Displaced Enemies, Displaced Memories: Diaspora Memorial Politics of Partition and the Holocaust

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Displaced Enemies, Displaced Memories: Diaspora Memorial Politics ofPartition and the HolocaustPnina Werbner a

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Displaced Enemies, Displaced Memories:Diaspora Memorial Politics of Partition andthe Holocaust

Pnina WerbnerKeele University, UK

abstract This paper argues that the refusal of the Muslim Council of Britain toattend Holocaust Memorial Day highlights a key dimension of memory as politicalmyth: namely, the sense that time is cyclical. Prior external and internal enemies (intheir current manifestations) are apocalyptically destined to threaten the integrity ofthe nation once more. Hence, ideologies based on political myths draw on both thefuture hopes and the future fears of people. The paper highlights the similaritiesbetween Jewish and Pakistani fears, rooted in the Holocaust and Partition, of arepeated ‘cycle of death and suffering’. These loom large especially for those sufferingracism. The more bound people are by their narrow group’s particular symbols andhistory, the more apocalyptic their vision of this future is likely to be.

keywords Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), Partition, genocide, myth, Pakistanis,Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Politics of Memory

A Preamble on Displacement

World War II and the Holocaust led to the death and displacement ofmillions of Jews. Indirectly, so Palestinians believe, the Holocaustalso led to the displacement of close to a million Palestinians1 and

to the catastrophe of the Naqba when, in November 1947, the UN approvedthe Partition of British Mandatory Palestine and the establishment of a Jewishstate on part of its territory. Almost at the same time, across the continent,the Partition of British India led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands ofIndians, many of them Muslims, in communal massacres perpetrated by allthree religious communities (Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims). This article considers

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the way memory of the Holocaust, the Naqba and Partition have come to beentangled and politicised in present-day Britain, as they are anguished overby those whose national communities, and sometimes they themselves, haveexperienced displacement and strangerhood. My aim is not to argue that thethree events are objectively comparable in the scale of horror they representedor the allocation of guilt and blame.2 The similarity lies in the traumas theirmemory has generated and in their narrative afterlife, expressed in collectivememorialisation and the political imaginaries of the two communities discussedhere: Muslim and Jewish.

It is evident that at the present time Jewish anthropologists who studyMuslim or Arab society cannot ignore the often tragic reality that the historiesof Jews and Muslims are intertwined with one another or that the Holocaust isambiguously placed at the intersection of Jewish, Arab and European histories.Despite the fact that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, actively supported Hitler’s Third Reich and the Axis forces, mostPalestinians, and Muslims more generally, see the Holocaust as a Europeancrime for which they have had to pay the ultimate price of losing their landand country. Few have the cosmopolitan vision of Edward Said who added acaveat to his article in La Monde after the Oslo Accords:

Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the Holo-caust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism. But no, they cannot use those facts tocontinue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibilityfor either of those prior facts. I have been saying for 20 years that we have no militaryoption and are not likely to have one anytime soon. And neither does Israel have areal military option. Despite their enormous power, Israelis have not succeeded inachieving either the acceptance or the security they crave. On the other hand, notall Israelis are the same, and whatever happens, we must learn to live with them insome form, preferably justly, rather than unjustly. (1998, emphasis added)

The Holocaust as memory and historical event far exceeds the moment of itsproduction.3 This analysis of a memory crisis in the present article followsRichard Werbner in rejecting a ‘presentist’ approach to memory whichreduces it to an artefact of the here and now (1998a:1, 2); instead, my analysisrecognises ‘the passion in, for and against memory, keeping it alive, burying itor killing it, disclosing, registering, textualising and recreating it’ (Werbner1998a: 3). As Werbner argues, memory and memorialising may contribute tothe ‘critique of power’, whereby agreed-upon assumptions are contested. Inthe present case this led to a memory crisis for the Muslims of Britain.

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Time and NarrativeSeveral questions have come to animate the renewed debate about narrative

and collective memory. Building on Halbwachs (1992), most recent writers havestressed the political dimensions of memorialism and commemoration.4 Thequestion of why people narrate themselves needs, however, also to be relatedto several other questions: What forms do these narratives assume, and whatstructure of time does the act of narration entail? What disguised messages donarratives hide?

Narration and commemoration are performative acts (Turner 1980;Connerton 1989). Through story telling, people recover the past as a meaningfulmoral world to be desired and reached out to (White 1980). Diasporic Pakistanis’rhetorical re-invocations of the traumatic events leading to the founding ofPakistan may be interpreted, the present article argues, as dramatic actsof reaching out to the past. But they are also in an important sense a reachingout to the present and the future. Indeed, the moral plots of political mythologiesunite the past with the present and future. They define, in Ricoeur’s terms, acommon destiny (Ricoeur 1980:186). This is a key point of the present article.

In arguing thus, I reject any simplistic opposition between profane, secularlinear time, on the one hand, and sacred, cyclical or mythical time, on theother, posited, for example, by Eliade (1971) or Geertz (1973). I am also not con-cerned, in the abstract, with a metaphysical or phenomenological conception oftime and memory as cyclical and thus subject-making, as in the work of Deleuze(2004), following Nietzsche and Bergson, though my conception of time maybe said to be consonant with Deleuze’s.5 Instead, my argument begins fromthe need to recognise the fuzziness of the boundaries between secular historio-graphy and sanctified myth in national ideology, and the way this is articulatedin modern-day commemorations of historical events that occurred within livingmemory – and in the political imaginaries, these events generate.

Anthropological analyses of memory and violence that stress the cyclicalnature of time record the imperative felt by activists not to forget; their commit-ment to avert the future recurrence of past conflicts. Increasingly, this is cast inthe language of human rights. So, for example, anthropological accounts of pro-democracy struggles in Latin America against the dirty war’s terror, assassina-tions and disappearances, highlight activists’ feelings that recovering the past isan essential debt to future generations.6 Truth commissions in post-apartheidSouth Africa and elsewhere explicitly aim to prevent the future recurrence ofthe atrocities of the past by exposing the perpetrators of violence to theirvictims, and giving victims a voice (Tutu 2000).7 These struggles to rescue

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the future from the past recognise that memories of violence haunt actors, bothindividually and collectively. The present paper focuses on past violent eventsfor which no restitution is felt by actors to be possible. In the case of thePartition of India, there were no truth commissions either side of the border;nor, at present, is there an end in sight to the Palestinian conflict, or a resolutionof the plight of the Palestinian refugees. In the case of the Holocaust, theenormity of the genocide seems to defy forgiveness.

