To be sure, Partition itself was the product of a utopic plan enacting Enlightenment notions about the rational ordering of society. It pro...
To be sure, Partition itself was the product of a utopic plan enacting Enlightenment notions about the rational ordering of society. It promised to produce order out of a religiously and linguistically mixed society. It promised a homeland to those out-of-place in nationalist India.
Many who moved did so out of faith in this project, out of conviction, at times against the wishes of their families (most famously, Jinnah’s only daughter did not move). Indeed, the deliberate sacrifice of home and bonds was the price that made the result – participation in the creation of a new nation-state – all the more sacred.
The poet credited with launching the Pakistan movement, Muhammad Iqbal, was shaped by education in Germany and Britain. Among his closest friends in Lahore from 1932 was Muhammad Asad, the Austro-Hungarian Jew who opposed Zionism but supported the creation of a Muslim state in South Asia. He had been an advisor to Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud in the 1920s – one of that world of European “spies in Arabia” I described in my first book.
Like them, he collapsed the tasks of reinventing the Middle East and himself. He would go on to shape Pakistan’s constitution and head the Middle East...
