Pakistan

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Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic State to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims — Hindus, Christians, and Parsis — but they are all Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world’s fifth-most populous country with a population exceeding 212.7 million people. In area, it is the 33rd-largest country, spanning 881,913 square kilometres (340,509 square miles). Pakistan has a 1,046-kilometre (650-mile) coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China in the northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the northwest, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.

A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L – M – N – O – P – Q – R – S – T – U – V – W – X – Y – Z – See also

Quotes[edit]

We represent the future of a modern Pakistan, a future that has no place in it for ignorance, intolerance, and terrorism. ~ Benazir Bhutto
Was anything wrong with the dream or with the one who made the dream come true? Opinions have differed and continue to differ. ~ Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
Islam and its idealism have taught us democracy. It has taught equality of man, justice and fairplay to everybody.. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

A[edit]

  • [Pakistan is] the most allied ally in Asia.
    • Ayub Khan, as quoted by "Pakistan: the Most Allied Ally in Asia" by Robert Nolan, in Foreign Policy Association Newsletter (2005)
  • In the present times of grave crisis we need dissident intellectuals who can challenge the establishment... Pakistan did not develop any tradition of dissident intellectual activity.
    • Mubarak Ali, In an interview published in The Times of India, New Delhi, 29 October 1997. Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 6
  • While the landlords and capitalists allowed the clergy to make Pakistan a religious state, the clergy allowed the landlords guaranteed property rights and the capitalists unbridled control over the economy. Theocracy and landlordism/capitalism are the two pillars of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
    • Akbar, M. J. India: The Siege Within. London, 1985 p 31, quoted in Ibn Warraq, Why I am not a Muslim, 1995. p 322

B[edit]

Pakistan has repeatedly denied that it was the architect of the Taliban enterprise.
But there is little doubt that many Afghans who initially joined the movement were educated in madrassas (religious schools) in Pakistan. ~ BBC
  • Pakistan was once called the most allied ally of the United States. We are now the most non-allied.
  • This is not a letter on Pakistan. If it were, I could have written a small book entitled "Glimpses of Pakistan's history". Time does not permit it. The nation is gripped in her worst crisis, standing in the middle of the road between survival and disintegration. Since the birth of Pakistan, crisis has followed crisis in rapid escalation. Millions of lives were sacrificed to create this country. Pakistan is said to be the dream of Mohammad Iqbal and the creation of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam. Was anything wrong with the dream or with the one who made the dream come true? Opinions have differed and continue to differ. The next few years will most probably decide the issue, perhaps once and for all, and not without bloodshed. This process is not inevitable but the present policies of the ruling junta are driving this country towards a sad inevitability
  • [Pakistan] will be a steadfast partner…. A force for freedom and moderation in the Arab world.
  • "..Reading the British complaints, it is striking how they pre-echo American complaints about Pakistan in the post 9/11 era. In both cases, 150 years apart, Western governments are accusing Pakistanis and their forebears of exploiting their relationship with the West to make money..."
  • "..In a telling metaphor replete with a sense of shame, many Pakistanis have likened Washington’s relationship with Islamabad to that of a virile man and his vulnerable mistress. At times the latter is being passionately wooed and courted, and at others — such as the phase we are in now — is cruelly spurned and ignored..."

C[edit]

  • There are deep problems in Pakistan - the economy is turning around, but not very fast; violence, sectarian violence, continues.
  • The Pakistanis... Nothing could embarrass that country... The country is effectively living on welfare, but they can afford nuclear weapons... They simply can't be trusted.

D[edit]

F[edit]

  • The first thought a Western woman has when she arrives in a rigorously Muslim country like Pakistan is that she appears to be the only woman to have survived a tsunami that has washed away all the others.
    • Oriana Fallaci. Quoted in De, S. C., & Harss, M. (2017). Oriana Fallaci: The journalist, the agitator, the legend.

H[edit]

Pakistan has a history of military support for different factions within Afghanistan, extending at least as far back as the early 1970s. During the 1980s, Pakistan, which was host to more than two million Afghan refugees, was the most significant front-line state serving as a secure base for the mujahidin fighting against the Soviet intervention. Pakistan also served, in the 1980s, as a U.S. stalking horse: the U.S., through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), granted Pakistan wide discretion in channeling some U.S.$2-3 billion worth of covert assistance to the mujahidin, training over 80,000 of them. Even after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, serving and former Pakistani military officers continued to provide training and advisory services in training camps within Afghanistan and eventually to Taliban forces in combat. ~ Human Rights Watch
  • For more than three decades, our supposed ally in South Asia has systematically lied to and manipulated successive presidential administrations — Republican and Democratic — in ways that have made the U.S. and the world less safe. Islamabad has been the recipient of more than $33 billion in American assistance since 2002, including $14 billion to combat terrorism and insurgents in the region even while Pakistan has been busily doing the opposite.
  • Most of our [British] Muslim population is Pakistani. If that population was Indonesian or Tunisian the situation would not be the same. Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
  • Pakistan has a history of military support for different factions within Afghanistan, extending at least as far back as the early 1970s. During the 1980s, Pakistan, which was host to more than two million Afghan refugees, was the most significant front-line state serving as a secure base for the mujahidin fighting against the Soviet intervention. Pakistan also served, in the 1980s, as a U.S. stalking horse: the U.S., through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), granted Pakistan wide discretion in channeling some U.S.$2-3 billion worth of covert assistance to the mujahidin, training over 80,000 of them. Even after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, serving and former Pakistani military officers continued to provide training and advisory services in training camps within Afghanistan and eventually to Taliban forces in combat.

