When western nations, especially Britain started to withdraw from their colonies, they made sure that the governments they left behind were loyal to them and their ‘values’. This was done by using loyal movements and people who had been indoctrinated by their culture in the colonized lands. In Pakistan it was the Muslim League headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah.The Muslim League was the vehicle used to “make” Pakistan. This party was set up on 28 December 1906 in Dhaka, with the following objectives:
·To promote among Muslims a feeling of loyalty to the British government and to remove misunderstandings
· To protect and advance the political rights and interests of Muslims, and to represent properly their needs and aspirations to the British government; and
· To prevent the rise of hostility among Muslims toward other communities.¹
The Muslim League was dominated by landdlords and westernised elite, who wanted to show that like Hindus, Muslims are also loyal to the British. So it was no real surprise that the Muslim League opposed the Khilafat Movement, led by Maulana Mohammed Ali, a Movement which was against the British and in support of the Khilafat, whose capital was in Turkey, at that time.
Jinnah was educated in the West in secular law, and assumed presidency of the Muslim League in 1935, after his return from England. He firmly believed in the separation of Islam and politics, which he made clear in his many speeches e.g. his speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, he stated:
“Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State".
In the Indian subcontinent prior to the creation of Pakistan, the muslims were 40% of the populous, with the non-muslims thoroughly disunited by their varying beliefs and casts systems. So it was not hard to imagine the muslims once again dominating that region, and therefore, in order to weaken and destroy muslim unity here also - the better plan for Britain in India, was to divide the muslims to two ends of the sub-continent whilst forming a much larger state in the middle, now with an even greater non-muslim majority.
Since Jinnah and the Muslim League believed in loyalty to the British, liberal and democratic values, they were ideal to use to rally muslims towards any agenda the British had. Jinnah however could not have said to the people he wanted to set up a secular and liberal state, as the muslims in general would not buy into this, so a deceiving strategy to achieve his goal was needed.
Jinnah had witnessed, during the Khilafat Movement, that Muslims aroused in the name of Islam and had realized he needed a slogan to gain the muslim support, which he did successfully. He made hundreds of speeches that he wanted Pakistan for Muslims in the name of Islam, which became very popular throughout the Sub Continent.
Many Muslim scholars of the time, including the Jamiyyat -al -Ulama -e -Hind, seriously suspected the religious commitment of the Muslim League because they knew of their secular background and of their little Islamic knowledge, but probably, like today, lacked political awareness to counter-act them.
Thus according to the plans of the British and with the help of their loyal assistants, the Muslims were cheated into sacrificing for a state that was promised to be a land for Islam and Muslims, but remains until today a land for secular nationalists and capitalist elites, disunited from the rest of the Ummah. It is high time those who still hold on to these corrupt values to stub them out under their feet and give their loyalty to the truth and support the revival of the Islamic way of life.