Holocaust Day MemorialsIn October 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted, almost unanimously,

the resolution to name January 27 International Holocaust RemembranceDay. This was the day on which the Soviet troops entered Auschwitz-Birkenau,the largest Nazi concentration camp where more than one million Jews weremurdered during World War II. In his address to the assembly, the UNSecretary-General Kofi Anan told delegates that the ‘UN was built largely onthe ashes of the Holocaust’.

Four years earlier, the then Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair, and hisgovernment had established Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day, memorialisedin a public ceremonial at Westminster Abbey on January 27 each year.8 TheQueen is patron of the charity that organises the event and the Home Officecontributes £500,000 a year to it. The memorial ceremony is attended by theRoyal Family, the Prime Minister and all the good and great of the nation –with one notable exception. Representatives of key Muslim community organ-isations, most notably the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), have boycottedthe event and have asked that Holocaust Memorial Day be replaced withGenocide Day to recognise the murders of members of their own faith in Pales-tine, Chechnya and Bosnia. One Muslim member of an advisory committeeadvising on extremism told reporters that the name Holocaust Day gave the‘impression that western lives have more value than non-western lives’ andthat ‘Muslims feel hurt and excluded’ (Helm 2005, in The Telegraph online).The Telegraph reports that ‘Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the charity Interpalwhich aims to provide relief and development aid to the poor and needy ofPalestine, said: "There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have beenwiped out over the years. That’s pretty genocidal to me"’ (Helm 2005).

Similarly, the MCB boycotted the event in 2006 for the fourth year runningon the grounds that it is not sufficiently inclusive. In response to this claim,Stephen Smith, Chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Trust, said that‘Holocaust Memorial Day has always been an inclusive event. That is why,

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from its very first year, survivors from Bosnia, Rwanda and the Holocaust havecome together: Jews, Muslims and Christians, as well as non-Jewish victimsof the Holocaust – gay and disabled people and Romani Communities’(Johnson 2006, reported in The Telegraph, online). Michael Whine, Directorof the British Board of Deputies, argued against the Muslim demand for a‘Genocide day’ that ‘the whole point is to remember the darkest day ofmodern history’ (Helm 2005).

Once again it appears, as on other occasions, that the Muslim diaspora inBritain, the majority of whom are Pakistanis and South Asians,9 has set itselfapart, beyond the moral community of its adopted nation, apparentlydenying its most fundamental values (on this tendency in the Pakistani diaspora,see Werbner 2002:Chapter 6). For the people of Britain in particular, theHolocaust, and especially the liberation of the camps, is remembered as partof the wider struggle against Nazism and Fascism memorialised every yearon Remembrance Day. Whatever its international significance, HolocaustMemorial Day thus also has deep emotive significance within the specifichistorical narratives of Britain and of other European nations. To reject that pol-itical mythology,10 as Muslims appeared to be doing, is to misrecognise almostdeliberately, or so it appears to fellow British citizens, the post-War civil religionof the nation, constructed around the heroism, suffering and sacrifices made bythe people of Britain during World War II, in their battle to liberate the freeworld from fascism and racism.11

Ironically, perhaps, both Israel and Pakistan owe their very existence to theevents of World War II. In the case of Pakistan, unlike Gandhi and the CongressParty who refused to back the Allied war effort, or the Arab world’s active supportfor the Axis Powers, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, publicly sup-ported and joined the British-led Allied fight against the Nazis.12 This supportarguably earned Jinnah the indebtedness of the imperial power in the post-Warnegotiations for separate statehood for the Muslims of India. Similarly, the over-whelming support for the partition of Palestine and recognition of the state ofIsrael by the United Nations, in November 1947, undoubtedly stemmed from col-lective guilt in the face of revelations of the horrors suffered by the Jews in theHolocaust. Both Israel and Pakistan, then, emerged from World War II and, asPakistanis themselves recognise, were for many decades the only two states inthe world established on the basis of a religious identity in the post-Warperiod (recently, Bosnia may count as another such state).

Pakistanis and Jews, whether at home or in the diaspora, also share anotherquality in common: in both, a sizeable majority of nationalists live with a sense

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of perpetual victimhood, an apocalyptic vision of disasters yet to come. In bothcountries, the political consciousness of nationalists on the Right of the politicalspectrum is shaped by an existential anxiety, a ‘ghastly premonition’ about thethreat of imminent subjugation, domination, extinction or annihilation. Thissense of communal ontological insecurity arises from a perception of theirhistory as marked by repeated cycles of death and suffering. As Shlaim(1994:5) argues, ‘Jewish history had traditionally been presented as an endlesschain of trials and tribulations which reached its climax in the Nazi [H]olocaust.Likud leaders have assiduously cultivated the image of a small and vulnerableJewish state surrounded by a sea of Arab hostility’. Hence a pervasive fear,explicitly expressed by one commentator, is that,

[t]he Holocaust is an event that could recur, in some form or other, if we do not openour eyes and understand that the Nazi monster is still breathing, and attempting tocontinue what Hitler, may his memory be blotted out, did not have time to finish.I am speaking of the Arabs around us, who have been trying, even from before theestablishment of the State of Israel, to eliminate any Jewish existence in EretzIsrael, regardless of our borders. The Arabs have been murdering us on a dailybasis from the days of the pogroms in 1929 (when it could not be claimed that wewere ‘occupiers’). (Matar 2004)