J[edit]

  • Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us.
  • There is no power on earth that can undo Pakistan.
  • The constitution of Pakistan has yet to be framed by the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. I do not know what the ultimate shape of this constitution is going to be, but I am sure that it will be of a democratic type, embodying the essential principle of Islam. Today, they are as applicable in actual life as they were 1,300 years ago. Islam and its idealism have taught us democracy. It has taught equality of man, justice and fairplay to everybody. We are the inheritors of these glorious traditions and are fully alive to our responsibilities and obligations as framers of the future constitution of Pakistan. In any case Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic State to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims — Hindus, Christians, and Parsis — but they are all Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan.
  • "We are starting the state with no discrimination ... we should keep that in front of us as our ideal, and you will find that in course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as the citizens of the nation."
    • Muhammad Ali Jinnah, on the day he was elected president of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, Jinnah in a moving speech, quoted in M. J. Akbar, India: The Siege Within (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985) p 34. As quoted from Ibn, W. (2004). Leaving Islam: Apostates speak out. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

K[edit]

  • We have proclaimed that if the Government of Pakistan would work for our people and our country the Khudai Khidmatgars would be with them. I repeat that I am not for the destruction of Pakistan. In destruction lies no good. Neither Hindus nor Muslims, nor the Frontier, not Punjab, Bengal or Sindh stands to gain from it. There is advantage only in construction. I want to tell you categorically I will not support anybody in destruction. If any constructive programme is before you, if you want to do something constructive for our people, not in theory, but in practice, I declare before this House that I and my people are at your service?
    • Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (February 1948) quoted in Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan: A True Servant of Humanity by Girdhari Lal Puri pp -188 ? 190
  • I tell you, the Pakistanis are fine people, but they are primitive in their mental structure. They just don’t have the subtlety of the Indians.
    • Henry Kissinger, to Richard Nixon. In 1971. Quoted in Gary J. Bass. The Terrible Cost of Presidential Racism Sept. 3, 2020 [2]
  • I assert that Pakistan is the biggest rogue of all the rogue states of today.
    I assert that what is taking form there, between Islamabad and Karachi, is a black hole compared to which Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad was an obsolete weapons dump.
    • Lévy, B.-H. (2014). Who Killed Daniel Pearl.

N[edit]

  • But wasn't this what Pakistan was supposed to be? After all, it came into being on the basis of the two-nation theory, that Hindus and Muslims were two separate states, that Hindus and Muslims could not live together. That was Pakistan's raison d'être. Supposing by some black magic they converted to another way of thinking... Pakistan would collapse. Therefore one of the planks of Pakistani statecraft was to keep reminding its people and the world at large of that mantra of survival: we are because we cannot live with them.
    • Saeed Naqvi, Reflections of an Indian Muslim, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 350
  • The Pakistanis are a different breed. The Pakistanis are straightforward—and sometimes extremely stupid....
    You know, Biafra stirred up a few Catholics. But you know, I think Biafra stirred people up more than Pakistan, because Pakistan they’re just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.
    • Richard Nixon, Nixon quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

P[edit]

  • What's happened recently in Pakistan, India and Kuwait only goes to show that it's futile to imitate Western democracy. They've ended up exactly where they started.
  • You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed -- that has nothing to do with the business of the State.
    • Muhammad Ali Jinnah's first Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (August 11, 1947)

Q[edit]

  • I have decided, keeping in view the letter which I’ll share with the Supreme Court, that I can no longer stay at the office of Speaker

R[edit]

  • It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men.
  • I’ve also seen both sexes mistreat their servants, servants' children, and scream abuses at poor people in the markets. In Pakistan, abuse is not as openly discussed as it is in the West. Abuse seems to be more acceptable as long as one maintains a luxury lifestyle.

T[edit]

  • The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!
    • Donald Trump, CNN: Trump's first 2018 tweet: Pakistan has 'given us nothing but lies & deceit' [3], The Independent [4]
  • This name-Pakistan-means literally ‘the Land of the Pure’ or of Purity. This implies clearly that Hindus and all that belongs to them credally and materially is impure, defiled and unholy. In a communally-charged atmosphere to have broadcast such an offensive name and concept among the Muslims was to extend an open invitation to racial and communal arrogance, contempt of others, challenges and counter-challenges.
  • Just as Medina had provided a base for the eventual victory of Islam in Arabia, Pakistan would pave the way for the triumphal return of Islam as the ruling power over the entire subcontinent. The whole of Hindustan would thus be turned into Pakistan just as the Prophet himself had turned all of Arabia into Pakistan.
    • Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, in 1946, as attributed and quoted in Creating a New Medina, Dhulipala and quoted from J Sai Deepak - India that is Bharat_ Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution-_ Bloomsbury India (2021)

W[edit]

  • Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state. Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse. For the past four years we have been trying to bring Islamic values to this country'.
    • General Zia-ul-Haq (1916-89), Chief Martial Law Administrator, Pakistan, 1981. quoted from Tariq Ali - The Clash of Fundamentalisms_ Crusades, Jihads and Modernity-Verso (2002)

See also[edit]

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