Persian, Urdu, English or Arabic language in Pakistan?

[Fighter]

We also consider Pakistan our land

Its funny when you have to explain something that simple to indians.

 

[Vinod2070]

^^ No one is saying it is not your land. You guys are missing the point.

Deliberately, I think. Doesn't matter.

 

[Fighter]

^^ No one is saying it is not your land. You guys are missing the point.

Deliberately, I think. Doesn't matter.

I seriously dont get the point.
Whats the point then

 

[Vinod2070]

I seriously dont get the point.
Whats the point then

The point is that you are not able to find your identity within your land. You need to look out to search for your identity. You are not even able to decide what identity you want. I mentioned some of them in an earlier post.

http://www.defenceforum.in/forum/in...ish-arabic-language-pakistan-2.html#post52070

I have read some Pakistanis claim that they are willing to let the whole of Pakistan burn for a grain of sand of Arabia! Many of you claim ancestry from invaders and look down on the native born Pakistanis (they are Ajalaf to the invader Asharaf). You look for leadership from all over the place, Turkey, Malaysia, Saudis, almost anyone will do.

To say that there is no identity crisis in Pakistan is being ignorant or stubborn. Just try to read up on many acclaimed Pakistani writers.

 

[Daredevil]

I seriously dont get the point.
Whats the point then

Since you are not getting the point, let me help you on this. Here is an article on a book written by a Pakistani called "Making sense of Pakistan" which talks about the quintessential problem of identity crisis faced by pakistan and its people. Go through it and then we can discuss further on this.

Making sense of Pakistan’s identity crisis

Hasan Suroor

A new book argues that there is no hope for Pakistan unless it sorts out its identity crisis which, it says, is the root cause of the country being such a disaster.

Arguably 60 years are not a long time in the history of a nation but by 60, even a country with a troubled past such as Pakistan, is expected to at least start making sense of what it stands for and where it is heading, however fuzzy the direction. And when it continues to flounder — like Pakistan — lurching from one crisis to another, it becomes a liability not only to its own people but also has implications for the wider international community, especially its neighbours — in this case India.

Pakistanis are a proud people. They feel humiliated when their country is mocked at as a “failed state” and routinely mentioned in the same breath as the pirate-infested Somalia which does not even have a properly functioning capital. For all its afflictions, Pakistan (a functioning democracy, however flawed, with a free press, an independent judiciary and a vibrant civil society) is by no means a failed state.

Not yet. But signs of a meltdown are all too evident and there are genuine fears about its future. One view, of course, is that the West will not allow it to fail for its own strategic reasons. But that is hardly very reassuring.

So what went wrong? How did a country which has no dearth of talent and whose founders had such high hopes for it that they named it “Pakistan” (a pure country) go so horribly wrong? Was there something rotten at the very core of the idea of Pakistan that has been its undoing? Is Pakistan’s failure to make sense of itself the result of a deep confusion over its Islamic/Muslim identity? If yes, what is the way forward, if any?

A new book, Making Sense of Pakistan (Hurst & Company, London) by Farzana Shaikh — a highly regarded U.K.-based Pakistani scholar and Fellow of Chatham House — argues that there is no hope for Pakistan unless it sorts out its identity crisis which, it says, is the root cause of the country being such a disaster. Indeed, in order to make sense of Pakistan, it is important to make sense of its identity crisis first.

Everything that is wrong with Pakistan today — its “distorted economic and social development,” its “obsession” with India, the sectarian divisions that have blighted relations among its various communities, its proneness to military dictatorships and the rise of extremism first directed at its “enemies” and now devouring its own creators — is a direct or indirect result of its confused sense of itself, Dr. Shaikh says.

So deep is this confusion that more than six decades after its creation, even the definition of who is a “Pakistani” is not clear with the Indian Muslim migrants still being regarded as outsiders by ethnic communities which claim that they are the “real” Pakistanis by virtue of their historical roots in the region. Over the years, this conflict between indigenous Muslim groups and migrants has been a source of deep (and frequently violent) divisions in Pakistani society. And it is still festering.

But nowhere is Pakistan’s self-inflicted identity crisis more evident than in relation to India, according to Dr. Shaikh. Because of the nature of its creation — a secessionist state born in opposition to the Indian nationalist movement — Pakistan was lumped with an identity, defined in terms of what it was “not” (it was “not India”) rather than what it was.

“Indeed, much of the uncertainty over Pakistan’s identity stems from the nagging question of whether its identity is fundamentally dependent on India and what its construction might entail outside of opposition to the latter. This has prompted the suggestion that Pakistan is a state burdened with a negative identity shaped by the circumstances of Partition,” Dr. Shaikh says.