In the diaspora, both Pakistanis and Jews face the need to constantly recon-nect themselves, on the one hand, to their symbolic homelands – Pakistan andIsrael – and on the other hand, to the wider diasporas of their imaginations –Jewish and Muslim. This means that as diasporans their normative vision shiftsimperceptively, almost by sleight of hand, from locatedness in place (Israel,Pakistan) to a wider locatedness in world history (of Judaism, of Islam) andcontemporary global events.13 In the case of the Jewish diaspora, as onewriter puts it,

The world has many images of Israel. But Israel has only one image of itself: that of anexpiring people, forever on the verge of ceasing to be . . . . He who studies Jewishhistory will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diasporaperiod which did not consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain. Each always sawbefore it the abyss ready to swallow it up . . . . Often it seems as if the overwhelmingmajority of our people go about driven by the panic of being the last. (Weiseltier 2002,citing Rawidowicz’s essay ‘The Ever-Dying People’)

There is little doubt that the Holocaust has been used by successive Israeligovernments to establish the moral high ground in negotiations with world

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leaders over the Middle East conflict. A succession of these leaders is whiskeddirectly from Ben Gurion Airport to Yad Vashem, the Memorial Hill inJerusalem that commemorates the atrocities of the Holocaust in a series ofaesthetically moving memorials and museums. Among the dignitaries whohave visited Yad Vashem over the past years are former US Presidents BillClinton, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, George Bush and George W. Bush;President Saadat of Egypt, former Presidents Nelson Mandela and FrancoisMitterand, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, and alongside these minorluminaries such as US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice andSenators Hilary Clinton (now Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs) andEdward Kennedy.

Human rights violations against Palestinians in the occupied territories,including dispossession of lands and livelihoods, house demolitions, bombingsand extra-judicial assassinations, with their attendant collatoral damage ofinnocent citizens, including women and children, are symbolically trivialisedby successive Israeli governments as minor infringements rather than crimesagainst humanity. How can these acts of necessary self-defence, it is implied,be judged by the same yardstick as the unique monstrosity of the Holocaust?The loss of life of a few thousand Palestinians and Israelis, killed in thesecond intifada or in the 2008 Gaza campaign, is thus minimised, pitchedagainst the atrocities of suicide bombers (unnatural and thus illegitimate inboth Judaism and Christianity) and the existential threat to the very existenceof Israel and the Jewish people supposedly posed by a billion hostile andmurderous Muslims worldwide, a sea of barbarity threatening the extinctionof the sole and only Jewish state in the world.

While all Jews mourn the memory of the Holocaust, its centrality inmodern Jewish life and the lessons for the present and future drawn fromit differ. The Jewish and Israeli Right, including the religious Right,appear to have an almost obsessive preoccupation with the Holocaust,memorialised every year in Israel on 27 Nissan.14 In recent years, linkedto the Right’s rise to power, the Holocaust has been taught to highschool children in Israel for a whole year. Regular and frequent trips toAuschwitz tap into young people’s sentimental identification with thevictims. They also engender the existential fear of future holocausts, andstress a certain interpretation of ‘Never Again’. Rather than the lesson ofracism, right wing Jews take never again to mean that never again willJews stand defenceless and go like lambs to the slaughter. The only strategyis to fight one’s enemies to the utter limit. Hence, the memory of the

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Holocaust and the individual memories of Holocaust survivors come to bepoliticised and incorporated into a particular kind of political mythology ofthe nation and its civil religion.

Liberal Jewish critics on the Left, both within Israel and in the diaspora, havecondemned this use of the Holocaust to justify contemporary violations ofhuman and citizenship rights. As Weiseltier argues in the New Republic,

If you think that the Passover massacre [in the town of Nathanya] was likeKristallnacht, then you must also think that there cannot be a political solution tothe conflict, and that the Palestinians have no legitimate rights or legitimate claimsupon any part of the land, and that there must never be a Palestinian state, andthat force is all that will ever avail Israel. You might also think that Jordan is thePalestinian state and that the Palestinians should find their wretched way there.After all, a ‘peace process’ with the Third Reich was impossible. (Weiseltier 2002)

He goes on to critique what he calls ‘the typological thinking of Jewish history’:

All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every otherJewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking aboutJewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy,and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timelesswar. This typological thinking defined the historical outlook of the Jews for manycenturies. It begins, of course, with the Amalekites, the nomadic tribe in the Sinaidesert that attacked the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt. (Weiseltier 2002)

In this typological thinking,

. . . Amalek became Haman (who actually was an Amalekite), who became theRomans, who became the Crusaders, who became Chmielnicki, who becamePetlura, who became Hitler, who became Arafat. The mythifying habit is ubiquitousin the literature of the Jews. In some instances, it must not have seemed like mythify-ing at all. A tale that began with Amalek,’ wrote the Yiddish poet Yitzhak Katznelsonin the concluding lines of ‘The Song of the Murdered Jewish People’ in 1944, not longbefore he died at Auschwitz, ‘and ended with the crueler Germans . . . ’. (Weiseltier2002)

In Israel, and increasingly in the Diaspora, constant invocations of theHolocaust by the Left and Right, hurling mutual accusations at one another,have cheapened its memory, resulting in what Arad (1997), citing Terdiman,also calls a ‘memory crisis’.15 ‘Watching daily on television how the historicvictims are being transformed into victimisers, many Israelis embarked on an

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inward journey.’ Hence, she says, ‘Under these circumstances even theHolocaust-anxiety rhetoric that the Gulf War provoked did not have muchof an impact. Instead, many Israelis became intoxicated with the hope forpeace’ (Arad 1997). In more recent years, she continues,

. . .. There is a sense that the nation’s collective historical past and its ideologicalessence are somewhat evading memory, that the traditional patterns of remembrancecease to integrate with present-day consciousness. Indeed, a number of Israel’s mosttime-honored assumptions are presently being challenged by a generation for whomneither the Shoah [Holocaust] nor the birth of the state constitute living memories.Being privileged, this generation is also skeptical. It questions if Zionism is the onlysolution to the ‘Jewish problem’; if the victimized collective Jewish past is thedictum for Israel’s future self-definition and self-understanding; and if this ‘essential’Jewish victimhood is a tenable qualifier that should earn discounts in assessingIsrael’s past and present conduct. (Arad 1997)

According to critics like Arad, young Israelis are moving away from an apoca-lyptic vision of a past/future in order to build a hopeful future, in a desire tohumanise and personalise Holocaust memories and to universalise its lessons.But perhaps the critics were over-optimistic, writing in 1997, during an intervalof relative peace following the Oslo Accords in 1993. Following Prime MinisterRabin’s assassination and the eruption of the second intifada in 2000, manyIsraelis and Jews in the diaspora reverted to the long-held narrative of existentialfear for the future. The same kinds of fears seem to permeate Pakistani politicalimaginaries, and this is reflected, among other sites,16 in their ceremonialscommemorating the events of Partition through the figure of the founder ofPakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. I turn now to a description of two suchceremonials, held by diaspora Pakistanis in Manchester.

