What is Pakistan?

Making Sense of Pakistan

Farzana Shaikh 

Westland Publications

275 pages 

Rs 499

After Israel, Pakistan is perhaps the only other country whose national identity has been subjected to such scrutiny. More than 70 years after its creation as a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, the idea of Pakistan remains deeply contested and it continues to struggle to reconcile the original vision of its founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah with its later trajectory. 

Indeed, there’s no consensus even around Jinnah’s supposed vision which broadly envisaged a pluralistic state that will not discriminate on the basis of faith or cultural differences. As Farzana Shaikh points out: “At its [Pakistan's identity crisis] heart lies the question of whether Pakistan was intended to secure a Muslim homeland free from the domination of a Hindu majority in independent India or whether it expressed a desire for a state informed by Islamic law where Parliament and the people would be subject to Divine injunctions mediated by a clerical elite.”

Whether or not the latter was the intended goal, that's how Pakistan has evolved and there is no indication that a change is imminent. Its newly-minted prime minister Imran Khan's remarks on the issue after his election victory illustrated the depth of the crisis and confusion as he tried to explain his vision for Pakistan: an odd cocktail of “the kind of country that our leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted” and the type of state established by Prophet Muhammad in the city of Medina. Ms Shaikh underlines the conflict between Jinnah’s broadly inclusive vision and Mr Khan's idea of “twenty-one century Pakistan ...informed by a seventh-century polity resting on the pre-eminent status of Muslims”. 

Upshot: No hope of an early resolution of the “contestation over Islam and its place in the definition of Pakistan's national identity”.

Ms Shaikh suggests that Pakistan's identity crisis is a legacy of Jinnah's own “ambivalent” understanding of the relationship between Islam and politics. While he deployed religious rhetoric to make the case for Pakistan, he appeared to be a “reluctant convert to his own idea”. 

“It’s no wonder then that, after Jinnah's death in 1948, within months of Pakistan’s independence, many of its political elites were uncertain about, or hostile to, his understanding of the role of Islam in defining the nation’s constitutional foundations,” she writes.

An eminent UK-based historian of Pakistani descent and an associate fellow at London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), Ms Shaikh has been an outspoken critic of Pakistan's successive regimes, and the political-military-clergy nexus that has been a feature of much of the country's tumultuous history. To declare my own interest I’ve known her for close to a decade and, in another avatar, reprinted her seminal work, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India 1860-1947.

Ms Shaikh’s emphasis on the role of Islamic identity in the creation of Pakistan and its subsequent problems clashes with the view of many of her contemporaries who give primacy to economic and political factors over identity. However, she sticks to her thesis that Pakistan’s “fragility as a nation-state” stems from “the underlying uncertainty” about its identity. Much of this uncertainty, according to her, has been a result of an obsessive policy of defining itself in opposition to India. Which has burdened it with “a negative identity shaped by the circumstances of Partition” — and feeding Pakistan’s “national obsession with India”.

The book examines the “political mythology” around Pakistan’s raison d'etre (“Why Pakistan?”) and raises the question: “Who is a Pakistani?” A definition that it says is “still deeply contested” with continuing tensions between Muslim migrants from India (the so-called “mohajirs”) and indigenous groups — “each armed with rival versions of ‘the Pakistani’”. The question will resonate in India, which also is in the grip of a divisive controversy over the definition of “who’s an Indian” fuelled by a resurgent right-wing Hindu nationalism seeking to declare non-Hindus imposters. 

Meanwhile, given Ms Shaikh’s identity-centred analysis of the nature of the Pakistani state it’s only logical that her prognosis should also be centred on it. So, she reckons that Pakistan’s future as a stable nation-state will depend on the nature of consensus around its identity; and she doesn't rule out the possibility that Pakistan could yet opt for pluralism. But if it doesn’t, it will have a damaging effect not only on Pakistan’s stability but affect regional stability.

One of Pakistan’s many self-inflicted misfortunes is that some of its best minds are forced to live abroad because of a climate of intolerance of dissent at home. This book was first published in the UK nine years ago, but failed to find a publisher in the author's native Pakistan where some accused her of seeking to undermine the idea of Pakistan. How little the country has changed in the past decade (or rather has remained the same despite apparent changes) is evident from the fact that even this edition reportedly remains without a publisher in Pakistan at the time of writing.