The making of nations: religion or ethnicity

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For Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father, it was clear that the country he was founding would not be an Islamic state. He said so in a speech given on August 11, 1947, three days before being sworn in as the country's first governor general. He had campaigned to create a country in which British India's Muslim population, then numbering about 100 million, could live comfortably and follow their distinct culture. That would not have been possible in an independent India in which those of Hindu religion will be in a large majority.

He seemed not to have given much attention to ethnicity which would – and in Pakistan's case did – stand in the way of nation building. He himself belonged to a small ethnic group called the Khojas which was largely based in Karachi. Small commercial activities were their main occupation.

Once Pakistan came into being, he thought that its creation would bring together and become a nation using the same language. That would be Urdu spoken by a minority of British India's Muslim population. About 3 to 4 million of this group, left their homes in what was now independent India and went to Karachi, chosen by Jinnah to be the new country's capital. Another 4 million went to the province of Punjab, occupying the land tilled by Sikh farmers who had migrated to India.

On his first and only visit to Dhaka, the capital of what was then called Pakistan's eastern wing, he suggested that Urdu would be Pakistan's national language. That was not acceptable to the Bengalis who lived in that part of Pakistan. They believed that Bengali, their language, was richer than Urdu. Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Bengali and poetry and prose.

Urdu was not Jinnah's language either. It was the language of some 4 to 5 million Muslims who left their homes in what was now independent India and headed for Pakistan. The decision was taken after Hindu-Muslim riots in their neighbourhoods had taken tens of thousands of lives. Most of the people belonging to this ethnic group went to Karachi and easily dominated the native Sindhis of the city.

The refugees had the skills that the new government and economy needed. Another 4 million Muslims left India and went to the Pakistani part of the province of Punjab, taking the land that had been tilled by the Sikh farmers ever since the British tapped the system of Indus rivers to irrigate the virgin land of the area. The Sikhs had lived in these areas even since the founding of their religion.

The Bengalis refused to accept domination by the people of the country's western wing. They first campaigned for autonomy and when that was denied to them, they bitterly fought a civil war to win independence which they won aided by India. The Pakistani general in charge of his country's forces in East Pakistan laid down his arms and was arrested along with 90,000 of its soldiers and taken to India as prisoners of war. The POWs were released when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, on taking over as Pakistan's prime minister, signed with Indira Gandhi, his Indian counterpart, what came to be known as the Shimla agreement, named after the hill city where the two leaders met.

The question I explore in this article is whether religion can overcome ethnic differences. To find an answer, I will briefly discuss the developing situation in two Muslim countries in the Middle East and South Asia – Syria and Afghanistan. Both are divided into several small groups, each jealously guarding their separate ways.

Talban now rule Afghanistan from Kabul, after taking over the government when the twice democratically elected President Ashraf Ghani escaped from the country's capital and finally landed in the UAE. That was on August 13, 2022. Ghani's departure allowed the Taliban to enter the presidential palace and establish an Islamic state.

Taliban's interpretation of Islam follows the one practised in Saudi Arabia. The world 'Taliban' in Arabic means 'students'. It now refers to the young men who were educated in the madrassas set up by Pakistan with the help of the Saudis. This was done to educate hundreds of thousands of Afghans who settled in neighbouring Pakistan, having escaped the fighting in Afghanistan between the Soviet troops and a group of Islamic fighters called the mujahidin. Moscow had sent in its troops in 1979 to keep the Communist regime they had established in Kabul from falling.

I met with then President of Pakistan Ziaul Haq after his prime minister Muhammad Khan Junejo had negotiated the Geneva accord which called for the exit of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan. "The reason I dismissed Junejo was not because of some trivial differences about the manning of the President's House as was generally rumored. He didn't accept my advice that Moscow should not to be pushed out of Afghanistan before a governing set-up had been set up.

In the absence of such a plan, the mujahidin groups would fall on each other and result would be chaos." That is exactly what happened. The infighting led to the rise of the Taliban who are now using their interpretation of Islamic modes of governance to put in a place a system of governance that has limited personal freedoms, especially for women. Taliban are also not tolerant of the communities that are different from them in terms of ethnicity and the way they practise Islam.

Syria is the other Muslim nation that is attempting to set up a system of governance that would cater to the needs of its diverse people. But it is faced with a different problem. We are likely to see the Sunni-Shia conflict reemerge in Syria as that country defines the way it would like to serve its very diverse people.

King Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow on December 5, 2024, was expelled as the rebels representing different, mostly religious groups, advanced towards Damascus, the country's capital. Ahmed el-Sharaa, who is now the interim president in the government that took office on March 1, had made a name for himself by espousing Islamic extremism aligned with Sunni beliefs.

His followers are now hitting the Alawites, a Shia community who supported President Bashar al-Assad. The recent attack was on the residents in the coastal village of Fahil, reflecting the often-fatal undercurrents roiling Syria. As one newspaper account put it, "sectarian fault lines, cut deeply across the slopes below Fahil, where hillside roads lead to Sunni communities on the Palins below."