1 00:00:01,860 --> 00:00:08,429 Welcome everybody and good afternoon. I am especially delighted to welcome our speaker today. 2 00:00:08,430 --> 00:00:10,170 Professor, Professor, Voice of the Deaf. 3 00:00:11,010 --> 00:00:18,600 I think there is very little need to introduce Professor Energy, but we just mentioned well, he's currently a reader, 4 00:00:18,900 --> 00:00:25,530 a reader write in South Asian history and fellow it's in Antony's previously held positions at New York University. 5 00:00:25,780 --> 00:00:31,259 So new school in New York Yale University University of Chicago where you where he had the he 6 00:00:31,260 --> 00:00:39,719 got is a huge reform he is the author most recently of Muslims in Pakistan is a Political Idea, 7 00:00:39,720 --> 00:00:46,950 which is published by the Harvard University Press. And the title of his talk today is Jewish Presidents and Muslim Nationalism. 8 00:00:47,170 --> 00:00:51,360 Professor, thank you so much. Thank you very much, Yakov. It's a pleasure to be here. 9 00:00:54,060 --> 00:01:01,120 Forgive me for the skimpy ness of my notes, but I find it filled with more interesting not to read out a paper. 10 00:01:01,230 --> 00:01:03,090 I might be incorrect. You can tell me later. 11 00:01:06,150 --> 00:01:15,420 So what interests me in writing this book, Muslim Zion, is how to tell the story of nationalism differently. 12 00:01:16,200 --> 00:01:21,270 And the historiography of nationalism tends to be dominated by themes of either triumph. 13 00:01:21,930 --> 00:01:26,880 You know, nationalism comes and everyone somehow succumbs to it almost without question. 14 00:01:27,210 --> 00:01:31,980 It becomes the natural political form of the 20th century of modularity. 15 00:01:31,980 --> 00:01:35,070 And this, of course, is the work of people like Benedict Anderson, 16 00:01:35,970 --> 00:01:47,060 where the nation form is seen as a kind of modular form that people can imitate and repeat in many different parts of the world or of derivation. 17 00:01:47,820 --> 00:01:55,469 And this, of course, is the work of part, the strategy to which I refer, where, you know, his question is whether the postcolonial nation state, 18 00:01:55,470 --> 00:02:04,980 especially in Asia and Africa, can be seen as a more or less perfect derivative of some European original. 19 00:02:06,270 --> 00:02:20,070 But what interests me is not the story of teleological triumph, but rather that of reluctance and self-criticism in the history of nationalism. 20 00:02:20,760 --> 00:02:25,770 How can we think about nations that are actually premised upon the critique of nationalism itself, 21 00:02:27,540 --> 00:02:31,680 that are therefore critical in some sense, that do not naturalise it? 22 00:02:32,190 --> 00:02:40,259 And I think many postcolonial forms of national identity in Asia and Africa, 23 00:02:40,260 --> 00:02:50,219 in Latin America are of this kind in greater a greater or lesser degree that they that they the those who are 24 00:02:50,220 --> 00:02:56,160 called nationalists are already fully aware of the perils and pitfalls of nationalism as a political form. 25 00:02:56,160 --> 00:03:04,320 It's not simply that they want to just get what Europeans already have, apparently, and that, 26 00:03:05,160 --> 00:03:11,250 you know, unlike the sort of romantic form that nationalism often takes on the European continent, 27 00:03:11,760 --> 00:03:22,020 many of these national movements, the kind that I'm interested in, actually entirely unromantic, are prosaic, are almost instrumental. 28 00:03:23,040 --> 00:03:28,109 They don't necessarily have a great ideal or romance built into them. 29 00:03:28,110 --> 00:03:39,480 Sometimes they emerge almost out of a sense of necessity or or of out of a history in which no other option has remained available. 30 00:03:39,840 --> 00:03:44,280 So nationalism might not even be the first choice of many of these movements. 31 00:03:44,670 --> 00:03:52,110 Now, that is not to say that once this nation states are created, you don't have ideals, romances and all the rest of them built into them. 32 00:03:52,890 --> 00:03:59,430 But I'm interested in exploring history, which is not always and already about those categories. 33 00:04:00,540 --> 00:04:05,850 Even today you see such forms of nationalism. They're not simply historical survivals. 34 00:04:07,230 --> 00:04:15,690 One can look at different forms of national, new national movements in the EU, for instance, 35 00:04:16,380 --> 00:04:24,690 which are curious because they tend not to gesture towards the older virtues of nationalism, whether it is Scotland or Catalonia. 36 00:04:25,920 --> 00:04:32,760 Both presume the existence of the European Union for their existence, for their own existence. 37 00:04:33,330 --> 00:04:43,740 Both appear to be national forms that lack sovereignty or that resigned sovereignty to a kind of federal whole, you know, that share currency. 38 00:04:44,580 --> 00:04:49,080 So that lack many of the perquisites of classical national movements. 39 00:04:49,470 --> 00:04:53,940 And they are not necessarily terribly romantic either, right? 40 00:04:57,820 --> 00:05:01,330 With the Kurds today. Also, you might see this sort of thing happening. 41 00:05:01,660 --> 00:05:07,840 So if you look at the work of Abdullah Ă–calan, it's very interesting because it's premised upon the critique of nationalism. 42 00:05:07,870 --> 00:05:16,570 It's entirely anti nationalist. And he, of course, was a great reader of of all people, Benedict Anderson, who himself was a critic of nationalism. 43 00:05:16,960 --> 00:05:21,640 So here you have a Kurdish national movement which emerges out of the critique of nationalism, 44 00:05:21,790 --> 00:05:26,470 which doesn't want to constitute a nation state of any classical or romantic vintage. 45 00:05:26,980 --> 00:05:32,500 So these uncertain, self-critical forms of nation building, I want to argue, 46 00:05:32,740 --> 00:05:40,900 are not only true of the past, but are in a way ever more true of our own present and future, 47 00:05:41,530 --> 00:05:51,219 that it's that history that might be the more illuminating and important history in terms of the future of 48 00:05:51,220 --> 00:05:58,960 nationalism than the old story of triumphant modular or derivative nationalism that the historiography tells us. 49 00:05:59,110 --> 00:06:09,280 Right. And in many ways, Zionism is part of this self-critical, uncertain, doubtful history. 50 00:06:10,390 --> 00:06:19,510 Now, in in my book, I wasn't because I'm not qualified to really write about Zionism per se. 51 00:06:19,510 --> 00:06:24,790 But it was important for me because it was important for many of the figures I was writing about. 52 00:06:28,060 --> 00:06:37,719 In particular, those Muslims in British India who like Jews in Europe, who were constituted as a minority at a certain point, 53 00:06:37,720 --> 00:06:42,940 and of course the figure of the minority only becomes possible in a if not in a nation state, 54 00:06:42,940 --> 00:06:50,650 then in a kind of proto nationalist imagination, when numbers of this kind matter and numbers of this kind matter, when, 55 00:06:51,040 --> 00:06:58,960 as it were, elections, democracy and and procedures such as these which belong generally to nation states, matter. 56 00:06:59,320 --> 00:07:04,090 Otherwise, majorities of minorities are of no particular consequence in an aristocratic state. 57 00:07:04,090 --> 00:07:08,680 After all, a minority is a good thing to be because that minority rules. 58 00:07:09,460 --> 00:07:13,450 But in a nation state, a minority is not necessarily a good thing to be. 59 00:07:13,540 --> 00:07:19,599 Right. So the history of nationalism and the category of the minority as well as the majority are intertwined. 60 00:07:19,600 --> 00:07:28,870 I think one with the other. And the minority only becomes a political reality and a problem once you have a majority, a national majority, 61 00:07:29,050 --> 00:07:33,940 and therefore once you have a national imagination and whether it is Jews in Europe 62 00:07:35,050 --> 00:07:39,520 and indeed in other parts of the world include the Middle East or in this case, 63 00:07:39,760 --> 00:07:42,220 in the case I was working on Muslims in India, 64 00:07:42,640 --> 00:07:50,860 you have a sort of shared language to some degree and something of a shared imagination, which becomes clear when you realise, as I did, 65 00:07:51,640 --> 00:07:59,080 that many of the people who came to be called Muslim nationalists were drawing explicitly upon European Jewry, 66 00:07:59,080 --> 00:08:03,580 its culture and the thought of early Zionism in particular. 67 00:08:07,960 --> 00:08:13,150 So let me proceed to talk about British India and then I'll come back to say 68 00:08:13,150 --> 00:08:18,910 something about the links with European Jewry and with Zionism in particular. 69 00:08:19,900 --> 00:08:25,390 So what happens in India is two national movements emerge, at least two big ones anyway. 70 00:08:26,530 --> 00:08:35,680 One Indian nationalism. But also in a way, Hindu nationalism is tied to historical continuities and geographical unities. 71 00:08:36,270 --> 00:08:42,850 Right. So this idea that there is a continuity of history from ancient times into the present 72 00:08:43,120 --> 00:08:47,920 that makes the nation what it is and that the territory of the nation is already given. 73 00:08:49,270 --> 00:08:52,150 The history belongs to the territory, the people belong to the territory. 74 00:08:52,570 --> 00:09:02,650 The two are almost coeval and that's what gets to make the nation state in the other. 75 00:09:03,340 --> 00:09:06,760 And in what comes to be Pakistani nationalism. 76 00:09:06,760 --> 00:09:15,370 Neither of these two things is given that there is no historical continuity and there is no geographical unity either, 77 00:09:15,790 --> 00:09:20,109 because the only way in which Pakistan can be conceived of as a separate nation 78 00:09:20,110 --> 00:09:26,080 state is by denying those unities and those continuities by acknowledging them. 79 00:09:27,070 --> 00:09:31,000 A muslim nationalist could only be drawn back to the history of India. 80 00:09:31,510 --> 00:09:34,540 Right, and to some form of Indian nationalism. 81 00:09:35,770 --> 00:09:40,809 So they are quite distinctive ideologically and conceptually, even though they are often dealt with, 82 00:09:40,810 --> 00:09:45,879 as, you know, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, forms of national movement. 83 00:09:45,880 --> 00:09:49,780 You know, there is the Indian one and the Pakistani one or the Hindu one of the Muslim one. 84 00:09:49,990 --> 00:09:59,360 They are not. In many ways, Muslim nationalism, what comes to be called Pakistani nationalism, 85 00:09:59,370 --> 00:10:06,090 unlike Indian or Hindu nationalism, draws from a tradition that is not European and not romantic. 86 00:10:06,570 --> 00:10:17,370 But that is, if you will, a new world and enlightenment in its character. 87 00:10:18,510 --> 00:10:26,460 And I say this because Pakistan is conceived like a new world country as something completely new, right? 88 00:10:26,880 --> 00:10:36,510 As a new kind of settlement, something that has never existed before, that it has a history, of course, in terms of the history of Islam. 89 00:10:37,110 --> 00:10:43,290 But the history of Pakistan in the history of Islam are not coeval. Pakistan is a new entity. 