Pakistan's identity is not a product of our organic history

A returning guest and the weight of being recognised

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Shershah Khan back to Thought Behind Things, and admitting on air that when people ask him to name his favourite past guests, Shershah is one he always cites. The first conversation between them — an exchange on social analysis — went viral and pulled Shershah out of his preferred anonymity. He had been writing on Twitter under a pseudonym precisely because he did not want his identity attached to his thinking. The podcast changed that.

He is direct about the cost. “Social media actually scares me,” he tells Muzamil. Once his identity was attached to his arguments, he says, he could no longer behave like an anonymous account or a troll. The exposure forced a different posture, more careful, more responsible — and, he admits, more freighted. Muzamil names the trade-off in his own register: “With great power comes great responsibility, unfortunately.” It sets the tone for what follows. This is not a conversation about easy answers.

The principal question — can Pakistan have a modern identity at all

Muzamil sets up the principal question by describing a recent trip to Balochistan. He saw districts that looked like the stone age, then crossed a small stretch toward the Iranian border and found infrastructure and order on the other side, in a country under sanctions. The contrast left him asking why a nation-state can fracture so easily. His answer, going in, is that Pakistan has no modern identity coherent enough to hold it together. He wants to know whether one is possible, whether it has to be Muslim or Islamic, and what it could look like.

Shershah’s answer is structural rather than rhetorical. The modern identity, he says, is the citizen-identity of the centralised nation-state, and it is a Western development. It emerged in Europe from roughly the twelfth century onward as religious denominations weakened and secularised identities took their place. It became a finished political form in England, France and Germany, and was then exported through colonialism as a ready-made template. “The identity we are trying to adopt,” he says, “is not a product of our organic history. It is something that has unfortunately been forcefully imposed on us.” That sentence becomes the spine of the rest of the conversation.

Lines drawn through people who have nothing in common

From there the discussion moves to the lines themselves. Muzamil points out the obvious — Baloch populations split across Iran and Pakistan, Tajiks and Uzbeks across Central Asia, Nigerian tribes cut into three by colonial-era borders. Shershah extends the argument inward. Peshawar and the Pashtun belt, he notes, have more in common culturally, linguistically and historically with Bukhara and Herat than with Bengal. Muzamil pushes the example further: Punjab is linguistically and culturally closer to the Indian side of north India than to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Sindh sits closer to Rajasthan than to its own north.

The conclusion they arrive at together is uncomfortable but clear. The borders were not drawn along any organic seam. They were imposed, and then a population that had no shared political history was instructed to negotiate a single identity within them. “You have forced a boundary on them,” Shershah says, “and then told them, now you must decide everything among yourselves.” Of course the arguments scatter. The question Pakistan keeps asking — what is our identity — is downstream of a more basic question it refuses to ask: why was this the unit at all.

The 1950s — the constitutional debate Pakistan lost

The most striking historical claim in the conversation is about the 1950s. Shershah argues that the first fifteen years of Pakistan’s existence were the country’s most intellectually productive period. The constitutional debates of that decade involved Muslim modernists, traditional ulama, scholars who sat between the two camps, and non-Muslims — and they argued seriously with each other. “If you went back and read what they were arguing for,” he says, “the sort of things they were arguing for are unimaginable today. We have travelled very far from that constructive phase.”

He places Jinnah inside this picture too, and not as the figure most Pakistanis are taught. Jinnah, he says, was a Muslim modernist, not a secularist — a distinction the rest of the conversation depends on. And Jinnah did not want the partition that Pakistan eventually got. “Jinnah was not in favour of the Pakistan that exists today. He did not want Punjab divided.” Muzamil adds his own frustration to this: Pakistan has reduced its founding to a single face, and forgotten the dozens of others — including Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Shah Waliullah — who shaped the intellectual ground the country stood on.

Muslim modernism is not secularism

Shershah takes time here to draw a careful line. Muslim modernism, he says, begins with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, and arguably begins with him for the entire Muslim world. Its central claim is that the Quranic spirit had been forgotten by Muslims and that this is why the community had fallen behind. Sir Syed wrote in the aftermath of 1857, when Muslims had been politically subjugated and economically devastated, and his project was to negotiate with the British imperial order rather than to break from it — to synthesise the Quran with the Western sciences arriving through British India.

The crucial qualification is the one most public discussion misses. “Muslim modernists explicitly said we are not in favour of secularism,” Shershah notes. He cites Fazlur Rahman, the foremost Pakistani Muslim modernist, who died in 1988, and the Moroccan scholar Al-Jabri — both of whom argued in print that secularism was not tenable in the Muslim world. Muslim modernism is a project of internal renewal that takes the Quran’s universal ethical principles — social justice, equality — as its anchor and treats the inherited legal tradition with more critical distance than the traditional ulama would accept. It is not atheism. It is not Western liberalism. It is something the Pakistani public sphere has largely forgotten how to discuss.

How the modernist–ulama dialogue collapsed

Shershah then traces the breakdown. In the early modernist period the gap between modernists and traditional ulama was narrow — they often shared teachers, they argued in the same vocabulary. By the post-colonial decades the division had hardened. Fazlur Rahman became closely associated with the Ayub Khan government, which used him to provide Quranic arguments for state policies — including media bans — that the ulama, particularly Maulana Maududi, considered both heretical and politically suspect. Once a modernist thinker became state-aligned, the rest of his work was tarred by that alignment.

The result, Shershah argues, is that Pakistan never had the sustained dialogue between modernist and traditional Islam that its constitutional moment briefly opened. Dictatorships interrupted the conversation repeatedly. “The thought process never developed,” he says. “And in the early years where the dialogue did happen, it could not be maintained.” By the time Zia ul Haq’s period closed, the camps had moved so far apart that reconciliation was no longer a serious project. Muzamil adds his own sharper framing: what survives is not philosophy at all but politics. “The actual fundamental philosophy is over. Now it is largely political camps and power groups.”

The contradiction at the centre of the Islamic-state argument

Muzamil takes the floor for an extended passage here, and the argument he makes is worth sitting with. If the religious clergy genuinely wants an Islamic state, he says, it will have to surrender its current independent power. Pakistan’s religious infrastructure — the mosques, the seminaries, the networks — operates independently of the state. An actual top-down Islamic state would, by definition, regulate that infrastructure and dramatically reduce its autonomy. You cannot, he argues, want an Islamic state and also want to keep all your existing leverage outside the state’s reach. “You can’t have a bit of both — we want an Islamic state that is top-down Islamic, but only when I personally am the one at the top making the decisions.”

He goes further: in a properly constituted Islamic state the multiplicity of definitions would have to collapse into one. No sects. No competing local interpretations. From Khyber to Karachi, each district has its own working definition of what Islam is and what Pakistan is, and the system is run on the resulting confusion. A genuine Islamic state, he argues, would be ruthless toward exactly the clergy that is loudest in calling for it. The argument exposes a contradiction the political-religious right in Pakistan has not honestly faced.

The real problem is the organising power of the modern state

Shershah’s response reframes the entire conflict. The problem Muzamil is naming, he says, is not really a problem with people holding different opinions. It is a problem with the organising power of the modern state. Pre-modern sultanates contained enormous internal diversity — different sects, different schools of jurisprudence, different communities all living next to each other — because the sultanate barely tried to regulate ordinary life. People practised their religion and their culture as they had inherited it.

The modern state is different in kind. “You have a centralised entity that is trying to regulate literally every movement of your life,” he says. Surveillance, mandatory education, economic productivity, a single legal framework — all of it converges on the demand that the people inside the border negotiate one identity. Disagreement was tolerable when there was no state apparatus insisting on consensus. The modern state cannot tolerate it, and so the arguments scatter to the extremes. “If we removed the centralising organising power of the modern state from the equation and let people live on a more horizontal plane,” he says, “I think you would find this much more acceptable.” The conflict is not between traditions. It is between traditions and the state form trying to flatten them.

Why other Muslim countries seem more at peace

Muzamil pushes on a contrast that bothers him. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Middle East, Central Asia — none of them seem trapped in the kind of identity crisis Pakistan is permanently inside. He recounts his own visit to Saudi Arabia, where the cultural framework struck him not as oppressive but as deliberately simple: men in white, women in black, both empowered, both moving through their day without sexualising the public square. He read it as a society that had a coherent starting point and was building from there.

He extends the same charity to Afghanistan. He is careful here — both of them note that this is the kind of observation that can be misread — but his point is structural rather than ideological. “Afghanistan has one starting point,” he says, “and they are solving that problem based on logic.” The Taliban era, in his framing, may carry enormous local costs, but the country at least has a unified frame within which to work. Pakistan has twenty-five crore people arguing from incompatible starting points, and so it cannot accelerate in any direction. Shershah agrees that Afghanistan is more culturally homogenous than Pakistan, and that the Durand Line, drawn through what was historically one cultural space, is a clean example of the imposition they have been describing.

Can Pakistan still host the hard conversations

Toward the end Muzamil asks whether Pakistan can still host the difficult conversations — not the blasphemy questions, which he sets aside, but the broader set of questions about identity, modernity and coexistence that the country once debated openly. Shershah’s answer is honest and bleak. “On the tough questions, unfortunately, the answer is no. And as much as I hate to say it, it makes me sad.” He notes that even within his own close circle of friends — people who read history and discuss these questions privately — there are subjects they cannot put on Twitter or YouTube, and which they cannot organise public sessions around.

He adds that Pakistan today feels more politically fractured than it has in his memory. Non-political entities controlling things, religious actors pushing in particular directions, an inability to host sustained intellectual debate in public — these have combined to produce what he calls a fractured state. Muzamil partly disagrees: he argues Pakistan has been politically fractured since independence, run not by its political class but by a bureaucracy that inherited British administrative power and never had to face the people it administered. For ordinary Pakistanis, he says, very little structurally changed at partition — the same officer, the same landlord, the same system, only without a white face at the top.

The third republic and the inevitability of consensus

By the end of the conversation Muzamil offers his most optimistic frame. He recounts a discussion with a former chief economist of the Planning Commission who described Pakistan as moving into its third republic. The first ran from 1947 to 1971 and ended when half the country broke away. The second ran from the 1973 constitution through to roughly 2023, sustained by a settled set of stakeholders. The third, he argues, is being born now — because the masses, with private media and the internet, have become a stakeholder in their own right and have begun to dream of a different country.

His final argument is that the consensus Shershah keeps pointing to is not something Pakistan needs to manufacture through discussion. It is something the new political reality will eventually force. “The consensus is an inevitability,” he says. The old Pakistan is not coming back. A new one is being demanded. The smart move, he tells listeners, is not to chase any single political party’s version of that new country, but to recognise that the underlying redesign — of what stakeholders want, of what they will tolerate, of what they expect a state to be for — is already underway. Whether that redesign produces the modern Muslim Pakistani identity the episode set out to define is a question neither host nor guest will answer. The honest position, by the end of the conversation, is that the question itself is now finally open.