Pakistan Quotes

“Pakistan, she observed, had a policy of “profiting from the disputes of others,” and she cited Pakistan’s desire to benefit from tension between the great powers and Pakistan’s early focus on the Palestine dispute as examples of this tendency. “Pakistan was occupied with her own grave internal problem, but she still found time to talk fervently of sending ‘a liberation army to Palestine to help the Arabs free the Holy Land from the Jews”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Suhrawardy, who was barred from politics by Ayub Khan, challenged the concept of Pakistan as an ideological state. Emphasis on ideology, he argued, “would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of independence.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“If Jinnah—a Western educated and, by all accounts, nonpracticing Muslim—could inspire India’s Muslims to create a state by appealing to their religious sentiment, Maulana Maududi reasoned there was scope for a body of practicing Islamists to take over that state.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Radical and violent manifestations of Islamist ideology, which sometimes appear to threaten Pakistan’s stability, are in some ways a state project gone wrong.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“The alliance between the mosque and the military in Pakistan was forged over time, and its character has changed with the twists and turns of Pakistani history.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Of all the United States’ partners in the global war on terrorism, Pakistan is the most vexing and arguably the most important.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“The traditional ulema and Islamists used the environment of jihad to advance their own agenda, and one agenda item was that they should be accepted as custodians of Pakistan’s ideology and identity. After the war, several state-sponsored publications were devoted to building the case that one Muslim soldier had the fighting prowess to subdue five Hindus.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“General Iskander Mirza had shared with the high commissioner the view that democracy was unsuited to a country like Pakistan, even as plans were publicly laid out for general elections. The high commissioner reported that the president had told him of his intention to intervene “if the election returns showed that a post-electoral government was likely to be dominated by undesirable elements.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“If concerns about national identity led to an emphasis on religious ideology, the need for keeping the military well supplied resulted in Pakistan’s alliance with the United States.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“As in many insecure states, in Pakistan the line between preventing the nation’s enemies from causing it harm and declaring everyone who disagrees with the government an enemy of the nation was blurred.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Notwithstanding the fact that the Pakistani army had been created out of the British Indian army and had inherited all the professional qualifications of its colonial predecessor, within the first few months of independence it was also moving in the direction of adopting an Islamic ideological coloring.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Although much thought might not have gone into creating the separate state of Pakistan, considerable effort was now expended on defining, justifying, and protecting it.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“The Jamaat-e-Islami played a key role in mobilizing theologians to favor an Islamic constitution. It maintained a hard-line posture against India and helped the state by describing leftists, secularists, and ethnic nationalists as “anti-Islam unbelievers.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“The Jamaat saw its opportunity in working with the new state’s elite, gradually expanding the Islamic agenda while providing the theological rationale for the elite’s plans for nation building on the basis of religion.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“West Pakistani soldiers, politicians, and civil servants dominated Pakistan’s government. Within a year of independence, Bengalis in East Pakistan were rioting in the streets, demanding recognition of their language, Bengali, as a national language. Soon thereafter, in the western wing of the country, ethnic Sindhis, Pashtuns (also known as Pathans), and Balochis also complained about the domination of the civil services and the military’s officer corps by ethnic Punjabis and Urdu-speaking migrants from northern India.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“During Pakistan’s formative years, however, pan-Islamism was more important for Pakistan’s efforts to consolidate its national identity than as the main-stay of its foreign policy.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Pakistan’s pan-Islamic aspirations, however, were neither shared nor supported by the Muslim governments of the time. Nationalism in other parts of the Muslim world was based on ethnicity, language, or territory. Most Arab governments, as well as secular states such as Turkey, were wary of a religious revival.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Inflexibility in relations with India, and the belief that India represented an existential threat to Pakistan, led to maintaining a large military, which in turn helped the military assert its dominance in the life of the country.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Pakistanis were being conditioned to believe that their nationhood was under constant threat and that the threat came from India. Within weeks of independence, editorials in the Muslim League newspaper, Dawn, “called for ‘guns rather than butter, ‘urging a bigger and better-equipped army to defend ‘the sacred soil′ of Pakistan.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“India, which became independent along with Pakistan in 1947, agreed on a constitution in 1949 and held its first general election in 1951. Pakistan’s first constitution was not promulgated until 1956, and within two years it was abrogated through a military coup d’état.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“In any case, Jinnah died within a year of independence, leaving his successors divided, or confused, about whether to take their cue from his independence eve call to keep religion out of politics or to build on the religious sentiment generated during the political bargaining for Pakistan.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“Getting the new state on its feet economically presented one of the major challenges. Pakistan had virtually no industry, and the major markets for its agricultural products were in India. Pakistan produced 75 percent of the world’s jute supply but did not have a single jute processing mill. All the mills were in India. Although one-third of undivided India’s cotton was grown in Pakistan, it had “only one-thirtieth of the cotton mills.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“The campaign for Pakistan had, in its final stages, become a religious movement even though its leaders initiated it as a formula for resolving post-independence constitutional problems. This created confusion about Pakistan’s raison d’être, which Pakistan’s leadership has attempted to resolve through a state ideology.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“The Muslim League won 75 percent of the Muslim vote and all the Muslim seats in the constituent assembly. Only 15 percent of the population had the right to vote on the basis of literacy, property, income, and combatant status. It can be said with some certainty that literate, salaried, and propertied Muslims as well as those who had served in the British army supported the Muslim League. The views of the Muslim peasantry and illiterate masses were less clear.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

“One-third of the Indian subcontinent’s Muslims remained behind as a minority in Hindu dominated India even after partition in 1947. The other two-thirds now lives in two separate countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh, confirming the doubts expressed before independence about the practicality of the two nation theory.”
― Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military