Between Universalism and National Identity

An analysis of the Jama‘at’s organization has to determine its identity and aim—does the Jama‘at view itself as a Pakistani or a pan-Islamist party? How the party identifies itself lies at the heart of its politics, and ultimately determines its social role. The division in the Jama‘at’s organization which followed the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 committed the party to the concept of the “nation-state,” which, above and beyond Mawdudi’s universalist claims, has determined the pattern of the Jama‘at’s political activities. The Jama‘at’s history attests to the truth of Benedict Anderson’s observation that “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”^[54] Today, there exist eight Jama‘at-i Islamis; six in Pakistan, India,^[55] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir, and India’s Kashmir province,^[56] plus the United Kingdom Islamic Mission and the Islamic Circle of North America. While all of these organizations are based on Mawdudi’s ideological perspective and replicate the organizational structure of the Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan with minor variations, they operate as separate entities, with activities defined by the territorial boundaries of the state in which they function. Relations between the various Jama‘at-i Islami parties, much like their relations with other revivalist movements, is also conditioned by nation-state boundaries. For these boundaries create barriers to greater unity among revivalist groups in general and the various Jama‘at-i Islamis in particular, bestowing a “national” independence upon each party that militates against universalism. As an indication of the extent of this independence, one can point to the difference in the reactions of the Jama‘at-i Islamis of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India to the Persian Gulf war in 1990–1991. While the Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan was anti-American and anti-Saudi, the Jama‘at-i Islamis of Bangladesh and India throughout the crisis condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and maintained that Saddam Hussein was the archvillain.^[57]

The evident doctrinal discrepancy between the Jama‘at’s professed universalist intentions and the party’s territorial and national reality is a bone of contention within the Jama‘at and a by-product of the party’s modernization that replaced the quest for a pan-Islamic order with a political dialectic premised on the concept of the nation-state. This discrepancy was already present when the Jama‘at was founded, in its communalist concerns and universalist agenda of renewal and reform of Islam which lay at the center of Muslim political discourse at the time. That is why the founders of the Jama‘at, while grappling with the immediate political predicaments of the Muslims in India, also devoted considerable energy to the propagation of Mawdudi’s works outside India.^[58] This task was entrusted to Masu‘d ‘Alam Nadwi, who had overseen the activities of the Arabic Translation Bureau in Jullundar since 1942. In 1944, Nadwi expanded the activities of the translation bureau by establishing Al-Huda, a journal of Islamic studies in Arabic, which was published in Pathankot. The journal exported the Jama‘at’s program to the Arabs, and to the Muslim world at large, where Arabic continues to be the lingua franca of religious circles. The Jullundar operation translated an impressive number of Mawdudi’s works into Arabic; they began to appear in Palestine and Iraq in 1947 and in Egypt and Syria soon thereafter. The bureau was transferred first to Rawalpindi and later to Lahore following the partition, where it continues to function with unabated vigor today.^[59] Mawdudi’s numerous travels through the Arab world in subsequent years helped establish a place for his works in that region and also further spread Jama‘at’s influence into more distant lands such as Tunisia and Morocco. Hitherto unaffected Muslims in Gabon, Mali, Malaysia, and Iran first came into contact with Mawdudi’s works through these Arabic translations, making them important in the development of contemporary revivalist thought.^[60] Similar projects were devised to translate the Jama‘at’s literature into Turkish and English, and later into an array of other languages from Japanese to Swahili, to augment the already significant impact of Mawdudi’s thought. By 1974 Mawdudi’s Risalah-i Diniyat (1932) had been translated into twenty-six languages, from Sinhala and Malayalam to English, French, and Spanish.

The significance of Mawdudi’s works and the Jama‘at’s untiring efforts to propagate them far and wide in the rise and articulation of revivalism in the Islamic world underline the universalist pretensions of the movement. However, the Jama‘at’s transnational aims and impact end there. The party, while aware of its importance in the Muslim world and eager to make its mark outside of Pakistan, has no concrete agenda for a supranational Islamic order. Its universalism is effectively checked and limited by its commitment to Pakistani politics and the vicissitudes of sociopolitical change in that country. The reality of the struggle for the soul of Pakistan has collapsed the Jama‘at into the mold of “territorial” politics, relegating universalism to a secondary concern. Although the Jama‘at has supported Islamic causes across the Muslim world, most actively in Afghanistan, India, and Tajikistan, Pakistan remains the focus of its political program. Much like the tensions witnessed in communist history between the interests of the former Soviet Union and those of a universalist communist doctrine, the Jama‘at’s revivalism, unable to escape the fate of universalist ideologies which have preceded it, is Pakistani first and only then international. This development is itself a significant innovation in contemporary Islamic political thought, a modernization of doctrine and worldview produced by the interaction of a universalist doctrine with the reality of the nation-state.