Making Sense of Pakistan Quotes

“It flowed from the experience of Muslim dominance in India, which reinforced the idea that an essential part of being Muslim entailed belonging to, or identifying with, the ruling power; but it also derived from an Islamically informed discourse that valued power as an instrument in the service of God’s Law.”
― Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan

“The fragility of its identity also explains why Pakistan has been driven to compensate for its ill-defined sense of nationhood by seeking validation abroad, and why of all its foreign engagements none has been as central as its opposition to India.”
― Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan

“Again historical antecedents played a part. There was dissent from the beginning. Jinnah’s claim to be the ‘sole spokesman’ for Muslims had vied with Maulana Mawdudi’s authoritarian reading of a ‘holy community of Islam’. In turn, General Ayub Khan (1958-68), in collaboration with various pirs (Muslim holy men), competed with the revivalist Jamaat-i-Islami to gain a monopoly over the discourse of ‘modernist’ Islam. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Awami League’s espousal of ‘Bengali Islam’ stood (again mainly versus the Jamaat-i-Islami) in opposition to the authority of ‘Pakistani Islam’. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1972-77), championed ‘folk Islam’, again in collaboration with an assortment of mainly Sindhi pirs, to challenge the dominance of ‘scripturalist Islam’, advocated both by the Jamaat-i-Islami as well as by sections of the country’s modernizing elite. Later, General Zia ul Haq (1977-88), who initially worked with but then against the Jamaat, favoured a ‘legalist’ interpretation of Islam with a strong punitive bias that aimed to stem both its popular as well as its modernist expressions. In time it strengthened the hold of an ulama-inspired, ‘shariatized Islam’ which, by the 1990s, openly challenged the legitimacy of the nation-state and further aggravated Pakistan’s consensus problem.”
― Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan

“With no clear appreciation of the role of Islam in public life, policies were pursued and judged not in terms of their success or failure to deliver broad social and economic benefits, but in terms of whether they weakened or strengthened the putative Islamic purpose of the state.”
― Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan

“That Pakistan should face a particularly acute challenge in forging a coherent national identity will scarcely surprise those who have long pointed to its artificiality as a nation-state. Indeed, at independence, the country was largely bereft of the prerequisites of viable nationhood. The exceptional physical configuration of the new state, in which its eastern and western territories were separated (until 1971 and the secession of Bangladesh) by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory, was an immediate handicap. So was its lack of a common language. Its choice of Urdu—spoken by a small minority—to serve as a national language was fiercely resisted by local regional groups with strong linguistic traditions. They expressed powerful regional identities that separated the numerically preponderant Bengalis of the country’s eastern province from their counterparts in the west, where Punjabis dominated over Sindhis, Pashtuns and Balochis. Pakistan’s national integration was further handicapped by the lack of a common legacy grounded in a strong nationalist narrative informed by a mass anti-colonial struggle. Yet, these severe limitations were judged to be of secondary importance when set against the fact of a shared religion—Islam—held up by Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), as the real test of the Muslim ‘nation’ that would inherit Pakistan.”
― Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan

“While Barelvis emphasise the importance of spiritual mediators and stress personal devotion to the Prophet Muhammad, the Deobandis call attention to individual responsibility and correct religious practice in line with the sharia.”
― Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan