Pakistan

History Prior to Independence

The Pakistan region was populated by members of the Pashtun ethnic group as early as 2000 BCE, though their origins have yet to be fully documented. What is now Pakistan was the region that was for many centuries the gateway to the Indian subcontinent for invading armies, traders, and explorers from the west, including the Aryans in 1500 BCE and Alexander the Great and his Greek armies in the fourth century BCE. Islam came to the region as early as the eighth century CE through traders and pirs, wandering Sufi mystics, and some units of the Umayyad dynasty. The Umayyads did not achieve great success in Islamicizing the region, but the settlements that remained following their retreat slowly made progress and gained assistance from the 10th-century Turkish and Afghani conquests. From the 12th through the 16th century, the region was governed by Islamic Turko-Afghan dynasties, which imposed taxes known as jizya on non-Muslims and oppressed the Hindus who constituted the majority of the population.

The high point of Muslim rule in the subcontinent came with the Mughal Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. The imperial government [Page 968]allowed wandering Sufis to convert many Hindus and Buddhists to Islam while neither explicitly supporting nor prohibiting the proselytization. As the Mughal Empire declined, the British East India Company claimed substantial control over the trade routes to the subcontinent and paved the way for the British Raj—colonial rule over the entire Indian subcontinent. By the end of the Moghul Empire, a quarter of the population of the subcontinent was Muslim.

In 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand in cooperation with the Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan fixed the boundary known as the Durand Line, designating the Afghani and British spheres of influence along an imaginary border running from Chitral to Baluchistan. This action would have repercussions reaching into the 21st century, as the threshold passed through the middle of traditional Pashtun lands, thereby effectively dividing a single ethnic group into two separate nations. The area was still under tribal governance under the British (who required a buffer territory to the Russian Empire more than more subjects), and the resiliency of tribal identity would prove problematic for both countries’ attempts to create nationalist sentiment.

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