Fatima Jinnah: Mother of the Nation'

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H-Asia Lambert-Hurley on Pirbhai, 'Fatima Jinnah: Mother of the Nation'

Review published on Thursday, April 30, 2020

M. Reza Pirbhai. Fatima Jinnah: Mother of the Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2017. Illustrations. viii + 279 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-19276-8.

Reviewed by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (University of Sheffield) Published on H-Asia (April, 2020) Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52865

Any reader who has visited Pakistan will be very familiar with the name—and probably the face—of Fatima Jinnah. In public buildings throughout the land, her painted image graces the walls, often at a spectacular level of magnification. The streets, too, are home to her effigy in the form of posters, statues, and plaques. In Karachi, a road, a housing colony, and a dental college are named for her, while, in Islamabad, a park, in Lahore, a medical school, and, in Rawalpindi, a women’s university. The list of her commemorations appears endless—even stretching, for those in the United Kingdom, to a waxwork at Madame Tussauds. In memorial as in life, she often appears at the side of her more famous brother, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Just as he is revered as Qaid-i-Azam, or “Great Leader,” for his role in founding Pakistan in 1947, so she is honored as Madar-i-Millat: “Mother of the Nation.” Together, they rest at the iconic Mazar-i-Qaid, or National Monument—a stunning example of 1960s modernism in marble not to be missed by any visitor—in the bustling, maritime city of their birth, Karachi. And yet how many know that much about Jinnah as an individual?

Thanks to the pioneering work of Barbara D. Metcalf and Gail Minault from the 1980s—and the generations of scholars who have followed in their footsteps—there now exists a rich scholarly literature on the history of Muslim women in South Asia.[1] No longer does it cleave only to topics defined by those great movements of Muslim reformism that turned their attention to women from the late nineteenth century. Instead, there is dedicated literature on Muslim women in medieval India, at the Mughal court, in eighteenth-century kingdoms, and beyond.[2] On the colonial period, there are regional studies of Muslim women in British provinces, like Punjab, Bengal, and Sind, as well as princely states, including Bhopal and Hyderabad.[3] The impenetrable divide between the “colonial” and “postcolonial” has also been bridged by those examining Muslim women’s lives and experiences through independence into the individual nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.[4] These time- and place-bound studies sit alongside more thematic ones on Muslim women’s engagement with nationalism, religion, law, travel, autobiography, and, most recently for me, food.[5] Burgeoning scholarly interest means South Asian Muslim women have even been treated to an invaluable research guide, Inscribing South Asian Muslim Women: An Annotated Bibliography & Research Guide by Tahera Aftab (2008).

Little of this specialist scholarship on South Asian Muslim women, however, engages in any depth with the figure of Jinnah. Her oeuvre has been the biography—of which the book under review is one

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Lambert-Hurley on Pirbhai, 'Fatima Jinnah: Mother of the Nation'. H-Asia. 04-30-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/reviews/6138652/lambert-hurley-pirbhai-fatima-jinnah-mother-nation Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Asia of the most recent examples. The author M. Reza Pirbhai notes in his introduction that, from Pakistan’s first fifty years or so, there was a decent selection of book titles in Urdu especially on Madar-i-Millat. But then the state sponsored a “Year of Fatima Jinnah” in 2003 and the floodgates opened, with nearly fifty books and innumerable short articles published since in English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Brahui. And so, the question arises: why one more? The author identifies a number of reasons to justify his own work: the hagiographical quality of many of the earlier books, their unwavering focus on Jinnah’s “affiliation with and service to her brother,” and a lack of engagement with wider theoretical and historiographical concerns (p. 3). His scholarly biography, in contrast, intends a more critical appraisal of his subject that facilitates broader reflection on themes of gender and nationalism. As noted in chapter 5, his historical evidence is thus interpreted not just for what it tells us about Jinnah’s extraordinary life: “It is also a window on the Muslim woman and public life” (p. 215).