Quaid-i-Azam Commemorations in Manchester17

If the leadership of the Muslims of Britain, the majority of whom are SouthAsians, object to what they see as the lack of inclusivity of Holocaust MemorialDay in Britain, this is because they too live with the sense that the cycle of deathand suffering they experienced in the past is a pervasive ontology. For both Jewsand Muslims, an important feature of their political mythology, then, relates tothe construction of time these narratives implicitly contain. Hence, as we haveseen, against the view that political myths are merely charters of present socialdivisions and current group interests,18 it may be argued that they are alsovisions of future potential dangers and threats. This embodiment of cyclical

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time contains the message that what was not only is but will be again. It wasexpressed in a public ceremonial held in Manchester to commemorate thebirth/death on 25 December 1988 of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan,known as Quaid-i-Azam, the Great Leader. Quaid-i-Azam day ceremonials aremoments for Pakistanis to commemorate and try to make sense of the trauma ofPartition.19 Maulana Saheb, a key speaker in the Nationalist-Religious gatheringI attended (and in which I was the only non-Pakistani outsider), began by stres-sing the significance of the past: ‘Those nations which do not keep in touchwith their past are wiped out from the arms of civilisation. The developmentof the future depends upon following examples from the past’.

The ceremony invited those who had personally suffered during the tragicevents following the Partition of British India to speak. In recalling theseevents, the central elements of Pakistani political mythology as a civil religionwere evident from the start. Quaid-i-Azam liberated the Muslims of Indiafrom slavery and subjugation. He fought against the conspiracies of theBritish and Hindus – external enemies – and the treachery of fellow-Muslims – internal enemies. His enemies not only bowed down before him,they also respected him for his intelligence and honesty. His strength wasthat of his faith and belief in his cause: to liberate his fellow Muslims so theycould practise their own faith and belief freely. In his battle, he was aided byGod and the Holy Prophet. His achievement, the creation of an independentMuslim state, is of major, global, historical significance.

One of the speakers, a young ‘international lawyer’, recounted the story ofPartition and stressed – as many of the speakers did – the injustice and discrimi-nation against Muslims in India which inspired the battle for a separate state:

Violence erupted between the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Muslims, although Jinnahwas a great believer in peace and non-violence, and his wish all the way throughwas that matters could be resolved peacefully.

In this national mythology violence is imposed by outside enemies. Thenation, like its symbolic leader, is fundamentally peace-seeking. It must,however, defend itself and in doing so it has to make terrible sacrifices.

The sufferings of the Muslims at the time of Partition were linked by theceremony’s Chairman to Quaid-i-Azam’s exceptional qualities as a leader.Thus, he recalls an incident at the time of independence. Jinnah,

. . . began to eat less as a sort of sacrifice. He used to say to his sister: ‘Fatima, mynation is dying of starvation, how can I sit and eat at this lavish table?’ One time

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during the Partition Quaid-i-Azam asked a reporter about news from Bengal.The reporter replied: ‘Muslims are being slaughtered’. Tears came into Quaid-i-Azams eyes. He sighed and said: ‘Yes, nations have to cross rivers of blood beforethey reach the banks of freedom’.

In his speech, Maulana Saheb, the maulvi (chief cleric) of Manchester’sCentral Mosque at the time, described the sufferings of the Muslims of India,incorporating these sufferings, and thus the whole struggle for independence,into the central Judeo-Koranic myth:

The cruelties that the Muslims of the Sub-continent endured were much worse thanthose endured by the Israelites. The Muslims were deprived of their share not only inpolitics but socially, economically and in all walks of life. All their lands and inheri-tances were confiscated. They were given to the Hindus and whatever we earnedwas given to the Hindus. Now look at the position of [Muslims left behind inIndia]. Demonstrations are held in Amritsar, Ahmadabad and Bombay, andMuslims are killed mercilessly. I would like to ask you: whenever a Hindu or aSikh picks up a sword to kill a Muslim, does he stop to ask him whether he is aShi’a, a Sunni or an ahl-e-Hadith, or does he just see that he is a Muslim, or hearthe Kalimah, and then kill him? Oh Muslims, look at the Palestinians, they arebeing killed ruthlessly and here you are, sitting, passing resolutions.

The plight of the Muslims of India is thus linked for Pakistani religious nation-alists with the plight of Muslims elsewhere in the world. Pakistan, an Islamicstate, is part of a wider nation, the Islamic ummah, defined (as Pakistan itselfis) by its religious observance. Once again, the Chairman raises this theme:

Today we have some news from the Middle East which has deeply grieved us [he isreferring here to the news on 15 January, 1988, that Israeli soldiers stormed the Al AqsaMosque during Friday prayers and dispersed the congregation with tear gas]. Theblood-stained hands of the Jews which have murdered many Muslims in the past,and have attacked the Al-Aqsa mosque, have again committed this deed. What canI say? Whatever I could say would not be enough. We are unlucky. What else canwe do? We draft resolutions and pass them. Our rulers pay little attention, forthem it is a case of in through one ear and out through the other. For many yearsthe Jews have been playing with the lives and blood of the Palestinians but noMuslim country has raised its voice in protest. I would like my voice, through HisExcellency the Ambassador [who was guest of honour at the ceremony], to reachour government. Our hearts cry. I wish that today we had great personalities suchas Salahuddin Ayube, Musa-bin-Nasir or Mohammad Bin Qasim who, in responseto the letter of one woman, travelled from Damascus and reached Hindustan at the

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age of sixteen. Nowadays who knows how many innocent women are raped?But what can I say? Our leaders seem to take no notice at all even if it is pointedout to them.

