Pakistan’s raison d’être as a nation-state has three positions.

At the time of the country’s inception in 1947, the state sought to invent a history in which Islam had arrived in India in the 8th century and, therefore, Pakistan was an evolutionary outcome of that arrival. The country was thus said to be the result of ‘cultural unity’ — the culture being Islam (Shumaila Hemani, University of Alberta, 2011).

The founders of Pakistan and the leaders of the country’s fledgling state described Islam as a progressive faith with a universal culture. The founders were largely repulsed by the idea of an Islamic theocracy though, or an ‘Islamic Leviathan’ as senior judge Justice Muhammad Munir described it in 1954.

Nevertheless, the state was convinced that the universality of Islamic culture would keep the Muslim majority of Pakistan united, despite the ethnic, sectarian and sub-sectarian diversity present within this majority. But it was also necessary to rationalise the country’s existence in the context of the region that it was situated in. 

Major symbols of Muslim rule in India, between the 13th and 19th centuries, were in regions that had become part of the Republic of India. According to Shumaila Hemani, in 1951, when an ancient site was discovered in Sindh, the state tried to resolve the dilemma by making a “nationalist use of archaeology”.

The site was called Bhanbhore. Those who discovered it claimed that it was the first Hindu region that was conquered by the Arab armies led by Muhammad bin Qasim in the early 8th century. The historian Manan Ahmed Asif sees this claim as a continuation of a distortion engineered by British scholars in colonial India. Qasim’s presence in Sindh was brief and he was largely forgotten until his resurrection in the 19th century as a ‘conqueror’.

Over the decades, leaders and scholars have attempted to formulate a central ethos which underpins and dictates the course Pakistan charts as a nation. After more than 75 years, this ethos still remains elusive

Manan posits that Qasim’s image as an Islamic conqueror vanquishing Hindus to lay the roots of Islam in India was largely derived from a flawed translation of the 13th century book Chachnama. According to Manan, the book “is less a history of the 8th century and more a political theory for the 13th century.” Yet, 19th century British historians treated it as ‘a book of conquest’. What’s more, Qasim really does not figure much in it. 

Manan laments that Hindu and Muslim historians adopted distorted 19th century British accounts of Qasim. The British did it to portray the Muslims as a warrior race, Hindu nationalists did it to describe the Muslims as violent outsiders, and Muslim nationalists did it to establish Islam’s ancient presence in the region. The fact is, Qasim was largely an insignificant blip in the region’s history. 

In the late 1950s, when the Bengalis of erstwhile East Pakistan began to demand majority rule in the country, a second position was shaped. Bengalis were in a majority compared to other ethnic groups. The early elites largely consisted of Punjabis and Urdu-speakers of West Pakistan. 

According to Hemani, this is when the ‘Indus thesis’ was evoked. The thesis understood people settled along the River Indus (in West Pakistan) as descendants of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) that existed 5,000 years ago. The thesis postulated that the descendants had evolved into becoming different ethnic groups but, once they began to adopt Islam after the 13th century, they became culturally homogenous.

This thesis was first formed by the British author Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who published it in the shape of a 1947 book, Pakistan as 5,000 Years Old. It was initially ignored. However, a decade or so later, when Indian culture and history began to be perceived as historically rich and ancient in Europe and the US, the Pakistani state dialled up the Indus thesis during the Gen Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-69). 

To frame Pakistan’s history as being equally ancient, IVC sites were turned into tourist spots. Artefacts from ancient sites along the Indus were placed in museums. The country began being explained as the evolutionary consequence of various ancient civilisations that had existed in the region that became Pakistan. Rather, West Pakistan, along the Indus. 

However, the position based on the Indus thesis started to be sidelined when East Pakistan broke away in 1971. In 1972, a new government headed by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto organised a conference to formulate a new raison d’être. Intellectuals, historians and artists were invited to come up with a new position. 

A new position did emerge. It was influenced by a book written in 1964 by the scholar Jamil Jalibi. In it, he had concluded that there was no Pakistani culture as such, but it could be created if one was willing to see the country as a guldasta or a bouquet of different cultures. The Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz held similar views and was present at the conference. 

But whereas Jalibi had put Urdu and Islam at the centre of his guldasta, Faiz saw Islam and Urdu as just two aspects of a larger national body that was made up of various equally significant ethnic and religious cultures and languages. Seeing the regime tilting towards adopting this position, those who opposed it began to publish a series of critiques of it in newspapers. 

The regime backtracked. When noted historian Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi declared, in 1972, that “countries come and go, but religions stay”, it became clear that Pakistan was to return to the first position. But this time, Islam as the glue for cultural unity was not to be provided by South Asian history. The country’s existential roots were now to be looked for in Arabia. 

Though some of Faiz’s ideas were incorporated by the Bhutto regime to appropriate ethnic cultures, the larger project was to gradually introduce ‘Islamic laws’. This project peaked in the 1980s during the Gen Ziaul Haq dictatorship, leading to the creation of a watered-down version of the once-dreaded ‘Islamic Leviathan’. 

But once the project took root, it triggered the birth of problematic outcomes: the 1974 ouster of the Ahmadiyya from the fold of Islam, the controversial 1986 Blasphemy Laws, the unchecked growth of violent sectarian organisations and then of militant anti-state Islamist groups. 

These have been pushing the state into a corner for quite some time now.

The third position that was rejected can still be relevant as an option. It needs to be re-looked at without the paranoid post-1971 eyes that suspected it of being ‘secular’ and overtly dependent on ethnic cultures. We urgently require a fresh point of view and this position just might be it.

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 1st, 2023