In Pakistan, I detected three schools of thought about Jinnah. The first was the official one, which declared him a great twentieth-century hero of Muslim rights, in the vein of Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The second, shared by a few brave Pakistanis and more people in the West, was that Jinnah was a vain man and a failure who unwittingly gave birth to a monstrosity of a nation that was, in turn, linked to much of the violence in Afghanistan in recent decades. The third view, though, was the most interesting, and in its way the most subversive, as well as the most informed.
In this view, Jinnah was a complex man of India, a London-Bombay intellectual, the son of a merchant from Gujarat and a Parsee from Karachi. Like Ataturk, who had grown up amid the nourishing cosmopolitan influences of Salonika (rather than amid the narrower Islamic world of Anatolia which he came to rule), Jinnah was the product of a sophisticated cultural environment, that of Greater India, and thus was at heart a secularist. Yet he believed his Muslim state was needed to protect a minority from uncertain majority rule. As misguided and politically opportunistic as this might have been, it made room for a state that, though composed mostly of Muslims, might still maintain a secular spirit, much like Ataturk’s Turkey. It would be informed by Muslim values without being necessarily ruled by Islamic law. Moreover, it might be a state with a high degree of provincial autonomy, in order to recognize the territorial-based nationalisms of the Pushtuns, Baluch, and Sindhis.
As I said, this view was the most subversive because it directly challenged what the ruling class in Islamabad—the generals and the politicians both—had turned the country into. Because Jinnah died in 1948, soon after Pakistan’s birth, it is impossible to know what the country might have evolved into had he lived longer. But one can argue that key principles of the Quaid-i-Azam have been violated. Rather than a state with a moderate sensibility, Pakistan maintained a suffocating Islamic milieu in which extremism was rewarded with political concessions, while the military and political parties jockeyed for position with one another. Alcohol was banned and girls’ schools in the rural areas were burned down. And as for autonomy, that was a myth that my meetings in Baluchistan and Sindh had made clear.
Jinnah’s tomb was like a two-dimensional stage prop, just as Pakistan itself had all the artificial trappings of a state, with its Mughal-cum-Stalinist public buildings in Islamabad. But in the eyes of many of its ethnic peoples, it still lacked political legitimacy.
“The Indian Subcontinent has produced only one liberal, secular politician, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. [Mohandas] Gandhi was just a British agent from South Africa, a reactionary with a sweet tongue. Ever since Jinnah, though, we’ve been ruled by these gangsters who serve the Punjabis—the stooges of America. You know why the Indus is so low—because the Punjabis are stealing our water upstream. Sindh is the only ancient and legitimate state in Pakistan.”
The speaker is Rasool Baksh Paleejo, a leftist Sindhi nationalist who had been imprisoned by both democratic and military governments in Pakistan. Before I met him in 2000, several people told me he was the most intelligent person in the city of Hyderabad (up the Indus, northeast of Karachi) with whom to discuss politics. In 2008, I returned to Hyderabad to see him again, to find out if his views had evolved or complexified. They hadn’t. His house stood behind high walls at the end of a road near the desert; as with the first visit, I sensed an extreme isolation. He was still a man with a lean and sculpted face, and a thick mane of white hair. His house was a seedy, tumbledown affair with broken furniture and dirt all over the carpets. A corner of the sitting room was filled with pictures of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and Najibullah, the pro-Soviet leader of Afghanistan in the 1980s. When I had met Paleejo nearly a decade ago he told me of his voluminous readings of all the great works of Marxism. When I asked him this time what he had been reading recently, he mentioned Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a controversial treatise published in 2007 claiming that excessive pro-Israeli influence has compromised American foreign policy.
He lectured me next about “criminal gangs,” “Punjabi parasites,” “imperialist pygmies,” “Bush fascists,” and “Jewish-capitalist-Taliban” who were all exploiting the Sindhi people. The mohajirs, Pushtuns, and Baluch were all “tools of America,” he said. Then his voice calmed and he talked of a golden age of Mughal rule in the early modern era. “The Mughals were not bigots. They married Hindus. They had Hindu generals. They had no home, but were at heart Turkic nomads.” He seemed to imply this was the era to which he wanted to return. If only Pakistan could disappear and dissolve into an even more pluralistic India, he rhapsodized.
