I read with interest Professor Faisal Devji's response here to a review in Dawn of his classic Muslim Zion.

When it came out ten years ago, I was among the first to respond with a knee-jerk in one of the articles I wrote on it. After all, calling Mr Jinnah "satanic" and "Devilish", and equating the Muslim nationalism that led to the creation of Pakistan to Zionism was, on first impression, unacceptable to any Pakistani worth his or her salt. So, I am not surprised that ten years later, the book continues to evoke patriotic outrage amongst Pakistanis. I had the opportunity to revisit the book when I was writing my book on Mr Jinnah and have gone back to it to understand the puzzle that is our homeland.

Professor Devji is a historian of ideas and, as such, believes in taking ideas seriously, which is commendable. For long, Pakistan has carried the stigma of being "insufficiently imagined". Regardless of the debate on what form Pakistan could have taken, be it within a confederation of India or as a separate state as it eventually turned out, the underlying idea of what Pakistan represented and what it meant to its main protagonist is one that remains relevant to Pakistan's many current predicaments.

Muslim Zion provided me with the vocabulary I did not have when describing the central idea behind Pakistan. For long, one has argued against the idea that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam, i.e., to enforce God's law and enforce the practice of the Islamic faith. Why was it that some of the proponents of the Pakistan idea, most notably Jinnah himself, were either irreligious or too modern to be concerned with rituals and Islamic conventions? The profane explanation is that the Aligarh school of Muslim modernists and the Muslim elites were cynically using religion for........

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