Ever since its formation, Pakistan has struggled to overcome this negative identity. Its search for what it regards as legitimacy has, in fact, been the “defining feature” of its policy towards India, especially the Kashmir issue, and is at the heart of its quest for military parity with a neighbour “almost seven times its size in population and more than four times its land mass.”

The dispute with India over Kashmir has come to symbolise Pakistan’s obsessive bid to delink its identity from its historical antecedents. To quote the author: “It is here [over Kashmir], amid the rhetoric of rival claims over territory and state sovereignty, that Pakistan has fought to assert itself and to liberate its identity from the uncertainties that have attached to its status as merely ‘not India’.” She argues that Pakistan’s efforts to achieve this identity underline its historical claim to parity with India: a claim “grounded” in Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s insistence that “equality of the nations of Hindus and Muslims” be the basis for any territorial division of British India.

As much as the national interest, it is Pakistan’s compulsive desire for parity with India (an extension of its efforts to assert its “independent” identity) that has shaped much of its foreign policy leading it to seek help from foreign powers. Take its alliance with America which, the author points out, has been motivated as much by security considerations — a protection against an attack from India — as by its “need for validation and its desire to win recognition of its special status.” Being a “strategic partner” of the world’s only superpower is seen in Pakistan as a boost to its “global image” to match India’s global status.

Again, it is Pakistan’s “self-perception” of national identity that, according to Dr. Shaikh, has led it to compete with India in the race for regional domination — by, for example, flexing its muscles in Afghanistan. “Although the consequences of these foreign policy ambitions have often been devastating to Pakistan and the strategic costs immense, no price is yet seen to be too high to validate Pakistan’s claim to nationhood ... Thus Pakistan’s struggle against India is deeply embedded in a painful awareness of its own lack of a national history,” she observes.

Ultimately, though, India is only part of a bigger story of Pakistan’s struggle with its identity which, Dr. Shaikh contends, has had a profound effect on every aspect of the country’s life and, indeed, its world view. The uncertainty resulting from a lack of consensus on what constitutes Pakistan’s national identity has “deepened the country’s divisions ... discouraged plural definitions of the Pakistani ... blighted good governance and tempted political elites to use the language of Islam as a substitute for democratic legitimacy.”

Today, Pakistan remains an enigma with no clear understanding of the nature of the Pakistani state. Analysing the causes of this debilitating confusion, she traces it back to the origins of Pakistan, the politics of its creation and the flawed assumption of its founders that religion could be the basis of a modern, forward-looking state.

A project forged around the idea that a Muslim religious identity, overriding cultural and social factors, was enough to unify a nation was doomed from the start. And, sure enough, the project started to unravel within years of its inauguration with Bengali-speaking Muslims breaking away from Pakistan to form their own Muslim state of Bangladesh. It is Pakistan’s “artificiality” as a nation-state — its eastern and western wings separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory and its citizens divided by a variety of linguistic and cultural traditions despite a common religion — that has prevented the evolution of a coherent national identity. This, in brief, is the thrust of Dr. Shaikh’s argument.

So what’s new, one might ask. Doesn’t it sound all too familiar? Dr. Shaikh may not be breaking new ground here but it is refreshing to come across a Pakistani viewpoint that doesn’t regard the discussion of Pakistan’s legitimacy as a no-go zone. It is a sensitive issue with Pakistanis who, as Dr. Shaikh points out, believe that India still “rejects the rationale of Pakistan’s statehood even if it has been forced to accept its reality.”

At the outset, Dr. Shaikh makes clear that her book is a “work of interpretation rather than of historical research.” Even so, one is often struck by what seems like an over-interpretation of Pakistan’s identity problem. There is a tendency to conflate issues which are not directly related to identity in order to fit an argument. For example, to see Pakistan’s arms race with India purely in terms of its attempt to overcome an identity crisis is to ignore the fact that any small country can have genuine security fears vis-À-vis a big and powerful neighbour, especially if there is a history of conflict between them.

That does not, however, take away from the importance of this book. It is a work of serious scholarship dealing with some of the most important issues that have shaped Pakistan and which, if not resolved, can have consequences for its future.

 

[Fighter]

The point is that you are not able to find your identity within your land. You need to look out to search for your identity. You are not even able to decide what identity you want. I mentioned some of them in an earlier post.

Now this is really stupid.
Why is that our id is only to be found outside of pakistan.

I have read some Pakistanis claim that they are willing to let the whole of Pakistan burn for a grain of sand of Arabia! Many of you claim ancestry from invaders and look down on the native born Pakistanis (they are Ajalaf to the invader Asharaf). You look for leadership from all over the place, Turkey, Malaysia, Saudis, almost anyone will do.

