The Pir of Manki Sharif (Amin ul-Hasanat), 1922–1960

At a glance

• Sayyid Muhammad Amin ul-Hasanat (امین الحسنات), the Pir of Manki Sharif, was the hereditary head of the Manki line of pirs in the North-West Frontier Province and the best-known religious leader the Muslim League won there before 1947. [8, 10]

• Dr Abdul Rasheed, whose 1991 book was published by the Pir's own family, gives his birth as 1 February 1922 and his death as 28 January 1960, three weeks after a road accident. [8]

• Naeemullah Khan reports an estimate of more than 700,000 followers in the Peshawar valley and the tribes around it. [10]

• At Mountbatten's meeting of 16 April 1947 the minutes record the Governor, Sir Olaf Caroe, calling him "undoubtedly the most sincere and the best leader of the Opposition". Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr Khan Sahib said he had incited violence. [3]

• He was in jail for part of the spring of 1947, campaigned in the referendum of July 1947, and left the Muslim League within a few years of Pakistan's creation. [8, 9]

Names

Caroe's letters call him "the Mullah of Manki". [1] Chaudhri Muhammad Ali and Naeemullah Khan write "the Pir of Manki Sharif", and Rasheed uses Hazrat Amin ul-Hasanat. [8–10] Rasheed's gloss on the name is the trustee (amin) of virtues. [8] He was the sajjada nashin, the hereditary custodian, of the Manki line. For the place of pirs and shrines in Pashtun religious life see religion among Pashtuns.

A pir at twelve

Rasheed dates his birth to 1 February 1922 and says his grandfather chose the name. [8] The family tells of a prophecy. Abdul Haq the younger, a forebear, is said to have declared of the boy: "my son will make the blue-eyed ones run", and Rasheed takes the blue-eyed to be the British. [8] That is the family's account, written after the event, and no other source repeats it.

His father, Shaikh Abdul Rauf, died when the boy was in his twelfth year. Before he came of age, Rasheed says, the leading ulama and shaikhs of the time named him sajjada nashin. [8] He kept studying while he held the seat. [8] Rasheed's footnotes name four brothers, Ahmad Gul, Noor Muhammad, Ali Ahmad and Fida Muhammad, and say Ahmad Gul worked beside him in the Pakistan movement and sat in the provincial assembly. [8]

The size of the following is estimated, not counted. Naeemullah Khan, in a Khudai Khidmatgar study written at Quaid-i-Azam University in 2020, gives "more than seven hundred thousand" followers in the Peshawar valley and the neighbouring tribes, as one estimate with no author named. [10] Rasheed says only that the disciples numbered in the lakhs. [8]

Joining the League, 1945 and 1946

By 1945 the League was weak in a province run by the Congress, with the Khudai Khidmatgars behind it. [10] Naeemullah Khan says Jinnah went to Nowshera on 24 November 1945 to invite the Pir to join, and that the Pir and tens of thousands of his followers were drawn to the League after that tour. [10] On 18 November Jinnah had written to him from Delhi: "I am reaching Peshawar on the 20th to attend the Frontier Conference and I am looking forward to meet you personally and have the pleasure and the honour of a talk with you." Rasheed prints the English text, and says the family still holds the letters. [8]

Rasheed adds that Jinnah came to Manki Sharif, and that when the address of welcome asked which law Pakistan would have, he answered that Muslims have one God, one Prophet and one Quran, and that the Quran is their law. Rasheed takes the speech from Aziz Javed's book on Jinnah and the Frontier. [8] Muhammad Shafi, a historian of shrine politics, writes that the Pir "threw his network behind the League in a province where the party was otherwise weak", and that the alliance was sealed by Jinnah's assurance that Muslims' lives in Pakistan would be ordered by the shariah. [11] Wali Khan, the Pashtun nationalist leader, gives the same promise as a letter from Jinnah to the Pir that Pakistan would be an Islamic state under shariat law, and cites it against the League. [6]

The machinery was religious. Naeemullah Khan says the Pir ran public meetings in Peshawar in April 1946 through his Jamiat-i-Asfia, and then carried them to Bannu, Kohat and Dera Ismail Khan. [10] He issued a fatwa that voting for the Congress was treachery against Islam and against the ulama's unanimous decision. [10] In a letter Rasheed prints from the weeks before the election of early 1946, the Pir told Jinnah that the Frontier League had no real organisation, and proposed that each district get a lorry with a loudspeaker, fifteen National Guards, five ulama as speakers and two reciters of devotional verse, from 10 January to 14 February. He complained that the League's committee of action had not acted on the plan. [8]

Nehru's tour of the tribes, October 1946

In October 1946 Nehru, now the interim government's member for external affairs and so for the tribal areas, toured the Frontier with Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Dr Khan Sahib. Caroe described the League's response in a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, on 23 October. [1] Until September, he wrote, the League had been dissuaded from entering tribal territory. Once Nehru's powers over the tribes were plain, it sent emissaries, "particularly the Mullah of Manki". Caroe asked himself whether to restrain him, saw that it could not be done without arrest, and was "not willing to risk this open challenge". [1]

