I was in Rawalpindi for my summer holidays in 1977 when General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew the elected government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and imposed martial law in Pakistan. ![]() It was as an undergraduate at Wellesley College that understanding the causes of Pakistan’s recurrent spells of military rule and the uses made of Islam by the state to govern a federally disparate and inequitable nation-state became an intellectual preoccupation. The events of 1971, which ended with Pakistan’s military defeat by India and the creation of Bangladesh, demolished the most cherished truths of official Pakistani nationalism and left a profound mark on my development as a historian. As a high school student in the cosmopolitan setting of Manhattan during the civil war in East Pakistan, I could not reconcile the narratives of Pakistan’s official nationalism with daily media reports of atrocities perpetrated by the national army and its auxiliaries against the Bengali population of the eastern wing. Ever since my formative teen years in New York City, the trials and tribulations of this self-styled Muslim homeland have sparked my curiosity and led me to ask questions for which there were no easy answers. ![]() Pakistan for me is more than just a place of origin.
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