Muslims against the Muslim League Critiques of the Idea of Pakistan

The popularity of the Muslim League and its idea of Pakistan has been measured in terms of its success in achieving the goal of a sovereign state in the Muslim majority regions of North West and North East India. It led to an oversight of Muslim leaders and organizations which were opposed to this demand, predicating their opposition to the League on its understanding of the history and ideological content of the Muslim nation. This volume takes stock of multiple narratives about Muslim identity formation in the context of debates about partition, historicizes those narratives, and reads them in the light of the larger political milieu of the period. Focusing on the critiques of the Muslim League, its concept of the Muslim nation, and the political settlement demanded on its behalf, it studies how the movement for Pakistan inspired a contentious, influential conversation on the definition of the Muslim nation.

Acknowledgements; Introduction Ali Usman Qasmi and Megan Eaton Robb; 1. Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani and the Jamiat 'Ulama-i-Hind: against Pakistan, against the Muslim League Barbara Metcalf; 2. The Partition conundrum: perspectives, experiences and ambiguities from qasbahs in India Raisur Rahman; 3. Choudhary Rahmat Ali and his political imagination: pak-plan and the Continent of Dinia Tahir Kamran; 4. Differentiating between Pakistan and Napak-istan: Maulana Abu'l A'la Maududi's critique of the Muslim League and Muhammad Ali Jinnah Ali Usman Qasmi; 5. Advising the Army of Allah: Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi's critique of the Muslim League Megan Eaton Robb; 6. The illusory promise of freedom: Mian Iftikhar-ud-Din and the movement for Pakistan Ali Raza; 7. Visionary of another politics: Inayatullah Khan 'al-Mashriqi' and Pakistan Markus Daechsel; 8. Nonviolence, Pukhtunwali and decolonization: Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar politics of friendship Safoora Arbab; 9. Islam, communism and the search for a fiction Ammar Ali Jan; 10. Muslim nationalist or nationalist Muslim? Allah Bakhsh Soomro and Muslim politics in 1930s and 1940s Sindh Sarah Ansari; 11. Dancing with the enemy: Sikander Hayat Khan, Jinnah and the vexed question of 'Pakistan' in a Punjabi unionist context Newal Osman; 12. Religion between region and nation: Rezaul Karim, Bengal and Muslim politics at the end of empire Neilesh Bose; 13. 'The Pakistan that is going to be Sunnistan': Indian Shi'a responses to the Pakistan movement Justin Jones; 14. The Baluch Qaum of Kalat state: challenging the ideological and territorial boundaries of Pakistan Abdul Majeed; Index.

Ali Usman Qasmi is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. He is the author of Questioning the Authority of the Past: The Ahl al-Qur'an Movements in the Punjab (2012) and The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (2015).
Megan Eaton Robb is Junior Research Fellow on the Atlas Project at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Junior Dean of New College, Oxford. She is interested in research on the history of the book, newsprint, publishing in South Asia, Urdu literature and translation, and the links between language and identity among Muslims in South Asia, the Middle East, and in the diaspora.