if you are not familiar with it, some suggested reading is works like Shikwa and Bang-e-Dara and Javid Nama. But most people may not be familiar with the author of the Reconstruction lectures, or the young unifier of India, before he went to Europe. I have spent many hours talking about Iqbal with my late friend Dr Rafique Zakaria, who said he had a book of Iqbal’s bawdy verse somewhere but could never find it. Iqbal died in 1938, a decade before Partition, but for some reason he is seen as one of its authors. The Iqbal shelves are also full of Urdu works printed and published quite cheaply. For readers who are unfamiliar with Urdu, this means that much of it has been hand-calligraphed and therefore not easy to read. One reason, of course, why these shelves are not touched very often.

The third author of note whose works are being bunged around is Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a sort of Muslim version of the RSS.

Maududi was from Aurangabad in Maharashtra but moved to Lahore before Partition. He had a very nimble mind and his most important work, called Al-Jihad fi al-Islam (Jihad in Islam), was written when he was only 24. It was interesting to go through the work of the modern Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb and see how much they had lifted from him, especially Qutb. And how much brighter he was than them. 

Almost no Indian today knows about Maududi, including people in public life and the media, which is astonishing because he provides all of the intellectual underpinning for what we call today Islamic fundamentalism. 

I will write about him at length perhaps another time because he is a most interesting individual who produced a sort of revolution. But that will probably require another shifting of the shelves.