Naveeda Khan - Muslim Becoming. Although an academic book, it is a fascinating account.
Naveeda Khan, a Bangladeshi anthropologist, in a brilliant book has captured some of the wonder and enthusiasm, which accompanied the birth of Pakistan. Contrary to those accounts which claim that Pakistan lacked vision, she identifies a commitment to Pakistan being a place for continual Muslim striving and aspiration, without a fixed end point. It is the spirit of striving, of becoming better Muslims, that is central in her account. And
“If…Pakistan’s claim upon Islam is more in the nature of an aspiration than a clear vision of the ends of such striving, we have to allow for the possibility that Pakistan’s identification of itself as an ideological state enables some experimentation”
She cites Wilfred Cantwell Smith, an observer of the Pakistan movement who wrote in 1957:
“We do not mean—and certainly the Pakistani devotees did not mean— that any independent state comprising Muslims is automatically Islamic. This is in fact not so. Egyptians, Turks, and other Muslims do not talk, do not feel, about their body politic as Pakistanis began excitedly to do about theirs. . . . Certainly Pakistanis themselves strongly felt their nation to be an Islamic state in a fashion unique in the modern world. Indeed, part of their enthusiasm was precisely for the point that they were doing something for Islam that other present-day Muslims were not doing: they were offering it a political existence that otherwise it has not had for centuries. Yet once again, their claim was not based on what their nation had accomplished; rather, on the spirit that it embodied.”
For Smith, ‘‘an actual Islamic state is a state that its Muslim people are trying to make ideally Islamic.’’ It is a state of becoming, rather than being, a continual process, rather than an end.
She shows this ideal of striving to be grounded in the thinking of Muhammad Iqbal. She demonstrates how the state inherited and took its cue from Iqbal’s thinking. She sees the Objectives resolution in a very new way as an espousal of the ‘spirit of enabling’ rather than one of ‘entailing’. She cites Liaquat Ali Khan’s speech where he envisaged Pakistan as a ‘laboratory’. As she states powerfully, summarising Liaquat's speech:
“It was to be a place for self-directed experimentation. And the question of ends is left intriguingly open. Only Muslims could find out for themselves what they could yet be, an opportunity for self-exploration for which they had been long seeking. That is, they alone could find out the answer to the question, “To what does a Muslim aspire?” as in God’s parting words in Iqbal’s Jawab-i-Shikwa.”
Her study also draws extensively on her ethnographic research, in such settings as the mosque, the library and the family home, pointing out that even in everyday sites of dissonance there is this tendency towards perpetual striving. She looks at the conflict in Pakistan, between Muslims, in very new ways. Indeed she acknowledges the dark side to the effort of striving, in the exclusion and discrimination that the Ahmadi community has been subjected to.
As she summarizes in her epilogue, it "a quality of restlessness of religious striving...which was informed both by disappointment with the present and by the pleasure taken in feeling bound to Islam" that she has sought to highlight.
This magnificent book unsettles many ideas that are regularly discussed in relation to Pakistan. It is difficult to see Pakistan in the same light after reading this book and there are not many books that one can say that about.