Free B005OWFTDW EBOK by John Freeman Page A

the anti-Pakistan Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind, Jinnah made sure a new Islamic party was created under a more compliant imam, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani. By 1946, Jinnah had been so successful at transforming the Muslim League into a mass movement that the party won 75 per cent of the Muslim vote, a stunning leap from only 4.6 per cent of the Muslim vote in 1937.
    There seems little argument that Jinnah was seeking political guarantees, not so much religious guarantees, for the Muslim minority within India. A group of historians led by Ayesha Jalal, the author of The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan , argue that if those guarantees had been entrenched in a strong federal state the Muslims would have stayed inside a unified India. They point out that in the rushed negotiations under Mountbatten, Jinnah was forced to accept what he called a ‘moth-eaten’ version of Pakistan. The new country was awarded only half of the vastly important Punjab and Bengal provinces and more Muslims were left behind in India than ended up in the new country.
     
     
    T o find out what the Islamists of Pakistan make of Jinnah, I travelled to the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa in Akora Khattack, not far from Peshawar. Some of Pakistan’s most notorious militants have graduated from this place, including Jalaluddin Haqqani, the veteran Afghan Taliban commander allied with al-Qaeda. At a recent graduation ceremony at the madrasa, tens of thousands of Taliban fighters, organizers, funders and sympathizers turned up, all of them opposed to a secular Pakistan. I had visited Haqqania several times. The administrator, Maulana Yousaf Shah, is a friendly, gregarious preacher and politician. From time to time he welcomes Western journalists, and when journalists have been kidnapped in the tribal areas he has tried to help as an intermediary.
    I turned up with my colleague Pir Zubair Shah, who is from south Waziristan, and a member of a prominent family of the Mehsud tribe. It was Friday, just before midday prayers at Haqqania, so we sat on the floor of the maulana’s reception area, a grubby narrow room with a single bed, a row of cushions arrayed along one wall for the guests to recline on. A strip of neon light illuminated the dark space, and a clutch of red plastic flowers sprouted from a space on the wall. There was no image of Jinnah, or anyone else.
    While the maulana delivered the sermon at the nearby mosque, we chatted with a barefooted, poorly dressed man who introduced himself as Juma Khan, a former member of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant group from the Punjab that is formally banned in Pakistan but seems unstoppable in its capacity to carry out terror attacks in major urban centres. He had been jailed a dozen times for speeches against the Shia, he said. Weary of jail, he had now retired from militant work to devote himself to hunting quail.
    What did a foot soldier in one of Pakistan’s myriad militant groups think of Jinnah? A dark look crossed his weathered face. ‘He was a Shia. They are the worst infidels on earth,’ he shot back. ‘His past is not so good.’ But was he not the founder of the nation? ‘God made Pakistan, not Jinnah.’
    The maulana, fresh from the pulpit, walked in wearing a dark turban and a fresh white shalwar kameez. Three of his children, two boys and a girl all under the age of seven, scampered in and out. One of them dutifully brought a tin spittoon and placed it on the floor by the bed where the maulana sat. Occasionally, he spat in it.
    ‘I grew up in a very religious family; they didn’t like Jinnah,’ said the maulana. ‘My forefathers were active in the referendum, and they supported Jinnah at every level at the formation of Pakistan. Then they complained: “You separated us from the Hindus but we do not have an Islamic state.”’
    In 1947, the expectations of the Islamists were high, the maulana said. The president of the new Islamic party, Maulana Usmani, raised the