The Chairman here contrasts the present failings of the Islamic nation as awhole, its various governments and their inability to defend Muslims underattack, with Jinnah’s heroic fight in defence of the Muslims of India. Thevision is one of a continuously beleaguered Islamic nation. Jews and Hindusare variations of a singular enemy. This is evident in the next part of the speech:

[The Jewish deportation of Palestinians] reminds me of a similar method adopted bythe Hindus. In 1964–5 they sent trains packed with Muslims across the Vagga border.The Government at that time protested strongly but was able to do nothing becauseit limited itself only to protests. Now let us satisfy our grieving hearts by passing aresolution: the last news was that the Israelis had attacked our most important,respected and sacred Al-Aqsa mosque. . .Today in this function we strongly protestagainst this atrocious act of the Israelis and we make a request to the UnitedNations to offer protection not only to our holy places but to the innocentPalestinians.

In the same vein, Maulana Saheb responded to the Chairman, saying:

Mr. Chairman you were saying that nobody listens to your plea. But who is thereto hear anyway? Damascus may still be present but regretfully there is noMohammad Bin Qasim. Madina Munawara [the town of Medina in SaudiArabia] may be present but there is no Khalid Bin Waleed. Egypt and Cairomay still be present but there is no Noor-ud-Din Zangi who would be movedby the plea of a Muslim and who, for the sake of God, with the strength of faithwould jump into the fire. Very few people like these are born into nationsnowadays. Our non-cooperation [with each other] and mistrust [of oneanother] are the reasons for our punishment. So when our nation has been fullypunished and when we repent, only then will God have mercy on us, and onlythen will God find a way for us. God will not forsake us because in this worldbeneath the sky if there is anyone who believes devotedly in God’s oneness, it isthe Muslims, and if there is anyone who follows the religion laid down by theHoly Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, it is the Muslims. It is a fact that Muslimswill remain on this earth; they will not die out but will spread throughout theworld. Judaism will die out. Christianity will die out. Hinduism will die out, andone day the name of Islam and only Islam la illaha il-Allah Muhammad-ur-RasoolAllah [the Kalimah: God is one and Muhammad is His Prophet] will be left.And when this day occurs - I may or may not be here to see it - it will be a day

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when the conscience of the Muslims will be fully awakened, and they will be ableto differentiate between theirs and others, and will be able to unite, Inshallah [Godwilling].

In all the speeches I recorded the stress on the present failure is set against thefuture and past glories. The values of the past, epitomised in the exemplary livesof great leaders such as Quaid-i-Azam and the Prophet himself, are todayreplaced by a void, a punishment for communal sins. Once the community ispurified of these sins, however, it will regain its lost glory. The Islamic nationwill then achieve its deserved global hegemony.

Later in the function, Maulana Saheb once again incorporated Quaid-i-Azam’sachievements into the central Judeo-Koranic myth. He began by recounting thedeeds of Moses chosen by God to liberate the Israelites from slavery. From thismyth, he moved on to describe the sufferings of the Prophet’s followers in Mecca.Stressing the cyclical recurrence of suffering and liberation, he said:

Now compare Quaid-i-Azam’s character with that of the Prophet’s. . . . God hadappointed him to do the same work in the subcontinent as He had given the prophetsin the Middle East, prophets such as David, Moses, Solomon, and finally the HolyProphet, Peace be upon Him.

From here, the Maulana went on to recount the freeing of the Prophet’sslaves Hazrat Zaid-Bin-Haris and Hazrat Bilal. He concludes:

So when Quaid-i-Azam freed so many thousands of Muslims and gave them anindependent country, then just think what his position must be in the eyes of Godand the Holy Prophet, Peace be Upon Him!

The fact that Jinnah was not an observant Muslim, while not denied by theMaulana, is dismissed as insignificant, an exterior reality hiding a much deeper truth:

I studied Quaid-i-Azam’s personality in the light of the Holy Quran, and the more Istudied it in this light the more my respect for him grew. I never bothered to see if hehad a beard or not [i.e. if he was a religious man or not], and it is my belief that he isbetter than a thousand of those bearded persons who sell the nation to fill their ownpockets. And today I stand on this stage and say that I do not care to know if heprayed or not, and in which way he prayed, what his beliefs were, and I havenever bothered to find out what his opinions were. I only know that if he did nothave deep respect and esteem in the eyes of God and the Holy Prophet, Peace beUpon Him, then he would not have been born on this earth.

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The civil religion constructed through these political myths is clearlyconsonant with the speakers’ ideological orientations. Above all, they stressthe external threats to the Islamic nation, its fall from grace expressed in itsinternal disunity, and its ultimate future redemption and achievement ofglobal hegemony. Their message is at once millenarian and deeply pessimistic.During Partition, according to one author,

Twelve million people crossed the border in both directions. Between August andNovember 1947 – a bare three months – as many as 673 refugee trains movedapproximately 2,800,000 refugees within India and across the border . . . a millionpeople crossed the border on foot, travelling from West to East [and vice versa].Everywhere along the route, whether people were on foot, in trains, cars, orlorries, attackers lay in wait. . . . thousands of women . . . were raped and abducted.(Butalia 1998:76–7)

