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.

Najam Sethi on a Liberal Pakistan

Sounds too good to be true!

Now, thankfully, positive change is in the air. Nawaz Sharif was handpicked and nurtured by the military three decades ago to do its bidding. He duly became the nemesis of the PPP, in the bargain getting into bed with the religious parties, passing Islamic laws and promoting jihad against India. Now he is all for peace with India, wants to stop all jihad across borders, is waking up to action against sectarian parties and religious terrorists and is embarrassed and hampered by the Islamic laws passed on his watch. The military, no less, sees the primary and immediate national security threat as emanating from internal religious extremism and not externally from archenemy India. Unfortunately, however, Imran Khan’s PTI is still muddying the waters by continuing to resist the development of a new national narrative of state and society based on modern notions of liberal and secular democracy.

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.

SDRE

In a book, "Pakistan - A Nation" by "El Hamza", published in February 1941, (Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, Kashmiri Bazar, Lahore), we find an SDRE (short-dark-rice-eater) reference.

Taliban-Army soldier debate

At the Internet Archive, archive.org, someone deposited an audio recording that purports to a debate between an army soldier and a Taliban.   This is an attempted transcript of that recording.  Unfortunately only the recording is available, with no context, when, where, who, etc.  Also, the recording evidently starts in the middle of the debate.

The liberals' Jinnah problem

Salman Arshad, in this comment on pakteahouse.net, makes it crystal clear

@ YLH:
If you really admire Jinnah for being the typical manipulative nasty politician who only admitted that “two religions equals two nations” only before 00:00 AM 15 Aug 1947, then there really is nothing to talk about.

You can go your way, let honesty go up anyone’s a***.
You need not even write this article.
.
But if you really admire Jinnah for being a man of principle, then the two nation theory is a matter of principle. Two religions means two nations which means they cannot live together in a democratic setup under the same constitution. In this case all nations MUST exist on the basis of religion (or any other cultural/social difference), and regions with majorities MUST be annexed (eg. kashmir) even through WAR because its a f****ing matter of principle.
.
Both cases are f*****up. No need to go into details. Just put a mirror before Pakistan. It will be clear.
.
The third case is the obvious one. Rise above these matters. Lets form our identity on the basis of a MISTAKE.

Let us be one of the few great nations in the world that admitted its own historical mistake. That might actually make us the greatest nation in the world. Lets admit that things have gone way forward and that there is no turning back. We are not merging with India if we admit our mistake.

As soon as we admit our mistake, we will be faced with the task of cleaning up the mess that our theory has created. That itself is a matter of a couple of decades.

Taseer: The Mango King

In Prospect Magazine, a look at a Pakistani feudal.

Taseer on why Pakistanis hate India

In the Wall Street Journal

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."

Our theory trumps your practice

In a comment on Cafe Pyala, Ali wrote:

.....here's something to ponder. Pre-47 assumptions about Hindu dominance were not the reason behind the philosophical conception of Pakistan. Pakistan was an evolution of the United India movement, which was simply a more universal form of the Islamic awakening described by Iqbal.

Why we're nowhere close to that vision of a near utopian paradise is our own fault. That India is nowhere close to that utopian vision, is why we parted ways in the first place.

We'll get it back though...after a bit of a struggle of course.

The highlighted sentences are exactly the attitude that is driving Pakistan down the drain.

A hard hitting piece by Hoodbhoy

Himal magazine published an article by Pervez Hoodbhoy, and it has been reproduced on pakteahouse.

Hoodbhoy makes the following point

Decades after the horrific bloodbath of Partition, the idea of Pakistan remains hotly debated. It did not help that Jinnah died in 1948, just a year after Pakistan was born, with his plans still ambiguously stated. He authored no books and wrote no policy paper. He did make many speeches, of which several were driven by political expediency and are frankly contradictory. These are freely cherry-picked today, with some finding in them a liberal and secular voice; others, an embodiment of Islamic values. The confusion is irresolvable. 

Pakistan is a bullock cart, not a Porsche

Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur in the Daily Times says that Pakistan's problems arise from the actions that led to its creation  (and the conclusion one would draw is that this cannot be rectified by historical revisionism - changing the narrative of Pakistan's founding).

Dwelling in the past

From a letter in the Daily Times:

Sir: As a 75-year-old Indian Muslim living in the US, I was delighted to read Shahid Ilyas’s article, ‘Stop blaming the West’ (Daily Times, June 2, 2010). What he said is very rarely heard from Pakistanis. I am glad some young people are beginning to think that Pakistan can move forward only by turning its back on the grand narrative of its creational narrative and ideology. Yes, its people must now say, “We exist, we are here, this is 2010 so let us give ourselves something new and bold and freeing.”

Pak Tea House is not among these young people.

Moderate?

Shiv had this argument

Pakistani and Western media have made it a point to say that only 12.5646789% of the electorate (or some similar cooked up figure) voted for Islamic parties. This is repeated in report after report after report almost as though people are reassuring themselves that Islamic parties have little support in Pakistan. And this statistic that has been converted into fact by repetition is subtly used to convey the impression that Pakistanis are not “fundamentalists”.