90 00:10:44,820 --> 00:10:46,440 It's not a romantic one. 91 00:10:46,800 --> 00:10:57,750 There are no great paeans of, you know, nationalist prose or poetry which talk about the lengthy gestation or survival of this new nation. 92 00:10:59,010 --> 00:11:05,790 It doesn't exist. And you can see this indeed by its name as well as its territory. 93 00:11:06,030 --> 00:11:13,589 So the name Pakistan is like USA or USSR, an acronym, you know, P stands for Punjab, 94 00:11:13,590 --> 00:11:18,510 A for of Ghana, K for Kashmir, the s for sind and tarn for Baluchistan. 95 00:11:18,510 --> 00:11:24,030 Missing is Bengal, which became one half of Pakistan. 96 00:11:24,030 --> 00:11:28,860 East Pakistan. What is today? Bangladesh. It's a name that has no history. 97 00:11:29,220 --> 00:11:32,730 It's a completely new name. It doesn't gesture towards the past at all. 98 00:11:32,910 --> 00:11:47,250 There's nothing like it. Its territory came to be a curious amalgam because, of course, you may recall Pakistan was created in two wings. 99 00:11:47,820 --> 00:11:53,580 West Pakistan. What is today? Pakistan. And then a thousand miles away, east Pakistan. 100 00:11:54,600 --> 00:12:01,760 Now, Bangladesh also very unlikely for a nation state which is usually conceived of at least 101 00:12:01,770 --> 00:12:06,360 a European form of nation state as something that has territorial and sort of integrity. 102 00:12:06,630 --> 00:12:09,890 Right here, you don't have that. 103 00:12:09,900 --> 00:12:18,090 In fact, the only models I can think of of this kind of dispersed form of national territory are new world forms. 104 00:12:18,090 --> 00:12:22,829 The United States is like that. It has Alaska separated from it by all of Canada. 105 00:12:22,830 --> 00:12:26,010 It has, you know, Puerto Rico and Hawaii, etc. 106 00:12:27,000 --> 00:12:31,110 Of course, colonial powers, all colonial powers still have overseas territories, 107 00:12:31,410 --> 00:12:36,569 but they tend to be conceived of only in terms of their primary territory. 108 00:12:36,570 --> 00:12:47,610 In in Europe, in Western Europe, the short lived United Arab Republic was like this, bringing together Egypt and Syria right in Nasser's day. 109 00:12:47,730 --> 00:12:56,370 But there are very few such examples. So you have a kind of imperial example, a new world example, sorry, like the United States, 110 00:12:56,370 --> 00:13:06,150 but also a kind of imperial example because of these these colonial powers, some of which still retain overseas territories. 111 00:13:06,390 --> 00:13:10,440 And of course, the imperial states themselves were often scattered across the globe. 112 00:13:13,470 --> 00:13:19,200 And in some ways, therefore, I think Pakistan looks backwards to imperialism on the one hand, 113 00:13:21,720 --> 00:13:28,920 but also to new world models and to internationalist models for its. 114 00:13:31,270 --> 00:13:32,510 Status, right? 115 00:13:35,800 --> 00:13:45,130 And it does so not simply out of necessity, but because, as I said, it's built upon a fundamental critique of the nation, of the nation state itself. 116 00:13:49,160 --> 00:13:57,710 So that like many groups that had come to be defined as minorities but sought to make themselves into majorities or national majorities, 117 00:13:59,960 --> 00:14:10,250 Indian Muslim nationalists were highly dubious about majority defined nation states because they 118 00:14:10,250 --> 00:14:16,400 thought that they themselves had been or were the potential victims of one such majoritarian nation, 119 00:14:16,910 --> 00:14:24,500 India. And they looked to other populations, such as the Jews in Europe, but also, 120 00:14:25,400 --> 00:14:33,010 interestingly, Protestants in Ireland and Germans at the Sudetenland as models. 121 00:14:33,020 --> 00:14:36,800 And all these models are incompatible with each other in many ways, obviously. 122 00:14:37,100 --> 00:14:44,960 But they came together for Muslim nationalists when they are trying to think of themselves in an international context. 123 00:14:48,190 --> 00:15:03,850 And the other ways in which this international or imperial world is thought about as a way of as a site of escape from the nation state, in a way. 124 00:15:04,390 --> 00:15:07,990 All right. So just as I describe Catalonia and Scotland. 125 00:15:08,350 --> 00:15:17,350 But there are others as well that seek to construct nation states of a certain kind, but only within the context of a federal or international order, 126 00:15:18,550 --> 00:15:22,390 because they are themselves critical of the old fashioned ideal of the nation state. 127 00:15:22,420 --> 00:15:30,700 So to Muslims, nationalism sought to locate itself, you know, either in some version of the Muslim world itself modelled on the British Empire. 128 00:15:31,300 --> 00:15:36,250 You know, there's a new book on the category of the Muslim World by Jeremy Leyden, 129 00:15:36,610 --> 00:15:41,019 which makes this argument he doesn't make it as clearly as I would have liked him to. 130 00:15:41,020 --> 00:15:46,210 But because I think the idea of the Muslim world actually takes the British Empire in particular as its model. 131 00:15:47,320 --> 00:15:52,420 It's not any pre-modern empire because pre-modern Muslim empires tended to be contiguous territorially. 132 00:15:52,570 --> 00:15:57,420 They spread, but they were not dispersed all over the globe in the way that the Muslim world is. 133 00:15:57,430 --> 00:16:02,620 It's not an imperial idea. It's not from the Ottomans or the Abbasids or anything like that. 134 00:16:04,600 --> 00:16:08,230 But also the League of Nations, also the idea of a communist international. 135 00:16:08,750 --> 00:16:20,920 So there are many models which are actively referred to by these figures who who theorise and and make Muslim nationalism into a reality. 136 00:16:23,590 --> 00:16:25,659 And of course, they're critical about the Nation-State, 137 00:16:25,660 --> 00:16:33,910 precisely because they have been constructed within national imaginaries as a minority and therefore have become a problem. 138 00:16:34,270 --> 00:16:38,319 So in Europe, of course, this problem is or. 139 00:16:38,320 --> 00:16:44,229 QUESTION These are the two terms used. It's dominated by European Jewry, right? 140 00:16:44,230 --> 00:16:47,890 So there's a Jewish question or a Jewish problem. 141 00:16:48,580 --> 00:16:55,660 Both these terms question. The problem are also used for minorities in other parts of the world, on the Jewish, European, Jewish example. 142 00:16:56,230 --> 00:17:07,330 And Amir Mufti at UCLA has written an entire book called Enlightenment in the Colony on how it was that these categories, 143 00:17:07,330 --> 00:17:13,660 as they come to be developed in Western Europe or with European Jews at their centre, 144 00:17:13,900 --> 00:17:20,800 get transferred to other parts of the world and in particular to India and re-used there. 145 00:17:23,740 --> 00:17:32,860 Now, of course, Zionism, unlike Muslim nationalism, relies upon an old name, Israel. 146 00:17:33,440 --> 00:17:39,640 All right. And relies upon a long history to legitimise itself. 147 00:17:40,240 --> 00:17:48,010 On the other hand, I think if I'm correct, it's still in many of its variant forms, 148 00:17:48,610 --> 00:17:56,170 is very critical indeed of the European nation state within which it finds itself. 149 00:17:57,100 --> 00:18:02,290 All right. So here you have the creation of a new nation of a new nation state eventually. 150 00:18:02,560 --> 00:18:06,040 That is also critical about the national form. 151 00:18:06,880 --> 00:18:12,400 And, you know, I, I, I wonder if it's correct to say that. 152 00:18:15,220 --> 00:18:16,060 Well, I don't if it's correct, 153 00:18:16,060 --> 00:18:32,140 but I think that it's a it's too easy a flip to make an argument that Zionism simply gets to recapitulate what European nation states do in Palestine, 154 00:18:33,040 --> 00:18:39,790 that it's simply a kind of easy imitation or even more, that it's a kind of new world settler colony unproblematic. 155 00:18:40,270 --> 00:18:46,870 I think the huge debates and discussions and moments of self-criticism, 156 00:18:46,870 --> 00:18:51,400 indeed structural self-criticism in their criticism of the idea of the nation state, 157 00:18:51,940 --> 00:19:01,300 which makes it like Muslim nationalism and other forms of nation making in the post-colonial world quite different from any European original. 158 00:19:04,300 --> 00:19:13,030 Now, the way in which in South Asia this could, the way in which this criticism manifests itself is very interesting. 159 00:19:13,030 --> 00:19:24,310 And it's not only among Muslims. So Gandhi early in his career is very interested in thinking about the British Empire as. 160 00:19:27,260 --> 00:19:30,290 A new kind of global political form, 161 00:19:31,730 --> 00:19:43,110 which would redeem the British and British history in the East entirely if it were to be democratised and he thought what you would have. 162 00:19:43,130 --> 00:19:50,300 In a way, it's the earliest, one of the earliest and most virile, if I can use that word. 163 00:19:50,690 --> 00:19:55,670 Ideas of what came to be the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is a pale reflection in comparison. 164 00:19:55,910 --> 00:19:58,100 So he thought that if you democratise the British Empire. 165 00:19:58,760 --> 00:20:02,720 Well, first of all, of course, India would take central centre stage because of its population. 166 00:20:03,590 --> 00:20:08,149 But secondly, what this would mean is that there could be no majority or a minority in such 167 00:20:08,150 --> 00:20:14,209 a political entity because it was too vast and diverse to be conceptualise 168 00:20:14,210 --> 00:20:22,100 in terms of majorities and minorities that you would get rid of the problem of majority of the minorities altogether in this global configuration. 169 00:20:25,990 --> 00:20:31,740 His Muslim compatriots also tended to think along these lines, though for different reasons. 170 00:20:31,750 --> 00:20:35,079 They were not interested in the same kinds of, you know, 171 00:20:35,080 --> 00:20:43,090 anti statist and non-violent political forms as Gandhi was, but nevertheless, they share a language. 172 00:20:43,960 --> 00:20:49,120 So, for instance, the Aga Khan, who was the first president of the All-india Muslim League, 173 00:20:50,470 --> 00:20:54,340 was equally interested in this way of transforming the empire. 174 00:20:56,320 --> 00:21:05,140 And he also was one, one of the earliest Muslim nationalist figures to actually draw up on Zionism as a more explicitly as a model. 175 00:21:05,590 --> 00:21:14,350 So he had gone on behalf of, I think, the Baron, Edmond de Rothschild, who was his friend to the Sultan in Constantinople, 176 00:21:14,350 --> 00:21:24,710 to plead the cause of the of Herzl, basically of the early Zionists, and to ask the Sultan to set aside Palestine for Jewish immigration. 177 00:21:25,120 --> 00:21:28,170 Here was the president of the All-india Muslim League. All right. 178 00:21:28,300 --> 00:21:29,260 Meeting the sultan. 179 00:21:29,560 --> 00:21:39,700 And his argument, it's very interesting because, of course, he knew and not just in London, but also in India, a number of early Zionists. 180 00:21:40,090 --> 00:21:45,070 He sympathised with them. He, after all, was himself part of a minority in India. 181 00:21:45,850 --> 00:21:53,410 He thought that Palestine set aside for Jewish migration would be simply another version of 182 00:21:54,130 --> 00:21:59,440 the the migration of Circassians into the Ottoman Empire and their supplement in Transjordan. 