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| 26/03/2004 |
| THE SHIFTING QIBLAH: Islamisation under General Ziaul Haq and Secularism under General Pervez Musharraf – The Pakistani Experience |
Paper for Conference on the Future of Secularism, sponsored by the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University, 26-27 March 2004.
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| I. THE QIBLAH IN ISLAM |
| ‘Will Muslim Pakistan ever become a secular state?” It is a question that its founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah must have asked of himself a thousand times, from the moment a separate homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent that he had been championing became a constitutional inevitability. It is a question every subsequent ruler of Pakistan since 14 August 1947 has tried to answer. |
| Jinnah can be forgiven for not having provided a solution to the problem created by his fecund brilliance. He died giving birth to Pakistan. The strain of bringing the infant state of Pakistan into existence killed him. Given his background – he was a British trained lawyer whose personal life was only nominally and in the end belatedly Muslim – he might not have been the most qualified oracle to provide that solution. Jinnah’s advocacy sharpened by an uncompromising political sagacity certainly had earned him the right to be identified as the ‘Sole Spokesman’ for the Muslims of pre-independence India. His reclusive, patrician personality and the contradictions in his dietary habits disqualified him from being their spiritual leader. [Extract] |
[For the complete paper, see Srinivisasan, T.N., The Future of Secularism (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007], and also in When Bush Comes to Shove.] |
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| 26 March 2004 |
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