Pakistan Unveiled

 

For an overview of Pakistan enter here:

 

Introduction: In 1941 Abul Ala Mawdudi (also spelled Maududi or Maudoodi) founded the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) redefined in 1947 to support an Islamic State in Pakistan.

 

Following a standoff between the Russian British Armies, Afghanistan's frontier with British India was drawn by Sir Mortimer Durand, in 1893 and was accepted by representatives of both governments. Recognizing Afghanistan as a buffer between the two empires saved the Russians and the British from having to confront each other militarily. The border, named the Durand Line, intentionally divided Pashtun tribes living in the area in order to prevent them from becoming a nuisance for the Raj. On their side of the frontier, the British created autonomous tribal agencies, controlled by British political officers with the help of tribal chieftains whose loyalty was ensured through regular subsidies. Continue P.1:

A good example of a displaced family is General Musharraf, who lived in New Delhi until the age of four when his mother suddenly had to leave with her three children. She later recalled in an interview with the New Yorker: " We fled for our lives. We took the last train out of Delhi. The train passed through entire neighborhoods that had been set to the torch. Bodies were lying along the rail tracks. There was so much blood. Blood and chaos were everywhere." Continue P.2:

 

Similar to the Hindu Nationalists of the BJP Party (the Governement untill late 2004) in India, also Pakistan's production of a national past required significant processes of forgetting-in this case, of regional value and regional history-offers some ways to think about territory, history, and ethnic belonging. Continue P.3:

 

In Pakistan’s early years there were clear camps of intellectuals who had competing claims linked to various ideological positions that impressed upon the state and the populace the legitimacy of one set of ideas over others. Among them were writers associated with the All-Pakistan Progressive Writers Association (APPWA) and closely affiliated with the newly formed Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). Other groups were not as organized and consisted of a range of free thinkers, modernist poets and independent-minded intellectuals, along with those who sought to link the question of Pakistan with Islamic morals and values. While APPWA had names like Hamid Akhtar, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sibte Hasan, Ibrahim Jalees, Abdullah Malik, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Sajad Zaheer under its banner, the “non-progressives” consisted, among others, of Ahmad Ali, Hasan Askari, Sadat Hasan Manto, Mumtaz Mufti, Akhtar Hussein Raipuri, N.M. Rashid, M.D. Taseer and Mumtaz Shirin. The latter group was intellectually eclectic and divided and many had also been previously close to the progressives.Two strands of intellectual ferment clearly stood out in these early discussions. One was the importance of linking Islam to Pakistani culture. The other was the place of Urdu in this new cultural space where a majority of its inhabitants did not use it as their first language. Hence the following case study offers a first glimpse of of the debates about the question of Pakistan’s future culture at the moment of its own inception as an independent state.

 

With the case of Indonesia, India, and Pakistan, however, language as the central subject of historical inquiry  remained underexplored to date, yet by acknowledging the produced nature of the national language, it allows us to better explain the otherwise puzzling persistence of attachment to more regional or local languages that one might have expected to fall into desuetude if nationalist enthusiasm were in fact the result of (rather than the precondition for) widespread monolingualism, print-capitalism, industrialization, the Mamlukization of society, and the emergence of a stable national space-time subscribed to by citizen-subjects. If these historical experiences of India, Indonesia and Pakistan alone (one-quarter of the world's population) do not offer a sufficiently convincing rationale for reconsidering the theoretical linkage of language and nationalism, consider this: Even a cursory look at the history of France points to a much weaker causal link between language and national consciousness than has been presupposed by key theories of nationalism. Continue P.4:

 

Who Made Pakistan? P.5: The Militarization of Pakistan

 

To understand the politics of S.Asia  however one has to understand that in many cases names mattered more than the things they were actually meant to designate. P.6 India’s Backlash:

 

Bangladesh’s Islamism has similarities with its counterparts in Muslim majority countries like Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia as West Pakistan. All of them had gone through secular national socialism and autocracies under civil/military rulers before turning Islamic during the last decade and a half. Continue P.7:

A Pakistani soldier mans a military outpost in Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal area near the Afghan border.

 

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