.

Kamal Alam June 3rd, 2015 Since Pakistan’s founding, religion, namely Islam, has fundamentally defined its political affairs. Despite this reality, however, Pakistan has historically accommodated its rich and long-standing history of Buddhist and mystic cultures, both of which predate the arrival of Islam around 720 CE. Indeed, for the first few decades of its existence, Pakistan was largely tolerant of its religious minority groups. Since the 1980s, however, a more stringent political Sunni-Islam, imported from Saudi Arabia, has come to replace Pakistan’s culturally tolerant version of the faith. The rise of this new form of Islam was a product of a political alliance between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that began in the 1970s. As a result of this relationship, Pakistan’s various religious and ethnic groups, particularly Christians and Shi’as, have been the victims of increasing attacks in the country. How Pakistan’s Regional Politics Bred Sectarianism Following the struggle ...

NADEEM F. PARACHA   —  UPDATED   A DAY AGO Modern cultural historians have usually defined the 1970s as being one of the most implosive decades of the 20th century. Their fascination with the 1970s has continued to this day — they describe the era as a period in modern history in which various contemporary ideologies of the left and the right fought their most decisive battles. The 1970s were no different in Pakistan as well. Flamboyant and edgy, here too, the prominent veneer of freewheeling cultural brashness and populism of the decade finally mutated and triggered social profligacy and economic downturns that (by the late 1970s) eventually gave way (around the world) to the emergence of starker forces of the ‘New Right’. Who, in turn, would go on to redefine global politics and society from the 1980s onwards. The cultural and political flamboyance of the 1970s eventually collapsed on itself. Incidentally (and rather aptly), the 1970s in P...