From the 8th International Fiqh Conference held in Pretoria, South Africa on the 18-20 October 2003
Fifty five years ago the appalling event of Partition took place, granting a de facto control of the greater land-mass of the Indian Subcontinent to the hindus. Two rump territories on the northwest and south-east were designated as a state to be ruled by Muslims. At the time, England’s greatest poet, W. H. Auden, wrote his famous poem ‘Partition’ to express his outrage. He said: In seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided, A continent for better or worse divided. The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not, Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot. Since the towering political reality of today, overshadowing everything else, is the collapse de jure and de facto of the sovereign state, and since new modalities of power have swept aside nationhood, statehood and the discrete, unassailable financial unit — because of all this, which is the age we have just entered, the time has come for the Muslims to re-assert their identity, their unity, and united, their unassailable power. The English historian A.J.P. Taylor once said that the study of history was that from the mistakes of the past we learn to make the mistakes of the future. Let us look in some detail at the Partition process, as certain factors which could not have been clear then can in the light of our new situation be made painfully clear.
On the 8th of July 1947 Sir Cyril Radcliffe arrived in Delhi. He was summoned by the Viceroy to meet Nehru and Sadar Patel for Congress, and Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan for the Muslim League. Sir Cyril pointed out that it was a considerable task that had been assigned to him and his two boards of judges. He spoke of the vastness of India, of the multitudinous population, of the difficulty of slicing hectares of territory on each side of the Subcontinent so that communities of people would be cherished, districts saved from division, towns and villages linked to their land. He insisted that this job would take even the most careful arbitrators years to decide, but he realised that the matter was urgent. He and his two Commissions would do their utmost to help. How long had he got? “Five weeks,” said Mountbatten. Before Sir Cyril Radcliffe could express his astonishment and dismay, Nehru interrupted: “If a decision could be reached in advance of five weeks, it would be better for the situation.” The others, Jinnah included, nodded in agreement.
Through Radcliffe, Mountbatten prevailed on the Partition Council on 22nd July to sign a joint statement saying: “Both Governments have pledged themselves to accept the awards of the Boundary Commissions, whatever they may be. The Boundary Commissions are already in session: if they are to discharge their duty satisfactorily, it is essential that they should not be hampered by public speeches or writings threatening boycott, direct action, or other interference in their work.”
The Award of Sir Cyril Radcliffe announced on 17th August 1947 illegally and unjustifiably deprived Pakistan of a number of contiguous Muslim majority areas. The Dawn newspaper captioned its editorial ‘Territorial Murder’ and declared that Pakistan had been cheated by an unjust award, a biased decision, an act of shameful partiality by one who had been trusted to be fair because he was neutral. It asserted that the Award was so unfair that it absolved the Pakistan Government of its prior undertaking to accept it. D.P. O’Connell in his International Law Volume II states the following grounds for the repudiation of an award or nullifying it:
- Lack of jurisdiction
- Violation of the rules of natural justice
- Failure to give a reasoned award
- Fraud and duress
- Essential and manifest error
Due to the events and circumstances, the Radcliffe Award may be considered invalid on these five O’Connell points, borne out by the intrigues and decision concerning the salient points about Gurdaspur and the tehsils of Ferozepur and Zira. In the Partition Plan the two Muslim majority tehsils, Gurdaspur and Batala were illegally given to India, partly as a result of prejudicial influence by Mountbatten when the matter was sub judici. Justice Munir said: “Gurdaspur was sacrificed in order to connect India to Kashmir.” If Radcliffe had awarded India only the non-Muslim majority tehsil, Pathankot, India would still not have gained access to Jammu and Kashmir, since the Muslim majority tehsils of Batala and Gurdaspur to the south would have blocked the way. Thus Radcliffe gave India the land-link to justify the annexation of Jammu and Kashmir. All of Kashmir’s lines of communication led into west Pakistan while there was no link with India. Mountbatten deliberately pushed the Boundary Commission to provide India with the Gurdaspur district. Without it, India could never have taken the state under its protection or assumed responsibility for its defence.
In the middle of July Sir Cyril went to Lahore. Lord Mountbatten gave him his own plane to fly the terrain but the flight was cancelled due to storm. Justice Din Muhammad, however, saw the flight plan which he had obtained from the pilot, and it was along the boundary line which eventually went on the map attached to the Award. Justice Din Muhammad said that it showed conclusively that the boundary had been determined before the award was made. On the outbreak of the Indo-Pakistan War of September 1965 Radcliffe admitted, “I was not aware of the Kashmir thing at all. If I had been, it might have been a factor to take into account.” Justice Munir summed up as follows: “When I read the text of the Award I was stunned. A two-page document and a line on a map, drawn as the fancy of its drawer dictated, that divided the fourth largest country in the world.”
On the 8th of August, confirmed by communication from Mountbatten to the Governor of Punjab, the tehsils of Ferozepur and Zira would go to Pakistan. On the 17th of August the Award of them went to India. Between these dates lay the private New Delhi meeting of Mountbatten and Radcliffe.
Before we examine the real and profoundly important issue that has to be confronted in the Subcontinent, we must have a necessary awareness that both the qadiani kuffar and the sikhs were awarded their terrain on the basis of the importance of their so-called holy shrines. Jinnah, the Isma‘ili, and his Muslim League submitted a memorandum in the course of which these vital confessions were made. The memorandum said:
“The League demanded a partition of India on the basis of the separation of those provinces in which the Muslims were in a majority from the rest of India. No claim was made by the League for the allotment of areas to Pakistan on the basis of religious sanctity, historical associations, sentimental attachment, proprietary interests, cultural considerations, educational facilities or any other similar factor.”
I now ask you to pay particular attention to the following sentence of the memorandum.
“In making its demand for partition and basing it on the single consideration of majorities in the populations of certain Provinces IT CONFINED ITSELF TO THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE of a single human soul having a value which could not be estimated in terms of property or of any of the other factors set out above. In taking its stand upon this principle the Muslim League was conscious that it must reconcile itself to leaving out of Pakistan its great religious and historical monuments like the Juma Masjid, the Red Fort, the Qutab Minar, Tughlaqabad, the shrines of Hazrat Nizam-ud-Din Aulia, the tombs of Humayun and other great Muslim emperors who reigned over the greater part of India, the imperial city of Fatehpur Sikri, the mosque of Aurangzeb at Benares, and the shrine of Hazrat Moninud- Din at Ajmer.”
This list continues, and in a masonic slip of the pen while referring to the tomb of Akbar, it calls him the greatest secular ruler that the world has so-far produced. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was an Isma‘ili, and that is not accidental to the history of the Partition of Pakistan. Isma‘ilism must be seen in its historical context and not just its juridical context. On the face of it it is a minor sect of the shi‘a, cast out both by them and the Muslim majority. In reality their doctrines are a receptacle which receives the detritus of failed rebel groups and extremists who have needed in their rejection of Islam to separate themselves from both the person of sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, and the Divinely ordained Shari‘at. In these terms Isma‘ilism is the home of the two extremes now prevalent in the dialectic of the kuffar — terrorism and suicide assassination carried out by youths and vagabonds, with an iconic hero inaccessible to the powers-that-be, at its inception, the Old Man of the Mountains and today Bin Laden, significantly hiding in the north-eastern Isma‘ili province of Pakistan — and its antithesis, when people are exhausted by terror, the Isma‘ilis come with the offer of world peace, brotherhood of man, a mystical angelology, and the “good news” that the Muslims need neither fast nor pray. We can today observe the loathsome Saudi royal family moving to the second stage of the dialectic.
Thus the political Isma‘ilism that now terrorises Israelis and Americans has, hidden beyond the terror, the absolute glorification of the secular state, the abolition of Islam and the submission to the mythic humanism which made the twentieth century the graveyard of a billion and a half dead humans. The existential reality of India had been that a legal Muslim government had established its great civilisation over a period of hundreds of years. When the last Moghul, Bahadur Shah II, was captured and thrust into a dungeon by the English, and his sons were paraded in front of an English regiment, stripped naked by the perverted English officer, and shot dead before the regiment, the beginnings of a new order could be recognised.
What was that New Order?
The previous Nomos — or let us say — civilisation had this form. The Muslims rule by the legal formula of Dar al-Islam with Dar al-Harb on the frontiers. Inside the Dar al-Islam, as under Aurangzeb, Zakat collected, Jizya paid, Madinan coinage of gold and silver. The Muslims of India were never militarily defeated, just as the Osmanli Anatolians were never militarily defeated. The transfer of power came by the imposition of the paper Rupee, and the paper Khaima in Osmanli lands, and the withdrawal of a real money currency, thus in one blow abolishing the ‘Amr of the ‘amir, real wealth by the flow of Zakat, and real governance by the movement of real money as defined in the Qur’an, where the word Dawla, now transferred quite wrongly to the political state, originally represented the movement of wealth among the people. Let us now look closely at what the current kafir model of power is. And it represents the end of civilisation. In 1977 the French philosopher, Foucault, defined the change in our political realities as follows: “We have crossed the threshold of a biological modernity.” Later, speaking at the College de France, he defined the transition to modernity, saying, “We are living the passage from the Territorial State to the Population State.”
