Muneera Mansoor

Course: Islamic and Pakistan Studies.

Course Instructor: Anushka Rustomji

Q.2) How significant a role does the understanding of one’s national history play in
determining one’s identity as individuals and our collective identity as a nation.

I remember how on every 14th of August we dressed up in shades of green and white to represent
the national flag, and then raising it on our rooftops to commemorate a day that wasn’t an easy
win on parts of our ancestors.

According to Benedict Anderson in his book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism, “nation is an imagined political community, and imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation
will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds
of each lives the image of their communion”.

Under the umbrella of a nation, we fight for our country, we cheer for it, we draw our values from
it, and it’s a big way many of us describe who we are. While our national identities up until the
recent past came from around us — clans, religion, family, the idea that one identifies with millions
of strangers just based on borders is a strange concept. Yet, national identity is the myth that built
the modern world, but it also primes us for dictatorship, racism, genocide. National identity
changes our reality; we experience whatever happens to our nation as if it happened to us.
Therefore, the belief that being a national is really about race, religion, and language runs
throughout history.

Considering Pakistan, there’s more to nationalism other than a public holiday carrying the weight
of our national identity. Nationalism is the identification with one's own nation and support for its
interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations. Nationalism is
both a cultural and political project, and it makes two big arguments: first, that nations exist and
second, that nations have a right to govern themselves.

To dissect the role of national history on our collective identity as a nation we’ll have to go back
to the events that followed the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

Jahangir in his paper relates, and I summarize, that the Muslims ruled India for centuries before
the British Colonialists dislodged it completely in the mid nineteenth century. Before the British
took over in 1857, the Muslims had ruled India through dictatorial regimes. One of the reasons of
the downfall of the Mughal Empire was the different factions of the Muslims as well as the Hindus
that wanted the share of the power from the Mughals. There were not a lot of efforts to integration
of the Hindu population with the Muslim rulers. And even lesser efforts to integrate the different
factions of Muslims and Muslim ethnic groups with each other.

Following the state of Muslims in the subcontinent Muslim League was created in 1906 as a
political party loyal to British to safeguard the rights and interests of Muslims in the region. The
founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a staunch supporter of Hindu-Muslim unity for a
long period. After the turn of a lot of events, in his speech in the All India Muslim League
conference in 1940, he openly described Muslims as a totally different group from the Hindus
whose religious philosophies, social customs, literature, civilization and culture were completely
different from the Hindus in the region. This, according to Jinnah was the reason Muslims needed
a separate political entity within a loose Indian confederacy.

However, Allama Iqbal, a Muslim poet and philosopher, envisioned the idea of Pakistan as early
as 1930. This idea of Muslim nationalism which was mainly advocated by Allama Iqbal first and
later was adopted by Jinnah and Muslim League. It was in early 1940s when Muslim League
started using the argument to ‘fight against anti Muslim forces’ and along with the influential
spiritual leaders, they managed to build a strong narrative for the Muslims for the Muslim League.
Pakistan got its independence from the British Empire in 1947 resulting in two parts i.e. East
Pakistan and West Pakistan. The subcontinent as a British Colony (presently India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh) had to be divided after the British left in a hurry in 1947 after being devastated in the
Second World War and a number of problems they were facing in India (Jahangir, 2019).

According to the state narrative, Pakistani nationalism is based on the Muslim nationalism in the
subcontinent and as a result of the ‘two nation theory’.

When British rule ended, Muslim nationalism emerged as justification for an independent
homeland with advocates of the Pakistani state, using Islam as the basis of a shared political
identity. With this possible exception of Islam, a genuine sense of a singular Pakistani national
identity has never existed. The role of Islam as a motivator of national identity came forward
during the WWII era with the beginnings of regional decolonization, and in turn political vacuums
in which Hindus and Muslims competed. As a result, Islam served as a political justification for
the two nation theory (Qaiser, 2015).
After Pakistan’s independence from the British, Pakistan had two options for the country’s future.
The first one was to work on the nation building, create democratic institutions, acknowledge and
to accommodate the ethnically, socially and culturally diverse groups. The second option was to
continue the use of the two nation theory as the basis of a homogenous Pakistani national identity.
The state of Pakistan chose to follow the latter. This brought about a confused national identity
stemming from ethnic conflicts deriving from language to race. Even after the separation of the
country’s Eastern Wing, the state did not change its stance regarding the two nation theory as a
basis of Pakistani nationalism which barely holds the national identity of Pakistan. Today Pakistan
still uses the Urdu language and the Muslim faith in order to create a homogenous Pakistani
identity.

