Number of words: 222

It is, of course self-evident that Islam is not, just as Christianity or Zoroastrianism are not, indigenous to India, for born elsewhere Islam came to India wielding the evangelising sword of the invader; in consequence it arrived as an outsider and, at least initially, remained just that (an alien faith). But India is a cultural ocean, rivers of many faiths empty here; in that same vein Islam, too, is a part of those cultural layers, absorbed by what exists, mixing then with the rest to become an inseperable part of the marvel that is India. The problem lay, still does, in attempting to separate, to keep distinctly apart this one particular strata from India’s foundational layer. That foundation is Vedic, though some historians like to dispute this; whereafter comes the Indic, the indigenous. It is much later that the more recent layers of the Indo-Islamic or the Indo-Anglian come into reckoning. The late Girilal Jain has reasoned convincingly that ‘Islam is a totality’. He has written to say: ‘The modern mind just cannot comprehend Islam precisely because it is a totality. Islamic society is rooted in the religion of Islam; it is not the other way about. The point needs to be heavily underscored that Islamic society is theocentric not theocratic’.

Excerpted from Page 13 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh