I remember reading, back in my college days, M J Akbar’s India: The Siege Within (1985) with a sense of discovery and excitement. Akbar came across as a stylish writer and I learnt many things about my country’s history from that book. His recent work is Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan (2011) in which he begins the history of Pakistan right from Mahmud of Ghazni’s plunder of Somanath in 1026 and even earlier.
More than half the book is about the legacy of Muslim rule in India prior to and during the British era and the events leading to the Partition.
M J Akbar writes with a fair pen and even his worst critic would not call him biased. His portrayal of Sir Syed Ahmed, founder of the Aligarh Muslim University, is crisp and informative. It must be remembered that it was the Aligarh Muslim University that provided decisive leadership to the Muslim League and, after partition, all its faculty moved en masse to Pakistan.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah emerges as the most enigmatic figure in the book. A westernized lawyer, who ate ham sandwiches, consumed alcohol, did not observe the Ramadan fast, and former promoter of Hindu-Muslim unity till the early 1930s, transformed himself into a two-nation theory proponent in the late 1930s. As Akbar puts it, “The man who had little religion divided India in the name of religion.”
Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad shines throughout the book as the moderate and reasonable voice of Islam. “He lived, breathed and practiced Islam but never once exploited religion for political gain….Pakistan, in his view, was a symbol of defeatism, a confession that Indian Muslims could not hold their own and had to find a reserved corner.” Many of his dire 1946 predictions of Pakistan have borne true.
Akbar also gives a lucid account of the Khilafat movement. It seems to me Mahatma Gandhi made a grave mistake by mixing suzerainty of the Caliphate of the Ottoman empire with his call for Swaraj. While he definitely succeeded in rousing the Muslims, they did not buy into his concept of “Ram Rajya”. Even today Pakistani books refer to Gandhi as a “cunning bania” rather than as a sympathizer.
Post Independence, Akbar deals with the various coups and reframings of the Constitution, He talks of the wars with India, the Kashmir issue, and American support of Pakistan in Afghanistan. I learnt that the Taliban was a creation of Benazir Bhutto in the war against Afghanistan and remains one of the major political blunders.
Pakistan has been let down by its leaders. Maybe, as Maulana Azad said, it will take a great catastrophe for the Pakistanis to come to their senses.
More than half the book is about the legacy of Muslim rule in India prior to and during the British era and the events leading to the Partition.
M J Akbar writes with a fair pen and even his worst critic would not call him biased. His portrayal of Sir Syed Ahmed, founder of the Aligarh Muslim University, is crisp and informative. It must be remembered that it was the Aligarh Muslim University that provided decisive leadership to the Muslim League and, after partition, all its faculty moved en masse to Pakistan.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah emerges as the most enigmatic figure in the book. A westernized lawyer, who ate ham sandwiches, consumed alcohol, did not observe the Ramadan fast, and former promoter of Hindu-Muslim unity till the early 1930s, transformed himself into a two-nation theory proponent in the late 1930s. As Akbar puts it, “The man who had little religion divided India in the name of religion.”
Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad shines throughout the book as the moderate and reasonable voice of Islam. “He lived, breathed and practiced Islam but never once exploited religion for political gain….Pakistan, in his view, was a symbol of defeatism, a confession that Indian Muslims could not hold their own and had to find a reserved corner.” Many of his dire 1946 predictions of Pakistan have borne true.
Akbar also gives a lucid account of the Khilafat movement. It seems to me Mahatma Gandhi made a grave mistake by mixing suzerainty of the Caliphate of the Ottoman empire with his call for Swaraj. While he definitely succeeded in rousing the Muslims, they did not buy into his concept of “Ram Rajya”. Even today Pakistani books refer to Gandhi as a “cunning bania” rather than as a sympathizer.
Post Independence, Akbar deals with the various coups and reframings of the Constitution, He talks of the wars with India, the Kashmir issue, and American support of Pakistan in Afghanistan. I learnt that the Taliban was a creation of Benazir Bhutto in the war against Afghanistan and remains one of the major political blunders.
Pakistan has been let down by its leaders. Maybe, as Maulana Azad said, it will take a great catastrophe for the Pakistanis to come to their senses.
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