What do you think?
Rate this book
Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea
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.
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.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published May 15, 2013
21 people are currently reading
414 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 4, 2021
This book works well as a history of the idea of Pakistan and its deep connection to Zionism as an ideology. These ideologies, the author posits, are deeply anti-historical, anti-territorial and fundamentally abstract. They are in many ways new ways of thinking about politics and the traditional Western notion of the nation-state. Devji traces the intellectual genealogy of Muslim nationalism in India, which includes an overview and analysis of the ideas propounded by Muslim intelligentsia including the likes of Sir Syed, Aga Khan, Iqbal, and eventually Jinnah. In the process, Devji manages to show the modern nature of 'Islam' and the ways it affected and got affected by Enlightenment and the modern nation-state.
He then moves towards showing the ways in which the intellectual journeys of Zionists (and world Jewry) were strikingly similar to Muslim nationalism in India. He also sheds some light on the views of Congress Leaders and Ambedkar. In the process, he is able to demonstrate how all these ideas were interlinked and constantly in engagement with each other.
However, this text becomes problematic for me in places where Devji refuses to engage with material realities as one of the most important bases to think about Pakistan. He also dismisses history from below as a proctological view. This makes his overall analysis limited in scope and rooted in pure abstraction.
Nevertheless, this text is worth reading and engaging with.
He then moves towards showing the ways in which the intellectual journeys of Zionists (and world Jewry) were strikingly similar to Muslim nationalism in India. He also sheds some light on the views of Congress Leaders and Ambedkar. In the process, he is able to demonstrate how all these ideas were interlinked and constantly in engagement with each other.
However, this text becomes problematic for me in places where Devji refuses to engage with material realities as one of the most important bases to think about Pakistan. He also dismisses history from below as a proctological view. This makes his overall analysis limited in scope and rooted in pure abstraction.
Nevertheless, this text is worth reading and engaging with.
February 28, 2014
An unusual analogy but credibly presented. The book brings out quite cogently the similarities between the creation of Israel and Pakistan. However, what is even more fascinating about this very well researched book is the selection of statements of the politicians and Islamic thinkers of the pre-independence era. Liaquat Ali Khan's statement in 1945 about Pakistan representing the future of humanity is quite revealing as he quotes: "We owe a debt to Islam. We have to show by our precept and example by working in the laboratory of Pakistan that the future of humanity lies in the teaching of Islam". The does, however conclude that " in many ways Pakistan...........serves as an illustration of the failure to escape or transcend the problem of minority politics in India"
February 16, 2024
Really enjoyed this book on the founding ideology of Pakistan. The comparison between Muslim nationalism and Zionism is interesting. I also found the figure of Mohammad Iqbal very intriguing; someone I should definitely read more about soon.
June 25, 2021
The theme of this book is to discuss two different nations - Jews and Muslims - in a single lens, Zionism. The writer believes that the Jews of Israel and the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent were scattered people who forged an ideology based on their religious sentiments, politicized religion, and pursue a separate homeland for themselves in their respective areas. It is a very different project for nationalism and anti-nationalism which explores thoroughly an ambiguous political narrative in which a nation never coincides with a state.
June 1, 2022
I'm not a fan of the author's writing style (he doesn't really have a proclivity for elegant speech), but this book was brilliant. While lacking a deep material analysis of the Partition (Chatterjee does a much better job on that front), the book does introduce broader questions about national belonging and its relation to "true homelands". Just as Hegel had once douted whether he was truly a European due to the Christianization of his name and the way his heroic myths all traced back to Palestine, the Pakistani movement had successfully internalized a limited conceptualization of national identity as fundamentally mythological and aesthetic. The connections Devji drew between those two vulnerable moments in history were extremely interesting. Since much of the history about Nehru-Gandhi-Jinnah is obfuscated in propaganda and contradiction, it was also quite eye-opening to see quotidien descriptions of their thoughts in the midst of the freedom struggle. Even though it's been almost a decade since this was written, the contradictions of Pakistan and the two-nation theory live on; in the 10 years since this was written, the other side of the two-nation theory, Hindu nationalism and its corresponding fascist elements, have been revived from their previous neutralization under the INC and socialist parties. The anxiety of neoliberalism, the corporate recolonization of India, the threat of nuclear war, the legacy of the Bengali genocide, the alienation of the Kashmiris, and a renewed interest in Punjabi and Sindhi unity across the Indian-Pakistani border have pushed us towards an extremely sensitive yet revolutionary period in history. Will Pakistan and Hindutva die together? Or will the subcontinent finally balkanize into a thousand pieces? In a semi-colonial, semi-feudal, semi-literate society, only time can tell.