It follows from the Foucault insight that the Partition of India was applying the principles of the high kafir doctrine which rendered people, bodies, as the raw material of the political programme, a power ownership which did not exist in the feudal period. The triumph of capitalism’s world would not have been possible without the disciplinary control of the new bio-power, which by a series of appropriate technologies has created the docile bodies which it needed for production and consumption and corporate trade.
The new bio-power has created a new polarity and a new order of rule. The friend is no longer set against the enemy, but rather the citizen is set against the non-person. The citizen is the one who functions inside the reward system of power, and his documented permission to be such is both his political passivity and his submission to the primarily debtor system of the numbers wealth with which he is governed. The citizen, therefore, is either a spending creditor or a hard-working debtor under financial control. The non-person, equally, can belong in two groups. Either he is for extermination: jews in the Third Reich, bourgeois in communist Russia, and today in Srebrenica, Palestine, and Kashmir, or he is for Aid-Programme help, that is food and medicine, survival never liberation, or he becomes a subject for a human-rights programme. For a human creature to be subsumed under the category of human rights is in fact to define him legally as a non-human in a state of temporary degradation or enslavement, and in danger of swelling the ranks of the other category of non-person due for extermination. It was the inevitable and logical conclusion of the humanist project that it had to create a category of non-humans and then place over them the umbrella of human rights to imply that they could be rescued back to citizen status. It follows from this that an acceptance of the world’s frontiers will lead in a very short time to the obliteration of the world Muslim community and its submission to a global Isma‘ilism. It must also be remembered that the bizarre insistence of the ruling system on keeping the old imperialist frontiers is not sentimental or rational, but rather that the frontiers do not delineate land but the encasement of population following the new system of bio-power which defines a nation as a catchment area for national debt. National debt could not be repaid following a significant frontier shift. From this resulted the genocide of Rwanda rather than logically dividing two enemy nations. In the Financial Times of London on the division of Bosnia from Serbia, bankers openly demanded that both halves pay the full amount of debt. The former Secretary of State to Carter, Brzezinski, in his book ‘The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives’ insisted that the key to world domination was Central Asia, and I quote: “To put it in terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, one of the grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy is TO KEEP THE BARBARIANS FROM COMING TOGETHER.” Well, here we are, and we are coming together!
Gathered here today are those who will create the first move towards an all-India Islamic reality. On the level of technology, and the brutality of the pagan hordes who pretend to modernity while continuing to worship elephants, monkeys and mythic monsters, while bathing in faecally infected waters in the vain hope of purification, they can still outbomb us and outkill us. We do not have terror for them, nor do we have tolerance. What is present here is one half of the equation, for this revival of unified Islam has to spread northwards to all the presently enslaved “-stans” whose tradition is unquestioned and whose historical Sufism is both renowned and recorded by the great al-Hujwiri, may Allah be pleased with him. We must finish Pakistan-India confrontation. I have made it clear to you that the national evaluation is a used ticket and a forgotten fantasy. The Muslims of India and the Muslims of Pakistan must not fight each other. The Punjabi military of the High Command of Pakistan must remove the kemalist pig Musharaf from power for us. It is their Islamic duty to prevent the bloodshed in the streets, which Musharaf would call for, to put down the irresistible rise of a protesting Muslim people.
In Afghanistan the Muslim people and the Muslim leaders must face up to the unspoken subject which the kafir media cynically avoids, that there is no occupying army without an institutionalised prostitution, and given the corruption of the occupying force, we must not forget that that involves the abuse of both boys and girls, as well as women. Just as there is no such thing as a hindu religion, but a series of mushrik cults which were sewn together by the christian imperialist theologians looking for triads of gods that they could stitch together as a metaphoric trinitarian base, equally there is no such thing as a hindu nation. It is split from top to bottom, by that I mean from its Brahmans in the Congress Party to its Untouchables, and from side to side, by which I mean the separatist movements that plague it from Kerala to Assam. It is in the light of these matters that I beg this Conference to re-think in the most vibrant Islamic terms how we may succeed with Allah’s guidance and with Allah’s release to us of a borrowed attribute of His power, without association, so that again we can come under one flag and end the kafir tyranny produced by the banking elite and its technical apparatus of numbers-finance which not only cannot manifest as gold and silver, but cannot manifest in any form of specie, even paper. Let us not forget that the greatest and most difficult part of raising Islam up again will not even come from among the great Salihun now rising up, but will manifest through the Qadr of Allah in making unexpected events which will hasten the collapse of this evil system which now encircles the world. The plot of Allah is greater and the victory of Allah is assured. We look to the future with a great expectation of help from Allah and we gather our strength in our love of our beloved Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, that soon we will make the Deen entirely Allah’s, across the world.