Altogether during Partition, 10 million refugees moved between countries,and some estimate that as many as one million people were killed or died(Butalia 1997:92).20 Even before the final Partition plan was announced, riotshad left thousands dead and there had been widespread looting, arson andviolence towards women. There had also been mass suicides for the sake offamily honour (Butalia 1998:72). Although the violence was caused by allsides, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, each side remembered its own violation.Among Pakistani settlers in Manchester, many were East Punjabis by originwho had themselves or their families been displaced and experienced thetrauma of Partition. Hence, the events of the terrible suffering of theMuslims of Pakistan and the Indian sub-continent are incorporated forthem into the broader mythology of Islam, which is itself a myth of thestruggle of true believers against idolaters (in the sub-continent representedby the Hindus) and people of the Book (Jews and Christians) who deny themessage of the Prophet and persecute his followers. In this battle, exemplarypersons, chosen by God, flawless and ritually pure, hierarchically placed abovethe community by their very nature, lead in their absolute and enduring faith.Quaid-i-Azam was one of those chosen few. The ideology draws on the centralthemes of sacrifice and martyrdom in Islam (see Ahmed 1986). In the words ofa young speaker at the ceremonial:

Alone he fought against the treacherous British and the Hindus. He kept his seriousillness a secret from everyone so that the nation would not lose hope. He himselfaccepted martyrdom, and until the day he died he thought only of Pakistan.

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Political Myths: Passion and CeremonialIn his discussion of myths of nationalism in Sri Lanka, Kapferer distinguishes

between three facets of political mythologising: myth, which like Ricoeur (1981)he regards, following Levi-Strauss, as a self-contained, coherently structuredsymbolic entity; ontology, which is a basic set of existential values uncoveredthrough a structural analysis of such myths and ideology, which is a set ofmore or less coherent prescriptive ideas for current action. Ideology, as acurrent appropriation, draws on the ontology implicit in national myths tomobilise support and to evoke passion and emotive identification. As such,ideology converts myth via ontology into social charter, a reflection ofpresent, contemporary social divisions. It is thus possible (although Kapfererdoes not show this) for several different ideologies to be based on a singlemythological corpus, with each ideology highlighting different ontologicalelements in the myths (Kapferer 1988).

Commemorations of the nation among diaspora Pakistanis in Manchesterpoint to a key dimension of political mythologising which Kapferer’s analysisfails to recognise and which relates to the notion of time such myths contain.In political myths, time is cyclical. A prior mythic unity will be recaptured ina visionary, utopian future. Prior external and internal enemies (in theircurrent manifestations) are apocalyptically destined to threaten the integrityof the nation once more. Ideologies based on political myth thus draw onboth the future hopes and the future fears of people. This is especially true ifthe enemy threatening the nation has not changed its identity – if it is stillthe Hindus, the British or the Jews for the Muslims of Pakistan, the Tamil forSinhalese in Sri Lanka or the Africans for Afrikaners in Southern Africa(Moodie 1975). But even when the enemy is different, fear of a new holocaustrepeating a prior one within a ‘cycle of death and suffering’, as Moodie callsit, is an important feature of a nation’s political mythology. Thus, in Zimbabwe,Ndebele and Kalanga were seen as surrogates of the prior white enemyby Mugabe’s government (see Werbner 1991); in Israel, the Arabs have displacedthe Germans, themselves manifestations of earlier enemies, Romans,Babylonians, Assyrians or ancient Egyptians in the apocalyptic politicalmythology of Israeli society (see also Paine 1989; Handelman 1990).

In this respect, political mythology and the ideologies it both generates andembodies do not simply reflect contemporary group material interests anddivisions, but a far more complex set of past social experiences and politicalphilosophies. For those who experience racism and exclusion in their dailylives, fears of expulsion and genocide loom much larger than for those who

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move easily through more tolerant, multi-ethnic circles. The extent to whichboth diasporans and their hosts are able and willing in practice to bridge culturaldivides between them, to move beyond the confines of their narrow groups,affects their imaginings of the future. The more bound they are by theirnarrow group’s particular symbols and images and its specific history, themore apocalyptic their vision of this future is likely to be.

Recent political myths, like those about the founder of Pakistan MuhammadAli Jinnah, based on events taking place at a time for which published records,memoirs, biographies and other documentary evidence are widely available, arenecessarily complex and replete with detail. This detail is drawn uponselectively and thus reconstructed and simplified in the speeches narrated byPakistani diasporans in their ceremonials of commemoration. Differentideological positions extract from these narratives different kinds of mythicemphasis. In some, the incorporation of recent national myths into thecentral religious Islamic and Quranic myth, which itself draws on Judaic andChristian myths, is more marked. In other Quaid-i-Azam day commemorationceremonials I attended, there was a much greater stress on his vision of democ-racy and equality. Yet despite their differences, the speeches shared a fundamen-tal ontology. One feature of this ontology is a cyclical notion of history, the ideathat the past forms the precedent for a visionary future unity, a unity whichfor a brief moment did, and will again, transcend the current threatened ordivided present. The other shared idea is that society in its utopian perfectionis embodied and personified by exemplary persons, chosen individuals who aredivinely endowed with transcendental status. Such individuals are perceivedto exist outside ordinary time and their presence not only redeems and unitesthe society, but revitalises its faith and power through sacrifice. The millenniumis the promise of their arrival.

The global scale of these arguments about the meaning of events of past suf-fering means that they have come to be globally politicised at the presentmoment. So much so that such fables of past suffering are able to dictatenational and even international political agendas, as in the case of InternationalHolocaust Day, and to make endemic national and international conflictsappear to be almost insoluble. Memory is a force in the present, compellingpeople to act, or alternatively, to forgive (Werbner 1998a).

Narratives of past events, imagined or real, confer retrospective meaningupon these events, drawing on the historical trauma generated by the collectiveexperience of death and suffering. Memories of the past mythologised in thepresent are reflexive; they reach out to past experiences through a heightened

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consciousness of the present. A corollary of this is that interpretations ofthe past depend on narrators’ present positioning. Different narrators creategenerically different tales of past experiences.

Finally, there is an important point that needs to be kept in mind, whichrelates to narrative time itself. For diasporic Pakistanis in Britain, relativelyrecent immigrants to Britain, the act of dramatic narration of the nationduring Quaid-i-Azam ceremonials marks a rupture as well as a continuity,since it inscribes a shift in space as well as in time. From there to here. Thedanger for them is that spatial disjuncture will stamp the present as a momentbeyond the past. To avoid this rupture of personal and collective subjectivityand identity, they must integrate the experience of diaspora into the nationalnarrative. In telling the past, speakers relocate themselves within the now-dispersed postcolonial nation, and thus revitalise their relationship to anidealised homeland.

