SMOKERS’ CORNER: IDEALS AND IDEOLOGIES

From the day Pakistan came into being, ideas formulated by ‘modernist’ scholars such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Allama Muhammad Iqbal have been cherry-picked by the state. By the 1980s, Iqbal had been turned into an Islamist ideologue and Sir Syed into a simple educationist who founded a university in pre-Partition India.

Sir Syed’s 19th century writings, which sought to reform the way Islamic texts were studied and then understood, are barely touched upon. But in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th...