My name is Pakistan and I’m not an Arab
Nadeem F. ParachaJuly 28, 2013
In 1973, my paternal grandparents visited Makkah to perform the first of their two Hajj pilgrimages.
With them were two of my grandmother’s sisters and their respective husbands.
Upon reaching Jeddah, they hailed a taxi from the airport and headed for their designated hotel.
The driver of the taxi was a Sudanese man. As my grandparents and one of my grandmother’s sisters settled themselves in the taxi, the driver leisurely began driving towards the hotel and on the way inserted a cassette of Arabic songs into the car’s Japanese cassette-player.
My grandfather who was seated in the front seat beside the driver noticed that the man kept glancing at the rear view mirror, and every time he did that, one of his eyebrows would rise.
Curious, my grandfather turned his head to see exactly what was it about the women seated in the back seat that the taxi driver found so amusing.
This was what he discovered: As my grandmother was trying to take a quick nap, her sister too had her eyes closed, but her head was gently swinging from left to right to the beat of the music and she kept whispering (as if in quiet spiritual ecstasy) the Arabic expression Subhanallah, subhanallah …’
My grandfather knew enough Arabic to realise that the song to which my grandmother’s sister was swinging and praising the Almighty for was about an (Egyptian) Romeo who was lamenting his past as a heart-breaking flirt.
After giving a sideways glance to the driver to make sure he didn’t understand Punjabi, my grandfather politely asked my grandmother’s sister: ‘I didn’t know you were so much into music.’
‘Allah be praised, brother,’ she replied. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
The chatter woke my grandmother up: ‘What is so wonderful?’ She asked. ‘This,’ said her sister, pointing at one of the stereo speakers behind her. ‘So peaceful and spiritual …’
My grandfather let off a sudden burst of an albeit shy and muffled laughter. ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘the singer is not singing holy verses. He is singing about his romantic past.’
My grandmother started to laugh as well. Her sister’s spiritual smile was at once replaced by an utterly confused look: ‘What …?’
‘Sister,’ my grandfather explained, ‘Arabs don’t go around chanting spiritual and holy verses. Do you think they quote a verse from the holy book when, for example, they go to a fruit shop to buy fruit or want toothpaste?’
I’m sure my grandmother’s sister got the point. Not everything Arabic is holy.
Even though I was only a small child then I clearly remember my grandfather relating the episode with great relish. Though he was an extremely conservative and religious man and twice performed the Hajj, he refused to sport a beard, and wasn’t much of a fan of the Arabs (especially the monarchical kind).
He was proud of the fact that he was born in a small town in north Punjab that before 1947 was part of India.
In the early 1980s when Saudi money and influence truly began to take hold on the culture and politics of Pakistan, there were many families (especially from the Punjab) that actually began to rewrite their histories.
For example, families and clans that had emerged from within the South Asian region began to claim that their ancestors actually came from Arabia.
Something like this happened within the Paracha clan as well. In 1982 a book (authored by one of my grandfather’s many cousins) claimed that the Paracha clan originally appeared in Yemen and was converted to Islam during the time of the Holy Prophet (Pbuh).
The truth, however, was that like a majority of Pakistanis, Parachas too were once either Hindus or Buddhists who were converted to Islam by Sufi saints between the 11th and 15th centuries.
When the cousin gifted his book to my grandfather, he rubbished the claim and told him that he might attract Saudi Riyals with the book but zero historical credibility.
But historical accuracy and credibility does not pan well in an insecure country like Pakistan whose state and people, even after six decades of existence, are yet to clearly define exactly what constitutes their nationalistic and cultural identity.
After the complete fall of the Mughal Empire in the 19th century till about the late 1960s, Pakistanis (post-1947), attempted to separate themselves from other religious communities of the region by identifying with those Persian cultural aspects that had reigned supreme in Muslim royal courts in India, especially during the Mughal era.
However, after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, the state with the help of conservative historians and ulema made a conscious effort to divorce Pakistan’s history from its Hindu and Persian past and enact a project to bond this history with a largely mythical and superficial link with Arabia.
