Competition with the Muslim League

Between 1941 and 1947 the language and tone of the League’s political program was increasingly Islamized, and relations between the two parties in those years were affected by this change in character, which not only created a common ground between the two but also made the Muslim League more susceptible to Mawdudi’s maneuvers. The League’s appeal to Islamic symbols created a niche in the political arena for the Jama‘at and prepared the ground for its activities. The Muslim League’s actions began directly to influence the Jama‘at’s reactions. In collaboration, and more often in confrontation, with the League, the Jama‘at found a political existence, as the League’s policies became the Jama‘at’s calling. When in a speech before the students at Aligarh Muslim University in 1938 Mawdudi first outlined his idea of the Islamic state, he did so by comparing and contrasting it with the Muslim League’s plans for Pakistan.

So long as he was unsure of the future, Mawdudi had sought to keep his options open by maintaining the Jama‘at’s distance from the Pakistan movement. This did not attest to his aversion to Muslim communalism but to his rivalry with the Muslim League. Behind Mawdudi’s sanctimonious derision of the League’s enterprise lay his own political ambitions. To attract the League’s constituency, the Jama‘at intensified its campaign to expose the “un-Islamic” nature of the Muslim League’s program, believing that a people moved by religious concerns and loyalties were bound to gravitate toward the party that best represented the essence of their communal identity. That Mawdudi was proved wrong suggests that religion could serve as the handmaiden of communalism, but not as its mainstay. Although Muslims were attracted by the Islamic symbols, their political decisions were not religiously motivated. Muslim communalism encompassed Islam, but went far beyond the theological boundaries of the faith. It was not long before it became apparent that the Jama‘at’s campaign had failed to dent the League’s following, let alone derail its plans for Pakistan. Party members, however, did not lose heart and decided that theirs was not a political problem. Mawdudi explained the Jama‘at’s failure to attract a following by citing Jinnah’s wealth and his own comparatively meager means.^[41] He could not find much solace in that argument for long, however, and relieved his frustrations by further escalating his scurrilous attacks on the Muslim League.

From 1939 onward, Mawdudi ceased to attack the Jami‘at-i Ulama and the Congress and directed his invective against the Muslim League instead. As uneasy as the Muslim League felt about Mawdudi’s broadside blasts against Jinnah and his program and despite its reactions to them, he presented no real dangers to the League. For Mawdudi and the Jama‘at in those years had no concrete strategy; their idea of an Islamic state was too vague, intangible, and often unpalatable to the average Muslim to be persuasive; and their hatred of the Congress and the Hindus still outweighed their dislike for the League. More important, unlike the Ahrar, the Jama‘at had never openly sided with the Congress and, unlike the Khaksar, their anti–Muslim League rhetoric had never been translated into violence. Therefore, the Muslim League’s attitude toward the Jama‘at between 1939 and 1947, despite the party’s periodic genuflections toward Mawdudi, remained by and large cautious but cordial.

The rapport between the two parties was further strengthened by personal and, on occasion, institutional contacts. While the Jama‘at and the League found themselves at loggerheads in the 1940s, the cordial relations between Mawdudi and the League’s leaders continued to determine the Jama‘at’s politics. Chaudhri Muhammad ‘Ali (a future prime minister of Pakistan), himself a deeply religious man, had been an acquaintance of Mawdudi since the 1930s; Nawwab Bahadur Yar Jang, also a pious man and a prominent Muslim League leader, was also close to Mawdudi. They not only reduced Mawdudi’s distance from the League but also tempered the League’s reaction to Mawdudi’s rhetoric. A similar influence was exerted by Muslim League workers who had grown close to the Jama‘at, and on occasion had even joined the party.^[42] As a result, Mawdudi himself proved to be more flexible toward the Muslim League than is today thought to have been the case. A copy of Mawdudi’s Islam ka Nazriyah Siyasi (Islam’s Political Views), for instance, inscribed with the compliments of the author, is kept in the collection of Jinnah’s papers at the Ministry of Culture of Pakistan.^[43]

Mawdudi proved even more amenable if Muslim League overtures raised his and the Jama‘at’s standing in the Muslim community. In 1940 the president of the Muslim League of the United Provinces, Nawwab Sir Muhammad Isma‘il Khan invited Mawdudi to participate in the Majlis-i Nizam-i Islami (Council of Islamic Order) in Lucknow, which was convened to devise a plan for incorporating religion into the structure of the future Muslim state. Mawdudi accepted without hesitation.^[44] The council was to consist of Isma‘il Khan, Chaudhri Khaliqu’l-Zaman, Nawwab Shamsu’l-Hasan, Sayyid Sulaiman Nadwi, Mawlana Azad Subhani, ‘Abdu’l-Majid Daryabadi, and Mawdudi.^[45] To be invited to this select council with religious luminaries was no doubt a great honor. The Muslim League may have been hard-pressed to find other religious leaders who would attend; or it may have sought to placate Mawdudi through this invitation; or it may have viewed the occasion as an opportunity for rewarding Mawdudi for his denunciation of the Congress and the Jami‘at-i Ulama-i Hind. Isma‘il Khan may also have been asked to invite Mawdudi by his friends among the League’s leaders. Whatever the case, it boosted Mawdudi’s ego and raised his stature as a religious leader. Between 1939 and 1947, the Muslim League paid back the favor Mawdudi had rendered it during the two preceding years by taking on the pro-Congress Muslim leaders.

Another cooperative effort between the Jama‘at and Muslim League came about at the request of Mawdudi following the Jama‘at’s formation. It pertained to a division of opinion between the Muslim League and the Jama‘at over the ultimate shape of the state of Pakistan. Soon after the formation of the Jama‘at in 1941, Qamaru’ddin Khan, the secretary-general of the Jama‘at, was dispatched to Delhi to meet with Jinnah. Through the good offices of Raja Mahmudabad—a deeply religious and generous patron of the League—a meeting was arranged between Qamaru’ddin Khan and Jinnah at the latter’s residence. During the meeting, which lasted for forty-five minutes, Qamaru’ddin Khan outlined the Jama‘at’s political platform and enjoined Jinnah to commit the League to the Islamic state.^[46] Jinnah responded astutely that he saw no incompatibility between the positions of the Muslim League and the Jama‘at, but that the rapid pace at which the events were unfolding did not permit the League to stop at that point simply to define the nature of the future Muslim state: “I will continue to strive for the cause of a separate Muslim state, and you do your services in this regard; our efforts need not be mutually exclusive.” Then he added, “I seek to secure the land for the mosque; once that land belongs to us, then we can decide on how to build the mosque.” The metaphor of the mosque no doubt greatly pleased Qamaru’ddin Khan, who interpreted it as an assurance that the future state would be Islamic. Jinnah, however, cautioned Qamaru’ddin Khan that the achievement of an independent Muslim state took precedence over the “purification of souls.”

At the time, the Jama‘at decided not to make this meeting public, although it had served to quell the anxieties of the pro-Pakistan members of the Jama‘at and had been seen as a green light for greater political activism by the party. If anything, Jinnah had hinted that his task was only to secure the land for the “mosque”; its building, the Jama‘at concluded, would be the work of the religiously adept. What this meant for the Jama‘at was that a continuum existed between the activities of the Muslim League and those of the Jama‘at; where one ended at partition the other began: the Jama‘at-i Islami was to inherit Pakistan. The symbiotic relationship between the League and the Jama‘at, within a communalist framework, was strengthened.

As India moved closer to partition, however, the Jama‘at’s competition with the Muslim League intensified, gradually overshadowing the concord which the contacts with the League in 1939–1941 had engendered. Perturbed by the League’s domination of the Pakistan movement, the Jama‘at increasingly focused its energies on undermining Jinnah’s position in the movement. The party’s attacks became more venomous and direct, transforming the relations between the Jama‘at and the League.

In October 1945, Mawdudi issued what amounted to a religious decree (fatwa) forbidding Muslims to vote for the “secular” Muslim League in the crucial elections of 1945.^[47] Muslim League leaders were understandably irritated at such behavior from the head of a party that was not even taking part in the elections and concluded that the move proved the Jama‘at’s pro-Congress sentiments. But, unperturbed by the implications of its anti–Muslim League campaign, the Jama‘at pushed ahead with its line of attack, which by 1947 became caustic vituperations. Mawdudi himself set the tone when in Kawthar in January 1947 he referred to the “Pakistan of the Muslim League” as “faqistan” (the land of the famished) and “langra” Pakistan (crippled Pakistan).^[48] While these insults were directed at the secular nature of Jinnah’s program for the new state, they incensed Muslim League leaders and rank-and-file members alike; they were having enough trouble defending their cause against the Congress party. They began to retaliate: when, at a regional Jama‘at-i Islami convention in Madras, Mawdudi said that “the Jama‘at’s sole objective is to present Muslims with virtuous leadership and to stop the ascendancy of a corrupt [fasiq’ufajir] leadership at the helm [of the Pakistan movement],”^[49] the crowd erupted into chants of “Long live the Muslim League,” “Long live the qa’id-i a‘zam [Jinnah],” and “Down with the Jami‘at-i Ulama [i.e. the Jami‘at-i Ulama-i Hind].”^[50] The crowd then turned the meeting into a Muslim League rally.

