LAHORE: Pakistani-American historian Ayesha Jalal says most people believe that enlightenment came from the West, which is ahistorical and incorrect and nothing but propaganda as enlightenment is not a Western gift.

`We have to accept that enlightenment is an attitude of mind. It`s something that your own religion urges you to seek as it asks you to seek knowledge. Those who think that enlightenment came from the West and that we are always catching up with the West ignore a large chunk of history, airbrushing the Muslim contributions,` she stated on the concluding day of Afkar-eTaza ThinkFest at Alhamra on Sunday.

Ms Jalal was replying to the questions asked by journalist Raza Rumi in the session, Can Muslims be Enlightened? She spoke about enlightenment among the Muslims, especially of this region with reference to her most recent book, Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia.

Ayesha Jalal said it should be acknowledged that the Muslims borrowed from Greek thought and translated into Arabic, which was then translated in the West that led to European enlightenment.

`There is a dominant thought that believes that Muslims are insular because their religion can`t be `liberal` though liberalism itself is a very problematic concept. I wanted to challenge those scholars who argue that the Muslims are non-dialogical and insular,` said Ms Jalal and she went on to say that when you read the 18th and 19th century Urdu literature, you find out that they were actively engaged with the new ideas. Syed Ahmad was telling the Muslims that their bigotry with the new kind of knowledge was misconceived because they had given their knowledge and enlightened thought to Europe which was being given back to them.

`The serious writers of the age were very familiar with the Western ideas.` She said the terms like Western and eastern and that theynever meet were mere propaganda as the actual evidence suggested that there was an active exchange.

`The people who were engaged with it thought that they were contributing to human knowledge, which is accumulative and not racially determined. Much of scholarship that`s even now coming out is overwhelmingly on Muslim theology and jurisprudence while literature is not even really considered a contribution to Muslim thought.

Ms Jalal said she was questioning the orientalist paradigm that reduced Islam to theology with a look atliterature and ethics.

`Pakistanis are generally more concerned about identity than quality of their faith. They always talk about it but they know nothing about it,` she declared.

Ms Jalal said exclusion of women was not restricted to Islam as Western liberalism also had not got a strong forte when it comes to women. Enlightened Muslim thinkers agreed that they (women) should be excluded but this `male problem` was there across religions, including Hinduism, Christianity and Islam.

Ayesha Jalal said her new book was a culmination of a long journey that began with her book `Self and Sovereignty` in 2000 which looked at religion as identity while the question of religion as faith was dealt with in Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia. This (new)book was a transcreation of religion after 1857 to see how the colonial state altered the meaning of religion from being a matter of personal faith and piety to a matter of identity, she explained. Talking about Ghalib, she said the classic poet was always on the borderline of faith and infidelity as he was a Muslim but many people questioned his father because of his temperament and personality.

About Syed Ahmad Khan, she said the trouble with historical treatment of Syed Ahmad was that he was primarily seen as either the father of the `two-nation theory` or as someone who was a collaborator (of the British) and the reason of this pigeonholing of his views was that people did not read his works.

He orchestrated the Aligarh movement that was engaged with new ideas but never losing their moorings in the Muslim tradition.

Ayesha Jalal said the second part of her book explored how the Muslim self dealt with history because one of main incentives to engage history was to challenge the colonial representation of Muslim history. `Most of colonial history was written by colonial officials turned historians. There was a colonial project that wanted to argue that the Muslims were illiberal and they were oppressive rulers. Under Syed Ahmad`s influence, the people like Shibli Nomani undertook a project on the heroes of Islam.