249 Quotes About Pakistan

The Muslim League won 75 percent of the Muslim vote and all the Muslim seats in the constituent assembly. Only 15 percent of the population had the right to vote on the basis of literacy, property, income, and combatant status. It can be said with some certainty that literate, salaried, and propertied Muslims as well as those who had served in the British army supported the Muslim League. The views of the Muslim peasantry and illiterate masses were less clear.

Getting the new state on its feet economically presented one of the major challenges. Pakistan had virtually no industry, and the major markets for its agricultural products were in India. Pakistan produced 75 percent of the world’s jute supply but did not have a single jute processing mill. All the mills were in India. Although one-third of undivided India’s cotton was grown in Pakistan, it had “only one-thirtieth of the cotton mills.

In any case, Jinnah died within a year of independence, leaving his successors divided, or confused, about whether to take their cue from his independence eve call to keep religion out of politics or to build on the religious sentiment generated during the political bargaining for Pakistan.

Pakistanis were being conditioned to believe that their nationhood was under constant threat and that the threat came from India. Within weeks of independence, editorials in the Muslim League newspaper, Dawn, “called for ‘guns rather than butter, ‘urging a bigger and better-equipped army to defend ‘the sacred soil′ of Pakistan.

Pakistan’s pan-Islamic aspirations, however, were neither shared nor supported by the Muslim governments of the time. Nationalism in other parts of the Muslim world was based on ethnicity, language, or territory. Most Arab governments, as well as secular states such as Turkey, were wary of a religious revival.

During Pakistan’s formative years, however, pan-Islamism was more important for Pakistan’s efforts to consolidate its national identity than as the main-stay of its foreign policy.

If Jinnah—a Western educated and, by all accounts, nonpracticing Muslim—could inspire India’s Muslims to create a state by appealing to their religious sentiment, Maulana Maududi reasoned there was scope for a body of practicing Islamists to take over that state.

The Jamaat saw its opportunity in working with the new state’s elite, gradually expanding the Islamic agenda while providing the theological rationale for the elite’s plans for nation building on the basis of religion.

The Jamaat-e-Islami played a key role in mobilizing theologians to favor an Islamic constitution. It maintained a hard-line posture against India and helped the state by describing leftists, secularists, and ethnic nationalists as “anti-Islam unbelievers.