Without any hesitation, I would place Mowahid Hussain Shah in the second category of debaters and advocates of contemporary issues. His collection of newspaper and magazine essays, Will & Skill, written over some three decades, are a passionate voice raised from Washington DC imploring justice and fair play for Muslims, wherever he thinks they are oppressed and given a bad deal. His essays have been published in many US newspapers and magazines and for years in a local English daily.
Shah makes such pleas as a man of the modern world, fully commensurate with universal humanist values and standards. He is therefore by no stretch of the imagination an apologist for the abuse of power, fundamentalism, and the perversions of corruption that pervade the corridors of power in Muslim societies, especially his beloved Pakistan. Many of the essays are a scathing critique of Muslim societies and their ruling classes.
Shah is a devotee of the idea of Pakistan. His father, Colonel (retd) Amjad Hussain Syed was one of the students who actively campaigned for a progressive Pakistan. The family hence subscribes to a different vision of Pakistan than the one that animated the clerics who wanted a fundamentalist state or the landlords who feared liquidation in a united India under Congress rule and therefore wanted a Pakistan wedded to conservative ideas.
In my doctoral dissertation on the Islamic state, I concluded that Pakistan was a phantasmagoria and different sections of the Indian Muslim community of British India saw and imagined it differently, hence, an unending controversy over the purpose for which Pakistan came into being.
Living in the United States and opposing the invasion of Iraq or taking up cudgels on behalf of the Palestinians is not the best investment career-wise, but some men and women will always defy self-promotion and speak the truth as they see it. Shah argues that the end of the Cold War between the two superpowers has been replaced by a Cold War against Islam. Thus, for example, the hyphenated construction ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilisation suggests misleadingly a shared religious and cultural legacy that is harmonious. Such a construction, arbitrarily excludes Islam from that shared legacy of the Abrahamic faiths, he emphasises. He asserts that the historical record and evidence is to the contrary.
Thus, for example, in an issue from 1990 of the influential History Today, it has been acknowledged that, “Jewish people received their most tolerant treatment at the hands of Muslims in the Maghreb, the Middle East, and Moorish Spain” (page 3). He makes a very cogent argument: “When Jews and Christians can live with each other after a 2,000-year history of persecution, pogroms, and the Holocaust, surely it is not entirely quixotic to envision the Christian West and the Muslim East finding their common humanity in the quest for a better tomorrow.”
The author echoes the thinking of many fair-minded Muslims and intellectuals who accept Israel’s right not only to exist, but also to become an integral part of the Middle East, on the basis of mutual benefit through interaction with the vast Arab humanity around it. Such a relationship is possible only if the suffering of the Palestinians groaning under years of inhuman occupation comes to an end. A two-state solution is the most desirable, but the Palestinian state has to be a viable entity and not a patchwork of Bantu lands. He calls for justice in Kashmir, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan as well.
Shah’s review of the life conditions of the people of Pakistan is very emotional indeed and suffused with sincere best wishes for their progress and consolidation as a modern nation. He appeals to the United States and the west to consider Pakistan’s legitimate interests with regard to security, reminding that Hindu fundamentalism in India is no less violence-prone. He gives the example of the attack on the Babri Mosque in December 1992 and other incidents to establish his argument that hostility towards Pakistan exists in India.
His strongest lament is for the worship of Mammon in Pakistan. Money and connections matter and that is all. He considers such decadence a betrayal of the Pakistan that many middle class Muslims believed would come into being. The spineless and corrupt Pakistani ruling class has “never failed to fail Pakistan”, he remarks most aptly.
Amid such patently political writings, we catch glimpses of Mowahid Hussain Shah’s refined tastes and sensibilities as well. It is his love for music, films, and nostalgia for the golden era of Pakistani cricket. When in the 1950s, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, Fazal Mahmood, Imtiaz Ahmed, Muhammad Hanif and many other great players created a sensation on the green turfs all over the world, his articles on them are a real treat and bonus in this book. Will & Skill is an erudite, very readable, and a most informative collection of essays, which express the concerns and hopes of a caring human being and an intellectual for Muslims and Pakistan.
*The reviewer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.
