'The latest contribution by Ali Usman Qasmi to the existing scholarship on the history of Pakistan and how religion has influenced citizenship and other issues in the country is Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan'. As is his wont, the Qasmi draws from his extensive research from mostly inaccessible national archives.
Citizenship has remained a contested issue in most postcolonial countries, and Pakistan is no exception. This book pays due attention to the conception of citizenship as it evolved in South Asia and especially in Pakistan with most of its legal and political implications.
Sovereignty and its meaning became a challenging issue for a majority of postcolonial states in the second half of the 20th century; Pakistan also grappled with the problem of defining the contours of its sovereignty. This was in relation to its neighbours, and to some extent with its own civil society that was in its nascent state of development.
Qasmi is adept at explaining the intricacies of Pakistan’s conceptual dilemmas in the early decades of its independent existence. Culturally speaking, the country was at a crossroads where its Indian past came face to face with its new identity that the new rulers were trying to introduce both in the eastern and western wings of the country. Defining the culture became an uphill task as the religious right was asserting itself while the meagre left-wing politics was at the receiving end of repeated crackdowns from the new establishment.
A major focus of the book is how the new country managed the challenge of creating a new national narrative so that the people of Pakistan felt an emotional attachment to their country that was unique in its geography with two parallel wings having fairly diverse cultural, ethnic, and linguistic roots. These roots influenced their aspirations and identities, and it was hard to reconcile them with a singular focus on their religious affinities. This was especially when the trauma of mass violence was still fresh in people’s minds, more pronounced in Bengal and Punjab which had witnessed massive population movements.
Pakistan was a country with multiple ethnic groups and was a multi-national entity rather than a nation-state in the classical sense of this term that had emerged in Europe in the 19th century. With this extent of diversity, promoting a uniform narrative of history and creating new symbols that could draw a consensus among the masses was not easy. In fact, the new state was even struggling to develop a framework for the country’s political life that could meet the democratic demands of the people while the civil and military bureaucracies were vying for power.
Qasmi delves deep into this framework that at times appeared to be crumbling but still managed to stay afloat at least till 1958 when the military top brass arrogated to itself the right to guide the country per its own preferences rather than the democratic aspirations of the people of Pakistan, especially those from East Pakistan which boasted of nearly 55 per cent of the country’s population. In addition to the political dimension, there were also the challenges of civilisational legacy that Pakistan could claim as its own, rather than continuing with an Indian past that the Muslim League had rejected as predominantly Hindu.
An interesting feature of the book is its discussion on the newly emerging political elite in Pakistan that comprised a hodgepodge of tribal and feudal lords to business persons and industrialists who had to face a British-trained bureaucracy with colonial roots. The people of Pakistan could confront this elite provided some democratic norms prevailed. But, as Qasmi points out, the elite used the concept of distinct Muslim history and political tradition that was more authoritarian and centralised than democratic and local. Especially under Ayyub Khan, the history textbooks highlighted those Muslim emperors who ruled with an iron hand and controlled the centre.
An idea of Pakistan became widely circulated with its millennium-long history of Muslim rule in India. Official histories started tracing the roots of Pakistan from Muhammad bin Qasim to Mahmud Ghaznavi. Pakistani history textbooks downplayed and even ignored the cultural interactions that Hindus and Muslims had over a thousand years or so. The official version of history tended to deny that any peaceful coexistence was ever possible. Any national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state was only possible through a religious tunnel that all had to enter without considering any alternative routes.
According to Qasmi, the formative period of Pakistan was riddled with bureaucratic wrangling on trivial issues rather than focusing on greater issues of formulating a constitution or consolidating the federation. The bureaucracy was more interested in inventing a range of new rituals of the state. The author has conducted painstaking research to unearth documents that contain discussions on the colour of the flag or a disagreement on the precise dates of birth of the national poet of Pakistan Allama Iqbal and the father of the nation M A Jinnah. Even the observation of Eid as a national festival was not a consensus decision.
The introduction to the book begins with an interesting announcement from September 1947, concerning J K Mehra who was station director of Radio Pakistan, Lahore. He changed his religion to embrace Islam and became Ahmed Selman to remain in Pakistan rather than migrate to India as most of the Hindus were doing. Then the story moves to 2016 when actress Salma Agha applied for an overseas citizen-of-India card to permanently settle in Mumbai. In her application, she emphasised her Indian roots by referring to her maternal grandfather J K Mehra who was married to her maternal grandmother Anwari Begum, a star singer in the 1930s and 40s.
The book is full of such interesting anecdotes and incidents. The first chapter of the book, ‘Noah’s Ark’, discusses the making of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslim nationals. It dilates upon the formation of a national citizenry in the new state. Qasmi traces the history of citizenship-making from an unexplored archive of the legal debates on what constitutes a Pakistani citizen. ‘Being Pakistani’ was conflated with “Muslimness to ensure that the doors were shut for non-Muslim minorities’ return to their neighbourhoods for emotional and material reasons.”
Chapter two, ‘Quilting Islam’, discusses Pakistan as an Islamic republic and focuses on state-led activities meant to establish state legibility to demarcate the ideal citizenry according to a majoritarian definition. Here too, the writer looks at archives of cabinet discussions and constitutional assembly debates. He also gives an overview of public opinion as expressed in newspapers and portrays a broader picture to represent the ideological spectrum on this issue. Qasmi asserts that the question of naming Pakistan as an Islamic republic was sort of a communicative and performative act which carried more symbolic meaning than any real substance.
In the third chapter ‘Making the state national’, Qasmi discusses the events and personalities involved in the finalisation of the national anthem and the development of the flag. He also traces the origin of various symbols such as the national animal and national dress. This chapter gives us an idea about how a normative culture for the new citizenry based on the symbolic representation of the qaum (nation) evolved. The debates on the language and lyrics of the national anthem are quite interesting.
The fourth chapter ‘Over the moon: Ulema, state, and authority in Pakistan’ focuses on the controversy around moon sighting and the procedure for sighting the moon as required by the Islamic lunar calendar. In the fifth chapter of the book, ‘Scripting the national time and space’ Qasmi discusses the politics of nationalist historiography as a process of deletion and creative remembrance to develop a master narrative.
In short, the book is a treasure trove of information and analysis that should be compulsory reading for all students and teachers of history in Pakistan.
Concluded
The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. He tweets/posts NaazirMahmood and can be reached at:mnazir1964yahoo.co.uk