In structure, the book takes a fairly standard biographical form: it is divided into five chronological chapters that take us from the subject’s birth in 1893 to her death in 1967 bookended with an introduction and a conclusion (the latter on “life and legacy”). The writing style is highly accessible, and yet the central argument remains salient throughout. In his earlier work, Reconsidering Islam in a South Asian Context (2009), Pirbhai portrays the socioreligious reforms initiated across the Muslim World from the eighteenth century as something so momentous that they ought to be labeled a “New Islam.” Here, he seeks to connect the example of Jinnah to this line of reasoning by exploring how she represented this newness as it was gendered in the form of the “new woman.” Articulated in Muslim societies from Turkey to Pakistan, this ideal was built on clerical and nonclerical models from the imperial era, while, in the South Asian context where Muslims were a minority, it relied firmly on Islamic legitimization. For Pirbhai, Jinnah takes form as the “new woman” par excellence in the mode of a nonclerical “New Islam” best represented by poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal: educated, enfranchised, and emancipated, but still the nurturing mother figure.

A continuity is thus underscored in this work between a Pakistan movement that retained space for a “modernizing feminism” and an independent Pakistan where “ecumenical Muslim nationalism” may have been squeezed but, until the late 1960s at least, still persisted (pp. 262, 263). Pirbhai takes issue, then, with those who reduce women to playing only a “symbolic role” in Muslim nationalism or subsume them into community as “unsubstantive subjects of the nation” (pp. 262, 263). Jinnah and her ilk were capable and talented women “in their own right” who played vital roles in the establishment and maintenance of Pakistan by mobilizing other women, leading relief measures, and engaging in mainstream politics (p. 263). Pirbhai lambastes, in turn, those scholars who fall into easy colonial dichotomies of “tradition” versus “modernity,” or, more recently, “Western” versus “Islamic” modernities with the latter equated with clerical models (p. 261). A fluid Islamic framework, he argues from Jinnah’s example, offers not a “cul-de-sac” but ongoing potential for women’s activism (pp. 254, 265). Had Pakistan’s political elite not, for their own cynical reasons, fostered a “fundamentalism” likened to one clerical brand of Islam above all others, these possibilities may be more palpable (p. 264).

To make these arguments, the author has clearly delved deep into the primary archive. The main source base, as noted in the introduction, is the vast and diverse Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah Papers preserved in the National Archives of Pakistan at Islamabad. As this collection includes “speeches, letters, diaries, notebooks, appointment books, her library, newspaper clippings and

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Lambert-Hurley on Pirbhai, 'Fatima Jinnah: Mother of the Nation'. H-Asia. 04-30-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/reviews/6138652/lambert-hurley-pirbhai-fatima-jinnah-mother-nation Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Asia more,” Pirbhai has been able to excavate Jinnah’s own words and perspectives, as well as what others thought of her (p. 19). The latter element is bolstered by the use of other media, as well as a decent array of memoir literature penned by men and women who knew her. Among the prominent women who appear at regular intervals—sometimes even hijacking the narrative—are Jahanara Shah Nawaz, Shaista Ikramullah, Atiya Fyzee, and Surayya Khurshid. It is evident that the author firmly believes that his immersion in the source material has given him an understanding of his subject’s emotions and intent. Perhaps the best example of this is in chapter 5 where he asks what Jinnah herself would have made of the controversies surrounding her own death: “I imagine her pouring a cup of tea, lighting a cigarette, throwing back her bobbed, silver hair, and laughing at the ‘shenanigans’ of the politicians she had known and loathed in life. But, of course, these would have been chortles holding back tears” (p. 251).

Whether this book is successful at “disentwining Fatima’s life and work from that of her brother”—a central aim underscored by the introduction’s subtitle: “Separating Fatima from Her Brother”—is open to debate (p. 18). Many of the early chapters especially dedicate many pages to the male Jinnah and his politics before turning, sometimes more cursorily, to his sister’s interpretation of his opinions and actions. The often fascinating first chapter, for example, is structured around the three colonial cities—Karachi, Bombay, Calcutta—that dominated Fatima’s childhood and youth. But midway through, the reader is introduced in some detail to Muhammad Ali’s professional circle, social life, and political preoccupations in the 1910s and 1920s as context to the “climate in which Fatima matured”—even though the sketchy evidence available suggests she was not much interested and usually elsewhere (p. 39). As to what she thought about “political developments of the day,” the author can only guess in terms of her presumed relationship to her brother, not least because she showed no proclivity for politics herself at this point (p. 46). This kind of reliance on conjecture to link Fatima to what we know already about her brother’s life can feel at odds with interpreting her as a historical subject independent of him.

