Creating a New Medina: State Power Islam, and the Quest For Pakistan In Late Colonial North India

This book examines how the idea of Pakistan was articulated and debated in the public sphere, and how popular enthusiasm was generated for its successful achievement, especially in the crucial province of U.P. — now Uttar Pradesh — in the last decade of British colonial rule in India. It argues that Pakistan was not simply a vague idea that serendipitously emerged as a nation-state, but was popularly imagined as a sovereign Islamic state, a new Medina, as some called it. In this regard, it was envisaged as the harbinger of Islam’s renewal and rise in the twentieth century, the new leader and protector of the global community of Muslims, and a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate.

The book specifically foregrounds the critical role played by Deobandi ulama in articulating this imagined national community with an awareness of Pakistan’s global historical significance. It demonstrates how these ulama collaborated with the Muslim League leadership and forged a new political vocabulary, fusing ideas of Islamic nationhood and the modern state.

It, therefore, challenges three principal strands in India’s Partition historiography: scholarship on elite politics that largely sees Pakistan’s emergence as the result of the breakdown of constitutional negotiations between the British government, the leaders of the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress; subaltern histories that argue that Pakistan was a vague but emotive religious symbol that found overwhelming popular support without an awareness of its meaning or implications; and finally, narratives which argue that Jinnah led a secular nationalist movement to create Pakistan as a liberal democratic state.