Past in Perspective.

'The Pakistan Movement started when the first Muslim put his foot on the soil of Sindh, the Gateway of Islam in India.'

Muhammad Bin Qasim is a central figure in the history of Pakistan, invoked by the leaders of Pakistan Movement in the past and still quoted as the first Pakistani in our national curriculums today. The story of his conquest of Sindh as the origins of Islam in the sub-continent reifies the idea of Muslim foreignness to the land, cultures, religions, histories of the sub-continent. Pakistan then enters into the picture as the preserver of this alienness. The story of Muhammad Bin Qasim's conquest, however, is rife with historical inaccuracies. Perhaps the only available historical source of this conquest is the text of Chachnama. The text has originally been believed to be translated from Arabic to Persian by a thirteenth century scholar Ali Kofi. However, Manan Ahmed has recently argued in his book how Kofi wrote the text on his own and invented the story of its translation from the Arabic source in order to give...