Paleejo signified for me the end of the road of ethnic nationalism. He had reduced the whole world to an embittered, schematic conspiracy theory. He and the other Baluch and Sindhi nationalists I met were, ultimately, the products of a state under military rule for so long that it had allowed too little breathing space for the exchange of ideas, and thus for normal politics to take root. So instead of the give-and-take of normal politics came the hard divisions of ideology and us-versus-them irrationalities.
To be fair, military rule had not been accidental to Pakistan. Pakistan covers the desert frontier of the Subcontinent. British civilian administration extended only to Lahore, in the fertile Punjab, near Pakistan’s eastern border with India. But the rest of Pakistan—the rugged border regions of Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, the alkaline wastes of Sindh away from the Indus, and the Hindu Kush and Karakoram Mountains embracing Kashmir—has never really been subdued by the British or anyone else. Much of the area was grossly underdeveloped compared with the rest of British India, so when seven million Muslim refugees fled India to settle in this new frontier state, the role of the military, perforce, became paramount. Indeed, with tribal and ethnic identities so strong in these badlands, civilian politics when they were given a chance became a bureaucratic forum for revenge and unsavory trade-offs. Rather than barter water wells and tracts of desert as in the past, in the new state civilian politicians bartered flour mills, electricity grids, and transport systems. So the military was periodically obligated to clean house, which it pointedly failed to do, as it had emerged in its own right into a corrupt state-within-a-state, identified in the popular mind with one ethnic group, the Punjabis, thus fueling various fissiparous nationalisms.
But Pakistan had no choice now but to move beyond military rule, even if that meant, as it probably did, years and years of corrupt, ineffectual, and unstable civilian governments. For it was the very certainty of civilian rule, as unsatisfactory as it was, that had allowed for India’s gradual emergence as a stabilizing, regional behemoth. Thus, it was Pakistan—unlike the Gulf states with their enlightened and efficient family dictatorships, and India with its venerable democracy—that had an especially arduous political future ahead of it. Consequently, like the troubled state of Burma at the top of the Bay of Bengal, Pakistan—in the middle of the littoral between the Persian Gulf and India—held the key to stability in the Arabian Sea region.
Yet, like the story of Oman, the coast did not exist in isolation. You had to travel inland to learn more. The map beckoned me northward, up the Indus into the heart of Sindh.
The Indus at Thatta, east of Karachi, is one of the last places to view the river before it breaks up into a vast delta along the Pakistan-India border. Here, it is said, Alexander’s army might have rested before marching westward along the Makran coast. Just prior to the monsoon, I saw the Indus as a cracked and bleached landscape: a wide, putty-colored sea, swirling around sandbanks, deathly in color even by the standards of normal ash and cinder. It was a giver of life so joyless that heat was the only smell. Beyond Thatta, the Indus turns north for hundreds of miles, creating a densely populated river valley civilization comparable to those of the Nile and of the Tigris and Euphrates.
In Egypt, migration routes moved up and down the Nile, granting its political units stab
ility and longevity. But the rivers of Mesopotamia, in the words of the early- and mid-twentieth-century British travel writer Freya Stark, rather than “parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic” like the Nile, were “obnoxious to the predestined paths of man”—that is to say, migration routes were at a right angle to the Tigris and Euphrates, making Mesopotamia susceptible to war and invasion.19 So, too, with the Indus, which has seen many invasions. The Indus signals the western edge of the Subcontinent, from where its political unity was frequently breached by invaders coming out of the plateau and deserts of Afghanistan, Iran, and Baluchistan. It is thus a lesson in the feebleness of borders.
