In the last chapter, where the author describes the rise of the Taliban in Swat, he comments: ‘It is not entirely coincidental that Sufi Mohammed and Fazlullah – two militant leaders – ‘ruled their virtual “Islamic state” in the same “liberated zone” from where Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi and his successor Shah Ismail established “Tehrik-e-Mujahideen” and fought first the Sikh kingdom and then the British in the nineteenth century.’ Akbar connects these two dots, separated by almost 200 years, as proof of his thesis, but ignores all the other points in between that belie the storyline.Īkbar records that the intermediary in the British taming of the NWFP was Syed Ahmad Khan, the 19th-century reformer. With tears in his eyes he said, “ Hum to tabah ho gaye ” (We have been destroyed).’ No sooner are we introduced to the rooting of the seeds of Islamic rule in the Northwest Frontier Province and the drive to seek distance from the infidels, than we are informed that ‘in a remarkable piece of social engineering, the British turned, through positive discrimination in education, job benefits and political empowerment, a hostile Muslim community into a resource for their Indian Empire within just two decades.’ Elsewhere, we discover that in the 1946 elections, swept by the Muslim League, ‘its only defeat was in the Frontier.’ Further along, Akbar reveals that ‘Gandhi’s most important associate during the salt agitation was a man from the Frontier,’ and many pages later we learn that when the Congress Working Committee accepted Partition, on 2 June 1947, ‘only the Frontier Gandhi’ – the Pashtun political leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan – ‘voted against the resolution. A sense of disconnect dogs the reader as time and again the explanation and the record trip over each other. But the chronicle lacks conviction, because too many of the clues tell a different story and the theory repeatedly contradicts itself. The book, the chronicle of a death foretold, aims to show how the interplay of the DNA and the theory of distance made the creation of Pakistan inevitable, and continued to nurture the tinderbox it has turned into today. Akbar embeds these seeds in a ‘theory of distance’, attributed to Barelvi’s predecessor Shah Waliullah, whose aim was to protect ‘Islamic purity’ from the ‘cultural power and military might of the infidel’ – ‘He urged Muslims to live so far from Hindus that they would not be able to see the smoke from their kitchens.’ Although the jihad ‘turned into an internecine war between Muslims,’ it was here, Akbar claims, that ‘the seeds of a concept called Islamic nizam, or rule’ were sown in the area. Starting from the arrival in AD 712 of Muhammad bin Qasim in Sind, he works through all subsequent invasions and battles till he arrives at the long jihad of Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, which ‘began in 1825 and continued long after his death in 1831, on the battlefield, at Balakote’ today, a parenthetical note reminds us, this area is ‘a principal centre of the Pakistan Taliban’. Rather, it sets out to search the past for the smoking gun that made Pakistan inevitable. Tinderbox is not really a whodunit, because Akbar identifies the villain at the outset. The senior journalist M J Akbar thus takes on a large challenge when he sets up his chase to identify the villain of the piece in this new book, billed as ‘historical whodunit to trace the journey of an idea … that divided India.’ Akbar repeatedly points to what he calls Pakistan’s ‘DNA’ as the key to this mystery – for example, in the comment that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto could have relaid the foundations of Pakistan along Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s democratic-secular blueprint, but the pull of his nation’s DNA prevented him from doing so. Historical accounts that rely on cultural or psychological constructs for explanations are particularly exposed to this danger, as any number of outdated verdicts can illustrate – the opium-eating Chinese, the Hindu rate of growth, the fatalistic Arabs, to name just a few. It is an irony that the most significant enemy of history books is history itself, books being frozen at a moment in time while history continues its relentless march – eventually mocking, more often than not, the certainties of an earlier age.

Tinderbox mj akbar