#religious groups

To Jinnah, Islam — as it had meant to scholars such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Syed Ameer Ali and Muhammad Iqbal — was something dynamic, democratic and ‘modern.’ According to Jamiluddin Ahmad’s book Speeches and Writings of Mr Jinnah, on May 23, 1944, when some supporters of Jinnah’s All-India Muslim League asked Jinnah to address the “Ahmadiyya question”, Mr Jinnah replied: “Who am I to declare someone a non-Muslim, if he professes to be a Muslim?” The founders of Pakistan had their own idea of Islam that was rooted in the scholarly works of ‘Muslim Modernists’. There was no room in it to appease the idea of an Islamic state held by radical religionists. Even five years after Jinnah’s demise, the state of Pakistan unblinkingly crushed the first anti-Ahmadiyya movement, headed by religious groups, in 1953.