183 00:21:59,470 --> 00:22:04,930 He uses that example. He recommends to the Sultan, who was not so interested in the end, 184 00:22:06,880 --> 00:22:13,060 but also is also interested after the First World War in setting aside German East Africa for Indian settlement. 185 00:22:13,240 --> 00:22:20,040 So it's not you know, it's a it's a how should I put it, a generalised logic. 186 00:22:20,050 --> 00:22:23,590 It's not a specific logic. It's not about Muslims or Jews. 187 00:22:24,100 --> 00:22:27,730 It's a it's a way of thinking about the political future. Right. 188 00:22:28,870 --> 00:22:37,960 And in all these ways, he's trading both on sort of imperial forms of political accommodation by the Ottoman or British, 189 00:22:38,290 --> 00:22:44,589 but also internationalist ones. He ends up after the First World War as India's representative for the League of Nations 190 00:22:44,590 --> 00:22:48,940 and eventually arises in the 1930s to become president of the League of Nations. 191 00:22:49,180 --> 00:22:56,020 So here is a man who belongs both in the old empire, but also in the new international order simultaneously. 192 00:22:56,210 --> 00:22:59,590 Right. Not accidentally. He's thinking along these lines. 193 00:22:59,920 --> 00:23:04,270 He can have a conversation with Gandhi about them, about this way of thinking. 194 00:23:04,270 --> 00:23:07,840 And Gandhi has his own way of considering the empire. 195 00:23:08,130 --> 00:23:15,970 Right. And of course, Theodor Herzl and the early scientists also thought along these lines, 196 00:23:16,930 --> 00:23:22,209 you know, how would you actually produce a Jewish homeland, etc., in the Ottoman Empire? 197 00:23:22,210 --> 00:23:27,640 Or as our entire Aaron would argue, as late as the 1940s, you know, 198 00:23:27,640 --> 00:23:35,830 a British imperial state within which Jews could have a national home and like 199 00:23:35,830 --> 00:23:40,060 the Indian Muslims had argued much earlier or Gandhi had argued much earlier. 200 00:23:40,090 --> 00:23:43,280 Get rid of the categories, minority and majority altogether. Right. 201 00:23:43,300 --> 00:23:52,510 So it's this is these are not just ideas coming from European Jewry and going to the east, but they return as well in some fashion. 202 00:23:55,240 --> 00:24:02,590 The invocation of European Jewry then begins here with the problem or question posed by new minorities, especially after the First World War, 203 00:24:02,590 --> 00:24:10,960 with the creation of all these new nation states in Europe, but also, as I mentioned, with the Germans of Sudeten land, the Irish Protestants, etc. 204 00:24:11,080 --> 00:24:18,820 Right. Whereas Indian nationalism refers to the non-citizen Germans and to the Irish godless. 205 00:24:18,910 --> 00:24:22,870 Right. So they take different sides on each of these conflicts. 206 00:24:26,890 --> 00:24:31,810 By the time you get to the 1940s, and indeed even from the late 1930s, 207 00:24:33,970 --> 00:24:40,060 Zionism comes to you know, comes to produce actual political categories for the Muslim League. 208 00:24:40,420 --> 00:24:50,500 Right. So the idea of a national home on the one hand and then later on how this is replaced by the of a national state. 209 00:24:50,950 --> 00:25:00,879 All right. Both somewhat undefined and a famous Indian political thinker and political figure, Dr. Ambedkar, 210 00:25:00,880 --> 00:25:07,060 who ends up being one of the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, is the one who points this out in the middle 1940s. 211 00:25:07,420 --> 00:25:10,239 How it is, how curious it is that Muslim nationalism, 212 00:25:10,240 --> 00:25:19,000 eventually Pakistani nationalism ends up using Zionist categories for itself almost deliberately. 213 00:25:19,240 --> 00:25:22,090 All right. Now, both. 214 00:25:24,870 --> 00:25:35,670 For many of these Muslim nationalists, both Jewish internationalism and Jewish nationalism or Zionism, serve as models of different kinds. 215 00:25:39,360 --> 00:25:44,640 They are very interested in Jewish internationalism because they conceive of themselves as being part of an international community, 216 00:25:45,480 --> 00:25:57,210 the Muslim world, and they don't want to hive off Pakistan what comes to be Pakistan as a nation state simply among other nation states. 217 00:25:57,270 --> 00:26:01,140 You know, it's part of some larger entity, which is international. 218 00:26:04,710 --> 00:26:11,470 But of course, they're also afraid of what happens to non-national forms of identification. 219 00:26:12,480 --> 00:26:21,780 Whereas these internationalist and imperial models were the imperial model was very popular before the First World War, 220 00:26:21,780 --> 00:26:25,500 after the first word goes out of fashion for clear, obvious reasons. 221 00:26:26,400 --> 00:26:30,540 Between the first and the Second World Wars, the internationalist model seems to hold sway. 222 00:26:31,380 --> 00:26:40,620 Equally understandable because of the League of Nations. But with the Second World War, it now seems that neither of those two are available. 223 00:26:41,010 --> 00:26:43,470 Right. That's. And Pakistan becomes a kind of reality. 224 00:26:43,740 --> 00:26:51,180 Perhaps that's also when Israel becomes a certain kind of political reality for exactly the same reason. 225 00:26:53,190 --> 00:27:00,000 So what I want to do is read just to give you a flavour of this way of thinking of this comparison. 226 00:27:01,110 --> 00:27:12,240 Read some sections of a very famous epic poem by the poet, the Indian poet, now considered the spiritual founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal. 227 00:27:13,230 --> 00:27:15,920 Hugely consequential all over the Muslim world, 228 00:27:15,930 --> 00:27:23,250 actually wrote in Persian and Urdu and was a philosopher as much as a poet and crucial to Pakistani nationalism. 229 00:27:25,170 --> 00:27:28,530 And here is this is quite early from 1918. 230 00:27:28,530 --> 00:27:32,639 So the end towards the end of the First World War from a work called Ramsay. 231 00:27:32,640 --> 00:27:37,500 Basically the mysteries of selflessness. Where he's writing about. 232 00:27:41,390 --> 00:27:45,170 You know, the European Jews and the idea of Jewish internationalism. 233 00:27:47,960 --> 00:27:51,890 And for Yakov sake, I can read it a bit out in Persian. Do I have time, please? 234 00:27:52,040 --> 00:27:56,420 Yeah. And. And then the translation. 235 00:27:57,140 --> 00:28:00,650 It brought us all to Israel. Dear God. Mossad. 236 00:28:00,650 --> 00:28:04,580 Who's got it? Who? Nagar, Sathya, John and Nazario Nagar. 237 00:28:05,810 --> 00:28:10,040 Who? Get on set us down. And I call you Sanjay. 238 00:28:10,040 --> 00:28:15,859 Suddenly, though, you see my Aigoo Pandya guys doing Q and good ish. 239 00:28:15,860 --> 00:28:24,620 PRASHAD Y'all got a mouthful. Haroon Ahmad as nearby optician ish MATHEWS Like in that scene is done Dada What happens 240 00:28:25,010 --> 00:28:30,170 is I'm Cajun jammy as Hampshire cast juice bar head off the guy and Mahmood in the 241 00:28:30,180 --> 00:28:35,270 spot So take warning He's addressing his Muslim audience Take warning from the Israeli 242 00:28:35,270 --> 00:28:41,450 to case consider well there are variable fate now what now called regard the obduracy, 243 00:28:41,660 --> 00:28:46,879 the hardness of their spare and tenuous soul sluggishly flows the blood within their veins, 244 00:28:46,880 --> 00:28:51,980 their furrowed brow so smitten on the stones of porticos 100 though heaven's 245 00:28:51,980 --> 00:28:56,330 grip hath Preston squeezed their grape the memory of Moses and Aron liberty. 246 00:28:56,330 --> 00:29:01,549 Yet, and though their ardent song had lost its flame still palpitating the breath 247 00:29:01,550 --> 00:29:05,630 within their breast for when the fabric of their nationhood was rent asunder, 248 00:29:05,930 --> 00:29:09,559 they still they laboured on to keep the high road of their forefathers. 249 00:29:09,560 --> 00:29:14,360 Right. So this is this it's a warning. It's a gesture of admiration. 250 00:29:15,200 --> 00:29:18,560 Right. And there's another I'll skip the Persian on this. 251 00:29:19,070 --> 00:29:25,160 Take heed once again, enlightened Muslim by the tragic fate of Moses, people who, 252 00:29:25,160 --> 00:29:30,860 when they gave up their focus from their grasp, the thread was snapped that bound their congregation each to each. 253 00:29:32,000 --> 00:29:37,760 That nation nurtured up upon the breast of God's apostles, and aware of the part, was privy to the secrets of the whole. 254 00:29:38,180 --> 00:29:42,980 Suddenly smitten by the hand of time, poured out its lifeblood in slow agony. 255 00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:49,610 The tendrils of its vine are withered now, nor even any willow weeping grows more from its soil. 256 00:29:49,910 --> 00:29:54,470 Exile has robbed its tongue of common speech, dead the lamenting moth. 257 00:29:54,950 --> 00:29:58,520 My poor dust trembles at its history. There's more of the thing. 258 00:29:58,610 --> 00:30:07,429 So you know, what's interesting, of course, is on the one hand, this idea of the tenacity, you know, the unity of a dispersed group, 259 00:30:07,430 --> 00:30:17,930 on the other hand, the fear that actually that the the the ties that make for that unity internationally outside the nation state will have snapped, 260 00:30:18,320 --> 00:30:23,240 you know, and that there's nothing left, there's no common language, you know, 261 00:30:23,440 --> 00:30:32,300 the muck circles around the flame, which is a stereotypical kind of poetic trope in Persian, in Urdu, etc. 262 00:30:33,110 --> 00:30:38,150 Now, it's nothing less than extraordinary that a writer in Persian and Urdu, 263 00:30:39,050 --> 00:30:44,180 you know, penned such fairly lengthy descriptions of the fate of the European Jews. 264 00:30:44,180 --> 00:30:52,560 And he can only do so because as an Indian Muslim who identifies with it and offers this example to his readers. 265 00:30:52,800 --> 00:31:00,170 Right. And this, of course, is not at all in contradiction with the fact that such people would have been anti-Zionist. 266 00:31:00,580 --> 00:31:02,840 All right. They can take example. 267 00:31:03,800 --> 00:31:14,120 They can model themselves on Zionism and they can take an example, an admiring example, make an example of Jews, and they can still be anti-Zionist. 268 00:31:14,720 --> 00:31:18,800 And so one has to rethink one's idea of intimacy and enmity. 269 00:31:18,890 --> 00:31:33,590 Yeah. So let me come to the end here just to suggest, to ask what happens then when these two nation states, in this case, 270 00:31:33,590 --> 00:31:39,620 Pakistan and Israel, come into being one immediately after the other and one with a precedent of the other? 271 00:31:39,620 --> 00:31:43,519 Because, as you know, Pakistan is created in 1947. 272 00:31:43,520 --> 00:31:51,530 And when Israel comes into existence at the United Nations in 1948, the creation of Pakistan is taken as a as a legal precedent for that of Israel. 273 00:31:51,860 --> 00:32:01,070 Because of Pakistan. You also have the creation of a nation state on the basis of a religious slash ethnic identity. 274 00:32:03,410 --> 00:32:14,900 It was therefore ironic, but not surprising that the anti-Israel charge of the United Nations was led by the Pakistani ambassador there, Chaudhry. 