The Pir toured Gandab in Mohmand country, a place in the Malakand Protected Area and Jamrud in the Khyber, timed to come just before Nehru. Caroe wrote: "There is no doubt that at those meetings a good deal of fanaticism was stirred up." The political agents and the saner tribesmen tried to dissuade him and failed. He did not go to Waziristan. [1] Of the stone-throwing at Landi Kotal, Caroe said the crowd was "no doubt excited by what the Mullah of Manki had been saying a couple of days previously". He also reported that ten days earlier the Pir had said in a speech that he would shoot the Governor if Jinnah gave the word. [1]

Wali Khan reads the tour as British management. He says the Pir spread a rumour that Nehru meant to take away the tribes' freedom and make them slaves of the Hindus. [6] He quotes Erland Jansson's interview with an assistant political agent in the Khyber, who said he told a Kuki Khel malik at Jamrud to resort to heavy sniping and then "contacted Mullah Sahib of Manki Shareef", who had many disciples among the Shinwaris and Mullagors and went on tour to Landi Kotal. [6] Naeemullah Khan adds that on the road to Sardaryab the Pir's followers tried to attack Nehru's party and were deterred by the number of Khudai Khidmatgars. [10]

The Pir's own letter to Jinnah of 1 November, printed by Rasheed from Khawaja Razi Haider's collection, says he had feared, while people were being readied to receive Nehru, that something against the League's constitution would happen and displease Jinnah, and was reassured to hear that Jinnah was not displeased. [8] Naeemullah Khan, who thinks Jinnah did approve demonstrations, says the Pir wrote that he was personally against any demonstration and was satisfied once Jinnah approved. [10] Jinnah replied on 7 November, thanking him for his devoted work and noting his advice on a tour of the Frontier. [8]

Civil disobedience and arrest, 1947

After the League won an election at Mardan in the middle of February 1947, Caroe wrote on 13 March, local League leaders began direct action against the ministry. Most of its assembly members were arrested. On 10 March a League crowd at the Assembly Hall in Peshawar was met with fire: seven rounds, fifteen casualties, two of whom died. [2] Caroe added that "on my advice Ministry, though reluctant, have refrained from arrest of Manki Mullah." [2] Wali Khan, quoting Jansson, and Naeemullah Khan both give a remark by Major Khurshid Anwar of the League's National Guards after police fired on a procession at the assembly. Wali Khan has "The mission is completed. He wanted to shed Muslim blood, now it has been done", and says the Pir's disciples had been put in the front rank. Naeemullah Khan has "We wanted to shed Muslim blood and it has been done", and says the dead were followers of the Pir. [6, 10]

The arrest came after that. Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, a senior Pakistani civil servant who became prime minister, writes that Abdul Qayyum Khan and "the highly respected and influential Pir of Manki Sharif" were among the arrested. [9] Rasheed says thousands of disciples went to jail at his signal. [8]

At Mountbatten's meeting of 16 April, Caroe said he had advised the Chief Minister against arresting the Pir, and that the premier had agreed. The Pir, he said, "was undoubtedly the most sincere and the best leader of the Opposition". When the Pir announced a procession in Peshawar and a demonstration outside the jail, Caroe told the premier to consider whether the time had come and said he would not stand in his way. [3] The arrest had united the tribes, who were holding jirgas and calling for his release, and Caroe said that in twenty-five years on the Frontier he had never seen such feeling. [3] He did not think the Pir had stirred up violence, though his followers had since his arrest "because he was not there to guide them". He called him "an organiser and not an agitator", and said that before his arrest the Pir had warned that the movement would fail if it turned to violence. [3]

Nehru disagreed. He said there was evidence that the Pir had "advocated methods other than peaceful ones" and incited his followers, and that he should stay in jail until the Opposition movement stopped. Mountbatten said his own opinion was that the Pir should be released and perhaps bound over to keep the peace, though the provincial government must decide. [3] Two days later he put to Dr Khan Sahib that the Pir had often preached non-violence in public. Dr Khan Sahib answered that this was true only of the recent past, that "six months ago the Pir of Manki said that he would shoot the Governor if he were told to do so", and that the Pir had been behind all the recent murder and looting. [3] The threat he cites is the one Caroe reported in October. [1]

When Mountbatten visited the province at the end of April, Chaudhri Muhammad Ali says, the Pir and Abdul Qayyum Khan were specially released from jail to meet him. [9] Naeemullah Khan counts six leaders released on parole, who demanded Governor's rule and immediate elections. Mountbatten replied that he could not yield to duress. [10] Rasheed's note gives a different date for his release, 3 June 1947. [8]

