Yasser76
Elite Member
Well, you have got it exactly backwards, and both your claims in this post can't stand scrutiny....
First, you are talking about rank and file, Devji about summit/leadership..... Sunnis were around 85% of Indian Muslims, so a Sunni-majority membership is a statistical inevitability that explains nothing........ What needs explaining is why that Sunni-majority body kept placing Ismaili Imams, Bohra industrialists, Shia Rajas and a Khoja barrister at its head and its treasury for 40 years straight, that's the entire lifespan of ML (pre-partition)...... and Devji's answer is that the sect-blind "general Islam" was the one formula under which those men could lead at all.... ML may have emerged from the Aligarh movement, but its leadership, the ones calling the shots from day 1, were from the minority sects....
Second, the actual Sunni religious establishment fought Jinnah's general Islam tooth and nail...... Madani's Deoband, the biggest Sunni clerical body in India, wrote whole treatises declaring the two nation theory un-Islamic and put up candidates against the League in the 45-46 elections..... Maududi, another Sunni stalwart, called a League made Pakistan a kafir government of Muslims and declared voting itself haram..... The Ahrar coined Kafir-e-Azam for Jinnah and after losing in 46 openly said "Madhe Sahaba" should be used as a weapon against the League, a direct sectarian attack on his Shia background.....
So the custodians of Sunni orthodoxy didn't produce the League's sect blind Islam, they declared war on it, and attacked its leader sectarianly, which proves Devji's point better than anything....
The "general Islam" of the ML was a lay identity built against the clerical establishment, led by an Ismaili Imam, financed by a Shia Raja, and consummated by a Khoja barrister, while the Sunni masses voted for it over their own muftis' fatwas..... That's not a Sunni clerical doctrine grandfathered in, that's the double minority thesis in action....
Again, why you so obsesses with sect, 99% of this post has nothing to do with the joint pact. It is just weird.