You read a lot my friend. But its me you are reading about.
You better believe this.

To say that there is no identity crisis in Pakistan is being ignorant or stubborn. Just try to read up on many acclaimed Pakistani writers.

So now i am stubborn.
I guess we found our lost id

 

[Vinod2070]

Now this is really stupid.
Why is that our id is only to be found outside of pakistan.

You are supposed to answer this.

You read a lot my friend. But its me you are reading about.
You better believe this.

Believe what?

So now i am stubborn.
I guess we found our lost id

Whatever makes you happy. :113:

 

[Fighter]

Daredevil
I have read it.
It fails to explain the id crisis.
Sorry.

 

[Ray]

Mussalman,

It was never your land.

I will not get into the genetic issues since it will cause controversies, fuelled by day dreams and fudge.

The Mughals were never Pakistanis, if indeed you wish to allude to them as the Emperors of India. Babur was the descendant of Chegiz Khan and Timur Lame. And anyway Bombay was under the Marathas.

It is fashionable to claim Arabic descent, but then a DNA test is adequate to establish where exactly one is from and to which community one originally belonged to!

 

[Daredevil]

Daredevil
I have read it.
It fails to explain the id crisis.
Sorry.

Well, if you feel ignorance is bliss, you are more than welcome mate.

 

[Fighter]

You are supposed to answer this.

Okay then.
Our id is within pakistan and never will be found outside.
End of story.
Its that simple but i guess you wont understand this.
You guys tend to make things way complicated than needed.

Whatever makes you happy. :113:

Really . New tones from india. :Laie_39:
I guess there is hope after all.

 

[Vinod2070]

Being in denial does not mean that the issue is resolved. Else Ostrich will be ruling the world now.

 

[Fighter]

Well, if you feel ignorance is bliss, you are more than welcome mate.

I have always believed in knowledge.

 

[Vinod2070]

It is fashionable to claim Arabic descent, but then a DNA test is adequate to establish where exactly one is from and to which community one originally belonged to!

I think it is out of fashion now. Especially after Israel has been rubbing the Arab nose to the ground for decades.

I strongly suspect that this is the reason why some Pakistanis suddenly woke up to the IVC. They needed a new identity.

 

[Fighter]

Being in denial does not mean that the issue is resolved. Else Ostrich will be ruling the world now.

What are you talking about.
So now you know me better than me. strange.

 

[Vinod2070]

What are you talking about.
So now you know me better than me. strange.

Well, I am living closer to Pakistan than you.

In this information age, we can all learn about each other without being physically present. Everything that I am saying has a basis, not just speculation. Most of the times, it is based on Pakistani writings. No point in denying the obvious.

 

[Fighter]

Mussalman,

It was never your land.

I will not get into the genetic issues since it will cause controversies, fuelled by day dreams and fudge.

The Mughals were never Pakistanis, if indeed you wish to allude to them as the Emperors of India. Babur was the descendant of Chegiz Khan and Timur Lame. And anyway Bombay was under the Marathas.

It is fashionable to claim Arabic descent, but then a DNA test is adequate to establish where exactly one is from and to which community one originally belonged to!

Yes it was our land .
Sorry to break this news to you.

WE ARE NOT ARABS . WE ARE NOT ARABS . WE ARE NOT ARABS
END OF STORY

 

[Fighter]

Well, I am living closer to Pakistan than you.

In this information age, we can all learn about each other without being physically present. Everything that I am saying has a basis, not just speculation. Most of the times, it is based on Pakistani writings. No point in denying the obvious.

It not the obvious.
A lot of things you will know better than me because you live closer to pak.
But we are talking id here.
I ought to know better about this matter right.
If you say no to this there is something really wrong with you.

 

[Vinod2070]

It not the obvious.
A lot of things you will know better than me because you live closer to pak.
But we are talking id here.
I ought to know better about this matter right.
If you say no to this there is something really wrong with you.

Not right! I have found that many foreigners may know more about India than most Indians. It depends on how well read they are, what is their learning ability and how much they want to learn, not where they are born.

So, a Pakistani may know more than me about certain aspects of India and I may know more than most Pakistani about certain aspects of Pakistan.

 

[Fighter]

Not right! I have found that many foreigners may know more about India than most Indians. It depends on how well read they are, what is their learning ability and how much they want to learn, not where they are born.

So, a Pakistani may know more than me about certain aspects of India and I may know more than most Pakistani about certain aspects of Pakistan.

But pakistanis wont know indian id better than indians no matter how educated they are.
Because id is not about education.

But i guess indians know pak id better than pakistanis.
It must be your new high tech spy satellites that you are using looking into the minds of pakistanis.