Comment South Asia? Middle East? Pakistan: Location, Identity

Abstract

Whenever some ministry or department of the Government of Pakistan organises an event for the benefit of foreigners – officials, tourists or investors – it publishes brochures and flyers which claim, proudly, that Pakistan is located at a particularly important and profitable geographical location, at the confluence of at least three (but occasionally four) civilisations or regional groupings. This publicity material talks about Pakistan’s historic and ancestral links with the Muslim world in West Asia (or the Gulf or Middle East) as part of a larger Islamic and Muslim civilisation and identity, both historical and contemporary, and also includes a second region, that of the Central Asian Republics, many of which also have ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’ markers and have belonged to a much broader Islamic civilisation of some centuries ago. The third region to which Pakistan is also claimed to belong – for which the term ‘civilisation’ would cause great problems for the officials who write such publicity blurbs, and hence is not used – is that of South Asia, a name primarily for a pre-partition (or, according to one view, post-independence, Greater) India, from which Pakistan was born. Both Central and West Asia have had an undeniably formative impact on this third region, now known as South Asia. Depending on the political mood of the times and on the audience e, a fourth site through which an association is claimed, is that of the ancient Chinese civilisation with references to the Silk Route, and a more contemporary relationship is also invoked with western China’s large Muslim population.