The referendum, June and July 1947

The League called off its civil disobedience on 3 June after Jinnah's broadcast. Chaudhri Muhammad Ali says Abdul Qayyum Khan, the Pir "and other leaders threw themselves heart and soul into the campaign for the referendum". [9] At the League Council in Delhi on 9 June, Pir Zakori Sharif of the Frontier spoke "on behalf of the Muslims of that province and on behalf of the Pir of Manki, who is sitting here" and promised a hundred thousand armed Pathans at Jinnah's hint. The proceedings survive because Sardar Patel got a copy through the Intelligence Bureau and sent it to Mountbatten. [4]

Rasheed says Jinnah set up a referendum committee for the Frontier with himself at its head and the Pir as an important member. He cites the result announced on 20 July and argues that most voters voted as the Pir told them. [8] The boycott by the Khudai Khidmatgars and the voting arithmetic are set out in partition and the 1947 Frontier referendum. On 16 July the acting Governor, Sir Rob Lockhart, passed on a report that Abdul Ghaffar Khan "was trying to find a way" to a compromise "through the Pir of Manki". [5]

After Pakistan

The Pir's name is tied to a promise. Rasheed says his Jamiat-ul-Asfia drew up a pledge that Islamic government would follow the creation of Pakistan, and that Jinnah and other League leaders signed it. A footnote adds that Rasheed could not find the document. [8] Wali Khan sets against it a remark Iskandar Mirza reported, that Jinnah had said "Nonsense", he was going to have "a modern State". He says the Pir was left "speechless with shock" when a Hindu, Joginder Nath Mandal, held the law portfolio. [6]

Rasheed says that as the senior Frontier leader the Pir had a claim to lead the province, and that he turned down a ministry, saying that dervishes had no business with ministries. He prints a letter of 9 February 1948 from Liaquat Ali Khan, who calls baseless a Frontier rumour that the Pir had wished to be a minister, and recalls that the Pir was asked to join the ministry when it was formed and declined, as he did again when they met. [8] Rasheed says the Pir served on the Quaid-i-Azam relief committee for refugees as deputy to the Governor, and that he went to the Kashmir front in the jihad. [8] He credits him with the argument at the League's Karachi session that party office and government office should not be held by one person, after which, Rasheed says, Jinnah resigned the League's presidency. [8]

The break was with Abdul Qayyum Khan. Chaudhri Muhammad Ali writes that Qayyum's "autocratic ways and intolerance of any opposition" alienated the influential Pir, "who had rendered outstanding services in the referendum for Pakistan", and that he and others "were driven out of the Muslim League". [9] See also Abdul Qayyum Khan. Rasheed says that in 1949 the Pir invited the Frontier's leading politicians to Manki Sharif and founded the Jinnah Awami Muslim League, because the government was not serious about an Islamic system. [8] Chaudhri Muhammad Ali has him joining Suhrawardy, the Khan of Mamdot and Maulana Bhashani in opposition. [9] Rasheed says Suhrawardy promised to enforce the shariah and then, as prime minister, did not, and that the Pir turned from politics to preaching Islamic values and public welfare. [8]

A CIA information report of 20 January 1954, which calls its information unevaluated, lists "Pir of Manki Sharif, formerly provincial border chief" among leaders who had resigned from the League over the prime minister's policy. A second source in the report says he and Shaukat Hayat Khan attended the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Peking in October 1952, and that their colleague was "not sufficiently suspicious" of the group. [7] Rasheed's footnote confirms the Pir was in the Pakistani delegation at Peking. [8]

Death

Rasheed says the Pir died on 28 January 1960 after a traffic accident on 5 January. Doctors tried to save him, he writes, and could not. [8]

How the Pir is judged

Rasheed, writing for the family, sees the man who delivered the Frontier to Pakistan and whom historians passed over while crediting a few names. [8] He also reports a miracle: Muhammad Hanif Khan of Hazara told him that when people in the Kaghan valley asked the Pir to pray for rain, heavy rain fell as the party drove off. [8] Rasheed adds that the Pir did not speak of such things himself. [8]

Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, from the Pakistani side, calls him "highly respected and influential" and says he was driven out of the League. [9] Shafi writes that the pirs of his study were "principals rather than instruments", who bargained over what the state would mean. [11] The Khudai Khidmatgar side reads the same career as the British use of mullahs and pirs: Wali Khan says that Pir Sahib Manki Shareef, Pir Zakoori and others "played political games from a religious base, impelled and applauded by the British". [6] Naeemullah Khan, whose thesis is a history of the Khudai Khidmatgars, writes that the Pir and other religious leaders played "a great role" in popularising the League. [10]

The shared ground is that he brought a large religious following to the League in a province it had lost, that he campaigned among the tribes in 1946, and that he fell out with the League within a few years. The dispute is over motive and consequence. Caroe thought him sincere and a restraint on violence, the Congress held him responsible for it, and the Pir's family says he acted for Islam and was pushed aside.