The Ideological Struggle for Pakistan

Since its inception in 1947, the idea of Pakistan has been a contested one. Today, Pakistan faces a militant Islamist threat that its elected government is trying to combat in fractious collaboration with the army. As the country finds itself on the defensive against an array of groups claiming to wave the banner of Islam, it must counter their ideology decisively. This assessment of the struggle for Pakistan’s identity, from its birth to the present day, provides a political and cultural understanding of the role and use of Islam in Pakistan’s evolution.

Author Ziad Haider, a Pakistani scholar, shows clearly how Pakistan’s viability as a state depends in large part on its ability to develop a new and progressive Islamic narrative. He identifies the key questions: How can religion in Pakistan be channeled as a force for progressive change, and what form should an enabling narrative of Islam in Pakistan assume? As the United States becomes more involved in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we shall need deeper understanding of both countries. This portrait of Pakistan is a valuable contribution to that endeavor.

Ziad Haider is a Zuckerman Fellow and a MPA/JD candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Georgetown University Law Center.

Ziad Haider is a J.D. and Masters in Public Policy candidate at Georgetown Law and the Harvard Kennedy School. He previously served as foreign policy advisor to Senator Chris Dodd, professional staff on the House Committee on Homeland Security, and as a research analyst at the Henry L. Stimson Center’s South Asia program. He was an American Society of International Law Fellow at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, where he researched governance reforms in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Haider has appeared as an expert commentator in Newsweek, the Associated Press, and Al Jazeera and has written in the Asian Survey, Far Eastern Economic Review, DAWN (Karachi), and Indian Express (New Delhi), among others. A Fulbright Scholar in Southeast Asia, he received his B.A. from Yale and is fluent in Urdu and proficient in Mandarin and French.