Awards

• Nominated for Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 2015
• Nominated for Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion 2014
• Nominated for Bernard Schwartz Book Award 2014
• Nominated for John F. Richards Prize 2014

Overview

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India’s Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India’s rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel. A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam. Revealing how Pakistan’s troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.

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9780674072671

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Reviews

No one but Faisal Devji could have given us Muslim Zion , which offers a brilliant, counterintuitive meditation on the analogy between ideologies of Zionism and Pakistani/Muslim nationalism, and at the same time a nuanced historical exploration of the idea of Pakistan. Intellectual history as a page-turner.--Noah Feldman, Author Of cool War: The Future Of Global Competition

A fascinating, thoughtful, and provocative work, Muslim Zion explores the paradoxical dimensions of Pakistan by focusing on the period when this country was imagined, but yet unrealized.--Christophe Jaffrelot, Ceri-Sciences Po/Cnrs

Devji provides a unique insight into the underpinnings of the idea of Pakistan. [He] sees a parallel between the Zionist movement for Israel and the Muslim nationalist movement for Pakistan Devji provides an excellent narrative of the course of Muslim politics, its interactions with other Indian movements, and the commitment to a separate political entity--Pakistan. This is familiar territory, but it is presented with an entirely new perspective--the author refers to contemporary literature, poetry, and political speeches and writings Devji s erudite, balanced and lucid work, embellished with pithy insights and interesting sources, is a stern warning about the hazards of basing nationhood on religious identity.--Talmiz Ahmad Business Standard (11/12/2013)

Author Information

Faisal Devji is Reader in Indian History and Fellow of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford.

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