The Jamiat had rallied around Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress during the freedom movement and opposed the creation of Pakistan. But there was a sizeable group of the Deoband ulema like Mau-lana Ashraf Ali Thanvi who did not endorse the politics of the Jamiat. The differences led to split and a parallel organisation headed by Mufti Shabbir Usmani was established in 1946 that actively supported the Muslim League and the demand for a separate state of Pakistan.
The Jamiat described participation in freedom movement a religious duty and not a national obligation asserting that “religious freedom was more important than political emancipation”. So much so that it claimed that its flag was a “replica of the flag carried by the Prophet and his companions”. It exhorted Muslims to support the Khilafat movement as a religious duty, to boycott foreign goods as enjoined by the sharia and to fight the British as ordained by God.
It was this practice of invoking religion in every affair that irked Maulana Azad to say “the effect which the words ‘nation’ and ‘motherland’ have on the rest of the world is produced on the Muslims by the words God or Islam. You can stir the hearts of thousands simply with one word — nation — but in the case of Muslims the only comparable word for the purpose is God or Islam”.
Categories : 
10:09 PM
Moderate Islamist here
0 comments:
Post a Comment