The Congress party was quick to take advantage of these confrontations, and this further deepened the antagonism between the League and the Jama‘at. The subtlety of the Jama‘at’s own communalism was all but drowned by the clamor of its confrontation with the League. Hopeful of enlisting the Jama‘at’s support and anxious to embarrass the League, the Congress openly wooed Mawdudi. In April 1947, during the Jama‘at’s regional convention in Patna, Gandhi attended a lecture by Amin Ahsan Islahi. After the lecture, Congress officials in the city announced that Gandhi had been invited to the session by the Jama‘at’s leaders, and a possible merger of the party into the nationalist movement might be in the making. Gandhi also lauded Islahi and endorsed his views, which the Mahatma argued “attacked the political uses of Islam!”^[51] Muslim League officials, already distressed by Mawdudi’s attacks, were finally provoked into saying what some of them had felt all along: the Jama‘at was Congress’s Trojan horse among the Muslims.^[52] The pro-Muslim League Nawa’-i Waqt of Lahore led the charge against Mawdudi, accusing him of anti-Pakistan activities, collaboration with the Congress party, and political duplicity.^[53] For the Muslim League, the Jama‘at had until that day been at worst a tolerable inconvenience, and at times a valuable “Islamic” tool against the pro-Congress ulama; it was now clearly a nuisance. Gandhi’s remarks changed the balance of relations between the Jama‘at and the Muslim League to the latter’s advantage. The Jama‘at, however, was not reconciled either to this change in its status or to the shift in its debate with the League from questioning the orthodoxy of the Muslim League’s program and leaders to questioning its own loyalty to the Muslim separatist cause.

Caught off guard, the Jama‘at appealed to Nawa’-i Waqt to publish the whole text of Islahi’s speech that Gandhi had alleged had been favorable to the Congress’s position, and it denied ever having invited Gandhi to the session. Nawa’-i Waqt declined to publish either the text or the denial; the League was not going to let Mawdudi off the hook that easily. To the dismay of the Congress, in May Mawdudi issued another salvo against the “secular, irreligious nationalist democracy” promised by the League, but sensing the adverse climate, desisted from attacking it further. In June 1947, Mawdudi wrote an open letter to the Muslims of India, encouraging them to choose Pakistan over the “Indian Republic,” and in July 1947 he encouraged the Muslims of the North-West Frontier Province to turn out their Congress ministry and to vote for Pakistan in the referendum which was scheduled to decide the fate of that province.^[54] In the same month, he issued a terse rebuttal to the well-publicized and damaging charge by the Congress that those Muslims who complained about the idea of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—as many Indian Muslims including Jinnah had—could hardly justify their demand for a Muslim one.^[55] Fearful of giving vent to accusations of being anti-Pakistan, the party withdrew into the “splendid isolation” of Pathankot.

Although the birth of Pakistan followed an ebb in the relations between the Jama‘at and the Muslim League, the concord which had characterized the relations between the two until 1945 continued to define their relationship at a more fundamental level. Since both were ultimately striving to secure communal rights for Muslims, the Jama‘at and Muslim League each legitimated the political function of the other in furthering their common communalist cause. It was the structure of this relationship that determined the interactions between the Jama‘at and the fruit of the League’s toil—the Pakistan state—more than their bickering over the nature of that state may suggest. The Jama‘at legitimated communalism in Islamic terms and helped the League find a base of support by appealing to religious symbols. The Muslim League, in turn, increasingly Islamized the political discourse on Pakistan to the Jama‘at’s advantage, creating a suitable gateway for the party’s entry into the political fray. The Muslim League leaders elevated the Jama‘at’s status, while institutional contacts and personal links between the two parties gave more concrete shape to the structure of relations between the two. Conflict, contact, and concord was rooted in communal interests and the legitimating role of Islam. That framework has governed the scope and nature of relations between the two parties since partition.