7 - Visionary of Another Politics: Inayatullah Khan ‘al-Mashriqi’ and Pakistan

Summary

The religious reformer and political activist Inayatullah Khan, better known as ‘Allama Mashriqi’ or ‘al-Mashriqi’ (‘Sage of the East’), has attracted interest among intellectual historians for his idiosyncratic interpretation of Islam as a ‘scientific’ social Darwinism and for his flirtations with European fascism. Born into a well-educated middle-class family in Punjab in 1888, he spent the first 30 years of his adult life as an educationist and civil servant in British colonial service. In 1924, he published al-Tazkirah, his main religious-philosophical work, which he claimed, with characteristic exaggeration, to have narrowly missed a Nobel prize nomination and to have directly inspired Adolf Hitler. But it was only after 1931, when Inayatullah Khan founded the paramilitary Khaksar movement (‘the humble ones’; lit. ‘those with ashes on their head’) that he began to develop a more public and activist political vision. It was underpinned, as this chapter will argue, by a distinctive notion of revolutionary politics that captivated the hearts of millions of South Asian Muslims, just as Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Pakistan movement was gathering pace.

At the height of his influence, Mashriqi's impact was spectacular enough to overshadow much better remembered events in the great drama of Muslim identity formation in South Asia. The Lahore Resolution of March 1940, for instance, is now universally regarded as a breakthrough moment for Jinnah and the Pakistan movement. But for observers at the time, who did not yet know where history would lead in the years to come, it was ‘al-Mashriqi’ and his Khaksars that made the headlines. In a signature moment of colonial violence, scores of the Allama's followers were shot dead by the police after deliberately defying curfew orders in Lahore's Old City. This was less than a mile away from Minto Park, where the Muslim League delegates were gathering for their historic annual session. In the minds of sympathetic observers, the massacre immediately invoked two of the most famous and significant battles of all of Islamic history. The precise number of Khaksar activists involved was said to be 313, the same as the number fighting under the Prophet Muhammad's very leadership to win their first military victory at Badr.