275 00:32:16,130 --> 00:32:21,890 Also Muhammad Zafar Larsen, who himself was from a much smaller minority called Ahmadis, 276 00:32:21,890 --> 00:32:26,570 who were eventually ostracised by the Pakistani state that he himself represented. 277 00:32:26,990 --> 00:32:32,510 So you can get minorities all the way down. In other words, you know, there's no none that is actually given as a singularity. 278 00:32:35,090 --> 00:32:40,820 The problem, in a way, one of the problems is whether and this you can see in the early work. 279 00:32:40,970 --> 00:32:49,459 Leo Strauss, for instance, where he asks, you know, is Judaism to lose its character as a philosophy, 280 00:32:49,460 --> 00:32:54,860 as a theology, as a religion, if you will, and simply become the dark matter of nationhood? 281 00:32:55,130 --> 00:32:58,220 Is it simply to be what is given to the nation state? 282 00:32:58,730 --> 00:33:03,160 It could be anything. It could be language, it could be race, it could be. 283 00:33:03,170 --> 00:33:06,350 But it just happens to be Judaism, which is reduced to those things. 284 00:33:06,890 --> 00:33:11,690 Or will Judaism actually take over the nation state? The same question is asked of Pakistan. 285 00:33:13,670 --> 00:33:19,219 And there have been similar ways of dealing with that question or that problem. 286 00:33:19,220 --> 00:33:25,730 So the those two old terms. But should the problem come back to these postcolonial states and in the new fashion, 287 00:33:26,720 --> 00:33:34,700 will Islam simply be what is given the dark matter that makes Pakistani nationalism or a majority form of nationalism, 288 00:33:34,700 --> 00:33:38,240 which can also include Hindus, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews, others? 289 00:33:38,810 --> 00:33:41,000 Or will it actually end up being ideologies? 290 00:33:41,090 --> 00:33:51,860 Can a theological or let's say, a religious identity survive unscathed within the nation state of which it is meant to form a constituent part? 291 00:33:52,250 --> 00:33:57,709 Or will it be willy nilly pressed into the service of the state and defined only by the state? 292 00:33:57,710 --> 00:34:01,640 And Iqbal had that worry. Even in that latter quotation I read from him. 293 00:34:02,210 --> 00:34:06,470 Right. So without a nation state, the Jews are dispersed. 294 00:34:07,040 --> 00:34:15,290 But with it, what's going to happen? All right. The same question he has about Muslim nationalism, because Iqbal is also a critic of the nation state. 295 00:34:15,290 --> 00:34:21,590 He doesn't like nation states, but you opt for one as well. Nevertheless, right in this negative way. 296 00:34:22,880 --> 00:34:31,550 So, you know, in both countries, then the religious element, if you will, comes to dominate the nation state, 297 00:34:31,550 --> 00:34:38,810 though perhaps in a perverse way, because it's difficult to identify it either purely theologically or religiously, 298 00:34:38,810 --> 00:34:48,350 if you want to use that term or philosophically, you know, and it dominated in a simultaneously national way, 299 00:34:48,350 --> 00:34:51,710 but also still internationally, that continues to be there. 300 00:34:52,430 --> 00:34:58,400 In a way. It's the tail end of that international or an imperial way of conceiving, of belonging, 301 00:34:58,580 --> 00:35:03,510 of political belonging that had been fashionable in the period before the First World War, 302 00:35:03,510 --> 00:35:07,850 and to some degree even in the period between the wars with Pakistan. 303 00:35:07,850 --> 00:35:14,809 Of course, this idea of innocence, of pain, Islamism or the Muslim world with Zionism, it is the idea of, 304 00:35:14,810 --> 00:35:19,790 if you will, a Jewish world, though that's not a common term, but certainly of the diaspora, the Jewish diaspora. 305 00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:26,270 Right. And in both cases, of course, the the notional boundaries of the nation state, the belonging, 306 00:35:26,270 --> 00:35:30,860 the geographical belonging of that is supposed to characterise nation states is 307 00:35:32,600 --> 00:35:38,959 detracted from by the fact that Jews anywhere can come and become Israeli citizens. 308 00:35:38,960 --> 00:35:45,230 They don't have to passport, they can belong to any language group, etc., and come and be citizens from somewhere else. 309 00:35:45,590 --> 00:35:51,770 Similarly, at least notionally, Muslims from all over the subcontinent can come and become Pakistani citizens, 310 00:35:51,770 --> 00:35:58,790 even if they're not from the area that constitutes a Pakistan. 311 00:35:59,180 --> 00:36:10,190 So even when they are made into nation states, that old world of the international and the imperial survives in some attenuated fashion to disrupt, 312 00:36:11,750 --> 00:36:20,210 even in their modern, even in their most nationalistic forms, the very idea and structure of the nation state by which. 313 00:36:25,460 --> 00:36:37,150 We open for question comments. As Professor Schneider and I begin by asking you a question from the last 314 00:36:37,150 --> 00:36:47,980 point you made about the similarity between the creation of Pakistan in 1947. 315 00:36:48,540 --> 00:37:00,939 You've been some articles written comparing the partition of India to the partition of Palestine, 316 00:37:00,940 --> 00:37:07,450 which happened in the same year when the U.N. passed the partition resolution in 1947. 317 00:37:08,110 --> 00:37:13,480 But the comparisons that I've come across were from the perspective of the British Empire. 318 00:37:13,510 --> 00:37:24,880 Mm hmm. Well, the most obvious parallel is that when British imperialism came to a dead end in a country. 319 00:37:27,680 --> 00:37:35,840 The game wasn't worth the candle. The solution was to cut and run and partition the country. 320 00:37:35,870 --> 00:37:40,520 This is what they did in India. This is what they did in Palestine. 321 00:37:41,240 --> 00:37:50,300 And Palestine was unique in the history of the British Empire in that there was no orderly transfer of power to a new authority. 322 00:37:50,540 --> 00:38:03,290 The British just cut and run. But this is irrelevant to you because you're interested in the notion of nationalism. 323 00:38:05,010 --> 00:38:17,050 And can you elaborate on that? On the similarity between the creation of Pakistan and the creation of of Israel, from your perspective? 324 00:38:17,450 --> 00:38:21,950 Yeah, I mean, I think you're right, of course. And Ireland is the answer to the original sin of partition. 325 00:38:22,040 --> 00:38:26,660 But that became the legal model for both Palestine and Pakistan. 326 00:38:28,070 --> 00:38:36,100 And, of course, partitions have occurred since then. You know, in the Balkans and, you know, after the Bosnian war in Sudan and, you know, 327 00:38:36,380 --> 00:38:41,030 you know, in a way, they are in their modern way, in in their modern form. 328 00:38:41,030 --> 00:38:46,520 They are a result of British imperial policy. 329 00:38:48,080 --> 00:38:56,240 And so they are many more places than we normally take into account, including very recent cases that I think should be brought into that history, 330 00:38:57,560 --> 00:38:59,780 even if it's not only the British were doing it this time, 331 00:38:59,780 --> 00:39:09,830 it's been made into a kind of part of international law like blockades, which are also a very nice British naval invention. 332 00:39:10,160 --> 00:39:15,920 You know, sanctions and blockades. And these come out of British imperial history and have not become part of international law. 333 00:39:16,040 --> 00:39:20,270 Right. So the the British element of those things needs to be stated. 334 00:39:20,390 --> 00:39:24,050 And partitions, of course, are one of these elements. 335 00:39:24,710 --> 00:39:34,580 I mean, you're right, of course, that there is no transition of transfer of power, as it was known, and there was cut and run, it seems. 336 00:39:34,880 --> 00:39:37,250 It seems there was an India to some degree as well, 337 00:39:37,280 --> 00:39:45,890 because even though there was a formal transfer of power, British troops were withdrawn or disbanded. 338 00:39:46,880 --> 00:39:58,580 Very few plans were made to actually deal with what ended up being a kind of overwhelming mass of refugees and very brutal violence. 339 00:39:59,060 --> 00:40:09,380 So say about ten or 12 million people moved in the partition of India and, you know, probably about 3 million killed. 340 00:40:09,800 --> 00:40:16,370 So these are sizeable numbers, you know, and you can count them as being as a part of the Second World War itself. 341 00:40:16,760 --> 00:40:24,260 This happened in 1947. Right. So it's if we extend the dating of the war, you can bring those people in there as well, 342 00:40:24,260 --> 00:40:32,480 because it's also part of the history of the war and the new role Britain was meant to play in the post-war, in the post-war world. 343 00:40:32,780 --> 00:40:40,970 But what might be interesting is to note how the Indian Muslim nationalists actually dealt with the partition of Palestine. 344 00:40:41,000 --> 00:40:53,290 It's fascinating. They had been involved from quite early days with it, you know, in a kind of pro-Palestinian sense, obviously pro-Arab way, 345 00:40:54,280 --> 00:41:06,160 but in a fashion that displays what I was describing a that, if you will, the inert ambiguity of the of Muslim nationalism itself. 346 00:41:06,670 --> 00:41:10,930 So even during the Palestine conflict in the 1935 or you know, 347 00:41:10,930 --> 00:41:21,000 you have a strong presence of and you will know more about this than I do clearly of Indians there as long as the British Empire, 348 00:41:21,010 --> 00:41:28,600 as long as the British continue to hold India, Indian Muslims and Indians generally have a disproportionate voice in Middle Eastern politics, 349 00:41:28,780 --> 00:41:33,220 because, of course, the Indian army was used in the Middle East and Africa. 350 00:41:34,120 --> 00:41:42,040 The British were worried about uprisings in India and the moment as if Pakistan became independent. 351 00:41:42,040 --> 00:41:50,499 India. Pakistan became independent. The the power of India and of Indian Muslims in particular was smashed in international can. 352 00:41:50,500 --> 00:41:57,460 The international order, which is an extraordinary thing where independence results in weakness rather than strength in this country, not at least, 353 00:41:58,000 --> 00:42:06,010 but the the Indian Muslims who were who partook and they partook of the Palestinian of 354 00:42:06,010 --> 00:42:10,180 the Palestine Conference and in the supposed negotiations over the future of Palestine, 355 00:42:10,480 --> 00:42:16,960 in many different capacities, on the one hand, working with the British very closely in a point at the Afghan itself was sort of, 356 00:42:17,140 --> 00:42:23,470 you know, by the Viceroy or the, you know, and on the other hand, you know, emerging out of mass movements in India. 357 00:42:24,070 --> 00:42:28,160 But when they are speaking to the Arabs, it's a fascinating story they tell. 358 00:42:28,360 --> 00:42:32,860 So if you read someone like Chopra Chronicles a man who was an important member of 359 00:42:32,860 --> 00:42:37,180 the Muslim League who has actually written his account of the Indian negotiators, 360 00:42:38,050 --> 00:42:42,730 they tell the Palestinians to accept a single state in Palestine. 361 00:42:44,230 --> 00:42:49,330 And the Palestinians say to them, But you want partition, you want the partition of India. 362 00:42:49,330 --> 00:42:53,980 Why are you asking us to have a single state with Jews and Arabs? 363 00:42:54,370 --> 00:43:00,670 And they say to him, they say the Indian Muslims say to their Palestinian interlocutors, but you don't understand. 364 00:43:01,390 --> 00:43:09,460 We in India in the position of the Jews, you in Palestine and the position of the Hindus, you know, you will be a majority. 365 00:43:10,000 --> 00:43:16,060 And once you get to a nation state, you can in a purely democratic way, stop Jewish migration or, you know, 366 00:43:16,150 --> 00:43:24,700 form formulate the citizenship laws of Israel or whatever Palestine, whatever the countries to be called in such a way as to maintain your majority. 367 00:43:24,700 --> 00:43:31,149 As long as you have a majority, you are fine. And indeed to have a Jewish population in Palestine is a good thing for Palestine and a good thing for, 368 00:43:31,150 --> 00:43:36,729 you know, to figure out so that capable of actually moving beyond themselves, 369 00:43:36,730 --> 00:43:44,350 rising outside their own identities, to actually take the position as they explicitly was like the Jews of India. 370 00:43:44,530 --> 00:43:51,790 We understand exactly what that means. And, you know, you are the Hindus, you the Muslims, the Christians are the Hindus. 371 00:43:52,390 --> 00:44:00,380 So they're using Indian categories to actually think about Palestine, you know, Middle Eastern realities in a way that you can just switch. 372 00:44:00,400 --> 00:44:05,050 It's like a game of musical chairs. You can literally put yourself in the identity of someone else. 373 00:44:05,800 --> 00:44:09,160 So there is a deliberate way in which they are comparing the partitions, 374 00:44:09,520 --> 00:44:15,880 but not in the fashion that you would imagine that even at that moment when they are strongly anti-Zionist, 375 00:44:16,690 --> 00:44:23,499 they actually are capable of of thinking intimately with Zionism because they 376 00:44:23,500 --> 00:44:26,840 know exactly what it is since they are model themselves on it for many years. 377 00:44:27,820 --> 00:44:29,050 This is really interesting. 378 00:44:30,040 --> 00:44:41,230 Can you can you say something more specific about in what sense was the creation of Pakistan precedent for the creation of Israel? 379 00:44:41,470 --> 00:44:47,260 I think it was it was it was mentioned that you it was brought up at the U.N. as a kind 380 00:44:47,260 --> 00:44:51,640 of because it had only it had only been created not so long ago out of a partition, 381 00:44:51,760 --> 00:44:59,319 after all. So both the partition is of Palestine is justified because of that of India. 382 00:44:59,320 --> 00:45:05,440 That has happened and also because it was the making of a religio national state for a minority. 383 00:45:05,440 --> 00:45:09,069 Is justified in Palestine is justified because of what happened in India. 384 00:45:09,070 --> 00:45:16,750 I don't think it's it's you know, it's part of the debate and the discussion and it's basically torn in the face of the Pakistani ambassador. 385 00:45:17,920 --> 00:45:25,600 So it's overtaken, as you know, basically, again, it's another example of the strange intimacy and of enmity. 386 00:45:25,600 --> 00:45:32,229 You know, it's like, okay, you don't want to you don't want Israel, but you have Pakistan on the same principle. 387 00:45:32,230 --> 00:45:42,550 How can you possibly deny Israel? Right. So both the Pakistanis or the Muslim nationalists and the international community fully seems to realise. 388 00:45:42,870 --> 00:45:46,500 The intimacies that exist between Zionism and Muslim nationalism. 389 00:45:47,490 --> 00:45:51,510 The Arab representatives don't, and they are not so keen on Pakistan. 390 00:45:51,510 --> 00:46:00,480 They're actually more keen on India, you know, which they see as the true model of the offer of a nation, of a post-colonial nation state. 391 00:46:00,750 --> 00:46:06,299 So in that way and in others, Pakistan, it gets to be really a you know, it stands, 392 00:46:06,300 --> 00:46:13,770 as it were, in a tangential relationship with the Arab world and the world of Islam, 393 00:46:15,420 --> 00:46:22,020 even though it is at this point the biggest Muslim country in the world, the most populous Muslim country in the world, 394 00:46:22,590 --> 00:46:30,149 and militarily, one of the more powerful ones and the one championing Palestinian rights. 395 00:46:30,150 --> 00:46:37,590 And yet it can only do so from a position that is, if you will, Zionist was the question. 396 00:46:38,070 --> 00:46:48,000 Well, thank you very much, both of you personally. And when you mentioned the religious appeal, the trans Islamic or trans Muslim religious appeal, 397 00:46:48,600 --> 00:47:02,330 do you understand from the ideologues point of view is is this primarily a religious or is it cultural in some sense, or is it a combination of both? 398 00:47:02,340 --> 00:47:15,959 And the reason I ask, because although Zionism as a putative basis in the Bible and religion or Judaism in early Zionism, 399 00:47:15,960 --> 00:47:21,720 certainly that that's a minority faction of a struggle to start, but it quickly becomes a minority. 400 00:47:21,930 --> 00:47:31,709 And what really becomes strong is, is the cultural, the kind of secular cultural faction, because most Jews, certainly in Europe, are secular Jews. 401 00:47:31,710 --> 00:47:36,090 And the religious appeal really wouldn't ring strong on their ears. 402 00:47:36,090 --> 00:47:41,160 So we've got to hand it to other people who for the big cultural Zionist and then of course, political Zionism. 403 00:47:41,550 --> 00:47:48,960 So even even though it's in the picture and the thing is and it actually practically speaking, it's not is as big as it seem. 404 00:47:48,970 --> 00:47:53,130 I'm wondering if there's a parallel or a big difference in your case? 405 00:47:53,460 --> 00:48:04,740 No, there's a striking parallel because in a way, Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, he's the kind of archetypical secular figure, 406 00:48:05,160 --> 00:48:13,080 not religious, not practising, in any case, from a heretical Shia, heretical by majority-Muslim standards, heretical Shiite sect. 407 00:48:13,740 --> 00:48:18,180 You know, he's not even a majority in terms of this is another example of a minority school. 408 00:48:18,330 --> 00:48:26,460 You can split any minority into more minorities, any majority to minorities, never known to practice religion, 409 00:48:27,810 --> 00:48:32,590 you know, publicly drinking alcohol, you know, eating ham sandwiches and sausages. 410 00:48:32,970 --> 00:48:36,450 But this is not a there's no element of practice almost at all, 411 00:48:36,450 --> 00:48:40,200 even though retrospectively now, of course, in Pakistan, you have to say that Jinnah was, 412 00:48:40,200 --> 00:48:44,279 in fact a practising Muslim and his official portraits are all in, you know, 413 00:48:44,280 --> 00:48:50,459 as it were, Eastern, if you will, because it's not Muslim, but Indian dress is. 414 00:48:50,460 --> 00:48:53,100 In fact, he wore Savile Row suits most of his life. 415 00:48:54,330 --> 00:48:59,970 And for him, just like with Ben-Gurion and others, the problem is precisely this What do you do with religion? 416 00:49:01,590 --> 00:49:09,180 He might himself be perfectly secular. So what you make of this thing, this Islam, that gives these people a national identity. 417 00:49:10,530 --> 00:49:19,380 And what he tries to do is, as it was spiritualised it completely so that it becomes nothing more than a set of inspirations or ideals. 418 00:49:19,770 --> 00:49:22,980 It can be reduced simply to that. So reduce to. 419 00:49:24,270 --> 00:49:27,810 But when you reduce things to that level, they become entirely generic. 420 00:49:28,170 --> 00:49:29,760 There's no specificity left in them. 421 00:49:30,180 --> 00:49:35,920 So, for instance, to say, oh, you know, Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood, that's well, you know, other people have brotherhood as well. 422 00:49:36,000 --> 00:49:45,330 Right? Equal egalitarianism. But that's not unique to Muslims if indeed it is even specific, even if it didn't need even characterises them, 423 00:49:47,430 --> 00:49:50,640 you know, all of these kinds of entirely anodyne and generic things. 424 00:49:51,180 --> 00:50:00,360 So he's unable to really do you can only sacrifice the specificity of both Judaism or Islam by reducing them to these sorts of things. 425 00:50:00,720 --> 00:50:06,060 So in the end, you have to bring back, even if in a purely symbolic way, you know, 426 00:50:06,060 --> 00:50:14,790 whether it is elements of architecture or are a menorah or whatever, you know, things that become national symbols, right? 427 00:50:15,240 --> 00:50:25,200 A star or in this case, a crescent in a star, you know, apparently deprived of any serious religious significance, but always there, 428 00:50:25,200 --> 00:50:32,520 you know, always available for appropriation by others who might be more religious, as is true now both in Israel and Pakistan. 429 00:50:33,030 --> 00:50:40,710 So I think that's, you know, it's a problem that vexes them, as I said, both someone like Ben-Gurion and Jinnah from very early days. 430 00:50:41,220 --> 00:50:49,890 And they are afraid. That you will have a kind of more intensely religious development occurring. 431 00:50:50,340 --> 00:50:53,549 And this is something Leo Strauss had actually mentioned in his early works. 432 00:50:53,550 --> 00:51:00,330 You know, it was it continued to be a problem, a new kind of problem in a way that it wasn't for other kinds of nation states. 433 00:51:02,070 --> 00:51:10,320 But what China does is even more curious, because he for him, there's he's so worried about this in a way, 434 00:51:10,320 --> 00:51:18,810 and he's so critical of the idea of the nation state that the Pakistani nation state has no quandt almost no contact at all. 435 00:51:19,380 --> 00:51:24,150 You know, as I said, they have to reject the language of history. He doesn't like history at all. 436 00:51:24,150 --> 00:51:30,480 He just condemns, you know, even the Mughal Empire and all the great Muslim empires of the past and India as a threat, 437 00:51:30,630 --> 00:51:34,590 you would have thought that he'd gesture towards this great, great and glorious past. 438 00:51:35,070 --> 00:51:37,940 He doesn't. He compared the Mughal Empire to the British Empire with it. 439 00:51:37,980 --> 00:51:43,110 You know, when empires is not the same as another, he's not interested in the great and glorious history of Islam. 440 00:51:45,270 --> 00:51:52,080 He for him, Muslim nationalism is a completely negative thing, you know, in a way. 441 00:51:52,680 --> 00:51:57,990 So it's there. And I wonder if you can also say this in some sense of a figure like Ben-Gurion. 442 00:51:58,020 --> 00:52:11,759 Right? So what Jinnah is interested in is, is this problem India by the 1940s is now this is now exists in such a way 443 00:52:11,760 --> 00:52:16,500 that its political language is determined by terms like minority and majority. 444 00:52:16,980 --> 00:52:22,440 But once you are a minority in majority, the minority is naturally it might ask for protection. 445 00:52:23,010 --> 00:52:26,370 And in the days of the League of Nations, people were satisfied with protections. 