Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam 135. Mohammed Ali Jauhar (1878-1931) and the Origins of Pakistan
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Mohammed Ali Jauhar was a product of the Aligarh movement and a principal figure in the historical processes that resulted in the emergence of Pakistan. To appreciate the contributions of this towering personality one must retrace the footprints of history in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
The decimation of the Muslim aristocracy in northern India following the uprising of 1857 created a political vacuum which left the masses despondent and rudderless. A new order had come into being, dictated by British imperial interests in which the prerequisite for advancement and prosperity was acquiescence to, and adaptation of Western education and cultural values. The Muslims distrusted the new order as hostile to their own values, beliefs and traditional educational systems.
The distrust was mutual. The British, on their part, looked askance at the Muslims whose rule they had usurped in large parts of the subcontinent through conquest, diplomacy or deceit. A principal figure, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan broke this cycle of mutual distrust.
Convinced that the advancement of Indian Muslims lay in acquiring the knowledge and wisdoms of the West and integrating them with traditional Islamic education, he moved into the educational arena and founded the institution, which in time evolved into Aligarh Muslim University. The Aligarh movement was a giant leap forward from the medieval to the modern age but the passage was not as smooth as Sir Syed had envisioned. Traditional school systems sprang up in Deoband, Nadva and other centers of learning, juxtaposed with the modernist Aligarh system. The graduates of the traditional schools had little understanding of the modern West while the graduates of Aligarh often were lacking in the traditional disciplines. The tensions between the traditional and the reformist persisted into the twentieth century, and indeed, they persist even to this day.
Mohammed Ali, one of three Ali brothers, was born into a Pashtun family of UP in 1878. His father, Abdul Ali Khan, passed away when Mohammed Ali was two years old. A bright student, Mohammed Ali studied at Aligarh, and in 1898, won a scholarship to study at Oxford University. Returning to India in 1904 he accepted employment first at Rampur as Director of the education department, then at Baroda in the Administrative services (1906). Later that year he resigned from civil service and dedicated himself to national service. He attended the first conference of the Muslim League in Dhaka in 1906 and, along with Wiqar al Mulk and Muhsin al Mulk, became a principal spokesman for Muslim aspirations on the national scene.
Mohammed Ali showed his metal as a writer and a poet at a very early age. He was equally fluent in English and Urdu. The Times of India ran a series on his observations on contemporary affairs in 1907. Some of his early poems, written while he was a student at Aligarh show a remarkable synthesis of revolutionary zeal and Sufi resignation:
Life in its full splendor will arrive after death, O executioner!
Our journey starts where your journey ends;
Confront you, who can (O executioner)? But—
Blessed is my blood after your bleeding;
The martyrdom of Hussain is indeed the death of Yazid,
The breath of life wakes up the faith of surrender after every Karbala!
His poetry is animated by the passion for righteous action and the power of perseverance. It is this universal appeal that has made him one of the most quoted poets of all times. He sounds off his clarion call to the isolationists in the following words:
Tell those who hide behind curtains to hide in their tombs—
The inert—no refuge do they have in this world!
He scoffed at titles and sycophancy preferring a higher reward:
The occupancy of the chair, that is worth its felicitation, O Jowhar!
But higher is the recompense of the Day of Recompense.
Neither a seeker of wealth nor a pursuer of honor am I,
The mendicants at this door—they ask for something else.
He was an activist. In the pursuit of higher goals, he was not afraid of making mistakes:
The intercession of Muhammed is a divine Grace for sure,
The Day of Gathering—Ah! That is a feast of Grace for the wrong doers.
There was no journal, and no newspaper that carried the voice of the Muslims. To fill this void Mohammed Ali started the weekly “Comrade” in 1911. Published in English from Kolkata, the journal electrified the Muslim educated class. It was read not just by English speaking Indians but also by the British bureaucrats who wanted to feel the pulse of the Indian political climate. It carried political commentaries, analysis and essays on social issues. The capital of India was shifted from Kolkata to Delhi in 1911. So, the publication of “Comrade” was shifted to the new capital. It was soon obvious that to reach the masses, a publication in the Urdu language was required. So, Mohammed Ali started an Urdu weekly “Hamdard” in 1911 as a companion publication to “Comrade”.
International events of global import soon overtook national events and consumed the attention of the Indian Muslim intelligentsia. The Balkan War of 1911-12, in which the combined forces of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece attacked the Ottoman Empire with the tacit connivance of Britain, France and Russia, alarmed the Muslim world. Italy invaded Libya and occupied it. There was not much that the large Muslim population of India could do except to petition the British government not to aid and abet the Balkan aggressors. The Maulana spoke up for justice through the voice of Comrade. His strident calls caught the attention of the ruling authorities. The publication of Comrade was stopped and the Maulana was jailed and stayed locked up until 1918.
The guns of World War 1 shattered the peace of the world in 1914. India, a captive colony of Britain, declared war on Germany. The Ottoman Empire entered the conflict ill prepared, goaded into the fray by the Young Turks who miscalculated that the initial rapid advance of the German armies into France presaged a quick victory, and their desire to recover territories lost in the Balkan wars of 1911-12.
The Indian army, largely recruited from the region between Delhi and Peshawar, consisted of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus in roughly equal proportions. It was unceremoniously packed up and dispatched to Iraq and Palestine to fight the soldiers of the Khalifa. The war ended in a disaster for the Turks. The Middle East was carved up and swallowed by the British and French empires. The Arab revolt of 1917 stabbed the Turks in the back, shattering the illusions of pan-Islamism harbored by many Indian intellectuals.
It was not the Ottoman defeat in the Great War but the British attempt to abolish the Caliphate that riled the Indian Muslims and impelled them to political activism. The Caliphate was an institution that had survived the vicissitudes of Islamic history for 1300 years. Most Muslims believed that it was an integral part of Islamic faith. A Khilafat committee was formed in 1920 to apply pressure on the British government on this issue. A delegation headed by Maulana Mohammed Ali was sent to London and returned empty handed later that year.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
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