"... So theology complicates history for the people of Pakistan. And for people who feel that their country hasn't worked, that in the Muslim homeland they are still strangers, or dispossessed, or threatened with dispossession, for such people the wish to claim kinship with a triumphant Islam makes for further disturbance.
"In orthodox theology only the first four caliphs were rightly guided. After that the caliphate becomes a dynasty; the Islamic ideals of brotherhood are betrayed. Sind, therefore, was conquered by the Arabs in the bad time; but the Arabs brought the faith, so the bad time becomes a sacred time. The Mongols destroyed the Arab empire in the east. So the Mongols were bad. But the Mongols became Muslims and established the great Mogul empire in India; so that becomes a wonderful time. The Turks displace the Mongols; but the Turks also become Muslims and powerful, and they too cease to be bad. So history - that begins as a 'pleasant story of conquest ' - becomes hopelessly confusing. And out of this more-than-colonial confusion some Pakistanis fabricate personalities for themselves, in which they are Islamic and conquerors and - in Pakistan - a little like people in exile from their glory. They become Turks or Moguls. Or Arabs.
"The Chachnama shows the Arabs of the seventh century as a people stimulated and enlightened and disciplined by Islam, developing fast, picking up learning and new ways and new weapons (catapults, Greek fire) from the people they conquer, intelligently curious about the people they intend to conquer. The current fundamentalist wish in Pakistan to go back to that pure Islamic time has nothing to do with historical understanding of the Arab expansion. The fundamentalists feel that to be like those early Arabs they need only one tool: the Koran. Islam, that made the seventh-century Arabs world-conquerors, now clouds the minds of their successors or pretended successors.
"It was the poet Iqbal's hope that an Indian Muslim state might rid Islam of 'the stamp that Arab imperialism was forced to give it'. It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time; since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved.
"History, in the Pakistan school books I looked at, begins with Arabia and Islam. In the simpler texts, surveys of the Prophet and the first four caliphs and perhaps the Prophet's daughter are followed, with hardly a break, by lives of the poet Iqbal, Mr Jinnah, the political founder of Pakistan, and two or three 'martyrs', soldiers or airmen who died in the holy wars against India in 1965 and 1971.
"History as selective as this leads quickly to unreality. Before Mohammed there is blackness: slavery, exploitation. After Mohammed there is light: slavery and exploitation vanish. But did it? How can that be said or taught? What about all those slaves sent back from the Sind to the caliph? What about the descendants of the African slaves who walk around Karachi? There is no adequate answer: so the faith begins to nullify or overlay the real world.
"The military rule; political parties are banned. There is fifteen percent literacy, and fundamentalism stifles the universities. There is no industry, no science. The economy is a remittance economy; the emigrants, legal and illegal, pour out. But in the Social Studies text book in the sixth class in English-language schools the child reads:
"'Uncle,' said Salman, 'I have read in my history book that in old times the caste system had a very firm hold in India. Everyone had to adopt the occupation of his family. He could take no other work.' 'Oh!' said the uncle. 'Conditions in India are much the same as to this day. But we are a democratic country. Here everyone is free to adopt the occupation of his choice. This is the secret of our progress.'..."
-- V.S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel prize in literature, "Among the Believers: an Islamic Journey"
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