The people's historian
Writing about the problems of historiography in Pakistan, Dr Mubarak Ali has pointed out that we are obsessed with the role of personalities, the Two-Nation theory, and religious feelings.
He recommends that now we change this framework and write history with new contours. He suggests that for good historiography and credible understanding of history we must get out of personality cults and break or at lease loosen the straitjacket of fixed ideologies and keep our religious sentiments away from history. He advocates a new interpretation of the partition of India that is in line with the changing ideas of new generations and their expectations.
We need to look at the past with a new angle now. In his essay titled 'Aap beeti aur history' (Biography and history) Dr Mubarak Ali raises a question about why some people write autobiographies.
"To project their own personalities as historical figures they make attempts to uncover such aspects that don't get attention in mainstream history. Some people also write autobiographies to either narrate their own versions of events, or to mutilate them with their own likes and dislikes. Sometimes they present a cursory narration so that not the whole truth comes out. Individually people also write autobiographies so that their errors of judgment, or their complicity in conspiracies and shenanigans, treachery, and corruption can be whitewashed to prove their own selves as innocent and sinless."
That's how Dr Mubarak Ali teaches us how to assess autobiographies in Pakistan, especially written by civil and military bureaucrats who have presented a certain kind of history that we need to judge and evaluate with stringent measure. Similarly, in his essay titled 'Historiography in Urdu' he highlights three feature in good historiography: First is the context in which events take place with their detailed background and foreground, second is the evidence or proof to verify those events and situations, and the third is the historian's own critical analysis and explanation.
"To write history now it is imperative to use a theoretical framework. History and theory have become interconnected. Such frameworks may include communalism, nationalism, Marxism, post-modernism, structuralism, and many others that have influenced historiography and a historian must try to explain and interpret historical events with their help."(Page 91)
Here by theory we mean an analytical perspective or viewpoint that serves as our lens to look at history. A historian may use more than one framework to avoid mutilating history by imposing one ideology. If any one official version of history is propagated - as happens in most authoritarian societies - the social fabric starts fraying with devastating results for society itself, be it an authoritarian persecution or the imposition of uniformity in the garb of democracy. Dr Mubarak Ali applied these points to his own PhD thesis on the Mughal court, which was written in the 1970s but is still important and useful.
While a majority of Pakistani historians have narrated Mughal history with a chain of events, Dr Mubarak Ali focused more on the Mughal civilization, culture, norms, festivals, and etiquettes. His thesis, which has seen multiple editions in Urdu, not only tells us about the pomp and glory of the Mughal court but also takes us behind the curtain of wealth to people's poverty and the mentality of a feudal dispensation. Another insightful book by Dr Mubarak Ali is 'Ulema aur Siyasat' (Religious scholars and history) in which he has discussed in detail the role such scholars have played in Muslim societies.
He explains that in Muslim society the clout of religious leaders intensified when the number of non-Muslims increased whose mother tongue was not Arabic and they faced difficulties in grasping the Quran and its exegesis, Islamic traditions and other religious teachings. There emerged a need for such people who knew the Arabic language and could impart religious education. So the scholars served as a link between people and religion. The seminaries these scholars established had differences in thought that resulted in the formation of denominations and sects. Contrary to Sunni Islam, in Egypt the Fatimids established al-Azhar that trained scholars in their own school of thought.
To counter that, the famous minister in the Seljuk dynasty, Nizam al-Mulk Tusi (1018 - 1092), started a chain of seminaries that became known as Nizamiya. And then there were countless seminaries of Hanafi, Shafii, and other schools of thought that went in opposition to Shia, Ismaili, and Qaramati movements.
That's why Mr Jinnah was dubbed the sole spokesman of the Muslims and the Muslim League.