The Shah Jahan Mosque in Thatta bears witness to this. In 1586 the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great turned his attention to Sindh, overpowering local forces in a hard-fought battle on the Indus River. In 1593, after suffering further defeats, the Sindhi ruler of Thatta, Jani Bek, paid homage to Akbar at the emperor’s court in Lahore. Indeed, it was the conquest of Sindh that strengthened Akbar’s resolve to retake Kandahar in Afghanistan.20 The eclectic nature of the Mughal Empire, which traversed modern borders from Iran to India, is deeply evoked by this mosque, built between 1644 and 1647 by Shah Jahan, Akbar’s grandson, who also built the Taj Mahal in Agra. In the prayer halls you might imagine yourself in Isfahan or Shiraz, or even in Herat or Bukhara, so overt is the Persian and Turkic influence, with the vast variety of blue and turquoise faience and bright yellow arabesques. Then there is the austere and mathematical brick-and-mortar work, with its dazzling conches and quarter domes that are again reminiscent of the Near East and Central Asia. In this mosque you become aware of Sindh as a confection of all the desert and plateau lands to the west, from where came the invasions that had established Sindh’s unique identity in the first place. Pakistan might have been created as a reaction to India, but as a frontier zone of the Subcontinent its material culture makes it a cauldron of the Greater Middle East.
A few minutes from the Shah Jahan Mosque is the necropolis on Makli Hill: tombs from the Samma, Arghun, Tarkhan, and Mughal periods, made of sandstone and glazed bricks. These, too, were dynasties with both Turkic and Mongol blood. And yet the tombs remind one of so many similar buildings in India, demonstrating that what we think of as Indian is itself a mélange of Near Eastern cultures.* Everywhere there are brick plinths, rectangular pillars, imposing ramparts, and cracked bulbous domes. The buckling, glazed brick is peeled away in layers, like old mascara, with faint touches of milky blue. These lonely monuments appear to soar into the clouds, each occupying its own little hill. Some, with their intricate fretwork, have an almost Byzantine stateliness. Others bear the proportions and complexity of the pharaonic buildings at Karnak. All stand in majestic separation from one another amid a destitute wasteland, with garbage everywhere, like at so many historical and cultural sites in Pakistan. It is as though in the last sixty years—unlike during the dynastic centuries recounted by these tombs—there has been no state here; nothing but marauders.
The Indus turned north and I followed, through a pasty landscape smothered in dust that had been, in turn, created by the cracked mud, and which made everything appear to move in slow motion. Here was a truly antique riverine civilization: fields of wheat and rice, bananas and mango trees, and extensive date palm jungles, all sectioned by canals. There were the ubiquitous black and primordial water buffaloes, partly submerged in the mud; heartbreakingly frail donkeys pulling the most immense carts of wood, as nearby dromedaries hauled carts of bricks. Vast, seasonal encampments of Gypsies from Baluchistan and southern Punjab lined the road. They had come for the date palm harvest to make syrup and oils and other date by-products. Layered in mud, they looked no poorer than everyone else. The rice fields bore various translucent shades of lime and green, and women in garish and shimmering saris moved in statuesque formation along the embankments. Yet the scene as a whole was robbed of color because of the ashen skies that rarely culminated in rain.
The farther north I traveled away from the Arabian Sea, the hotter and more windless it became. The temperature hovered above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The homes and rest houses I entered all had air conditioners that didn’t work because of “load-shedding.” Shops and cars were plastered with photographs of Benazir and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Sindh was the stronghold of the two slain former prime ministers: the daughter killed by an assassin’s bomb and bullet in 2007; the father hung in 1979 by army dictator Zia ul-Haq. Yet these images did not necessarily denote loyalty: Many reportedly displayed the photographs and stickers out of fear that their property would be destroyed if they didn’t. The photographs were insurance against rioters, I was told.
I reached Khairpur at night. There was nothing to the east of here except the Thar Desert that traverses the border with India. Before partition Khairpur had a large Hindu population. I discovered that the Muslims here had retained the Hindu custom of touching the foot of an elder upon greeting. It was a small gesture that added much to the sense of civilization in this crowded little city. I found the people at all levels warm and intimate, even though the heat was dense and heavy like water, and the hand of the state apparently absent except as an indifferent force of nature. There were tribal and clan feuds in the region, culminating in back-and-forth revenge killings in which the belligerents were armed with assault rifles, even as running water was a rarity. The reasons for these troubles were many, but the ultimate cause was the absence of development. I thought back to Gwadar, existing as a traditional culture in idyllic isolation from a rapacious state, living handily off the commerce of the ocean. While Gwadar felt itself threatened by modernity and the state’s looming reach, by contrast interior Sindh constituted an entire civilization decaying because of overuse of resources, and so desperately required the hand of the state to help with its struggle with nature.
