On September 11, political and cultural organization Inquilab Mancha remembered Pakistan’s founder with “respect and love”, describing him as one of the subcontinent’s leading politicians and an influential figure in the anti-British movement. It was the 78th anniversary of his death.
Predictably, the post [about this commemoration] received the sort of mixed reception on Facebook that most activities of Inquilab Mancha now seem guaranteed to receive. But the interesting fact is why, 55 years after Bangladesh fought a war to leave Pakistan, some Bangladeshis have suddenly decided that Pakistan’s founder deserves renewed attention.
There is a strange identity project underway among a section of the post-Hasina political generation. Its adherents appear keen to describe themselves as distinctively Bangladeshi Muslims. The distinction matters to them becasue “Bengali Muslim” carries the cultural baggage of Tagore, Calcutta, Bengali literary modernity, leftist politics, a certain secular disposition and, inevitably, 1971. The imagined “Bangladeshi Muslim”, by contrast, is expected to possess a more explicitly Muslim political genealogy.
The trouble is that Bangladesh was born in 1971. If 1971 is regarded as intellectually contaminated by the Awami League’s ownership of it, one needs somewhere else to begin the national story. And 1947 is conveniently available. Once you move the starting date backwards by 24 years, Jinnah comes free with the package.
Barely a month after Sheikh Hasina’s fall, in September 2024, the obscure Nawab Salimullah Academy organised a Jinnah commemoration at the National Press Club in Dhaka. Speakers argued that “without Pakistan there could have been no Bangladesh, and therefore without Jinnah there could have been no Bangladesh.” Urdu poems were recited. One participant suggested Bangladesh might otherwise have suffered Kashmir’s fate.
The syllogism is ingenious. It is also rather like thanking your first wife for making your divorce possible. Yet something important is happening underneath the comedy.
For most post-liberation school-going Bangladeshis, Jinnah was hardly a historical personality at all. He was more of a textbook appearance. He arrived in Dhaka, declared that Urdu and no other language would be Pakistan’s state language, irritated the Bengalis and disappeared from the syllabus shortly afterwards. Students memorised the relevant sentences, reproduced them in examinations and moved on to more urgent matters.
The history itself was less tidy. During his 1948 visit, Jinnah said that East Bengal could choose its provincial official language, but insisted that Pakistan needed one inter-provincial state language and that it should be Urdu. His encounters with Bengali students were tense, and his refusal to retreat on the language question badly damaged his standing in East Bengal. There was therefore perfectly good reason for Bangladeshis not to build statues to him.
But Sheikh Hasina’s rule changed it.
During her long autocratic tenure, the Awami League increasingly converted the history of 1971 from national inheritance into party property. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was no longer merely the central political figure in Bangladesh’s independence story. He was the story. The state became saturated with him…portraits, murals, speeches, anniversaries, institutions, films, slogans and increasingly extravagant assertions about his historical singularity.
The distinction between Bangladesh, the Liberation War, the Awami League and Sheikh Mujib became deliberately difficult to locate. Hasina attempted, in effect, to construct a Mujibian state.
That had an unintended consequence. When her government collapsed, some people began rummaging through the historical attic looking for everything her regime had instructed them not to admire. Jinnah was sitting there in a very good suit.
The first public commemoration of his death anniversary after Hasina’s fall in 2024 would have been virtually unthinkable during her rule. At the time, I argued that it was too simplistic to interpret such events merely as evidence that Bangladesh had suddenly become pro-Pakistan. Younger Bangladeshis generally had little practical reason to think about Pakistan at all.
But the political permission to question the old binary under which admiration for India was associated with the Liberation War while sympathy for Pakistan could be classified as anti-liberation was changed.
Two years later, however, Jinnah appears to be acquiring something more substantial than permission to be discussed. He is becoming useful. That requires some historical editing of its own.
The Jinnah being recruited into Bangladesh’s new Muslim nationalism is often imagined as the patriarch of an Islamic political project. The real Jinnah is inconveniently complicated. He was a constitutional lawyer, an early advocate of Hindu-Muslim cooperation, personally remote from clerical politics and, for much of his career, recognisably a product of British liberal political culture.
Even sympathetic scholarship struggles to turn him into an Islamist.
