Maulana Muhammad Ali - A Strategic Point in Indo-Muslim Politics (Comment)

‘A great man’, says Justice Oliver Wendell, Jr, ‘represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in being there’. (italic ours). And Maulana Muhammad Ali was one such nerve-centre in Indo-Muslim society during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, he was one such strategic point in the onward march of Indo-Muslim politics that eventually found culmination and crystallization in the emergence of Pakistan. Actually no one else represented the tone, tenor and temper of the romanticist, Khilafatist era (in the 1910s and 1920s) as he did in his hectic life, his revolutionary activities his numerous discomfitures, and in his tragic death. Whether he led a hectic life, whether he took recourse to a revolutionary path, or whether he goaded himself to die a tragic death outside the frontiers of his motherland cataclysmically, in whatever he did, he, consciously or unconsciously, carried forward the campaign of Indo-Muslim history: the redemption of Islam in India and abroad. In other words, he stood, above all, for an honourable existence for Muslims in India and in the rest of the troubled Muslim world in the existential crisis that convulsed Muslim India and that world.

A Comparative Studies of Yasa and Pashtunwali in Islamic Perspective

Genghis Khan (1162-1227), Mongolia’s great emperor, ruled over large parts of the world for a long period of time. He had, under his banner, nomadic tribes and desert people. For controlling, uniting and disciplining the variant people and ruling over them, he framed a conventional constitution named “Yasa” (Holy laws), which was comprised of primitive traditions, customs, laws and Genghis Khan’s own insights and decisions. Every subject was obliged to abide by the rules of the said constitution. “Pashtunwali” is the Comprehensive customary law of the way of life of Pashtuns. Pashtuns call their supreme morals, merits, actions, customs, civilization and values as “Pashtunwali”. Pashtuns are mandated to live their life according to “Pashtunwali”.Both Mongols and Pashtuns had their own distinct ways of life and conventional constitutions, which the Mongols called “Yasa” and the Pashtun’s “Pashtunwali”. For centuries, no amendment was made possible in both these constitutions. But it was only after they embraced Islam that we see some changes made in their conventional constitutions. Because the “Yasa” was to some extent, according to Islam while the Pashtunwali too was mostly according to Islam. So the followers of the two constitutions, therefore, did not find it hard to act upon the message of Islam. Therefore, the need of the hour is that both the conventional constitutions of Mongols and Pashtun be analyzed in Islamic perspective so as to find out what they shared with the teachings of Islam and where they differed. Furthermore, we shall be able to explore, through this research, the aspects that the Pashtuns and Mongols shared intellectually.