Pakistani nationalism

[4] This concept of a separate state for India's Muslims traces its roots to Allama Iqbal, who has retroactively been dubbed the national poet of Pakistan.

[8] According to Iqbal, the uppermost purpose of establishing a separate country was the preservation of the Muslim "cultural entity", which he believed would not be safe under the rule of the Hindu majority.

[13][14][15][16] In the colonial Indian province of Sind, the historian Ayesha Jalal describes the actions that Jinnah's pro-separatist Muslim League used in order to spread communal division and undermine the government of Allah Bakhsh Soomro, which stood for a united India:[17] Even before the 'Pakistan' demand was articulated, the dispute over the Sukkur Manzilgah had been fabricated by provincial Leaguers to unsettle Allah Bakhsh Soomro's ministry which was dependent on support from the Congress and Independent Party.

On a small island in the near distance was the temple of Saad Bela, sacred space for the large number of Hindus settled on the banks of the Indus at Sukkur.

The symbolic convergence of the identity and sovereignty over a forgotten mosque provided ammunition for those seeking office at the provincial level.

[17]The Muslim League, seeking to spread religious strife, "monetarily subsidized" mobs that engaged in communal violence against Hindus and Sikhs in the areas of Multan, Rawalpindi, Campbellpur, Jhelum and Sargodha, as well as in the Hazara District.

[18][19] Jinnah and the Muslim League's communalistic Direct Action Day in Calcutta resulted in 4,000 deaths and 100,000 residents left homeless in just 72 hours, sowing the seeds for riots in other provinces and the eventual partition of the country.

[23] Ahmadis argued to try to ensure that the city of Qadian, India would fall into the newly created state of Pakistan, though they were unsuccessful in doing so.

[25] Elizabeth A. Cole of the George Mason University Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution noted that Pakistani textbooks eliminate the country's Hindu and Buddhist past, while referring to Muslims as a monolithic entity and focusing solely on the advent of Islam in the Indian subcontinent.

[28] According to Pakistan Studies curriculum, Muhammad bin Qasim is often referred to as the first Pakistani despite having been alive several centuries before its creation through the partition of India in 1947.

[29] Muhammad Ali Jinnah also claimed the Pakistani separatist movement to have started when the first Muslim put a foot in the Gateway of Islam,[30] and that Bin Qasim is actually the founder of Pakistan.

In 1835 Lord Macaulay's minute recommending that Western rather than Oriental learning predominate in the East India Company's education policy had led to numerous changes.

In place of Arabic and Persian, the Western languages, history and philosophy were taught at state-funded schools and universities whilst religious education was barred.

[43] Seeing this atmosphere of despair and despondency, Syed launched his attempts to revive the spirit of progress within the Muslim community of India.

He was convinced that the Muslims, in their attempt to regenerate themselves, had failed to realise that mankind had entered a very important phase of its existence, i.e., an era of science and learning.

He had two immediate objectives in mind: to remove the state of misunderstanding and tension between the Muslims and the new British government, and to induce them to go after the opportunities available under the new regime without deviating in any way from the fundamentals of their faith.

The idea of complete independence did not catch on until after World War I, when the British government reduced civil liberties with the Rowlatt Acts of 1919.

In the 1960s, the imagery of Gandharan and Greco-Buddhist artefacts were unearthed in Pakistan, and some Pakistani nationalists "creatively imagined" an ancient civilisation which differentiated the provinces now lying in Pakistan from the rest of the Indian subcontinent, which is not accepted by mainstream historians; they tried to emphasize its contacts with the West and framed Gandharan Buddhism as antithetical to 'Brahmin' (Hindu) influence.

However, the Awami National Party, At the last legislative elections, 20 October 2002, won a meagre 1.0% of the popular vote and no seats in the lower house of Parliament.

[48] Early Muslim thinkers viewed the idea of Pakistan, with its strong military tradition, as a guardian of South Asia.

In subsequent years Pakistani strategists came to see Pakistan as a balance to both the Soviet Union from Central Asia and the pro-Soviet government of India.

[49] In a June 2023 survey titled "National Public Opinion Poll Report", Gallup Pakistan found that the military remained the institution Pakistanis trust the most, with 88% of approval, ahead of the media and the judiciary, with 56% for both, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the approval for the army reaching its highest at 91% followed by Punjab with 90% with a lowest of 66% in Balochistan.

First public tests were experimented out in 1998 (code names:Chagai-I and Chagai-II) in a direct response to India's nuclear explosions in the same year; thus Pakistan became the 7th nation in the world to have successfully developed the programme.

Pakistan, along with Israel and India, is three of the original states that have restrained itself from being party of the NPT and CTBT which it considers an encroachment on its right to defend itself.