JINNAH’S ISLAMIC VIEW OF PAKISTAN

The historical narrative of the founding of Pakistan has always been a source of controversy for researchers. From 1947 until perhaps the early 1970s, the standard narrative upheld in Pakistan was that ‘Pakistan’ was a stated goal from March 1940 and that its ideology was Islam. This narrative received little in the way of an open challenge, much less a concrete one, from its detractors until the 1980s when the rise of the so-called revisionist movement created a new standard narrative that has since been widely accepted among academia worldwide and the liberalists in Pakistan.

With respect to the ideological dimension of the story of Pakistan, today it seems that the inheritors of the revisionist narrative generally treat the old so-called ‘ideologue’ narrative more as a national legend than as history. Instead of a stated goal, Pakistan’s founding is presently considered a kind of accident that has come from a series of negotiations and bargaining gone wrong, while the commitment of Pakistan’s founding fathers (and in particular

M.A. Jinnah) to its ideology is open to question. In recent years, there has been a quiet but steady influx of revivalist discourse that contests the current trend in thought, but it remains dwarfed by the overwhelming volume of material written in support of the revisionist narrative.