Quaid-i-Azam ceremonials have specific connotations in Britain. There weretwo major themes highlighted in the Manchester context, one implicit, theother explicit. Implicitly, there is the underlying realisation of being, onceagain, a Muslim minority ruled by the British. Islamophobia, racial harassmentand racial abuse are something with which British Pakistanis must increasinglylive as a constant factor in their daily lives. Their helplessness in the face of suchprejudice and their inability to redress the situation are tangible evidence of theirlack of influence and lowly status in British society. At the same time, theManchester community has prospered economically and its younger gener-ation is at present entering successfully into business or professional occu-pations. The ceremonials described here took place just before the Rushdieaffair, the first Gulf war and September 11, and the open confrontations withthe state these caused, and hence at the time no direct reference was madeduring either function to British Pakistanis’ current predicament as a racialand religious minority. If a sense of threat and impotence existed, it was displacedeither historically, in mythic terms, or globally, on to the international arena.Indeed, in the second, pro-democracy function I attended, an attempt wasmade to minimise the past conflict with the British. One of the speakers atthat meeting, who had earlier spoken of the broader fight against colonialism,also pointed out that for an earlier leader, Sir Sayed Ahmed Khan,

. . . if the choice was between Hindu dominance or the dominance of the British,[Khan’s view was that] we should choose the British. Not because he loved theBritish, not because he loved slavery, but out of frustration that if Hindus are to

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run the country [we Muslims] would be better off with the British because at leastthey understand, they have the same God; they worship one God, we worship oneGod. Christianity is a part of Islam, we understand Christianity and Christianityunderstands that it is consistent with the tenets of Islam.

The ambivalence expressed by the speaker about the British colonial regimein India, which in some ways still characterises relations between BritishPakistani immigrant settlers and their British hosts, constituted an underlyingtheme running throughout the ceremonials. British colonial enmity and‘dictatorship’ on the one hand, and the commonality of values on the other,are open to differential stress depending on the current state of both nationaland international relations. There remains, however, a basic sense of suspicionand resistance to the full incorporation into the British realm. I never witnessedamong Pakistanis, as I did in an India Independence Day celebration inManchester, a toast to ‘The Queen, the Duke of Lancaster’! The other side ofthis is the deep continuing commitment to, and identification with Pakistan,and more broadly, the Palestinians and the Islamic ummah, which theceremonials articulated.

The equation between the divinely chosen leader and the nation or commu-nity leads to a Muslim political mythology and the civil religion constructedaround the sacralised qualities and values of exemplary persons such asQuaid-i-Azam. As a central figure in this political mythology, Muhammad AliJinnah is clearly placed, in Bakhtin’s terms, in epic time. Bakhtin argues that,

Epics are not simply set in time that has receded, for time is best perceived as value.What was in the past is automatically considered to be better, bigger, stronger ormore beautiful. In epic, someone is speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible,and he adopts the reverent point of view of a descendant. (Clark & Holquist 1984:287)

The reverence with which Jinnah is held in both ceremonials and the idealisedvalues he embodied locate him in an epic narrative of supreme heroism andself-sacrifice.

Conclusion: Myths of Nations from the MarginsMembers of both the Jewish and Pakistani diaspora communities are located

on the margins of two imagined communities: the national and the religious.Living at the epicentre of international power, in the West, exposed to aconstant barrage of media images showing graphically the atrocities anddeaths in the Middle East, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya,

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both diasporas globalise their predicaments and fuse them with their deep senseof historical malaise and present trauma. In this process, actors dramatisethrough ritual acts of reverent observance and passionate rhetoric, an interpret-ation that conflates old enemies with new ones. Even in the case of Israel,apparently a newly born independent nation-state, the process of ceremonialdramatisation of Holocaust Day has led, as Handelman (1990) perceptivelyargues, to the diasporisation of the Israeli nation, fusing it with the widerJewish diaspora and its history of suffering. So too the nation-state of Pakistan,ever embroiled in constant enmity and war with India, diasporises itself, fusinginto the wider, geographically distant, Muslim ummah and thus inevitably alsointo the ummah’s bloody historical encounters with Christians and Jews.

Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that from 2001, when it wasfirst introduced in the UK, until 2007, the Muslims of Britain, represented by theMCB, rejected Holocaust Memorial Day as silencing and indeed obliteratingtheir own experiences of suffering – inflicted at least partly, as they see it, bythe Jews whose own past suffering Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) commem-orates.21 In December 2007, however, the MCB caved into pressure from theGovernment and overturned its six year boycott, voting by 18 to 8 to attendthe next HMD, on January 27, in Liverpool. In defending the decision theyargued that their protest was ‘misconstrued as anti-Semitism’ (Dodd 2007;Khanna 2007). Imposed multiculturalism, British style, had triumphed itseems. In Liverpool and all over Britain, Muslim children joined other childrenattending the ceremony in commemorating the Holocaust. A year later,however, in response to the Israeli Gaza campaign in December 2008, theMCB again suspended its attendance of the ceremony.22

Despite the (intermittent) collapse of the boycott, the memory crisis aroundHolocaust Memorial Day in Britain is likely to continue as long as the politicalconflict in the Middle East remains unresolved. State monumentalism, asRichard Werbner recognises, ‘cannot suppress popular history’

[S]ubjected to buried memory, people do not so much forget as recognise – and oftenever more forcefully – that they have not been allowed to remember. (Werbner1998a:9; cf. also 1998b)

Indeed, people may ‘feel compelled to unbury the memory’ (Werbner 1998a). AsJewish and Muslim community leaders in Britain attempt to reach out to oneanother in a spirit of tolerance under the umbrella of the multicultural state, itis evident that the past cannot easily be buried for either community.

