Many Muslims in colonial India recognised themselves as Indian citizens alongside Indians of other religions. These Muslims saw India as their permanent home, having lived there for centuries, and saw it as a multireligious state with a history of peaceful coexistence. Mian Fayyazuddin, a legislator, declared, “We are all Indians, and we share the same Indian-ness.” We demand nothing less than an equitable share since we are equal partners. Forget about minority and majority; these are political constructs used to garner political mileage. Others, on the other hand, began to contend that Muslims were their own country.

In Pakistan, it is widely assumed that the movement for Muslim self-awakening and identity was started by Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), who fought against Emperor Akbar’s religious syncretist Din-iIlahi movement and is thus considered “for contemporary official Pakistani historians” to be the founder of the Two-nation theory, and was particularly intensified under Muslim reformer Shah Waliullah (1703-1762), who, because he wanted to restore Muslims’ self-citi.

Because of their purist and militant reformist movements targeting the Muslim masses, Akbar Ahmed considers Haji Shariatullah (1781–1840) and Syed Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831) to be forerunners of the Pakistan movement “Reformers such as Waliullah, Barelvi, and Shariatullah were not calling for a modern-day Pakistan. They did, however, play a key role in raising awareness of the impending Muslim crisis and the need to form their own political organisation. Sir Sayyed’s contribution was to create a modern idiom for expressing the search for Islamic identity.” As a result, many Pakistanis regard Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), a modernist and reformist thinker, as the father of the two-nation doctrine.

Sir Syed, for example, spoke of two separate countries in a January 1883 address in Patna, even if his personal approach was conciliatory: Friends, in India, there are two significant nations, Hindus and Mussulmans, who are distinguishable by their names. These two nations are analogous to the primary limbs of India, much as a man has several major organs. [32] However, he rejected composite Indian nationalism because the formation of the Indian National Congress was seen as a political threat. In a lecture in 1887, he remarked, “Now, suppose all the English left India—who would be the rulers of India?” Is it possible that two nations, Mohammedan and Hindu, could sit on the same throne and share power in these circumstances? Without a doubt, It is necessary for one of them to conquer and subjugate the other. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and inconceivable. In 1888, in a critical assessment of the Indian National Congress, which promoted composite nationalism among all the castes and creeds of colonial India, he also considered Muslims to be a separate nationality among many others: The Indian National Congress’s goals and objectives are based on a lack of understanding of history and current politics; they ignore the fact that India is home to a diverse population of nationalities; and they assume that Muslims, Marathas, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Banias, Sudras, Sikhs, Bengalis, Madrasis, and Peshawaris can all be treated equally and belong to the same nation. Congress believes they share the same faith, speak the same language, and have the same way of life and practises… I believe that the experiment proposed by the Indian National Congress is laden with perils and misery for all Indian nations, particularly Muslims.

Justice Abdur Rahim (1867–1952) was one of the first to openly articulate how Muslims and Hindus form two nations in 1925, during the Aligarh session of the All-India Muslim League, which he chaired, and while it would later become common rhetoric, historian S. M. Ikram says it “created quite a sensation in the twenties”: “The Hindus and Muslims are not two religious sects like the Protestants and Catholics of England, but form two distinct common. Their distinct attitudes toward life, culture, civilization, and social habits, as well as their traditions and history, as well as their religion, divide them so profoundly that the fact that they have lived in the same country for nearly 1,000 years has done little to help them unite as a nation… Any of us Indian Muslims travelling in Afghanistan, Persia, and Central Asia, for example, amid Chinese Muslims, Arabs, and Turks, would feel right at home and would not encounter anything unfamiliar. In India, on the other hand, when we cross the street and reach the section of town where our Hindu neighbours dwell, we find ourselves absolute strangers in all social affairs. The poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) offered the philosophical explication, and Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1871–1948) turned it into the political actuality of a nation-state, more significantly and influentially than Justice Rahim or the historiography of British administrators. Some consider Allama Iqbal’s presidential address to the Muslim League on December 29, 1930, to be the first formal presentation of the two-nation theory in favour of what would become Pakistan. In its endeavour to represent Indian Muslims, the All-India Muslim League believed that the Muslims of the subcontinent constituted a unique and independent country from the Hindus. They requested separate electorates at first, but when they realised that Muslims would be unsafe in a Hindu-dominated India, they desired a separate state. The League wanted self-determination for Muslim-majority areas in the form of a sovereign state that guaranteed minorities in these Muslim-majority areas equal rights and protections. Many experts believe that an elite class of Muslims in colonial India organised the establishment of Pakistan through the partition of India, rather than the average man.

A vast number of Islamic political parties, religious schools, and organisations opposed India’s partition and called for a composite nationalism that included all Indians in resistance to British authority (especially the All India Azad Muslim Conference). According to a CID report from 1941, hundreds of Muslim weavers from Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh descended on Delhi under the guise of the Momin Conference to protest the projected two-nation doctrine. At the time, a meeting of more than 50,000 individuals from an unorganised sector was unusual, thus its significance should be recognised. The majority of Indian Muslims, non-ashraf Muslims, were opposed to partition, but their voices were not heard.

They were devout Muslims, yet they were hostile to Pakistan. On the other hand, Ian Copland, in his book about the end of British rule in the Indian subcontinent, clarifies that it was not solely an élite-driven movement that spawned separatism “as a defence against the threats posed to their social position by the introduction of representative government and competitive recruitment to the public service,” but that the Muslim masses were heavily involved due to religious polarisation.”The fact that some of the loudest spokesmen for the Hindu cause and some of the biggest donors to the Arya Samaj and the cow protection movement came from the Hindu merchant and money lending communities, the principal agents of lower-class Muslim economic dependency, reinforced this sense of insecurity,” and “each year brought new riots” because of Muslim resistance, so that “by the end of the century, Hindu-Muslim relations had become so soured by this deadly roun,”