The project began to evolve at a much more rapid pace from the 1980s onwards. The streaming in of the ‘Petro Dollars’ from oil-rich monarchies and the Pakistanis’ increasing interaction with their Arab employers in these countries, turned Pakistan’s historical identity on its head.
In other words, instead of investing intellectual resources to develop a nationalism that was grounded and rooted in the more historically accurate sociology and politics of the Muslims of the region, a reactive attempt was made to dislodge one form of ‘cultural imperialism’ and import by adopting another.
For example, attempts were made to dislodge ‘Hindu and Western cultural influences’ in the Pakistani society by adopting Arabic cultural hegemony that came as a pre-requisite and condition with the Arabian Petro Dollar.
The point is, instead of assimilating the finer points of the diverse religious and ethnic cultures that our history is made of and synthesise them to form a more convincing and grounded nationalism and cultural identity, we have decided to reject our diverse and pluralistic past and instead adopt cultural dimensions of a people who, ironically, still consider non-Arabs like Pakistanis as second-class Muslims.
Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com. He is also the author of two books on the social history of Pakistan, End of the Past and The Pakistan Anti-Hero.
He tweets
@NadeemfParacha
https://www.dawn.com/news/1032519
Arab origins
By
Salman Rashid
Published: January 6, 2012
219SHARES
SHARE TWEET EMAIL
The writer is author, most recently of, “The Apricot Road to Yarkand” (Sang-e-Meel, 2011) and a member of the Royal Geographical Society
salman.rashid@tribune.com.pk
Every single Muslim in the subcontinent believes s/he is of Arab descent. If not direct Arab descent, then the illustrious ancestor had come from either Iran or Bukhara. Interestingly, the ancestor is always a great general or a saint. Never ever have we heard anyone boasting of an intellectual for a forebear. We hear of the progeny of savage robber kings, but there is no one who claims
Abu Rehan Al-Beruni or Ibn Rushd as a distant sire.
Arab origin is the favourite fiction of all subcontinental Muslims. Most claim their ancestor arrived in Sindh with the army under
Mohammad bin Qasim (MbQ). But, I have heard of lineages reaching back to Old Testament prophets as well. An elderly Janjua (Rajput), from the Salt Range told me of a forefather named Ar, a son of the Prophet Isaac. Ar, he said, was the ancestor of the races that spoke the Aryan tongue!
Touted as a local intellectual, this worthy was unmindful of the fact that Aryan was not a tribal name but a linguistic classification. Neither could he tell me how the name Ar, not being in the Old Testament, had reached him. He insisted this name headed his family tree and was, therefore true. The chart, written on a piece of rather newish paper had been, the Janjua insisted, copied from an old original. The original was of course destroyed after the copy was made.
The Arains flaunt Salim al Raee as their father — the clan being called after his surname. A great and valiant general in the army of MbQ, this man was from an agricultural family of Syria, so the
Tarikh-e-Araiantells us. Closer to our times, the Arains are indeed acclaimed for their green thumb for which reason Shah Jehan relocated a large bunch of them to mind the newly laid out Shalimar Garden of Lahore. Today, they are a very rich clan in Baghbanpura.
The
Tarikh expounds on this fictional ancestor’s noble background and courage in battle to the extent that he almost outshines MbQ. But it does not give us any source or reference for the rubbish that sullies its pages. There are two authentic histories of the Arab conquest of Sindh. Ahmad Al Biladhuri’s
Futuh ul Buladan (written circa 860) and Hamid bin Ali Kufi’s
Tarikh-e-Hind wa Sindh, translated first into the Persian as
Fatehnama Sindh and then into Sindhi as the
Chachnama (written circa 1200).
There are dozens of names sprinkled across the pages of both works, but no mention is made of a blue-blooded warrior called Salim al Raee. There are other histories besides these two works which also disregard this name for the only reason that such a man never existed.
