57of Indian Muslims. They feared that granting of special privileges to Jews
in Palestine would anger the Indian Muslims. This apprehension was vin-
dicated when the Khilafat leaders viewed Palestine as an integral part of
the Jazirat-ul- Arab (literally island of Arabia or Arabian Peninsula) and
hence cannot be ceded to non-Muslim control let alone sovereignty
(Egorova 2006 , 57–58). Under the spell of the Khilafat phase, Mahatma
Gandhi vehemently argued that Jewish and Christian could not claim
sovereign rights in a place that has remained under Islamic control for
centuries (Kumaraswamy 2018 , 69–89).
The abolition of the Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in March 1924 ended
the Khilafat struggle in India and this kindled a process of alienation of
the two prominent religious communities. The evolution of the Pakistani
nationalism championed by the Muslim League was partly the result of
the Muslim fears over the Hindu-dominated Congress Party replacing the
British as the new rulers of the free India. The British policy of divide-
and- rule accentuated a long-running distrust between the two communi-
ties. For example, between 1885 when it was founded and until the
Khilafat phase the Congress Party only had three Muslims as president
(Badruddin Tyabji in 1887; Rahimtulla M Sayani, 1896; and Nawab Syed
Muhammad Bahadur in 1913). Four more were elected during the
Khilafat years, namely, Syed Hasan Imam (1918), Hakim Ajmal Khan
(1921), Maulana Mohammed Ali (1923) and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
(1923). If Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari was elected in 1927, Azad returned as
president in 1940 and continued until the end of the Second World War
when most of the Indian leaders, including himself, Gandhi and Nehru,
were incarcerated. After Azad’s extended term ended in 1946, no Muslim
had ever been elected as president of the Congress Party since India’s
independence (India, INC 2018 ).
It is possible to argue over the validity of the Muslim apprehensions
over their possible marginalization in the post-British political order but
the League thrived and pandered on such fears. After Jinnah’s re-election
as League’s president in 1933, Pakistani nationalism gained momentum
and eventually culminated in the division of the subcontinent along com-
munal lines in August 1947. The partition came with geographically and
culturally different East and West wings of Pakistan separated by a sizeable
Indian territory.
The formation of Pakistan comprising of the Muslim-majority areas on
the periphery of the subcontinent was accompanied by a large number of
Muslims opting to stay in India and become a part of its multicultural
ISLAMIC DIMENSION