446 00:52:26,910 --> 00:52:34,380 Once the Second World War breaks out, they all realise, like the European Jews did, that there was nothing to protect them. 447 00:52:34,710 --> 00:52:41,190 You know, that the League of Nations protections didn't work and so they give up their faith bitterly, 448 00:52:41,190 --> 00:52:44,570 very bitterly in this international order, this idea of them. 449 00:52:44,700 --> 00:52:50,459 This is when the goal for the nation state, but in a completely negative fashion, in fear and trembling, 450 00:52:50,460 --> 00:52:55,830 not because of this great delight in in acquiring such a property which they had been 451 00:52:55,830 --> 00:53:00,149 criticising for decades in the form of India or in the form of European nation states. 452 00:53:00,150 --> 00:53:04,050 Because remember, for India, the nation state was also problematic in general, 453 00:53:05,130 --> 00:53:09,870 because they understood the colonial state as being in excretions of the European nation state. 454 00:53:10,620 --> 00:53:16,229 They thought that European liberalism and European nationalism were fundamentally complicit in it, 455 00:53:16,230 --> 00:53:20,010 implicated in imperialism that you couldn't separate. 456 00:53:20,430 --> 00:53:25,740 Nehru tried to separate the two England's. He called them the liberal England of Democracy and Parliament. 457 00:53:26,070 --> 00:53:32,430 And then there is the evil England of colonialism. And Gandhi said, No, no, it's one and the same England one depends on the other. 458 00:53:32,910 --> 00:53:38,819 And so there's a general colonial distaste with European nation states and with the idea of the nation state to begin with, 459 00:53:38,820 --> 00:53:45,390 quite apart from Muslim or Hindu. Then with the Muslims, there's even more of a criticism because of their minority character. 460 00:53:45,510 --> 00:53:47,370 All right. And that also their fear, 461 00:53:47,580 --> 00:53:55,200 if they actually were to achieve a nation state of losing the connection that bound them to other Muslims in a kind of non statist community, 462 00:53:55,200 --> 00:54:01,410 again, the Jewish example becomes crucial, right? The loss of language and all of these things that Iqbal describes. 463 00:54:01,980 --> 00:54:06,030 So for Jinnah, what he does is to say, okay, there are no majority of the minorities. 464 00:54:07,500 --> 00:54:10,020 Muslims are not a minority because they are so large. 465 00:54:10,020 --> 00:54:16,470 There were about 70 million at that time, larger, as he puts it, than any European population outside Russia. 466 00:54:17,310 --> 00:54:21,930 You know, how can you call a population of that size a minority plus to have regional majorities? 467 00:54:22,380 --> 00:54:27,510 Hindus are not a majority because they're divided by caste and language and region, just like Muslims are. 468 00:54:28,770 --> 00:54:32,549 So what do you do? You have to fight to get rid of these languages altogether. 469 00:54:32,550 --> 00:54:39,000 So he's tried to get rid of the language initially by thinking of an internationalist or an imperial political form, 470 00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:42,870 and then eventually by the late thirties into the early forties by saying, 471 00:54:42,870 --> 00:54:49,320 okay, we'll go for the nation state, even though we hold our noses when we go for it and will do it in the following manner. 472 00:54:49,340 --> 00:54:56,460 There is no majority. There's no majority or minority. There's only one two nations, the so-called two nation theory, Hindus and Muslims. 473 00:54:57,150 --> 00:55:02,430 But for him, these are entirely negative forms. He doesn't actually believe that there is a Hindu nature or a muslim nation. 474 00:55:03,660 --> 00:55:10,350 He simply wants to replace the categories of majority and minority as legal terms by two nations, 475 00:55:10,350 --> 00:55:14,460 to create equality, to create parity so that there's parity in negotiation, 476 00:55:15,120 --> 00:55:22,350 so that despite the difference in numbers, Muslims and Hindus have to speak as equals because they are not part of a single nation. 477 00:55:23,670 --> 00:55:27,450 And by the time he gets Pakistan, there is no content to this Muslim nationalism. 478 00:55:28,350 --> 00:55:38,100 So it's become a it's a huge problem and it's an that, if you will, a vacuum that Islam gets remade, you know, is what is it to be a Pakistani? 479 00:55:38,730 --> 00:55:42,420 Because they are meant to be Hindu Pakistanis and Muslim Pakistanis. Right. And Sikh Pakistan. 480 00:55:42,490 --> 00:55:46,380 And all Muslims. Should it be an Islamic state? 481 00:55:46,390 --> 00:55:53,200 It wasn't initially. It becomes an Islamic republic compared with the first Islamic republic later on in 50 years or so. 482 00:55:54,160 --> 00:56:05,350 I think the second is Iran. So there's a you know, the question, it starts off with the question of what is the nation? 483 00:56:05,800 --> 00:56:12,580 And even by the time Pakistan is achieved, the question is simply a more intense, both in a more intense way. 484 00:56:13,630 --> 00:56:19,900 And it's to, as it were, break this or answer this question that religion becomes crucial. 485 00:56:21,850 --> 00:56:28,360 Yes. And do you think when everybody's writing about Zionism, a lot of these things, you know, 486 00:56:28,360 --> 00:56:36,610 in terms of contemporary history, condition of European Jewry, etc., but also about sacred history and. 487 00:56:37,920 --> 00:56:46,090 So it's a great if you choose this idea of, yes, if something had gone wrong and most this was a lot of it. 488 00:56:46,650 --> 00:56:51,780 And in that state, if that's true, then that says scientists and this kind of stuff. 489 00:56:51,780 --> 00:56:55,590 In end, it's an accidental loss of the ideal model. 490 00:56:56,940 --> 00:57:02,879 That's interesting. Yes, of course. I mean, already in that first poem I read out, Moses and Aron are mentioned. 491 00:57:02,880 --> 00:57:06,209 Right. And Moses is crucial. You know, it's interesting. 492 00:57:06,210 --> 00:57:15,600 He says crucial for for very obvious reasons, because of the, you know, the promised land, 493 00:57:15,600 --> 00:57:20,670 the leading of God's people into the promised land and the making of the law. 494 00:57:20,940 --> 00:57:30,720 All right. So he's crucial to any thinking about the nation state for it, but also Khamenei in different ways. 495 00:57:31,020 --> 00:57:39,540 Moses is hugely important for Khomeini in the Iranian revolution, whether it's the pharaoh, the shy pharaoh. 496 00:57:39,550 --> 00:57:44,340 Right. And and community, of course, is Moses. And then there's the Red Sea moment. 497 00:57:44,340 --> 00:57:46,800 And all of these things are they're edible as well. Right. 498 00:57:46,830 --> 00:57:55,950 So certainly Moses and Arendt to some degree, but not interestingly, Jesus, which is really fascinating here. 499 00:58:00,030 --> 00:58:13,050 I'm trying to think whether he obviously does have a kind of grasp of the history of monotheism and therefore, you know, ancient Judaism. 500 00:58:14,130 --> 00:58:22,710 He doesn't write that much about it. He's more interested in Zoroastrianism because of the Persian interests and all the rest. 501 00:58:22,950 --> 00:58:36,780 And he's trying to argue that Persia, in fact, his his first his doctoral thesis called the Development of Metaphysics in Persia, which is in Munich, 502 00:58:37,260 --> 00:58:45,389 is fascinating because what he does there is he basically inserts Islam into a narrative that begins with Zoroastrianism, 503 00:58:45,390 --> 00:58:49,050 that begins in Zoroaster and ends up borne out by them. Right. 504 00:58:49,060 --> 00:58:51,900 And it's made part of a single genealogy. 505 00:58:51,900 --> 00:59:01,650 And one reason why he's doing that is because he wants to remove Islam from a kind of Greek centred historical 506 00:59:01,650 --> 00:59:07,680 narrative where Islam only takes its meaning because it somehow transmits Greek philosophy to the West, 507 00:59:07,680 --> 00:59:13,890 or somehow therefore is derivative in the sense he thinks that Persia is much more important. 508 00:59:14,520 --> 00:59:20,549 And so he's willing to, as it will make Islam into clearly the, the, the main element, 509 00:59:20,550 --> 00:59:24,210 but still neither the beginning nor the end of Persian metaphysics. 510 00:59:24,690 --> 00:59:30,540 The end is behind them. But he loves by them, strangely, you might think. 511 00:59:32,730 --> 00:59:40,980 So the hesitant monotheistic elements get set aside there, and they are put aside along with, you know, Christianity and Judaism. 512 00:59:40,980 --> 00:59:46,170 But I've set aside along with Greece because they've been too influenced by it. 513 00:59:46,350 --> 00:59:53,610 I mean, it's in a way, it's a kind of a reverse version of what Strauss does by bringing in my model is 514 00:59:53,610 --> 00:59:59,430 al-farabi to break the completely Greco centric cloister of European political thought. 515 00:59:59,470 --> 01:00:07,500 Right. He breaks it by introducing these to my more specifically, but also far behind introduces them into European political thought. 516 01:00:07,920 --> 01:00:15,239 And Iqbal, you know, deals with the Greek in this manner by because of where he is and who is in India, 517 01:00:15,240 --> 01:00:17,910 by bringing in Zorra, Iran, Zoroaster and all that. 518 01:00:18,660 --> 01:00:24,780 But where he really thinks about Judaism and in comparison with Islam is in the early modern period. 519 01:00:25,230 --> 01:00:33,270 So he's fascinated by Spinoza and he supports the Jews of Amsterdam against Spinoza. 520 01:00:33,630 --> 01:00:37,260 He thinks Spinoza is of course of is a great philosopher. 521 01:00:37,860 --> 01:00:43,769 But he argues that the Jews of Amsterdam, which he follows, you know, will and will do to, you know, 522 01:00:43,770 --> 01:00:50,219 that story of philosophy, a situated that there were as a kind of vulnerable minority in Amsterdam. 523 01:00:50,220 --> 01:00:56,670 They had no choice. They could not tolerate to Spinoza that despite him being a great philosopher, 524 01:00:56,910 --> 01:01:00,990 they had to close ranks against Spinoza because Spinoza would destroy the Jewish community. 525 01:01:02,310 --> 01:01:09,690 And he recommends that as a model for, if you will, Muslim conservatism in India, that though he might not agree with that conservatism. 526 01:01:12,090 --> 01:01:16,320 What is true of the Jews and Spinoza is also true of Muslims. 527 01:01:16,410 --> 01:01:25,049 I think he's interesting because he takes not ancient Judaism, but if you will, diasporic Judaism as his model. 528 01:01:25,050 --> 01:01:31,020 But that is also makes perfect sense given who he is and given Muslims in India. 529 01:01:32,040 --> 01:01:37,340 So you don't have that apart from prophets like Abraham and Moses and what, you know, seem. 530 01:01:37,760 --> 01:01:43,700 Muslim prophets. It doesn't really deal with monotheism. 531 01:01:43,700 --> 01:01:47,020 And it's ancient history. So. 532 01:01:48,070 --> 01:01:53,260 I want to ask you, I guess moving to the contemporary period thought about the afterlife, 533 01:01:54,250 --> 01:02:02,020 because I think what you've presented today very clearly could upset a lot of contemporary debates or disrupt a lot of contemporary debates. 534 01:02:02,020 --> 01:02:05,170 And I'm just wondering how you've negotiated that as a scholar, 535 01:02:06,490 --> 01:02:12,190 how your work maybe has been instrumentalized by a variety of forces, how you kind of contend with that? 536 01:02:13,000 --> 01:02:19,370 Well, it's not it's somewhat surprisingly, it's not resulted in much anguish for me. 537 01:02:19,390 --> 01:02:23,170 I mean, yes, in Pakistan, there has been some upset. 