Supremacy

Muhammad Mohsin Iqbal in The Friday Times, April 25, 2025 https://thefridaytimes.com/25-Apr-2025/india-s-actions-and-pakistan-s-response-peace-with-strength

The Pakistani nation, along with its brave armed forces, is made up of resilient, courageous, and self-sacrificing people. In times of national crisis, the entire nation becomes united like a clenched fist. The passion with which Pakistan responds to aggression transforms every child into a soldier. Our people do not fear death—in fact, the Muslim spirit considers martyrdom an honor and a divine reward. This belief grants the nation a spiritual and moral strength that no adversary can match. It is this superior will and unshakeable determination that makes us distinct from India, and this distinction will remain until the end of time.

Army Chief Asim Munir's Full Speech From Convention for Overseas Pakistanis | Dawn News

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN0DWmIjGBU

Taking on the Founders

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2016/01/28/comment/debunking-the-founders-of-two-nation-theory/

Umer Ali:

Ever since its inception, many efforts have been made to justify the creation of Pakistan. Based on Two-Nation Theory, one that defines both Muslims and Hindus as different nations, the said purpose of its creation was to safeguard the rights of Muslims.

The theory itself is full of glaring paradoxes and has been questioned innumerable times in the past. To counter these questions, many state-sponsored historians, most of them belonging to far-right, have tried hard to prove the authenticity of the theory by relating it to Muslims rulers from the past.

From Muhammad Bin Qasim to Mahmud Ghaznavi, we have named the foreign invaders as the founders of this theory.

One such ‘historian’, Dr Safdar Mahmud, wrote last year that Ghauri was in fact the founder of Pakistan.

Debunking this vile claim, Dr Mubarak Ali wrote, “It is customary to be proud of our invaders such as Muhammad Bin Qasim, Mahmoud of Ghazna and Muhammad Ghori and to denounce other invaders who looted our country from time to time. In fact, all these invaders were mass murderers and should be treated as criminals in history.”

Many such historians trace the spiritual link of Two-Nation Theory to the likes of Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Shah Wali Ullah. In our textbooks, the foundation of the idea of two different nations has been credited to Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.

When reading through the original text from these personalities, one comes to conclusion that their ideologies were as contradictory and paradoxical as the theory itself.

Boy cuts off his own arm for blasphemy

Agence France Presse reports:

A 15-year-old Pakistani boy cut off his own hand believing he had committed blasphemy, only to be celebrated by his parents and neighbours for the act, police told AFP Friday.

Local police chief Nausher Ahmed described how an imam told a gathering at a village mosque that those who love the Prophet Mohammad always say their prayers, then asked who among the crowd had stopped praying.

Mohammad Anwar, 15, raised his hand by mistake after apparently mishearing the question.
The crowd swiftly accused him of blasphemy so he went to his house and cut off the hand he had raised, put it on a plate, and presented it to the cleric, the police chief said.

The incident took place at a village in Hujra Shah Muqeem district, some 125 kilometres (77 miles) south of Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, about four days ago, according to the policeman.
Ahmed said that he has seen a video in which the boy is greeted by villagers in the street as his parents proclaim their pride.

No complaint has been made, he said, so no police report has been filed and there will be no investigation.

Pakistan's CNIC: cannot exit Islam

Pakistan has a national identity card (CNIC - Computerized National Identity Card).

A checklist for applicants for the card, or for those who have a card but need to make changes, is available here from a Govt. of Pakistan website.  (PDF)
https://www.nadra.gov.pk/docs/cnic_checklist.pdf

For a modification in CNIC, due to change in religion, there is a note:

Note: Change of religion from ISLAM to any other religion will not be entertained.

PAKISTAN: A Sea of Forced Conversions Floods the country

The Asian Human Rights Commission reports that in Pakistan, "the attack on minorities and forced conversions are on a dramatic upswing resulting in mass exodus of minorities, particularly the Hindu community."

Ishtiaq Ahmed: What's inside Muslim minds

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012/03/04/story_4-3-2012_pg3_3

Distinguished Pakistani sociologist Professor Emeritus Riaz Hassan has undertaken one of the most extensive studies of the religious consciousness of Muslims: Inside the Muslim Minds (Melbourne University Press, 2008). It has recently been published under the title Muslim Zehn from Lahore (Mashaal Books, February 2012).It covers seven countries — Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Iran and Turkey — and is based on the evidence of 6,390 Muslim respondents. The research was conducted in cooperation with research institutes in the respective countries. The themes include issues of personal piety, conscience, philanthropy and social justice, veiling, blasphemy, hudood laws, jihad, political order and religious institutions, globalisation and the Islamic ummah, Islam and civil society, mutual suspicions between Muslims and the West. The author has adhered to the highest standards of honest and qualified research. The result is a mine of information and profound insights. He makes it clear at the outset that multiple meanings and interpretations of Islam are possible. The two main interpretative approaches he identifies are those of the apologists who strive to reconcile Islam with modernity and the Islamists who fiercely oppose it. It is the latter’s influence that has been growing currently and the book highlights the problematic aspects of this.

Pakistaniyat

SSridhar on BRF:

One of Pakistan’s best known historians, Prof. K.K.Aziz, in his book, “Murder of History” has the following to say of a Pakistani propensity:

Almost every Muslim of any importance claimed, and still claims today, in his autobiography reminiscences, memoirs, journal and bio data, that his ancestors had come from Yemen, Hejaz,* Central Asia, Iran, Ghazni, or some other foreign territory. In most cases, this is a false claim for its arithmetic reduces the hordes of local converts (to Islam) to an insignificant number. Actually, it is an aftermath and confirmation of Afghan and Mughal exclusiveness. It is also a declaration of disaffiliation from the soil on which the shammers have lived for centuries, and to which in all probability, they have belonged since history began. If all the Siddiquis, Qureshis, Faruqis, ... have foreign origins and their forefathers accompanied the invading armies, or followed them, what happens to the solemn averment that Islam spread peacefully in India? Are we expected to believe that local converts, whose number must have been formidable, were all nincompoops and the wretched of the earth—incapable over long centuries of producing any leaders, thinkers, or scholars?

Reading about the genome sequencing and the unique genetic markers that are said to have been found to identify inner-most Pakistaniyat, I was somehow reminded of the above.  

What he is referring to is this news that Pakistan has sequenced its first genome:

“Our nation is a mix of a lot of races,” said Prof. Dr M Iqbal Choudhary, who heads the project. “Pakistanis are like a “melting pot” ie a mix of Mughals, Turks, Pashtuns, Afghans, Arabs, etcetera.”
{No Indian component?} 

“According to the researchers, the newly sequenced Pakistani genome has uncovered a multitude of Pakistan-specific sites which can now be used in the design of large-scale studies that are better suited for the Pakistani population,” said Dr Choudhary, who is the director of the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences at Karachi University."

Religion in the public discourse in Pakistan

Tazeen, at A Reluctant Mind, has a great essay.
She writes about how religion has played the determinative role in the media narratives of four killers who captured the headlines recently - Mumtaz Qadri (killer of Salman Taseer), Raymond Davis (CIA operative who shot dead two men), Osama bin Laden and Illyas Kashmiri.

Gul Bukhari on understanding radicalism

In the Daily Times of Pakistan, Gul Bukhari writes that

People will always be free to believe in what they will but they cannot be allowed to execute their ‘beliefs’ with impunity, with no concept of a state, law by consensus and without punishment because they are accorded, for some unfathomable reason, the pedestal of all moral high ground owing to emotions emanating from a set of beliefs.

Reply to Political theology and literature

A.A. Khalid expands on his essay on Religious Liberalism,

The argument is that in Pakistan (and in the Muslim world) realistically, liberalism can exist only as religious liberalism.

For Pakistani liberals to have a truly transformational effect, they need to speak in the religious idiom and bring to the table a rigorous and charismatic theology of liberality. It is critical to talk about the arts, Urdu literature and the humanities but not as a hope that it will act as a creative buffer against radicalisation. The real buffer against terrorism with a religious impulse is a culture of religious tolerance and pluralism borne out of a unique theology of liberality in combination with these aforementioned disciplines.

Examples of liberal theology, the use of the religious tradition to cultivate democratic sensibilities and cherishment of tolerance and diversity do exist among Muslim intellectuals. Unfortunately, their presence is being felt mainly in traditionally non-Muslim societies in the US and Europe. There is an issue of outspoken religious liberals being exiled or forced out from their own countries due to their writings such as Nasr Abu Zayd in Egypt, Abdul Karim Soroush in Iran or the late Professor Fazlur Rahman in Pakistan. These are the theologians and religious intellectuals who call for greater democracy, tolerance and pluralism, but do so from within the religious tradition which is why their voices are more potent than say the secular left who try and locate these same concepts but in a foreign idiom. That is not to say that one should reject an idea on the basis of its origin. However, this is the reality of social and political discourse in Muslim societies.

Reply to Force, Fear keep Iran Together

PTH draws conclusions for Pakistan from Iran's experience of religious rule.

Reply to Religious Liberalism - Our Greatest Hope?

A.A. Khalid argues that

1. There is a long-existing Liberal Islam.
2. There is no discourse of Liberal Islam in Pakistan.
3. Pakistani liberals could have connected with this tradition of Liberal Islam. They haven't.
4. The idea of removing religion from Pakistani politics is purely theoretical and unpractical. However, in the pursuit of this idea, Pakistani liberals have ceded the interpretation of Islam to the fundamentalists.

Hence liberals and secularists should stop asking the question if there is too much or too little religion. The question which should be asked is what type of religiosity do we need in order for Pakistan to flourish? What type of religiosity supports democratic governance, human rights, pluralism and tolerance? How can such a religiosity be constructed? The liberals and progressives need to bring to the table a genuine political theology of liberality which can find its legitimacy not only in civic reason but in religious reason in terms of establishing a link with the Quranic text.