Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Excellent analysis of the emergence and current state of Pakistan and pan Islamism

This book has an interesting perspective on the seemingly unlikely parallel between Israel as an ancestral home for Jews and Pakistan as a home for Muslims. It will probably appeal to academics since it is written is a postmodern style of writing. The author writes well, but reading it is tough slogging.

I enjoyed Mr. Devji's book very much, although I had to concentrate hard. Muslim Zion is a complex and intellectual assessment of Pakistan and her foundation as a nation. A foundation which has much in common with that of Israel, hence the title. This is a very interesting and fascinating analysis and I was impressed with the author's conclusions. Pakistan is a complex and contradictory nation and certainly one which was a product of it's time in the immediate post-War world. If you want to know about Pakistan then you should invest in Muslim Zion. According to the author, Pakistan is a paradox; a country which rejects history and territory in favour of a 'homeland'. Yet this homeland itself is a nation state with historical roots in Punjab, Bulochistan, Sindh and also Kashmir. Pakistan is nation established on the sole basis of religion (just like Israel). Because of this, Pakistan rejects the more traditional nation state concepts such as 'blood and soil', which tended to characterise traditional forms of nationalism in Europe. Indeed, Devji makes many parallels between this Muslim Nationalism and Zionism, claiming that there is significant similarity in the aims of both. Initially, the concept of a Muslim homeland developed out of the ideas of the Muslim philosopher Mohammed Iqbal. Iqbal was concerned for the fate of India's Muslims and was in favour of recognition of a Muslim province in any future independent Indian nation. These ideas fermented and were taken up by the secular Muslim politician Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah and his Indian Muslim League were to ultimately advance these ideas and declare at the 1940 Lahore Convention the desired aim of a separate Muslim nation. Mr. Devji makes a good case for Pakistan as a political idea. Further to what's written above, he explores fears amongst the Muslim leaders of India of Muslims becoming a minority in a Hindu dominated Indian nation, comparisons with the struggles of other Indian minorities such as the Dalit peoples (the 'Untouchables'), and a belief that Pakistan would not only be a home for India's Muslims but Muslims across the world. However, one of the most interesting aspects of the work is how the author describes Pakistan as a bundle of contradictions. Jinnah, a leader of Muslim independence who was himself a secular Muslim, and even a little contemptuous of the more devout worshipers of Allah. A nation state that rejects the concept of history and territory, yet functions as a nation. How the Muslim basis for its existence failed to inspire a codified concept of worship within Pakistan, leading to a generic Sunni/Shia mix of practice. The comparisons of Muslim Nationalism with Zionism and yet the refusal of successive Pakistani governments to recognise the nation of Israel. Mr. Devji's work is fascinating yet complex. This is a serious study on the origins of Pakistan as both a nation and a political idea. One would suggest they they are one and the same. I understand more about Pakistan now than I did before I read the book, and I'm no stranger to intelligence on the country. This is a core work for scholars of Pakistan.

Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion is stimulating if you’re interested in Pakistan’s intellectual history. Its archival vignettes and reflections on Muslim nationalism are engaging. But as a book to understand Zionism, it’s deeply misleading. The problem is definitional. Devji adopts a non-standard definition of “Zion” as a modern religious-nationalist form in which a dispersed minority abandons an old land for a new one, loosening “blood and soil”: Israel as showcase, Pakistan as precedent. Once the baseline is wrong, the comparison collapses. Zionism is not a fungible relocation scheme. It is a territorial restoration: the return of an indigenous people to a specific ancestral homeland. The land was non-interchangeable (hence the rejection of substitute schemes). And Zionism’s practice, land purchase and settlement, Hebrew revival, state- and defense-building, was classic territorial nation-building, not post-territorial identity politics. Collapsing Jewish peoplehood into mere religion erases the movement’s ethno-historical bond to the land. Finally, equating Israel with Pakistan is a category error: Pakistan emerged from partition among existing Muslim-majority provinces (most Muslims never moved), whereas Zionism mobilized a diasporic return to one particular territory. Some analogies are catchy but strained. The Urdu/Hebrew parallel, for example, misses how Hebrew’s revival operated within a long-standing peoplehood rather than being an elite imposition over disparate populations. Verdict: Worth reading for Pakistan; not a reliable guide to Zionism. Read critically and alongside more representative Zionism scholarship.

Brilliant book. Highly recommended. Most Pakistanis most get a jolt after reading this one, but they have to realise it sooner or later.

Brilliant book. Highly recommended. Most Pakistanis most get a jolt after reading this one, but they have to realise it sooner or later.

Devji is a native orientalist par excellence who has written a book that is guaranteed to be well-received by Zionists and Western and Indian Islamophobes.. He fixates upon superficial similarities between Pakistan and Israel to construct his thesis that the two are twins, possessing strong parallels that no one had noticed until his book. Israel was conceived and executed as an exclusionary colonial-settler state mostly be a few Europeans of the Jewish faith who nowhere constituted a majority in any European space. Its aims was to establish a Jewish state inhabited by European Jews after displacing by force the Arab population of Palestine. In the late 19th century, when the Zionist idea was being proposed, the Jews constituted a tiny percentage of the population of Palestine and about half of them were European Jewish settlers. As such Zionism has no parallels to the Pakistan movement. The idea of Pakistan was to establish Muslim sovereign states (one or more) over large contiguous territories in the eastern and western parts of northern India where Muslims constituted a clear majority of the population. The leaders of the Pakistan movement did not claim that this would be a homeland for all the Muslims of India or that non-Muslims would be displaced from the territories that would constitute Pakistan. Israel was established as a Jewish state for all the Jews of the world. As a result, any Jew living in Manhattan, NY, or Ethiopia, or anywhere else in the world had the right to land in Israel and claim Israeli citizenship. This has never been the case with Pakistan. Pakistan is a country of the people who inhabited Pakistan. Not more than 5 % of the Muslims of the territories that lived in the Indian territories with Hindu majorities (barring Punjab) migrated to Pakistan. There was a larger exchange of Muslim and Hindu populations of Punjab but this was not part of the Pakistan plan; it was the result of violence that was certainly not planned by the Pakistani leaders. Zionism was but the latest example of exclusionary European settler colonial movement that had the support at different times of every Western power, a settler state that would be deployed against the nationalist aspirations of the Arabs in the Middle East, that would serve -- as Theodore Herzl said -- as "a rampart" of Western powers in the Muslims world. Israel was not created as the result of a liberation movement against Britain. It was a British creation that also had the support of other major Western powers. It was an alien (mostly European) presence forcibly planted on Arab territories: one that had strong similarities to the Crusades except that the Crusaders in this case were Jews (if European) who wanted to gain violent possession of 'their' Holy Lands.