The Awans, similarly, have a fictional ancestor called Qutb Shah from the line of the last caliph of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs. My friend Kaiser Tufail, an Arain, has had himself genetically tested from the US. He has no trace of Arab blood. His line comes from what is now Uzbekistan and has lived from early historic times in the subcontinent. The rest of us of this clan will see similar results should we go through this exercise. Kaiser had his son-in-law, an Awan, also tested. He, too, is singularly clean of Arab genes.
Most of us are the progeny of converts. In their need to escape the discrimination of the so-called higher castes, our ancestors converted to a religion that in theory claimed to profess human equality regardless of colour or caste. I use the words ‘in theory’ because even as the Arabs converted our ancestors to Islam, they discriminated against them for being “Hindis” as we learn this from Ibn Batuta’s own prejudices. And he is not alone.
Consequently, even after conversion, my ancestors, poor agriculturists, were looked down upon by the Arabs and even those who had converted earlier the same way as they were by the Brahmans when they professed their Vedic belief. Within a generation or two, those early converts began the great lie of Arab ancestry to be equal to other converts and the Arabs. This became universal with time.
The challenge then is for all those, Baloch,
Pathan, Punjabi et al, who have invented illegitimate fathers for ourselves to get ourselves tested and know the bitter truth.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 7th, 2012.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/317619/arab-origins/
Why Pakistanis are more Muslim than thou
Posted by
Razib Khan on February 1, 2010
(17)
More »
A comment at Secular Right:
Ever since the Revolution the Mullahs have wanted to erase all traces of the pre-Islamic Persian society. They realized they couldn’t go and raze Persepolis and other relics without losing the support of the people. I’ve heard that it is common for people in Iran to complain openly that worst thing to ever happen to them was the Arab invasion.
A similar strain in Egyptian Islamist clerics and leaders exists but again, they cannot destroy the pyramids without losing legitimacy. Too many Egyptians are attached to their history, whether for economic or cultural reasons.
The contradictions of Persians in relation to Islam and Arabs have always perplexed me, and my Persian American friends have never been able to unpack the sentiments coherently. On the one hand Persians are resolutely Muslim, have been by and large for over 1,000 years. Their script is
derived from Arabic, Farsi has been strongly influenced by Arabic, and many Persians have names of Arabic provenance. Muhammad, Ali and
Husayn were Arabs. On the other hand, Persians are often racist against Arabs, something which takes concrete form against
Iranian Arabs. As far back as Ferdowsi’s
Shahnameh you see Muslim Persians looking back to a glorious past, and bemoaning their cultural enslavement by barbaric bedouins.
When it comes to the Islamic regime’s ambivalence, and on occasion outright hostility, toward the glories of pre-Islamic Iran, the authorities need to tread a fine line. The Persians may be Muslims, and have synthesized their culture with Islam so that the religion is part & parcel of a modern Persian identity, but they also retain their ethnic-national identity as distinct from the Arabs, and later Turks, who ruled them. The customs, traditions and physical monuments from pre-Islamic Iran are witness to the concrete aspects of Persian identity which are prior, or independent of, Islam.
The issue with Egyptians is somewhat different, because the Egyptians
became Arabs, abandoning the Coptic language, which descends from ancient Egyptian. After the decline of Baghdad Cairo became the cultural capital of the Arab world, and more recently was the locus of pan-Arabism. In contrast to the Persians the Egyptians subsumed their own identity with that of the Muslim Arab conquerors.
But, they retain pride in their ancient civilization, which is still concrete in the form of the pyramids. I don’t think this is particularly surprising; from what I can tell the Greeks take pride in the achievements of the ancient Greeks, the Chinese believe that the ancient Chinese invented everything, while black African and northern European racial nationalists have concocted an alternative history whereby all of antiquity was the handiwork of their own ethnic groups. If one’s history includes Egypt of the Pharaohs, I am skeptical that any Muslim group would disavow it on account of it being pre-Islamic.
