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The world sees Pakistan as an excessively religious country which is only defined by its Islamic values today. But the reality is much more antagonistic to what world or even the locals perceive and is actually more close to nation’s two entirely opposite extremes fighting with each other for their believed rights – leaving nation’s development at a dusk.
The roots of this instability lie in the creation of Pakistan itself. As a separate state for the Muslims of India, the ideology that supported, and at the same time, opposed the partition of India in the very same manner still supports its extremism today. Pakistan was in fact founded on the basis of Muslim extremism against the non-Muslims’ opposition, whose seeds were panted during the Mughal rule in India – a Muslim power which proved to be one of the most successful rules in the history of the Indian subcontinent which contributed a lot in the way it works today.
The trade was thriving, and the rulers allowed the whites – who had by then already stepped on the shores of India – to start trade with the local Indians. That was only the first step on the ladder of power for the whites, British specifically, in India who will later change its map, dividing them both mentally and geographically into two extremes.
Fast forward to the 17th century, the company which was once thought to prosper the Indian land through their trade with Europe, now hold much of the powers in India. The Muslims of India, at the dusk of their empire, found themselves in this extraordinary moment of losing the control they once held over India by the very act they thought that would strengthen it. For the Hindus though, who had not ruled their land for more than ten centuries now, it was only a matter of change of master who felt no significant threat from the colonization.
But for the Muslims, on the other hand, it was the matter of losing the power and control they have had for centuries on the Indian land. Thus, they eventually became an obstacle for the whites and opposed their rule in India. The British belonged to an educated, well mannered and a sophisticated land but possessed the heart of a mouse for the other nations. Their ruling strategies were unlike anything the local rulers of their colonies had ever imagined, leaving those powerless who opposed their rule.
The most significant aspect of their colonization was the introduction of a different form of identity to the locals by converting the nation’s youth and rulers into cheap imitations of Englishmen through their superior education and English manners. The division would eventually end up resulting in creating yet another class of people who were neither Indian nor British but acquired a strong desire to become one and now saw their local traditions and identity as backward. That was a turning point for the locals, who would later lose their true identity – like a man standing on two boats going in entirely different directions.
This act triggered the former rulers, the Muslims, who now started to rebel through staying in their mosques and excessively promoting their religion along with local identity and considered it as an answer for the colonizers that Muslims are keen on their grounds. They left education as they had associated it as a means for colonizers to expand their colonialism. The most humiliating aspect of this division was the separation of religion and modern education. Mosques became the home for religious education while science got limited to modern or British institutions only, which Muslims had rejected. Western suits got associated with secularism while shalwar kameez – the local dress – was seen as a sign of being religious
The opposition continued for another 200 hundred years, and eventually demand for separate nation started to emerge when Muslims realized that the Hindus too, in some manners, supported the colonizers who had promised them to return their land to them along with its former glory – a perfect example of a divide and rule strategy implemented by the British here. Due to long continued fight against ‘westernization’, the excessive Muslims had now forgotten modern education and started to take it as a threat by the west to their religion and ideology.
Science became fake and Jewish conspiracy near the Muslims, and their students were only taught and instructed about religious education and how to protect it, even if they have to pay their lives for it. The venom eventually spread all over the globe in different Muslim nations the whites tried to colonize.
Then, once Pakistan emerged, their powers strengthened and instead of developing the newly founded nation, these people, who actually controlled the roots of the country, continued their religious fight against westernization and now became more brutal from their own base. In fact, the word ‘terrorism’, or ‘Muslim Terrorism’ in today’s context was unknown as late as 1960 – the time Muslims initiated their brutal war on westernization – and before that, ‘colonialism’ had the very same spot in the world.
Today, Islam is confined to mosques only where modern education is considered a curse and is very quickly fading, causing it to be taken as backward by the very people who helped to made it so. The west blames religious extremists for promoting backward ideas in the east and threatening their development, but the reality is they are only protecting the idea which was once treated and still is by the west near them – an idea which in fact is not much different from the west’s if truly understood. Their fight then is, in some manners, as for right as west’s fight towards their modern ideology.
Pakistan now works in a hierarchy of classes, of which two out of three of them are on the extremes, the mosque confined Mullah who control the nation indirectly and the westernized, so-called, Desi American supporting the western ideology who control it directly, both fighting with each other for their believed rights to strengthen their grounds and outperform the idea of one another. In the middle lies the only power that can not only balance and abolish those extremes but also help to form successful self-government in the nation. A voice is only heard when it becomes a crowd, the power working/middle class holds is far greater than any other, but so is their fear and lack of knowledge to use this power.