To the more practiced eye of William Dalrymple, a journalist, historian, and author specializing in the Subcontinent, who visited Sindh shortly after me, Sindh was actually “quieter and safer than it had been for some time.”21 Indeed, as he writes, the moderate Sufi culture of Sindh provides a mechanism for combating the religious extremism of other parts of Pakistan. The scholar André Wink concurs, noting that Sindh was historically a refuge for “ ‘dissidents’ and ‘freethinkers’ ” such as the Ismailis.22 And as the Baluch and Sindhi separatist leaders never tired of telling me, theirs were essentially secular movements that owed nothing to Muslim orthodoxy.
All true, and yet my overall impression of Pakistan on this trip, taken near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency in the United States, was one of neglect and threatening state failure. I had been here near the beginning of the Bush presidency, eight years earlier, and now could identify barely any progress in the intervening years. Because Pakistan and its stability had figured so prominently in Bush’s foreign policy, the lack of improvement here constituted an indictment of his strategy, and an indictment of the diversion of resources to Iraq, a war I had supported early on. To be sure, I did not have to come to Pakistan to realize something so obvious. After all, I had been to both Iraq and Afghanistan periodically over the years, and reported on the chaos in both places. But to see such failure face-to-face, to see how vulnerable Pakistan was to upheaval after a hiatus of eight years, was to be faced with more unarguable facts.
To travel through Pakistan was to realize in a very palpable and visual sense how the United States could not possibly be in control of such broad historical processes as the future of an urbanized society of 172 million half a world away. Yet as the globe’s preponderant power, America had the responsibility of at least trying to help wherever it could. In fact, America was heavily engaged in Afghanistan and Pakistan because of its own naked interests, following the attacks of September 11, 2001. But were the United States to sufficiently help stabilize Afghanistan in the years to come, that would only allow for the integration of the Indian Ocean–Central Asian region through energy pipelines, which would ultimately benefit China more
than the U.S. In other words, the Gwadar port project may demonstrate more about the geopolitical world that awaits us than the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
The nearby ruins of the Bronze Age city of Moenjodaro (“The Mound in Front of” the Indus) stand as both a rebuke and a summation to everything around them. That Moenjodaro represented wealth and perfection in its age was a further reminder of the grim, poverty-stricken character of Indus valley civilization today—even as the ruins highlight the very agelessness of this valley and, therefore, its potential for regeneration. The square and oval shapes imprinted on bricks everywhere on the site declare a stunning geometrical flawlessness. Moenjodaro and Harappa farther upstream constituted the two major cities of Harappan civilization. Joseph A. Tainter, an American anthropologist and historian, describes Harappan culture as a “highly centralized society in which the state controlled many facets of daily living—milling grain, manufacturing bricks and mass producing pottery, obtaining firewood, and building residences.”23 In a slightly different interpretation, the historian of South Asia Burton Stein posits that Harappan cities like Moenjodaro were the core of “complex chieftaincies rather than unified states,” and that each city was the “gateway” to an agrarian hinterland.24 In any case, hard borders probably did not exist as they do now, even as a vast region from Baluchistan to Gujarat—that is, from southern Afghanistan to northwestern India—was united.
A series of excavations at Moenjodaro throughout the course of the twentieth century revealed about 120,000 square yards of an intricate dun and roseate maze-work of wafer-thin baked brick dating back nearly five thousand years, forming houses, streets, and canals. This represented only 10 percent of the ancient city near the banks of the Indus, possibly the largest city of its time in the world, twice the area of Roman London.25 In the dark and humble museum, where I escaped momentarily from the heat, the faces of the figurines bear a distinct Sumerian look, with cropped beards and slitted eyes. A portion of the Sumer people had migrated here from Mesopotamia across the Iranian plateau and Baluchistan desert around 4500 B.C.26
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