Many major Islamic scholars, including the leadership of the Darul ‘Ulum of Deoband, India's leading Islamic seminary, and the major organization of ’ulama, the Jami'at ‘Ulama-i-Hind (JUH), opposed the creation of the separate Muslim state of Pakistan. Many academics, and observers generally, have judged this to be a historical paradox. As scholar of Islamic thought and Muslim history Yohannan Friedmann writes, ‘one would have expected the Muslim religious dignitaries to enthusiastically support this call for separatism.’ In the words of cultural theorist Aijaz Ahmad, ‘it is one of the great paradoxes of modern Indian history that traditions of Islamic piety … eventually found their way into a composite cultural and political nationalism; theories of modernization as taught in British and proto-British institutions, from Lincoln's Inn to Aligarh, begat, on the other hand, communal separatism.’ In the face of this alleged ‘paradox,’ one response has been to assume that this opposition was in response to the secular vision of the Pakistan movement's leadership in the Muslim League (ML), epitomized by the dubious religious credentials of the non-observant Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948).

That explanation sells short the positive arguments of the leading nationalist ‘ulama in favour of undivided India. For a start, they claimed sacred precedent for their commitment. But their line of reasoning, perhaps surprisingly, went far beyond ‘religion.’ They argued that the very foundation of the modern nation-state was territorial, encompassing whatever diverse population lived within. They expected the new state to be in a position to resist the kind of exploitation of India's economic and political interests that a colonizing power had exercised; and they argued that division would leave smaller states that would continue to be vulnerable. They were optimistic about a democratic state, attuned to minority interests, where they would even more effectively secure their own position, carved out over a century, as guardians of a distinctive sphere engaged with family law, morality, and practices of worship and ritual. Theirs was, in short, an enhanced vision of continuity of the colonial strategy of non-interference in ‘religion,’ recognized in the interwar period as ‘minority cultural rights.’ They understood the risks of totalitarianism, so evident in the interwar period, in any movement to secure the ideologically defined state that some proponents wanted for the separate state.