March 5, 2021
The only problem I have with this book that it would make you think its about Israel and Pakistan when it is just about Pakistan. Although that was quite a shrewd marketing tactic. I love love this book. After reading it I was like, wait....how come we never thought of this before? Like it is so obvious that Pakistan and Israel are ideological twins, except Israel's holy land actually represents something for jews but Pakistan doesnt. Another problem is how Devji doesnt take into account the succession of Bangladesh in 1971. It did shake the ideological foundations of Pakistan's nationalism-and I wished to see a discussion about Bengal's role in the Muslim movement. Although the author does talk a bit about how India became the home of universalist Islam, he didnt talk much about Bengal. Other than that whatever I understood from this book was brilliant and the parts I couldnt, I hope i get them some day lol.
November 1, 2025
Strong on Pakistan; weak on Zionism’s basics
Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion is stimulating if you’re interested in Pakistan’s intellectual history; its archival vignettes and reflections on Muslim nationalism are engaging. But as a book to understand Zionism, it’s deeply misleading.
The problem is definitional. Devji adopts a non-standard definition of “Zion” as a modern religious-nationalist form in which a dispersed minority abandons an old land for a new one, loosening “blood and soil”: Israel as showcase, Pakistan as precedent. Once the baseline is wrong, the comparison collapses.
Zionism is not a fungible relocation scheme. It is a territorial restoration: the return of an indigenous people to a specific ancestral homeland. The land was non-interchangeable (hence the rejection of substitute schemes). And Zionism’s practice, land purchase and settlement, Hebrew revival, state- and defense-building, was classic territorial nation-building, not post-territorial identity politics. Collapsing Jewish peoplehood into mere religion erases the movement’s ethno-historical bond to the land. Finally, equating Israel with Pakistan is a category error: Pakistan emerged from partition among existing Muslim-majority provinces (most Muslims never moved), whereas Zionism mobilized a diasporic return to one particular territory.
Some analogies are catchy but strained. The Urdu/Hebrew parallel, for example, misses how Hebrew’s revival operated within a long-standing peoplehood rather than being an elite imposition over disparate populations.
Verdict: Worth reading for Pakistan; not a reliable guide to Zionism. Read critically and alongside more representative Zionism scholarship.
Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion is stimulating if you’re interested in Pakistan’s intellectual history; its archival vignettes and reflections on Muslim nationalism are engaging. But as a book to understand Zionism, it’s deeply misleading.
The problem is definitional. Devji adopts a non-standard definition of “Zion” as a modern religious-nationalist form in which a dispersed minority abandons an old land for a new one, loosening “blood and soil”: Israel as showcase, Pakistan as precedent. Once the baseline is wrong, the comparison collapses.
Zionism is not a fungible relocation scheme. It is a territorial restoration: the return of an indigenous people to a specific ancestral homeland. The land was non-interchangeable (hence the rejection of substitute schemes). And Zionism’s practice, land purchase and settlement, Hebrew revival, state- and defense-building, was classic territorial nation-building, not post-territorial identity politics. Collapsing Jewish peoplehood into mere religion erases the movement’s ethno-historical bond to the land. Finally, equating Israel with Pakistan is a category error: Pakistan emerged from partition among existing Muslim-majority provinces (most Muslims never moved), whereas Zionism mobilized a diasporic return to one particular territory.
Some analogies are catchy but strained. The Urdu/Hebrew parallel, for example, misses how Hebrew’s revival operated within a long-standing peoplehood rather than being an elite imposition over disparate populations.
Verdict: Worth reading for Pakistan; not a reliable guide to Zionism. Read critically and alongside more representative Zionism scholarship.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews