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Pakistan stands at the crossroads of the world where the cultures of the Middle East and Asia meet and become one
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Thirty Million Years ago (even more than that) the giant natural forces that shaped the continents and the oceans as we know them today raised up a great buckled arc of mountains between central Asia and the Indian land mass. These mountains--the Himalayas, the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush range and the Sulaimans--now form the northern and western borders of Pakistan. Eight of the world's ten highest peaks are to be found here, including K2--28,250 feet (8,610 meters).
Between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago, it is believed that first 'society' (remarkable civilization) emerge in Moenjodaro (Sindh) and Harappa (Punjab). Evidences are the ruins discovered at these places. The Indus Valley Civilization collapsed around 1500 BC and its people vanished without trace into the mists of history.
327 BC, Alexander the Great led his army here after conquering all of Greece, Egypt and Macedonian empire further. His foot-soldiers and cavalry swarmed through the Khyber Pass and along the banks of the Kabul River from Afghanistan, and made their way to Indus. The hold of the Greeks in Pakistan was short-lived, and it is dificult today to find even the faintest trace of their influence. Alexander left behind several thousand settlers but after news of his death in 323 BC filtered back to them, they too drifted away.
AD 711, Mohamed Bin Qasim, a brilliant 19-year-old Arab general from Basra (in modern Iraq), marched into Pakistan by way of Persia and the Baluchistan coast at the head of an army of 6,000 men. He stromed and captured the port of Debul (near modern Bhanbore). From there Muhamed Bin Qasim marched north to Nerun (Hyderabad) where is engaged Raja Dahir, the local Hindu ruler, in battle. He defeated him with contemptuous ease and Dahir was killed in the affray. From Nerun the Arab army continued its relentless northward march until it arrived at Multan. There, with effective control over the whole of Sindh and a fair part of the Punjab as well, Muhamed Bin Qasim called a halt and set about consolidating his rule and strengthening his hold over the people. Fate did not allow him to see this task completed. Two years after his arrival in Multan he somehow displeased the allpowerful Caliph of Baghdad and was recalled and executed. No one knows for certain exactly how Muhamed Bin Qasim incurred the Caliph's anger, and there are several different accounts of the manner of his death. Probably he achieved toom much too quickly and too visibly. However, his real importance lies in his role as the bringer of Islam to Pakistan.
800 years after the death of Muhamed Bin Qasim, the turbulent history of the subcontinent, and of the many competing dynasties that struggled for ascendancy there, gave way to a period of political calm and cultural achievement that was to last for more than three centuries.
1525, a Turkish chief named Babur followed the same road of conquest into India that so many warlords had taken before him. In 1526, at Panipat, 80 kilometers from Dehli, he defeated the ruler, Ibrahim Lodhi, in battle. In the following year another major battle was fought and won, and the year after that another. By 1530, when he died, Babur controlled an empire that stretched from Kabul in Afghanistan through the Punjab to the borders of Bengal. Babur founded the Mughals dynasty. His personality, and the personalities of the five other Great Mughals who followed him, are stamped upon the face of modern Pakistan with indelible firmness.
Humayun, son of Babur, inherited much of his father's sensitivity but he did not have the same qualities of decisive statsmanship or the quick military skills. His reign was marred by internecine strife and he suffered a lengthy period of exile. He did eventually overcome his enemies and, in 1555, he won his way back to Dehli. It is a comment on a man who was always a better scholar than soldier that, when he died just six months later, it was not on the battlefield but from a fall in his observatory.
Akbar, son of Humayun, was just fourteen years old when he took the throne in 1556. His survival in the early years owed much to the loyalty of Bairam Khan, the tutor and regent that his father had appointed to care for him. Akbar assumed direct rule in 1560, at the age of eighteen, and, during the near forty-five years, extended the frontiers of the Mughal Empire to the Bay of Bengal in the east and the Persian border with Afghanistan in the north-west. He also held dominion over much of southern India, over Kashmir, and over Baluchistan and Sindh. Akbar started his imperial career as a devout Muslim, but died something of a heretic. He allowed a cult (religious system) to develop around his personality, and his apparent wish that this cult should become the basis of a 'universal religion', embracing the best features of all the other faiths of the empire, caused him to fall seriously out of line with his Islamic advisers. Akbar called his personal creed Din Illahi--'the divine faith'.
On his death in 1605, after a long reign, Akbar was succeeded by his son Jehangir, one of the most attractive characters amounst the Great Mughals. The victim of a tragic love affair in his youth, Jehangir took a number of wives in later life and was described as 'a kind father, a loving husband and a benefactor to his kinsmen.' Although he had a weakness for strong drink, Jehangir built a reputation during his 23 years on the throne as a great and just king, and was particularly admired for his sense of fair play and for his unbiased judgements in disputes.
Jehangir died in 1628 leaving two potential heirs--his son Shah Jehan, and his stepson Shahryar. Shah Jehan took the throne and mercilessly killed Shahryar and all other possible claimants. Despite this bloody start he was to prove a good ruler. Like other Mughals Shah Jehan was a significant parton of the arts and of architecture. In India he built the Red Fort in Dehli and, in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, the Taj Mahal at Agra, one of the beautiful buildings in the world.
History, however, has a way of repeating itself. Shah Jehan came to power with a sword in his hand and murdered close relatives whom he regarded as his rivals. Late in his life his four sons fought over the succession and, in 1658, Shah Jehan was deposed by the victor Aurangzeb. Two of Aurangzeb's brother, Dara Dara Shikoh and Murad, were put to death while a third, Shuja, disappeared without trace. Shah Jehan was locked away in the fort at Agra with nothing but a view of his beautiful taj Mahal to comfort him and remind him of his past glories. Aurangzeb ruled the empire with an iron hand. He was an orthodox Muslim in his beliefs. He continued and strengthened the return to Islamic law that had been instituted by his father and appointed a commision of scholars to compile a code of Islamic Jurisprudence relevant to the conditions of life at that time.
Aurangzeb died in 1707. The forces that he had suppressed within the empire did not take long to reassert themselves. His son and successor, Bahadur Shah, was already old when he took the throne, and was confronted with one rebellion after another. He died in 1712, a dissatisfied man who had witnessed the begining of the end of the empire founded by Babur. Though the Mughals continued to hold nominal power in at least some parts of India untile the 1850s they never regained the dignity and authority of their early days and often disgraced themselves by their bad behaviour, spiritual weakness and love of intrigue.
The decline of the Mughals allowed new influence to come into play in the subcontinent. The Persian Nadir Shah was able to sack Dehli in 1739 and, in 1756, Ahmed Shah Abdali, the Afghan King of Kabul, did the same.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century the Sikhs emerged as a power to be reckoned with in the Punjab. And at about same time, the British began to extend their influence, first insidious but soon with overwhelming military force, so that by the min-nineteenth century, they were the new emperors of all india.
Attempts to consolidate British rule met with considerable resistance, the high point of which was the 1857 'Mutiny'. After the uprising was crushed, however, the Muslims--who had always been in a minority in the subcontinent, even at the height of their powers--became the victims of several political repression and adverse discrimination. Official policy divested them of much that they owned and favoured Hindus and members of other religions for all Civil Service positions. In the newly recognized army, too, Muslims were overlooked and pride of place was given to the Sikhs--who had not participated in the Mutiny. As a result of Muslim misery and humiliation in India at this time, the political movement that was to preside over the creation of Pakistan almost a century later was born.
The key figure in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a scholar and a man of vision who, because he had not associated himself with the Munity, was able to wield influence with the British to an extend that other potential leaders were not. In 1875 his efforts led to the setting up of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh which, in due course, developed into the Aligarh Muslim University. Sir Syed hoped that Aligarh would provide a focus for cultural and scientific advance amongst Muslims and that from it an educated cadre of leaders would emerged. He was a realist, and this realism led him to think of Muslims and Hindus, without acrimony or any sense of prejudice, not just two peoples of different faiths but actually as two distinct and separate nations. After making a ground for Muslims, fairly, one can say that first hint for a separate ' Muslim Nation' in the subcontinent was given by Sir Syed.
The logical outcome of thinking of this sort came in 1905 when the All-India Muslim League was established as a political organization intended to advocate and advance Muslim views. Though its initial objectives were extremely mild, the league became increasingly disenchanted with both the British Government and the Indian National Congress, the part that represented the interests of the Hindus. Great efforts were made to set up a common front against British rule. Congress, however, refused to countenance the notion of special safeguards for the Muslims of India after Independence, and, by 1928, the two parties were moving on obviously divergent tracks.
The first thirty years of the twentieth century were momentous periods for Muslims of the subcontinent, as they emerged from relative obscurity to an awareness of their own potential as a community. In this sudden awakening a number of figures stand out as being of pre-eminent importance. Foremost amoung them was Dr Muhammad Iqbal, the Islamic poet who played a vital role in the birth of Pakistan, was the first to advocate the formation of an independence Muslim state for the subcontinent. His dream was fulfilled later by a brilliant Karachi-born barrister, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, now recognized as the founder of the Pakistan nation. During the 1920s Muhammad Ali Jinnah had striven with all his considerable powers to resolve the differences between the Congress and the Muslim League. In 1930s, however, a number of bitter experiences gradually brought him round to Dr Iqbal's more radical view, about his concept of a separate Muslim homeland in the subcontinent. Dr Muhammad Iqbal died on 21 April 1938--about 9 years prior to the independence of Pakistan.
In 1940 Jinnah was instumental in getting the League formally to adopt Iqbal's vision. Th eMuslims were an anxious as the rest of the population of India to secure independence from Britain, but their greatest concern was to ensure that this independence would be meaningful to them. They were no longer willing even to consider autonomy within a united India under the majority rule of the Hindu-dominated Congress party. Accordingly, while the Congress called on the British to 'Quit India', Jinnah and Muslim League insisted that Britain should 'Divide and then Quit'.
When the Second World War (1942) ended, both the Congress Party and the Muslim League intensified their political pressure on the British Government. The League made it clear that it wanted India's six Muslim Provinces--the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan, Sindh, Bengal and Assam--to be grouped together into an effectively self-governing Pakistan prior to Independence. The British, however, attempted to impose an interim government on India that did not fully recognize the Muslim demands, and the League therefore refused to participate.
A 'Direct Action Day' was declared on 16 August 1946, intended to explain to the public why the interim proposals were not acceptable. Although most of the demonstrations held on that day passed off peacefully enough, there was a major disaster in Calcutta when, at the instigation of the Congress Party, Hindus attempted to stop a Muslim march. More than 5,000 people lost their lives in a single afternoon and atleast 10,000 were injured. Therfore, rioting broke out over the whole of northern India, with particularly serious violence against Muslims in Bihar and Punjab.
Britain was compelled to act and to act quickly. The new Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, initially intended Independence to be granted to the subcontinent in June 1948; however, more rioting, almost on the level of a civil war, foeced him to revise the timescale. On 3 June 1947 Mountbatten announced that India would be partitioned into two independence states, Indai and Pakistan. The formal handover of power in Pakistan took place on 14 August 1947, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the Governor-General of the new State.
During the early and difficult months of Pakistan's emergence, Mohamma Ali Jinnah, although in ill-health and over 70 years of age, undertook a countrywide tour aimed at building confidence and rising people's spirits. He died on 11 September 1948, just 13 months after the Muslims of India had come into their homeland. Jinnah's role in this Pakistan that had indeed come to stay is immeasureable. His people bestowed upon him the title Quaid-i-Azam, 'Great Leader', because, without him, Pakistan would not have existed at all.
PAKISTAN--the name means 'Country of the Pure'--was born in bloodshed and turmoil and, in the early years, it only survived because of the tremendous sacrifices made by its people. In spite of the burden of several million refugees, and the untold suffering and disruption of the months immidiately after Partition, when more than one million people lost thier lives, the nation proved its resilience. The memory of this tragic period is still very evident amongst Pakistanis today, and is a factor in the country's strong sense of nationhood.
