Free The Duel by Tariq Ali Page A

Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and all the other implacable and ironhearted creators of a Jewish state were not religious. The same was, more or less, true of a number of Muslim League leaders. This was one reason why the more serious Islamist organizations in India, the Jamaat-e-Islami, led by Maulana Maududi, and the Majlis-i-Ahrar, had both opposed the demand for Pakistan to be “un-Islamic.” The Majlis had been set up in 1929 and was linked to the Congress Party. Its key founder, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, refused to accept Pakistan and became a leader of the Indian Congress Party and a close friend of Nehru’s. The Ahraris believed in a composite nationalism and had been long aligned with the Congress Party, but key figures split with Azad and decided to shift to Pakistan. Like Maududi, they loathed Jinnah. He was trying to steal their flock. For them the idea of a secular nationalist Muslim state was “a creature of the devil.” They migrated to Pakistan and gave battle.
    The headquarters of the Islamist groups had been in what was now India. Had they been consistent in their beliefs, they would have stayed there propagating the idea of a world Islamic caliphate. It was not as if India were ever going to be denuded of Muslims, however hard the Hindu fundamentalists might try to bring this about. Some venerated Muslim leaders such as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad were members of the new Indian government. Azad had reduced the Muslims of Delhi to tears with his famous address pleading with them to stay on: “How can you bear to leave this our city, our Chandni Chowk, all that our forebears helped to build. . . .” But Maududi and the Ahraris chose Pakistan. Having done so, they were determined to purify it of all un-Islamic influences, and of these there were many, starting with the Great Leader himself. So began a long battle for the soul of the newstate. The terrain chosen by the Islamists was faith. They ignored non-Muslims since they were unbelievers and should be treated as such without any nonsense of equal citizenship. None of the Islamist groups, however, could agree on what constituted an Islamic state, though Saudi Arabia came close to being a model for many orthodox Sunni Muslims. Shia divines would hark back to the form of government during the Prophet’s lifetime, but there was never any agreement on the precise functions of the state or the composition of those who controlled it. What the followers of Maududi and the Ahrar leadership and smaller groups did agree on was that the Muslim League was led by a bunch of infidels, and that the country’s first foreign minister, Zafarullah Khan, was an apostate who deserved death. Why? Because, they argued, he belonged to the heretical Ahmediyya sect, which had no place in the Islamic community. Having opposed the creation of Pakistan, these worthies were now determined to prove their loyalty to the new state by sprinkling hydrochloric acid on the impure.
    A campaign against the Ahmediyya community began with the birth of Pakistan and was the first episode in the long duel between Islamists and the state for control of the country. Islamic history is replete with “heretical sects” and reform movements from the earliest days after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. During the nineteenth century a self-proclaimed Mahdi (a controversial notion in Islam, a redeemer who will make himself known before the Day of Judgment) emerged in the Sudan at the head of a giant mass movement, created a guerrilla army, and defeated the British at Khartoum in 1885. Poor General Charles Gordon was martyred in the process.
    Mirza Ghulam Ahmed (MGA), the founder of the Ahmediyya sect, was far removed from any notion of an armed struggle against British imperialism. He was born in Qadian in 1835, the grandson of a Muslim general who had fought under the legendary Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh. In a subcontinent riven with religious controversy and Islam under attack by