However, rising ethnic nationalism has hindered government efforts to consolidate a singular
religious based national identity that could transcend local loyalties. Pakistan’s social demography
is divided along linguistic and ethnic orientations, and Islam has not proven sufficient to unite a
group of people divided by diverse languages, castes, cultures, tribes, and historical experiences.
The separation of East Pakistan, creating the state of Bangladesh serves as a crucial example of
the collapse of the two nation theory when a large part of the population prioritized ethnic identity
over religious identity (Qaiser, 2015).

Now the question arises how important is the aforementioned national history of Pakistan in
determining our identity as individuals and our collective identity as a nation.

The answer to that is relative to situations we find ourselves in. With hindsight it is important to
accept that most of the times our ethnic identities overpower our religious identities. We seldom
find ourselves reflecting upon the part of history which highlights the sacrifices our ancestors had
to make in order to free us from the sub-continent. However, we’re one, Pakistanis, inside a cricket
stadium, but become divided with our ethnic backgrounds as soon as a marriage proposal for our
daughters hit the doorstep.

The slang language of Pakistan is also rich in defining different cultures with words and idioms
which pervade in all aspects of our lives, from buying groceries from a certain vendor, to
befriending people from a certain ethnic background or getting privileges in a work environment.
Since British rulers encouraged different ethnic identities and their differences through policies
fearing the Muslim revivalism in the subcontinent, we still face ethnic crisis.

These policies resulted in the inter-culture alienation and inter-ethnic animosities and eliminated
the chances of integration and unity among the Muslims for a long time. This was done by gifting
and providing for the ethnic groups that were loyal to the British and others were deprived of
development and modernization. There were numerous expeditions that were sent to the tribal
regions near Afghanistan to quell the rebellion amongst the local Pathan tribes. There was a special
law which controlled them, and punished them to control their rebellion.

Same was experienced by the Maari and Bugti tribes of Balochistan, and in Sindh with the Hur
tribes. All these ethnicities and regions remained neglected and in a way punished by the British
ruler. Hence different areas were treated differently and there existed a huge disparity in
infrastructure and modernization even within a province. Since the Muslim Punjab supported the
Brtish rule, they were handled differently (Goldman, 1974).

This pre-partition state resulted in ethnic disparities in the post-partition Pakistan. Sindhis,
Balochis, Punjabis, Pashtoons, all consider their ethnic identities prior to their national identity in
certain aspects of their livelihoods.

However, all differences aside, as Pakistanis, we still take pride in our national collective identity.
We all have the need for affirmation of national or communal identities as an anchor to our
individual identities, which is the crux of nationalism (Pfaff, 2005). Urdu is still a widespread
language that takes communal priority in all different ethnicities of Pakistan. Most of our
population is still cohesive under the banner of Islam. The people still believe that there was a need
for a separate nation. This affirms the two main reasons of this country becoming established.

Hence, national history contributes fairly to form our national and individual identities. Our
ethnicities go back to the partition so does our religion and our need to become one under a separate
nation from India.

(Word Count: 1553)

References:

1. How Nations Make Up National Identities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9qF6FvwrHI
2. Jahangir, Ahsan. “Pakistan’s national identity conundrum: Making sense of the composition,
evolution and conflict of Pakistan’s national identity.” University of Bergen, Department of
Administration and Organization Theory.
3. Qaiser, Raja. “Nationalism and Political Identity in Pakistan: The Rise and Role of
Indigenous Identities.” The SAIS Review of International Affairs 35, no. 2 (2015): 105–16.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27001001.
4. What is Nationalism and How Did It Spread? World History Project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KrgiJ6051g
5. Goldman, M. “Political Change in a Multi-national Setting (Dynamics of the Third World).”
Cambridge Mass, 171.
6. Pfaff, W. “What's left of the union.” New York: The New York Review of Books.