538 01:02:24,460 --> 01:02:28,660 You know, and I'm occasionally called anti Pakistani, but I'm not a Pakistani anyway. 539 01:02:28,660 --> 01:02:37,330 So and never have been so. So then I might be described as an Indian nationalist because I am of Indian origin and all the rest. 540 01:02:37,660 --> 01:02:41,470 But what's interesting is that there it plays out as an Indo-Pakistani fight. 541 01:02:41,920 --> 01:02:49,240 It's not about anything else. The comparison with Israel, of course it's not. 542 01:02:49,750 --> 01:02:53,470 How should I put it? It's it's not one that runs throughout the book. 543 01:02:54,010 --> 01:03:01,300 It's there, obviously. But because there are others also and I describe some of them, you know, Ireland, etc., 544 01:03:02,410 --> 01:03:08,470 I found the term Zion interesting, not simply for political reasons, but because it has meaning beyond Zionism, 545 01:03:10,000 --> 01:03:15,490 which is why earlier in the book I brought in Liberia, you know, and the making of a new, you know, 546 01:03:15,610 --> 01:03:22,799 a state for a poor of a minority, displaced people, population returning, etc., 100 years before Pakistan in this world. 547 01:03:22,800 --> 01:03:28,360 Right. And you don't normally get discussions of Liberia in the history of Zionism, but I think you might do it. 548 01:03:28,630 --> 01:03:35,620 And also there are ways in which because with Liberia and with movements in South Africa and elsewhere, 549 01:03:35,620 --> 01:03:42,999 you have explicit invocations of the children of Israel and the wanderings and the promised land and all of this kind of stuff. 550 01:03:43,000 --> 01:03:51,500 So they are part of the history of Zion, if not Zionism anyway, and that there's a prior Christian history of Zion before Zionism begins. 551 01:03:51,520 --> 01:04:03,280 Right, obviously. But so apart from that, it's very difficult to deny, you know, the comparison even in Pakistani textbooks to this day in school, 552 01:04:04,090 --> 01:04:11,559 you will have sentences like, you know, in the middle of the 20th century to ideological notoriety. 553 01:04:11,560 --> 01:04:17,200 Those ideological states were created. Israel and Pakistan, they state clearly. 554 01:04:17,500 --> 01:04:26,889 Right. I quote here in the preface. Zia ul Haq, the military dictator who was president of Pakistan, saying, you know, 555 01:04:26,890 --> 01:04:32,050 Pakistan and Israel are two states, the only two states in the world that are much more like each other. 556 01:04:32,380 --> 01:04:38,980 And if you get rid of Judaism from Israel, it'll collapse. If you get rid of Islam from Pakistan, if you collapse whatever is meant by those terms. 557 01:04:38,990 --> 01:04:43,240 So this is a popular culture. Everyone knows it in Pakistan. 558 01:04:43,240 --> 01:04:54,670 It cannot really be denied. I've just worked it out in terms of political thought, so people might be queasy with that in Israel. 559 01:04:54,670 --> 01:04:58,809 I mean, I gave a paper based on this book at Hebrew University a couple of years ago, 560 01:04:58,810 --> 01:05:03,700 which when it was five, you know, so it was very interesting for me. 561 01:05:04,420 --> 01:05:07,749 And, you know, it makes me think that I'd like to know more about, you know, 562 01:05:07,750 --> 01:05:12,880 obviously I read a lot of secondary work on Zionism when I was writing this book. 563 01:05:15,130 --> 01:05:23,320 But, you know, I'm certainly not expert enough to be able to pronounce on it myself, but I find the of fascinating. 564 01:05:25,650 --> 01:05:29,520 Now I take the prerogative and, uh, take the question. 565 01:05:30,250 --> 01:05:45,120 Um, you mentioned that both national movements arise from, uh, a critique of the European nation state mindset of minorities and minorities. 566 01:05:45,120 --> 01:05:49,800 And I guess they both arise from the Jewish problem and different variations of it in a sense. 567 01:05:50,460 --> 01:05:56,040 Um, but if you fast forward, especially the Israeli case, 568 01:05:56,100 --> 01:06:01,770 it's clear that the nationalist statist mindset has taken over so much so that the 569 01:06:01,770 --> 01:06:07,440 Judaism itself is redefined along these lines to the degree to which is where it is uh, 570 01:06:07,620 --> 01:06:13,460 obsessively busy with the arithmetic of yeah, call it ethnics race, whatever, uh, 571 01:06:13,650 --> 01:06:17,550 viewing each on Jewish that is dependent upon preserving the Jewish majority. 572 01:06:18,120 --> 01:06:26,040 I think it goes back to what you referred to in Leo Strauss's work at the point we are now. 573 01:06:26,040 --> 01:06:32,969 It seems that the relationship he was hoping for that the idea is overcome, the politics is reversed, the politics overcome, 574 01:06:32,970 --> 01:06:36,750 the ideas to the degree to which the Judaism is really is redefined in a sense in 575 01:06:36,750 --> 01:06:41,310 Israel it has been nationalised in the sense that it is read through this line. 576 01:06:41,730 --> 01:06:51,990 Has the same happened in Pakistan to some degree because especially after the Pakistani civil war in 1991 that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh, 577 01:06:52,710 --> 01:06:57,160 you know, it became clear that Islam was not something that kept these two things together, 578 01:06:57,630 --> 01:07:02,820 both Muslim populations, but they could not survive in a single political unit. 579 01:07:04,140 --> 01:07:12,780 So and in a way that made Islam much more italicised and located in Pakistan, of course, that doesn't mean that they are not pan-Islamic. 580 01:07:12,780 --> 01:07:17,670 There's a huge debate on whether it's militant or not movements that are. 581 01:07:18,720 --> 01:07:24,420 But those movements, what I find fascinating is that it's the people who are defined as religious, 582 01:07:24,930 --> 01:07:31,380 who have taken on the most crucial categories of the early secular nationalists. 583 01:07:32,220 --> 01:07:39,959 You know, so for instance, this the the anti nationalism itself, which is not, you know, 584 01:07:39,960 --> 01:07:47,550 it's not it's it's not the olamide was not the clerics who were propounding theories that were against nationalism. 585 01:07:48,330 --> 01:07:50,040 They didn't have that much problem with it. 586 01:07:50,790 --> 01:07:58,260 It was, you know, people like Iqbal and, you know, people like Jinnah and others who were Iqbal was arguably a vision, 587 01:07:58,860 --> 01:08:06,270 at least gave the impression of being a practising Muslim, though he had running fights with religious leaders and authorities. 588 01:08:07,020 --> 01:08:16,170 So neither of these people nor anyone else in the Muslim League really was an acceptable figure for the deeply devout and the religious establishment. 589 01:08:16,530 --> 01:08:22,980 Much of the religious establishment sided with the Indian National Congress and went with India, not with Pakistan, 590 01:08:23,250 --> 01:08:33,480 because precisely because the leader of the Muslim League was seen as being too secular and, you know, likely to betray Islam. 591 01:08:34,680 --> 01:08:40,620 And they were used to Islam as being a part of a state of some sort, whether dynastic or colonial. 592 01:08:40,620 --> 01:08:48,900 And why not national? You know, there was not a huge problem because India Nationals was not about eliminating religion from public life. 593 01:08:50,760 --> 01:08:54,629 But now in Pakistan, in what you would call the religious right, 594 01:08:54,630 --> 01:09:02,670 what in Israel is what you would call the religious right has taken on these very anti nationalist teams from various secular, if you will, 595 01:09:02,670 --> 01:09:12,300 rivals among the early Muslim nationalists and are also interested in propagating a religion or Islam as national culture, 596 01:09:14,160 --> 01:09:20,700 you know, so that the very arena which Jinnah had, for instance, had left vacant. 597 01:09:21,090 --> 01:09:25,650 He didn't give a definition of what it meant to be Pakistani. What was the national culture of this? 598 01:09:26,580 --> 01:09:36,510 It had to be made post facto. These guys think they know it, and precisely because it doesn't exist, it must be Islam that becomes not so. 599 01:09:36,510 --> 01:09:47,400 There is an identification of both national culture and Islam, but also Islam as a form of as a critique of nationalism, of a European kind. 600 01:09:47,850 --> 01:09:57,959 So both of them coexist uneasily. So they are very pro Pakistan, but at the same time, they don't want to sacrifice the kind of larger Muslim world, 601 01:09:57,960 --> 01:10:04,500 which is not the same thing as the international order, obviously. And you find this in particular with Islamism. 602 01:10:05,310 --> 01:10:13,709 Indeed, with Islamism, you have this very curious situation in which Abul al-Mahdi, the most important of them, 603 01:10:13,710 --> 01:10:23,980 the founder of the Jamaat e Islami Party, you know, is interested in or was long dead and died in Buffalo. 604 01:10:24,440 --> 01:10:30,830 Believe it or not, but they had gone for medical treatment after inveighing against America for decades. 605 01:10:31,250 --> 01:10:37,400 But he he was deeply suspicious, not only of the form of the nation state. 606 01:10:37,910 --> 01:10:50,690 He was deeply suspicious of sovereignty of Britain about this, because he thought that that was a form of tyranny and was a full fledged military. 607 01:10:51,600 --> 01:11:00,380 The European idea of sovereignty as propounded by thinkers, as diverse as Schauble, than Thomas Hobbes, 608 01:11:00,770 --> 01:11:12,799 whom he cites, by the way, is so absolute and so laden with power as to be impossible for a human being to wield. 609 01:11:12,800 --> 01:11:21,490 It is impossible, as we know. So in his view, sovereignty, whether belonging to a dictatorship or a monarchy or a nation separate, 610 01:11:21,590 --> 01:11:25,100 particularly a nation state, is a theological category. 611 01:11:25,700 --> 01:11:34,250 But in earlier days, he thought there was because sovereignty could only belong to God, ordinary rulers could never be sovereign. 612 01:11:34,280 --> 01:11:39,880 It's only with the secular nation state that sovereignty becomes possible. 613 01:11:39,890 --> 01:11:47,720 And therefore the secularists are in fact the ones who are most truly theological, because they try to they take God's place. 614 01:11:48,320 --> 01:11:53,780 And of course, you have this critique in Israel as well. Right. And so what do you do? 615 01:11:53,840 --> 01:12:02,030 You need to somehow by saying that sovereignty only belongs to God, which is a kind of Islamist mantra, shibboleth and a cliche in a way. 616 01:12:02,780 --> 01:12:09,890 You try to you expel it altogether, and you have to conceive of society and society running itself, managing itself. 617 01:12:10,640 --> 01:12:11,770 This is not accidental. 618 01:12:11,780 --> 01:12:21,320 You know, modesty comes out of a situation in which he had been in his early days, a great fan and biographer of Gandhi's, for instance. 619 01:12:21,830 --> 01:12:25,610 So this is a situation which, like Gandhi, was also deeply suspicious of sovereignty. 620 01:12:26,540 --> 01:12:32,750 And Gandhi, too, drawing upon both anarchist and Bolshevist narratives. 621 01:12:33,510 --> 01:12:37,639 By Bolshevist, I mean the very end of Lenin's theory. 