ANNIVERSARY OF PAKISTAN

According to the press reports, the Central Pakistan Government is making preparations to celebrate the anniversary of the establishment of Pakistan this month. The Provincial Governments are likely to follow suit.

One can well imagine what form these celebrations may take. There will be military parades, there will be march past, there will be speeches and messages, perhaps there will be a state banquet. The propaganda departments of the Government will bring out the usual pamphlets eulogizing the wonderful achievements of the Government in the face of enormous difficulties. In the midst of all this tom-tomming the one thing on which attention must be focussed and which really matters is likely to be conspicuous by its absence, and that is our own unfitness for and unworthiness of Pakistan.

Pakistan was the greatest boon ever conferred on a people but at the same time it was accompanied by the greatest calamity that ever befell a people in recorded history. The first was the ample grace of God, for which our hearts, as a nation should have been filled with thankfulness to Him. The second was the bitter fruit of what our own hands had wrought in the past, for which we should have gone, as a nation, through ashes and sack cloth. We did neither the one nor the other. We neither learnt anything nor unlearnt anything.

How did we show our thankfulness to God? By a wave of all round corruption unprecedented in history, by showing scant regard for our work and duty, by an all-round fall in our national morals. We hailed Pakistan not as a responsibility devolving on as certain very hard obligations, but as a licence absolving us of all obligations.

How did we show our penance for our past which was responsible for bringing on us this doom? There was not so much as a realization of this. We contented ourselves with cursing the Sikhs for the tragedy that was visited upon us. This was blinking facts. It was our own hands that were busy weaving this doom for us through generations past. The Sikhs were but instruments to carry out the decree of fate which we had built up with our own hands.

Muslims ruled India for centuries – very long centuries. Had they shown the slightest respect for the explicit Quranic mandate that we must carry the message of brotherhood which Islam is to the whole of mankind, there would have been no Hindu Muslim question, no partition of the country and no such tragedy as we have just gone through. If Persia today is an Islamic country, if Egypt to-day is an Islamic country, if Indonesia to-day is an Islamic country, where lies the secret of it. The secret lies in the fact that early Muslims did not turn a deaf ear to this Islamic call and wherever they went they took the message of brotherhood with them with the result that whole populations joined the universal brotherhood of Islam. Our ancestors in this country showed criminal neglect in this respect and we are now ruing the day.

Iqbal was one of the greatest champions of Islamic culture. But who was he? A Kashmiri Pandit by ancestry. Long ago someone, showed the light of Islam to his forefathers. We reaped the fruit thereof in the person of Iqbal, the most vehement advocate of Islamic values of life. That could equally well happen to Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel, even Master Tara Singh, had we done this duty on a national scale.

If the partition of this sub-continent which by now should have been an exclusively Islamic country, should remind us of anything it is this criminal neglect of God-ordained duty of Ishaat-i-Islam by our fore-fathers. The penalty for that crime is not over with the two million that have been butchered and the six million that have been uprooted from their homes. The fate of 40 million left in India is yet hanging in the balance and it will be nothing surprising if this huge population of Islam is totally liquidated and absorbed within Hinduism within half a century. A worse tragedy may be yet in store for us.

The Nizam is another very pathetic case in point. This scion of Hazrat Abu Bakr, as this House is supposed to be, turned his back on the golden example of his illustrious forebear who spent all his wealth, on pushing forward the cause of Islam and made the hoarding of gold the main hobby of his life. The law of God has had its course and to-day when his very crown is threatened by the Indian Dominion that gold is no more than worthless stone. Had he respected the Quranic injunction and extended the brotherhood of Islam to the millions of untouchables in that state, Hyderabad would to-day have been a predominantly Muslim State.

Have the people of Pakistan yet taken this lesson of heart? Has the Government of Pakistan at all realized this aspect of the tragedy of partition? Neither the people of Pakistan, we are afraid, nor its leaders of thought do so much as believe in Ishaat-i-Islam, to say nothing of doing anything in this direction. As regards the Government of Pakistan, it is too busy with other important affairs of state to find time for what God and the Prophet ﷺ say and want of us, in this respect.

But for Ishaat-i-Islam, Pakistan is a house of cards. We can not deceive nature and must be prepared for worse things if we persist in our present state of mind towards Ishaat-i-Islam. Islam is the very soul of this Islamic State. But for this, it is a body without soul and a lifeless body cannot be long supported by material props. It should be driven home to every individual in Pakistan on August 15, 1948, the first anniversary of Pakistan that the real strength is the strength of the soul, and the soul of Pakistan is Islam. With that soul glowing with the warmth of life, Pakistan can go ahead and march from strength to strength. Without that inner vitality we are bound to be a lifeless nation and, as in the case of East Punjab, liable to crumble before any passing gust of political wind. With that inner life of Faith throbbing within us Pakistan shall be a rock against which hostile forces will vainly beat. The revival of that inner life, the soul of Pakistan should be the foremost thought on the first anniversary of Pakistan with those who really want to build Pakistan on foundations firm and sure. Iqbal said: It is one’s faith and culture that is worth living for and dying for. We make bold to say: It is by our faith and culture alone that we can live in honour and die in honour.

M.Y.K.

(The Light – Sunday, August 1, 1948)