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AcknowledgementsThis article presented at the conference on Comparative Study of Jews and Muslimsin Britain, Europe and North America, 22–23 June 2006, at the Royal HollowayCollege, University of London, organised by Hamuyan Ansari and David Cesarini.I am grateful to the participants at the conference for their helpful comments, aswell as two anonymous reviewers for this journal. The discussion of the Quaid-i-Azam commemorations are taken from my book Imagined Diasporas among Manche-ster Muslims (Werbner 2002).

Notes1. Estimates of the real numbers displaced in 1948 vary, with UNRWA figures for 1950, 2

years after the war, being 711,000 with an additional 274,000 internally displaced.2. The atrocities of the Holocaust was perpetrated by the German Nazi regime, with

Jews and others (such as gypsies) unambiguously the victims. In Partition, victimsand victimisers were drawn from the same religious communities and blame wasthus ambiguously distributed.

3. There is a vast literature on the Holocaust and memory which cannot possibly belisted here. For one such deeply moving book, see Langer (1993).

4. In particular, Connerton (1989); see also the contributions of Bhabha (1990), Gillis(1994), Ben-Ari and Bilu (1997), Werbner (1998a and 1998b) and Anthias andYuval-Davis (1991:Chapter 2). On narrative constructions, see Mitchell (1980) andRimmon-Kenan (1983). On historiographical mythology or mythistory, seeMacNeil (1986) and Mali (2003).

5. Deleuze sees memory as synthesizing present and past repetitions of (unlike) experi-ences (even if similar) in the making of the subject.

6. The literature is vast. See, for example, Arditti (1999) and Schirmer (1993).7. In line with the current Foucauldian deconstructive turn in human rights analysis,

anthropologists have tended to cast doubt on the South African Truth and Recon-ciliation Commission’s achievements (Wilson 2001; Ross 2002), and hence have notfully acknowledged what I regard as the essential role it played in envisioning a newfuture for South Africa, despite its limitations.

8. The main official event appears now to rotate between cities.9. According to the 2001 census, there were 700,000 Pakistanis, 275,000 Bangladeshis

and approximately 100,000 Indian Muslims in the UK out of an overall Muslimpopulation of around 1.5 million Muslims.

10. I use political mythology here, following Thompson (1985), in preference to otherterms such as mythico-history used by Malkki (1995:54) following Tambiah(1986), but with the same basic assumptions about the moral constructedness andinternal coherence of historical narratives.

11. On Civil Religion in America, see Bellah (1967). Bellah recognised that state nationalceremonials in America incorporated religious themes, rituals and values. In theBritish context, the elaborate ritual ceremonials on Armistice Day around theTomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Cenotaph commemorating Britain’s fallensoldiers since World War I have been discussed extensively. See Mosse (1990)and Laqueur (1994).

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12. There are several biographies of Jinnah. See, for example, Ahmed (1997). Of thetotal casualties of the Indian army, including many Muslims, 160,000 are comme-morated in war cemeteries in 50 countries extending from the Pacific Islands toUK, according to Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Several Muslimswere awarded the Victoria Cross. It should be noted that the Jewish Yishuv(Jewish settlement) in Palestine under the leadership of David Ben Gurion alsosuspended its struggle against the British during WWII, forming the JewishBrigade as part of the British army. Both Jinnah and Ben Gurion were rewardedafter the war.

13. This is a common feature of the diasporic imagination, discussed at length inWerbner (2002). In their self-representations, the location of diasporas’ emplace-ment in the world is shifting and unstable, dependent on occasion and context,and so too, their history is both that of their respective nation-states and that oftheir dispersed peoples or co-religionists world-wide, depending on the context.

14. For a masterly account of the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance DayMemorial ceremony in Israel and its symbolic significance within a wider spectrumof state memorialism, see Handelman (1990). Since writing his account, the cer-emony has added, significantly, the reading out of victims’ names over the wholeday, under the saying that ‘Unto every person there is a victim’.

15. She uses the notion somewhat differently from Werbner (2002).16. The long-term obsession with the threat from India/Hindus is a constant theme of

Pakistani politicians and the military, reflected in the Pakistani media and the reasonwhy Pakistan built up its nuclear capability. By 2008, this obsession had come undercritical scrutiny from the Americans, attempting to mobilise the Pakistani govern-ment and military to redirect their efforts towards stemming the rise of Al Qaidaand the Taliban, seen by NATO as posing a greater threat to national (Pakistani)and international stability.

17. This and subsequent parts of the article draw on Werbner 2002, Chapter 4.18. This is an argument associated with Malinowski (1955) and taken up by others, for

example, Thompson (1985) in his analysis of Afrikaaner nationalist political myths inApartheid South Africa.

19. Recently, a literature documenting the personal memories of victims who sufferedduring the Partition of India and Pakistan has emerged on both sides of the border.Much of this literature focuses on the oral histories of women, many of whom suf-fered atrocities of rape, bodily mutilation and murder, including by their ownkinsmen who felt they could not protect them (on the Indian side of the border pri-marily, see, for example, Das & Nandy 1986; Das 1991; Chakrabarty 1996; Butalia1997, 1998; Menon & Bhasin 1998; on the Pakistan side, see Khan 1996a, 1996b,1997, 2006). As in the case of many Holocaust survivors who until quite recently pre-ferred to remain silent, South Asian victims seem reluctant to speak of their experi-ences, which explains the relative dearth of personal oral accounts. The atrocitiescommitted at the time on both sides remain unspeakable. Supporters of the peacefulresistance movement in the Frontier studied by Banerjee (2000) were remarkable inremembering friendships with Hindus in prison.

20. Most commentators agree that between 500,000 and one million died, and 10– 15

million persons were displaced in an exchange of populations.

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21. Some Muslims have always attended the ceremony. The MCB is an umbrella organ-isation claiming to represent 400 umbrella organisations and networks in the UK.

22. For a full account of the debate in the public sphere in Britain on the question of theMCBs participation in Holocaust Memorial Day, see Werbner (2009).

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Displaced Enemies, Displaced Memories: Diaspora Memorial Politics of Partition and the Holocaust

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