Because the final two chapters address the period after Muhammad Ali’s death in 1948, it is perhaps inevitable that the story here unfolds less in his shadow. Particularly rich is the fourth chapter, “Dear Mother,” covering the first ten years after the male Jinnah’s death. As the title suggests, among its source material are letters written to Fatima Jinnah—by now conceived as Madar-i-Millat—by the “disempowered citizens of Pakistan suffering under the yoke of the state’s authority” (p. 183). A rare view is thus provided into the concerns of ordinary Pakistanis, male and female, from different provinces, social backgrounds, and personal circumstances—even if these are mostly listed, rather than probed.[6] Another revealing section is that in which we are invited to eavesdrop on Jinnah’s private conversations as recorded in her friend Surayya Khurshid’s diary—written while they lived together for six months at the former’s residence, Flagstaff House, in early 1956. There is only a nod here to the potential fallibility of this diary as a source for Jinnah’s “political perspective,” but elsewhere more derogatory remembrances of the subject—particularly from Rana Liaquat Ai Khan with whom she is said to have had an “acrimonious” relationship—are treated to a more critical reading (pp. 198, 44n86).

In the final pages of the conclusion, Pirbhai focuses on Fatima Jinnah’s legacy as the exemplar of the “new woman.” Without her, the ground would not have been readied for later female prime ministers in Pakistan and Bangladesh—Benazir Bhutto, Khaleda Zia, Sheikh Hasina—all of whom followed her example in “public persona” (p. 265). The “power of her vision,” he argues, accounts for why

Notes

[1]. For an overview of Metcalf’s and Minault’s contributions, see Barbara D. Metcalf,Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Gail Minault, Gender, Language and Learning: Essays in Indo-Muslim Cultural History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009); as well as their key works: Barbara D. Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

[2]. As an example of this literature on the eras before British colonialism, see Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[3]. For example, see Sonia Nishat Amin,The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876-1939 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Siobhan Lambert-Hurley,Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal(London: Routledge, 2007); and Dushka Saiyid, Muslim Women of the British Punjab: From Seclusion to Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Also on the colonial period is Azra Asghar Ali,The Emergence of Feminism among Indian Muslim Women 1920-1947 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[4]. On Pakistan, see Rubina Saigol, The Pakistan Project: A Feminist Perspective on Nation and Identity (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013); Sarah Ansari, “Polygamy, Purdah and Political Representation: Engendering Citizenship in 1950s Pakistan,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 6 (2009): 1421-61; and Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed, Women of Pakistan (London: Zed Books, 1987).

[5]. For example, see Mahua Sarkar, Visible Histories, Disappearing Womanhood: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2008); Justin Jones, “Towards a Muslim Family Law Act? Debating Muslim Women’s Rights and the Codification of Personal Laws in India,” Contemporary South Asia 28, no. 1 (2020): 1-14; Daniel Majchrowicz, “Malika Begum’s Mehfil: Retrieving the Lost Legacy of Women’s Travel Writing in Urdu,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (forthcoming October 2020); and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley,Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography and the Self in Muslim South Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). My current project on food history in Muslim South Asia funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) is “Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India” (2019-21).

[6]. The one paragraph in chapter 3 on letters written to Jinnah during Partition would also, undoubtedly, repay more detailed scrutiny (pp. 138-39). For an example of this kind of analysis, see

Sarah Ansari, “Everyday Expectations of the State during Pakistan’s Early Years: Letters to the Editor, Dawn (Karachi), 1950-1953,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 1 (January 2011): 159-78.

Citation: Siobhan Lambert-Hurley. Review of Pirbhai, M. Reza, Fatima Jinnah: Mother of the Nation. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. April, 2020. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52865

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.