622 01:12:37,640 --> 01:12:47,719 The buitrago of the state. Right. How can you conceive of a society that manages itself without sovereignty that in Gandhi 623 01:12:47,720 --> 01:12:51,260 in terms of would be self running villages and all the rest are known by the right? 624 01:12:51,710 --> 01:12:55,100 In Modi's terms, you would have the mechanism of a state in a way, 625 01:12:55,580 --> 01:13:05,150 but its authorities would be religious authorities outside the state who would basically control not the levers of power, 626 01:13:06,230 --> 01:13:11,780 but because they were outside it, but prevent the state from assuming the sovereign absolutist form. 627 01:13:12,620 --> 01:13:16,540 In both cases you have it's an anti political vision in so many ways, you know. 628 01:13:16,790 --> 01:13:22,519 So that's what he does is he takes the deep suspicion of nationalism and he 629 01:13:22,520 --> 01:13:27,820 turns it in this direction precisely by doing what the secularists never did. 630 01:13:27,830 --> 01:13:31,580 They all wanted sovereignty. He wanted to get rid of sovereignty. 631 01:13:31,580 --> 01:13:35,480 And so the Pakistani constitution reserved sovereignty for God. 632 01:13:36,910 --> 01:13:40,850 You know, and of course, it's very difficult to imagine to actually have that in practice. 633 01:13:40,850 --> 01:13:45,020 And what happens in practice is precisely because it's not vested institutionally. 634 01:13:46,250 --> 01:13:49,610 It comes back to haunt the state from many different directions. 635 01:13:50,150 --> 01:13:59,510 You know, so I often tend to think of the military coup as being in a way it's a classic Schmitt Ian version of sovereignty because it's a temporary, 636 01:13:59,960 --> 01:14:05,410 supposedly temporary suspension of the law. And the military coup gets to be it. 637 01:14:05,540 --> 01:14:08,570 It works like a miracle in a way. You know, it suspends natural law. 638 01:14:08,600 --> 01:14:15,050 And and that's the way in which sovereignty manifests itself in in Pakistan, precisely because it's not situated anywhere. 639 01:14:15,320 --> 01:14:20,000 The president has doesn't have it. The prime minister doesn't have it and parliament doesn't have it. 640 01:14:21,140 --> 01:14:24,980 So it's difficult to keep it away. But the ideal was a social of what? 641 01:14:24,980 --> 01:14:29,240 Social self-management, the sovereignty to God and bound to. 642 01:14:29,460 --> 01:14:37,350 Yes, yeah. Yes. Last question, maybe. And I was also thinking about what actually quite. 643 01:14:38,900 --> 01:14:45,930 Talk about the issue of Muslim nationalism built on a fundamental critique of the European team. 644 01:14:46,340 --> 01:14:53,120 And you also mentioned about the Zionism being that when everyone was kind of nodding and I was thinking maybe perhaps I'm thinking about this. 645 01:14:53,770 --> 01:15:02,500 Or maybe it's your skin colour. The biggest critic I could see Zionists having against the European nation state is that they were rejected by it. 646 01:15:02,680 --> 01:15:08,080 Hmm. Not that it. Not with the actual concept of it. 647 01:15:08,260 --> 01:15:13,450 And so even if we think about how Zionism does it, really. 648 01:15:14,150 --> 01:15:22,100 anti-Semitism. It just kind of internalises it and then tries to fit the image of its own creation of self fiction. 649 01:15:22,880 --> 01:15:29,570 Then it doesn't seem to me as that same critique perhaps, or maybe on that of that kind of, 650 01:15:30,050 --> 01:15:33,200 you know, kind of really getting down to the side of championship. 651 01:15:33,470 --> 01:15:37,970 How do you see that Zionism as kind of this fundamental critique similar to Muslims? 652 01:15:38,720 --> 01:15:46,940 Yeah, you know, as I said, it's not something I'm particularly expert in, but 2 to 2 things. 653 01:15:47,180 --> 01:15:58,159 One is that almost as it would by default or maybe speaking in a structural manner, if there is already a critique, 654 01:15:58,160 --> 01:16:10,700 as there was of nationalism, as the problem which makes which makes the minority question, then there's already a realisation that, you know, 655 01:16:11,180 --> 01:16:21,540 not all is about me and one might want to be part of the nation while at the same time realising that it, it, 656 01:16:22,110 --> 01:16:30,019 it has reinvented and made a new kind of made a group that might have been once 657 01:16:30,020 --> 01:16:35,030 considered purely theologically or religiously into a new kind of problem, 658 01:16:35,810 --> 01:16:39,620 minority problem, in which numbers are crucial. 659 01:16:39,630 --> 01:16:48,320 What you were mentioning and that this there seems to be full realisation of from Herzl onwards the fact that 660 01:16:48,320 --> 01:16:55,129 you might also then want a nation state of your own if you want it to be integrated into the old one in a way, 661 01:16:55,130 --> 01:16:59,240 is neither here nor there. I mean, I find fascinating Herzl's novel. 662 01:17:00,350 --> 01:17:06,799 What's it called? Yes. You know, where you actually have these two, you know, you have a new world, 663 01:17:06,800 --> 01:17:11,750 as it were, version, and you have an old world and, you know, you move from one to end. 664 01:17:11,750 --> 01:17:14,780 He seems to be rehearsing that problem. You know, can you belong? 665 01:17:16,550 --> 01:17:22,700 Is it possible to have a nation state or do you, Robinson Crusoe, like start to gain in some different fashion? 666 01:17:23,630 --> 01:17:28,520 Similarly, the way in which he tries to insert a Jewish homeland into the Ottoman Empire, 667 01:17:28,880 --> 01:17:35,660 eventually that moves to think about the Jewish homeland within a British with an Arab does with a British empire or commonwealth. 668 01:17:36,170 --> 01:17:42,770 These are all ways of which of thinking that recognise the problem that the nation state poses for minorities, 669 01:17:42,950 --> 01:17:48,019 what they've been defined as minorities. So I think there is a critique. 670 01:17:48,020 --> 01:17:51,590 It may not be expressed in the same way or as fulsomely. 671 01:17:51,890 --> 01:17:57,810 Now what I'm mufti does is that I think he he I don't think he I don't think it's a very productive way of doing it. 672 01:17:57,830 --> 01:18:06,490 He then talks about various Jewish and indeed Muslim intellectuals who abandoned this abandoned idea, 673 01:18:06,560 --> 01:18:13,160 Zionism on the one hand, or Jewish or Muslim nationalism on the other, and become these pariah figures. 674 01:18:13,160 --> 01:18:17,989 And he's relied on Arabs. The word pariah, of course, is interesting as it comes from India, right? 675 01:18:17,990 --> 01:18:32,629 So pariah goes from India to Europe to describe Jews and ghetto goes from Europe to India to to describe both castes, generally low caste groups. 676 01:18:32,630 --> 01:18:37,190 So there's a nice or not so nice exchange of derogatory terms here. 677 01:18:38,660 --> 01:18:42,620 So I'm a move to basically says these are the great heroic figures, the pariah figures. 678 01:18:43,240 --> 01:18:49,940 Right. Who have removed themselves. I don't think it's who wants to be a self-conscious pariah, you know. 679 01:18:49,940 --> 01:18:57,739 And how is that a political possibility worth anything, instead of which you can understand why people, for whatever reasons, 680 01:18:57,740 --> 01:19:04,250 go for either Muslim nationalism or Zionism, because it's a real political project of which something can be made. 681 01:19:04,250 --> 01:19:08,150 You can't really make very much of the pride of purely individual status. 682 01:19:10,580 --> 01:19:17,239 So I think the you know, there is by default or structurally the critique is there, though it might be voiced quite differently. 683 01:19:17,240 --> 01:19:22,459 So for instance, with the Muslim nationalist, there is an explicit disavowal of nationalism. 684 01:19:22,460 --> 01:19:27,230 We take model for instance, links to, you know, I didn't do it at the time, but, you know, 685 01:19:27,230 --> 01:19:36,110 he he links to capitalism in the form of private property that the nation state is simply private property writ large and guarantees private property. 686 01:19:37,550 --> 01:19:43,040 And it makes all going back to ideals, you know. 687 01:19:43,040 --> 01:19:50,059 Strauss It really turns all ideals into interests, interest being defined by property of certain kinds. 688 01:19:50,060 --> 01:19:52,610 So your or your religious identity can also be an interest. 689 01:19:52,850 --> 01:19:57,440 You're conceived of it as you conceive of your body as your property, which is what gets rights. 690 01:19:57,440 --> 01:20:04,220 Rights attributed to you. Right. And this, he thinks is a is is a hideous defamation of religion. 691 01:20:05,010 --> 01:20:13,700 Right. But when it becomes property and rights and interests and all the standard language politics, then all ideas disappear and all of. 692 01:20:13,740 --> 01:20:22,970 Of his leftist instrumentality, which is violent by definition. So the preservation of religious ideals is not there because, you know, 693 01:20:23,010 --> 01:20:28,950 simply because they exist, but because he thinks that it's not a historical thing, 694 01:20:28,950 --> 01:20:37,260 that we must protect what has existed before, but it's a future orientation because he's interested in, as we saw, both of Judaism, 695 01:20:37,590 --> 01:20:45,959 but also with Islam in how religion conceived of in a non instrumental non interested way as a let's say an ideal 696 01:20:45,960 --> 01:20:54,090 or principle with specificity can actually stand as a bulwark against purely instrumentalized form of politics, 697 01:20:54,540 --> 01:21:00,480 which is violent out of necessity, a right in which anything can be remade into something else. 698 01:21:01,830 --> 01:21:05,430 And that is what he doesn't want. That's what he thinks nationalism brings in. 699 01:21:06,060 --> 01:21:11,460 So it's a philosophical critique of nationalism. It's not simply, Oh, we are a minority, so it won't do us any good. 700 01:21:12,660 --> 01:21:21,930 And, you know, people like Strauss, arguably, if you will, on the right has it and I read it also in our own way, has it on the as it were left. 701 01:21:22,890 --> 01:21:31,080 So it's it's there. You might not say it's part of mainstream Zionism, but then neither is that part of mainstream Muslim nationalism, 702 01:21:31,080 --> 01:21:35,250 though many of the key figures of it are very conscious of it. 703 01:21:35,970 --> 01:21:41,640 If I may just make a short commentary, I think one of the ways to understand this is to to the rhetorical, 704 01:21:42,360 --> 01:21:46,350 dangerous move of separating the Zionist Europe from the Jewish Europeans. 705 01:21:46,740 --> 01:21:55,530 The European Jew, I think by definition does challenge European nationalism, political Zionism, specifically inside the way that it does. 706 01:21:55,830 --> 01:22:01,250 Yeah, it does only complain about not being included and then wanting to do it. 707 01:22:01,920 --> 01:22:07,229 I think this reason this has been a great lesson in the in the problematics, to say the least, 708 01:22:07,230 --> 01:22:14,670 of adopting a European discourse and conceptualisations to speak of non-European cases and then the realities that grew out of them, 709 01:22:14,670 --> 01:22:20,310 which are much stronger than any idea in any, you know, any matter of linguistic linguists. 710 01:22:22,170 --> 01:22:28,920 I have to thank the the speaker. Thank you all. I think, Professor, for this lovely discussion.