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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Pakistan
Index
Artist's rendition of tile mosaic of horsemen and soldiers from the
Pictured Wall, Lahore Fort, Punjab. Artwork represents seventeenthcentury tessellated tile work of the Mughal period.
WHEN BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGIST Sir Mortimer Wheeler was
commissioned in 1947 by the government of Pakistan to give
a
historical account of the then new country, he entitled
his work
Five Thousand Years of Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistan
has a
history that can be dated back to the Indus Valley
civilization
(ca. 2500-1600 B.C.), the principal sites of which lay in
present-day Sindh and Punjab provinces. Pakistan was later
the
entryway for the migrating pastoral tribes known as
Indo-Aryans,
or simply Aryans, who brought with them and developed the
rudiments of the religio-philosophical system of what
later
evolved into Hinduism. They also brought an early version
of
Sanskrit, the base of Urdu, Punjabi, and Sindhi languages
that
are spoken in much of Pakistan today.
Hindu rulers were eventually displaced by Muslim
invaders,
who, in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries,
entered
northwestern India through the same passes in the
mountains used
earlier by the Indo-Aryans. The culmination of Muslim rule
in the
Mughal Empire (1526-1858, with effective rule between 1560
and
1707) encompassed much of the area that is today Pakistan.
Sikhism, another religious movement that arose partially
on the
soil of present-day Pakistan, was briefly dominant in
Punjab and
in the northwest in the early nineteenth century. All of
these
regimes subsequently fell to the expanding power of the
British,
whose empire lasted from the eighteenth century to the
midtwentieth century, until they too left the scene, yielding
power
to the successor states of India and Pakistan.
The departure of the British was also a goal of the
Muslim
movement championed by the All-India Muslim League
(created in
1906 to counter the Hindu-dominated Indian National
Congress),
which in turn wanted both political independence and
cultural
separation from the Hindu-majority regions of British
India.
These objectives were reached in 1947, when British India
received its independence as two new sovereign states. The
Muslim-majority areas in northwestern and eastern India
were
separated and became Pakistan, divided into the West Wing
and
East Wing, respectively. The placement of two widely
separated
regions within a single state did not last, and in 1971
the East
Wing broke away and achieved independence as Bangladesh.
The pride that Pakistan displayed after independence in
its
long and multicultural history has disappeared in many of
its
officially sponsored textbooks and other material used for
teaching history (although the Indus Valley sites remain
high on
the list of the directors of tourism). As noted
anthropologist
Akbar S. Ahmed has written in History Today, "In
Pakistan
the Hindu past simply does not exist. History only begins
in the
seventh century after the advent of Islam and the Muslim
invasion
of Sindh."
Data as of April 1994
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