As noted by A. H. Nayyar and Ahmad Salim, in a report for the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Pakistan, [SIZE="3"t]the educational system in Pakistan was designed from the very beginning to reinforce one particular view of Pakistani nationalism and identity, namely that Pakistan is an Islamic state rather than a country with a majority Muslim population. [/SIZE][/B]Furthermore, the educational [SIZE="3"]system needed to produce an image of a singular homogeneous majoritarian Muslim identity that could be sharply differentiated from that of India, even though it meant suppressing the many different shades within Pakistan.
This was done through myth-making and the embellishment of history. In a chapter on Historical Falsehoods and Inaccuracies in Pakistani education, Salim observes that many Pakistan Studies textbooks declare that Muhammad-bin-Qasim, an Arab general who led the Umayyad conquest of the Sindh and Punjab regions in the early eighth century, was Pakistans first citizena full twelve centuries before its independence in 1947. Indeed, one textbook simply declares that although Pakistan was created in August 1947, . . . the present-day Pakistan has existed, as a more or less single entity, for centuries.