Jaswant Singh discovered the political hazards of pointing this out. His 2009 book Jinnah: India–Partition–Independence presented Jinnah as a considerably more complicated figure than the cardboard villain of Indian nationalist memory and questioned the familiar allocation of responsibility for Partition. Singh, a former Indian foreign and finance minister and senior BJP figure, was expelled from his party shortly after publication; Narendra Modi’s Gujarat government banned the book.
The episode demonstrated something useful about South Asian nationalism. Every country insists that its neighbours have falsified history while maintaining a small Department of Historical Simplification of its own.
The greatest difficulty for Bangladesh’s new Jinnah enthusiasts, however, is not Mujib or Hasina. It is Abul Ala Maududi. This is where the ideological family photograph becomes awkward.
Maududi, founder of Jamaat-e-Islami and the intellectual ancestor of the political movement that today represents one of the strongest organised expressions of Islamic politics in Bangladesh, was no admirer of Jinnah’s project. He opposed Muslim nationalism as insufficiently Islamic and attacked the Muslim League relentlessly. He regarded nationalism itself as a European concept and objected to democracy because it located sovereignty in the people rather than God.
In 1939, Maududi argued that Jinnah did not understand the fundamentals of Islam. He dismissed the League as essentially secular in political outlook and regarded the proposed Muslim state as inadequate because Muslim rule was not the same thing as Islamic rule. He even described the League as a Jamaat-e-Jahiliyat.
His objection to Pakistan was not that Muslims did not deserve political protection; it was that Jinnah's nationalism placed the Muslim nation where Maududi wanted to place Islam.
After Partition, Maududi moved to Pakistan, but the disagreement did not magically disappear. He criticised Jinnah’s famous August 11, 1947 speech promising equal citizenship and separating religious identity from the business of the state. Contemporary accounts of Maududi’s politics explicitly described Jinnah and the Muslim League leadership as intending a secular state.
So the modern Bangladeshi Islamist who wishes simultaneously to claim Jinnah and Maududi has a small administrative problem…the two men disagreed about the thing for which both are now being claimed.
This is what makes the rediscovery of Jinnah fascinating. He is less a recovered historical figure than a weapon in an argument about the present.
For some, he offers a Muslim political identity predating 1971 and therefore escaping the Awami League’s historical vocabulary. For others, he provides an answer to Indian Hindu nationalism. If India increasingly defines itself through a Hindu civilisational story, why should Bangladesh suppress the Muslim political history that preceded its independence?
For still others, praising Jinnah is simply the most economical way of annoying the people who spent 15 years deciding which historical opinions respectable Bangladeshis were permitted to hold. But annoyance is not, let’s say, historiography.
The irony is that a serious reconsideration of Jinnah would actually be worthwhile. He was neither the secular saint imagined by some admirers nor the one-dimensional communal villain of old Bangladeshi textbooks. His politics changed and his demands clearly changed. Most importantly, the constitutional arrangements he was prepared to consider changed.
In May 1947 he was still publicly opposing the partition of Bengal and Punjab even while demanding Pakistan. The historical Jinnah is considerably more interesting than either his Pakistani shrine or his Bangladeshi caricature. And Bangladesh should be mature enough to read him without either worshipping him or banning him.
The same also applies to Mujib. Escaping Hasina’s suffocating cult of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman does not require replacing one oversized portrait with another. A country need not choose its history as one chooses a football team. Jinnah can be important to understanding why Pakistan was created; Mujib can remain indispensable to understanding why Bangladesh was created; Maududi can illuminate why Muslim nationalism and political Islam were never synonymous.
The newfound enthusiasm for Jinnah therefore tells us rather less about Jinnah than about Bangladesh. A society emerging from an authoritarian attempt to prescribe its past is experimenting with previously forbidden memories. Some experiments will be intelligent. Some will be reactionary. Some will consist mainly of Facebook posts.
That is probably unavoidable.
But if the purpose of returning to 1947 is to understand ‘Bangladeshi Muslims’ better, the exercise may produce an inconvenient discovery. Bengali Muslims did not stop evolving in 1947, any more than they suddenly appeared in 1971. Their political history contains Pakistan and Bangladesh, language and religion, Jinnah and Mujib, Fazlul Huq and Bhashani, nationalism and repeated rebellions against nationalism’s excesses.
History is untidy like that. And the curious thing about Bangladesh’s latest search for a suitably Muslim founding figure is that Jinnah himself may prove too secular for the job.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa