The creation of a link between events in 712 and 1947 The Pakistan Ideology had begun to place Pakistan’s historical roots in lands from where Arab horsemen had begun to invade India from the 8th Century onwards
To the JI, the story of Pakistan began not during the Pakistan Movement, but with the invasion of Sindh by Arab commander, Muhammad bin Qasim, in the 9th Century who defeated the region’s Hindu ruler, Raja Dahir.
Khilafat Movment (1919-1924) had fragmented the views of Muslim Nationalists, with one section looking at it as a universal Pan-Islamic idea whose epicentre was India, and the other faction holding on to the idea’s India-centricity, concerned only with the economic and social uplift of the region’s Muslims.
Iqbal’s writings in this context attempted to bridge the gap between the two poles
qbal also emphasised that Muslims need not be taken in by modern concepts such as secularism because Islam was inherently secular as there was no concept of the Church and/or official clergy (as a mediator between God and man) in Islam.
But he added that they should now politically strive to carve out their own sovereign abode.
It was only when the Congress announced its Socialist manifesto that promised to outlaw feudal properties that the Muslim zamindars of Sindh and Punjab plus the nawabs of UP created the Pakistan movement
Once Pakistan was formed he inherited provinces where the Muslim League had never won an election - Ghafar Khan was the Frontier Gandhi and against the creation of Pakistan. Tiwana had Unionist Punjab and was against the creation of Pakistan. Sind with GM Seyed was against the creation of Pakistan.
They apprehended a a back lash from the Hindu majority , who had been subjected to Muslim rule for a thousand years. This fear was further confirmed when Hindus came into power in eight provinces of India in 1935 and immediately set about imposing their Hindu ideology and language upon the Muslims. The 1946 elections showed that even the Indian Muslims who had no intention of leaving India, voted for the Muslim League
In his dialogue with Dr. Ambedkar Allama Iqbal expressed his desire to see Indian provinces as autonomous units under the direct control of the British Government and with no central Indian Government. He envisaged autonomous Muslim Provinces in India
Jinnah’s Muslim Nationalism was still embedded in the act of safeguarding the economic, cultural and political interests of India’s Muslims.
Jinnah ordered that the Bengali writing system (close to Vedic and classic Sanskrit) be replaced with Arabic script and even with the Roman script.
It was as if the government was suggesting that Bengali could not be adopted as the national language because its writing system looked too much like that of Hindi.
Jinnah’s desperate attempt to replace the Bengali writing system was vehemently challenged by Bengali intellectuals and politicians and he had to beat a hasty retreat on the issue.
witnessing the ascendency of leftist parties and student groups in West Pakistan, and the growing agitation by Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan, the JI declared that socialism and secularism were anti-Islam ideologies akin to atheism.
late 1960s, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto formed the socialist Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), and when Sindhi, Baloch, Pushtun and Bengali nationalists had accelerated their agitation for provincial autonomy.
JI and other religious parties had explained the break-up of Pakistan in 1971 as a consequence of its rulers’ refusal to turn the country into an Islamic state and thus, giving secularists and ethnic nationalists enough reason and space to dictate terms and harm the unity of the country.
It had alarmingly seen the rise of socialist regimes in Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Sudan, Somalia and Pakistan in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Saudi Arabia hardly played a role in the matters of Pakistan before 1973. But after 1973 Bhutto’s Pakistan (just like Sadat’s Egypt) began to court the oil-rich Saudi monarchy, hoping to fatten their countries’ struggling economies with hearty hand-outs from their wealthy Muslim brethren (‘Petro- Dollars’).
But the money came with a condition. The Saudi monarchy was a passionate proponent of a rather puritanical strand of Islam (‘Wahabism’).
In 1976 PTV began running a series called ‘Tabeer.’ It depicted the 1857 Indian Mutiny as a Muslim Jihad against the British and their Hindu allies and the beginning of the Pakistan Movement.
in December 1976, a 9-party alliance of religious and anti-Bhutto parties united under the umbrella of the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA).
The alliance geared up to face Bhutto’s PPP in the 1977 election. And it was only when the PNA used the words ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa’ (The Prophet’s System) as its main slogan,
In July 1977, Bhutto’s own General toppled his regime in a military coup and promptly arrested him.
General Ziaul Haq was handpicked by Bhutto, in spite of him having a history of being highly conservative and an admirer of JI’s chief and Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi.
When he imposed the country’s third Martial Law, Zia took PNA’s Nizam-e-Mustafa rhetoric and turned it into a draconian, and then a legislative ideological project, giving the whole concept of the Pakistan Ideology its starkest and weightiest Islamic aspect thus far.
Bhutto was hanged in April 1979 through a sham trial.
1980s, the Afghan war provided this lobby the opportunity to acquire weapons, military training and international patronage to fight the Russians.
In 1982 Zia announcing his dictatorship’s new set of so-called Islamic Laws.
After 1989, when the Soviets left Afghanistan, the religious lobby decided to use their Afghan experience for turning Pakistan into a religious state.
Pakistan indeed was turned into a large laboratory where militant groups from all over the Islamic world were brought together, initially with support from the US and its Arab allies, to do all sorts of experiments with the country.
This exercise brought forth Taliban militants.But the Taliban are not the real cause of Pakistan’s identity crisis. They are just a symptom.
The gods of the past ought to be questioned if the goddess of present is to smile. Pakistan, however, is still stuck in 1947.
The generals did not really invent the doctrine of 'strategic depth'. They merely discovered it
The plan was to use the Islamist militants for creating the so-called strategic depth by bringing Afghanistan on Pakistan’s side in a possible conflict with India. This target was never achieved but the militants did become an existential threat to the Pakistani state.
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