Academic literature on the topic 'All-India Muslim League - History'

This chapter explores the late colonial milieu with its opposing discourses of communalism and nationalism that left a deep impact on Shi‘i community formation. In the first half of the 20^th century, India’s Shi‘is portrayed themselves as being on a higher spiritual level in contrast to the common (Sunni) Muslims. Yet, once the Muslim League (ML) adopted the creation of Pakistan as its goal, influential Shi‘i voices expressed deep and increasing skepticism toward the founding of a state that claimed to form an inclusive homeland for all Muslims of the subcontinent. This chapter further demonstrates the substantial links that connected South Asian Shi‘is to major events in the Middle East. Finally, the chapter shows that Lucknow’s religious scholars were far from secure in their leadership position of the Shi‘i community. The modernist-minded All India Shi‘a Conference (AISC) viewed these mujtahids as hopelessly out of touch with the challenges of the time and regarded the AISC as a more appropriate vehicle of communal leadership.

This chapter analyzes the vibrant discussions of the early twentieth century over how to revive a caliphate best suited to the post-war era. While some advocated preservation of a traditional caliphal figurehead, many Muslim intellectuals were greatly persuaded by new models of internationalism embracing the nation-state and proposed international caliphal councils and organizations, similar to the League of Nations, or other purportedly spiritual institutions, similar to the refashioned papacy, to preserve the bonds of a transregional religious community. To varying degrees, all the participants in the debate over reviving a twentieth-century caliphate were influenced by an intriguing confluence of both the historic transregionalism of the Muslim community as well as the modern thrust of the new age of global internationalism.

This chapter traces the rise of Muslim nationalism within the large network of twentieth-century Urdu literary journals and print novels. While this period is best-known for the subversive works of All-India Progressive Writer’s Movement, a Bloomsbury-inspired collective in India, the powerful, looming influence of a parallel set of Muslim nationalist writers—Rashid ul-Khairi, Nasim Hijazi, and Razia Butt—has gone unnoticed in literary histories both in the Euro-Amerian academy and in Urdu. Composed largely from the 1920s into the 1970s, the novels of these nationalist writers resituate the once-itinerant, despotic Mahometan in terms offered by colonial modernity: nation, state, language. Within these mainstream works, which include Hijazi’s wildly successful Muhammad bin Qāsim (1945) and Butt’s enduring Bānō (1971), the Muslim qaum, or nation, is envisioned in terms of a single origin and its onward history: the caliphate or Mecca, and the revived relevance of mujāhids, or warriors who fight in the name of Islam for the purpose of creating a separate Muslim state called Pakistan.

The most direct legacy that we can leave to future geology is that of our own mortal remains. Today, in reconstructing the long-vanished Jurassic landscapes, we put the mighty, charismatic dinosaurs square in the foreground. This focus we have—well-nigh a fixation—seems to us almost self-evident. Were they not the rulers of their empire, just as we are of ours, literally bestriding their domain as colossi of scale and blood and bone? Their skeletons, avidly sought, intensely studied, painstakingly reconstructed in museum displays, are the symbols of those times, iconic, mesmerizing. Might we not hope for similar awe and reverence from our future excavators? There is no guarantee, of course, that these as yet unborn explorers of a future Earth will share this perspective. Perhaps their focus will be on what, among all the diverse living inhabitants of this planet, is most important in preserving this living tapestry. They may well regard the myriad tiny invertebrates, or the bacteria, of the world as much more important to that (in planetary terms) rare phenomenon, a stable, functional, complex ecosystem. If these future explorers took this view, at the risk of off ending what little there might then remain of our amour propre, they would have a point. Take away the top predator dinosaurs, and the Jurassic ecosystems would have been a little different, to be sure, but no less functional. Take away humans, and the present world will also function quite happily, as it did two hundred thousand years ago, before our species appeared. Take away worms and insects, and things would start seriously to fall apart. Take away bacteria and their yet more ancient cousins, the archaea, and the viruses too, and the world would die. But, let us imagine our excavators as being, in true science fiction style, just as obsessed with their relative position in the food chain as we are. Let us assume that, in their excavation of the Earth’s history, they will be looking for the power brokers of the ancient past, that they will be digging for bones and bodies.