History of Pakistan

The history of Pakistan preceding the country's independence in 1947 is shared with that of Afghanistan, India, and Iran.

Quotes

• The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology. The excavated city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley—overrun by the Aryans in 1500 B.C.—is one of the archaeological glories of Pakistan and the world. The excavations are now being damaged by waterlogging and salinity, and appeals for money have been made to world organizations. A featured letter in Dawn offered its own ideas for the site. Verses from the Koran, the writer said, should be engraved and set up in Mohenjo-Daro in “appropriate places”: “Say (unto them, O Mohammed): Travel in the land and see the nature of the sequel for the guilty … Say (O Mohammed, to the disbelievers): Travel in the land and see the nature of the consequence for those who were before you. Most of them were idolaters.”
  So theology complicates history for the people of Pakistan. And for people who feel that their country hasn’t worked, that in the Muslim homeland they are still strangers, or dispossessed, or threatened with dispossession, for such people the wish to claim kinship with a triumphant Islam makes for further disturbance.
  • Naipaul, V.S. - Among the Believers (Vintage, 1982)

• In orthodox theology only the first four caliphs were rightly guided. After that the caliphate becomes a dynasty; the Islamic ideals of brotherhood are betrayed. Sind, therefore, was conquered by the Arabs in the bad time; but the Arabs brought the faith, so the bad time becomes a sacred time. The Mongols destroyed the Arab empire in the East. So the Mongols were bad. But the Mongols became Muslims and established the great Mogul empire in India; so that becomes a wonderful time. The Turks displace the Mongols; but the Turks also become Muslims and powerful, and they, too, cease to be bad. So history—which begins as a “pleasant story of conquest”—becomes hopelessly confusing. And out of this more-than-colonial confusion some Pakistanis fabricate personalities for themselves, in which they are Islamic and conquerors and—in Pakistan—a little like people in exile from their glory. They become Turks or Moguls. Or Arabs.
  • Naipaul, V.S. - Among the Believers (Vintage, 1982)

• The Chachnama shows the Arabs of the seventh century as a people stimulated and enlightened and disciplined by Islam, developing fast, picking up learning and new ways and new weapons (catapults, Greek fire) from the people they conquer, intelligently curious about the people they intend to conquer. The current fundamentalist wish in Pakistan to go back to that pure Islamic time has nothing to do with a historical understanding of the Arab expansion. The fundamentalists feel that to be like those early Arabs they need only one tool: the Koran. Islam, which made the seventh-century Arabs world conquerors, now clouds the minds of their successors or pretended successors.
  • Naipaul, V.S. - Among the Believers (Vintage, 1982)

• History, in the Pakistan schoolbooks I looked at, begins with Arabia and Islam. In the simpler texts, surveys of the Prophet and the first four caliphs and perhaps the Prophet’s daughter are followed, with hardly a break, by lives of the poet Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, the political founder of Pakistan, and two or three “martyrs,” soldiers or airmen who died in the holy wars against India in 1965 and 1971.
  History as selective as this leads quickly to unreality. Before Mohammed there is blackness: slavery, exploitation. After Mohammed there is light: slavery and exploitation vanish. But did it? How can that be said or taught? What about all those slaves sent back from Sind to the caliph? What about the descendants of the African slaves who walk about Karachi? There is no adequate answer: so the faith begins to nullify or overlay the real world.
  The military rule; political parties are banned. There is 15 percent literacy, and fundamentalism stifles the universities. There is no industry, no science. The economy is a remittance economy; the emigrants, legal and illegal, pour out. But in the social studies textbook in the sixth class in English-language schools the child reads:
  • Naipaul, V.S. - Among the Believers (Vintage, 1982)

• There was something else that Iqbal had never considered: that in the new state the nature of history would alter, and with that altering of the historical sense, the intellectual life of the country would inevitably be diminished. The mullahs would always hold the ring, would limit inquiry. All the history of the ancient land would cease to matter. In the school history books, or the school “civics” books, the history of Pakistan would become only an aspect of the history of Islam. The Muslim invaders, and especially the Arabs, would become the heroes of the Pakistan story. The local people would be hardly there, in their own land, or would be there only as ciphers swept aside by the agents of the faith.
  • Naipaul, V.S. - Beyond Belief (Vintage, 1999)