Which brings me to Pakistan. A recent
Pew survey indicated that 90% of Pakistanis view themselves as “Muslim first” (as opposed to being citizens of their country first). The numbers in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Indonesia are 60%, 70%, 50% and 35% respectively. Why is the number so high for Pakistan? One straightforward reason is that
the raison d’etre of Pakistan is to be a state for Muslims. In other words, the Muslim identity of Pakistan is operationally coterminous with national identity. The conflict with India is generally couched in terms of the communal divide (even if India promotes itself as a secular state, it is perceived as a Hindu nation). This strong contrast along the axis of religion, as well as the history of Pakistan’s origin, are obviously important.
But there is something deeper about Pakistani identity which I have always perceived,
and that is that Pakistanis, and to some extent South Asians Muslims generally, highlight and emphasize the non-South Asian antecedents of their identity. By this, I mean that South Asian Muslims are
no different genetically, by and large, from Hindus (Hindu Sindhis vs. Muslim Sindhis, Hindu Bengalis vs. Muslim Bengalis), and yet seem to have an affinity for the alien Turkic conquerors of South Asia. Here’s
a criticism of Pakistani history textbooks:
Nayyar, Jalal, Hoodbhoy and Saigol suggest that associated with the ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ is an essential component of hate against India and Hindus. Some time after Pakistan’s defeat in the 1971 war, Indo-Pakistan history was replaced with Pakistan Studies, whose sole purpose was to define Pakistan as an Islamic state.
Students were deprived of learning about pre-Islamic history of their region. Instead, history books now started with the Arab conquest of Sindh and swiftly jumped to the Muslim conquerors from Central Asia.
The history of the geographic region of Pakistan began during the epoch of the
Indus Valley Civilization, which is arguably the most antique hearth of city-culture outside of the Middle East. This is not a trivial history. Additionally, the region of Pakistan played a major role as an area which served as a jumping off point of Buddhism into Central Asia, and from there to China. In other words, there are thousands of years of history before the conquest of Sindh by the armies of the Umayyads.
Why the difference between Pakistan and Iran and Egypt? Iranians and Egyptians are no less Muslim than Pakistanis, and Egyptians are even Arabs, and yet they take great national pride in their antiquities which pre-date Islam. By national pride, I mean that ancient Egypt is of interest to those outside of the elites or specialist scholars, while the
Shahnameh, which is a chronicle of pre-Islamic Iran, is presumably known outside scholarly circles. The
Vedas were composed in the Punjab, which is the geographic and cultural core of Pakistan, but I presume that most Pakistanis are unfamiliar with their contents (I am willing to be corrected here).
And I think that points to a difference between Egypt and Iran, and Pakistan:
India exists in continuity from the pre-Islamic period, while the Copts and Zoroastrians in Egypt and Iran are arguably simply fossil identities which do not impinge upon the central role of Islam in Egypt and Iran. A few years ago I read an article about the shift from Persian to Arabic names among elite Persian families in the centuries after the Muslim conquest concomitant with their conversion to the new religion. Only when the vast majority of Persians were Muslim did Persian names start to reappear among the elites! At that point Persian names were no longer associated with a vital non-Muslim Persian cultural tradition which might be seen as a rival to the Muslim Persian cultural tradition, and so the pre-Islamic past in the form of names could be accepted without it being taken as a sign that one was not a Muslim.
The situation in Pakistan then is one where its own pre-Islamic glory has a distasteful valence in a nation which finds itself facing an India which is a living expression of pre-Islamic South Asian civilization, manifest in the religion that is Hinduism. In fact, from what I have seen and heard Indians take great pride in the Indus Valley civilization, even if it was mostly centered within the modern confines of Pakistan. Additionally, about 60% of Pakistanis are ethnic Punjabis. This group is also prominent in India, but they are mostly Hindus and Sikhs. The Sikh religion has to some extent become a de facto Punjabi ethnic religion; the
Sikh scriptures are in Punjabi.
Pakistani cuisine, language and physique all point toward the affinity with India. If Indians magically became Muslim then I assume Pakistanis would look at their indisputable South Asianness, and take pride in those aspects which mark them as a more antique civilized people than the Arabs who gave them their religion. But as it is Indians are witness to that ancient history, claim it as their own, respect the Vedas not as documents of historical interest but of contemporary piety.
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/02/01/why-pakistanis-are-more-muslim/
