Retributions  

In his presidential address delivered at the Lahore session of the All-India Muslim League on 29^th December 1930, Muhammad Iqbal said,

Is religion a private affair? Would you like to see Islam, as a moral and political ideal, meeting the same fate in the world of Islam as Christianity has already met in Europe? Is it possible to retain Islam as an ethical ideal and to reject it as polity in favor of national politics, in which religious attitude is not permitted to play any part? This question becomes of special importance in India where Muslims happen to be in a minority. The proposition that religion is a private individual private affair is not surprising on the lips of a European. In Europe the conception of Christianity as a monastic order, renouncing the world of matter and fixing its gaze entirely on the world of spirits led, by logical process of thought, to view embodied in this proposition. The nature of Holy Prophet’s religious experience, as disclosed in the Quran, however, is totally different. It is not mere experience in the sense of a purely biological event, happening inside the experient and necessitating no reaction in his social environment. Its immediate outcome is the fundamentals of a polity with implicit legal concepts whose civic significance cannot be belittled because their origins are revelational. The religious idea of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other.

This famous speech is now recognized as elucidating the philosophical basis for Pakistan for the very first time. Now contrast this to the equally famous speech delivered by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to the constituent assembly of Pakistan on 11^th August, 1947. After arguing that the divisions within Indians was the single most important factor behind responsible for their subjugation by the British, Jinnah says,

You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your Mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed-that has nothing to do with the business of the state… Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in due course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of the each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.

I would argue that it is this confusion as to the role of Islam which is responsible for the fundamental confusion in Pakistan: Its failure to decide whether it is a Muslim-state or a state for Muslims.