History Taught In Pakistan

[acharya]

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Pakhistory.com used to be hosted as "geocities sub domain" and now we've purchased this domain and any future updates will happen here. Much of the writings in the Pakistan History section are based on 'Historical Background of Pakistan and its People', is written by Ahmed Abdullah and edited by K. Hasan.

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These are just some of the links and sources that show how extremists and Brahmin extremists of South Asia have tried to distort South Asian history and mislead people of South Asia and the world with wrong and false information. Their lies have been exposed and now it's time for people to find out the truth.



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Changes in History teaching in Pakistan:



There is increasing evidence that changes in history teaching in Pakistan were being matched with changes inside India after 1971. The western institution and think tanks ; probably are involved in this change in both countries. University of Nebraska had a program to change the curriculum of Afghanistan text books after 1980 to make Russians as enemies during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally AH Nayyar a Pakistani commentator said 'The fact of the matter is that jihad by sword came into not only Pakistani textbooks but Afghan textbooks as well, only because the US wanted it so. He said the task of putting jihad into textbooks in Afghanistan(and prob. Pakistan) was given to a University of Nebraska department in the Cold War years'. He said 'the same University of Nebraska entity has now been instructed by the President Bush's wife to take charge of getting jihad OUT of Pakistani(actually Afghan-corrected) textbooks.' At least one education program the U.S. did sponsor probably did little to break the culture of violence that envelops children here from an early age.



The Agency for International Development paid the University of Nebraska $50 million over eight years, from 1986 to 1994, to produce educational materials for Afghan primary- and secondary-school students. But texts on a range of subjects were highly politicized and often had a militaristic overtone, Tom Gouttierre, director of the university’s Center for Afghan Studies in Omaha, now concede. Some questions prodded students to tackle basic math by counting dead Russians and Kalashnikov rifles. In addition to arming such groups for hitech jihad, the United States became directly involved in their indoctrination process. Between 1986 and 1992, USAID underwrote the printing of explicitly violent Islamist textbooks for elementary school children. The University of Nebraska, Omaha (UNO), oversaw this $50 million contract with the Education Center for Afghanistan (ECA), a group jointly appointed by the seven mujahideen organizations that the ISI and CIA had taken under their wing. With this money, the Peshawar-based ECA published a series of first- through sixth-grade textbooks whose recurrent theme was the promotion of Islam through violence.



The education changes in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1980 may considered as social engineering projects and may be one of largest ever done in history. This social engineering resulted in a steady stream of Islamic jihad militants for the next 25 years that it has changed the world as never before. India has been the biggest targeted country due to the effects of this social engineering.





Taking rather a different tack than Dr.Seuss, these USAID-funded books instructed children that, in the Persian alphabet, Alif is for Allah, Jim is for Jihad, and Shin is for Shakir, adding that “Shakir conducts jihad with the sword. God becomes happy with the defeat of the Russians.” Third- and fifth grade books depicted automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and tanks. A fourth grade mathematics text noted that “the speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second,” and then asked students, If a Russian is at a distance of 3,200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.

One of the two official views of history also causes problems for the study of History in Pakistan. This view popularized by Dr Ahmad Dani locates Pakistan as part of a Central Asian historical and cultural entity, rather than within India/South Asia. In the first decade after Pakistan's independence, Pakistan considered its history to be part of a larger India's, a common history, a joint history, and in fact Indian textbooks were in use in the syllabus in Pakistan.



However, this changed in the early 1960s when Ayub Khan's government wanted to create a 'History of Pakistan' independent and separate from that of India's. The historians who were given this task attempted to 'take out' Pakistan from Indian history and just look at Pakistan without India. This gave rise to the writing of a Pakistani history disassociated from an Indian past and links were established with Central Asia. All the association with the Indian history has been negated or totally omitted.



It is very clear, that in Pakistan, it is 'Muslim history' that is being taught, and not 'Indian history'. In fact, this Muslim history, as we argue above, is perceived to be a Pakistani history dating from 712 AD. This has major repercussions on what is taught and the way it is taught. For example, since there is a Muslim history and there are courses and subjects called 'The Freedom Movement' which looks at the struggle for an independent Pakistan - the seeds of which according to some historians were sown in 712 AD, but for others in 1857 - seems to overlook the colonial period entirely and treats the Freedom Struggle as a struggle from Hindu domination, not colonial rule.



In none of the curricula studied, did we find a single course on British India, or on colonialism; the period after 1857 is seen as the beginning of the Pakistan Movement and of the Freedom Struggle. From the 'Muslim' period, we move on to the 'Struggle for Pakistan'. In essence, the Freedom Movement is shown to be a movement for the freedom of Muslims in India, but not of India from colonialism. What is interesting, though not at all surprising, is that post-independence modern India, is not taught as part of the history syllabus in Pakistan. For that matter, nor is there a course on the history of modern Pakistan, since both of these countries in this era, are treated under politics.



Interestingly enough, teachers at the University of Karachi's international relations department said that as late as 1989, the term 'South Asia' was "banned" in the department, since it was considered too 'pro-India' and was thought to be a part of an India-centric thinking. South Asia as a subject was introduced only after a democratic government took over in 1988-89 after the death of General Ziaul Haq.



One objective of change in Pakistani text book is to create an benign Islamic political history of the Mogul period in the sub-continent so that there is no antipathy towards the Muslim culture and Muslim people by the non-Muslims in the sub-continent. For the Muslims when a Islamic political history is glorified and is a continuum of the larger pan Islamic history; it energizes the Muslim community and unifies them over any political/ethnic differences. Pakistan after 1971 was rocked by decussating by Baloch and Sindh and unrest. The change in the education was to bring a common Muslim history to bind the provinces. This process was a way for creation of a sub-continent Muslim ruling class accepted by all the people in the sub-continent in the long run.



The assumption here is that non-Muslim population will loose their Hindu attributes and blend with the Muslims in the long run and accept their hegemony. For 30 years in its 55-year history, Pakistan has had governments that were run by the military or put into office and sustained by the military. It is not a matter of surprise that the government-textbook connection has developed into a military-textbook bond. This started in the 1970s when a former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, introduced a full two-year course on the ‘Fundamentals of War’ and ‘Defense of Pakistan’ for Class XI and XII respectively.



In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code. Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.



During that time of Soviet occupation, regional military leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country. They demanded that the primers contain anti-Soviet passages. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders. "I think we were perfectly happy to see these books trashing the Soviet Union," said Chris Brown, head of book revision for AID's Central Asia Task Force. AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996.





In the ‘Fundamentals of War’ themes like objects and causes, conduct, nature, modern weapons, operations, ethics, war and modern warfare were thoroughly discussed. The ‘Defense of Pakistan’ dealt with Pakistan’s defense problems, economy and defense, foreign policy, military heritage, the role of its armed forces during peace and the qualities of military leadership. There was a military science group for intermediate students, which consisted of war, military history, economics of war, military geography, defense of Pakistan and special military studies as subjects.



General Ayub Khan abolished history from the school system, and got official textbooks prepared for history students at the university level. Between 1960 and 1980 the students read no history at all for the first 12 years of their studies.[ why from 1960 the year Indian movies were banned in Pakistan ] Instead, they were taught a newly invented subject called "Social Studies", which was an uneven and coarse amalgam of bits of civics, geography, religion, economics and history. During the 13th and 14th years (undergraduate period) they read a history book prepared by the government. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's regime did not make any change in this scheme.



General Ziaul Haq promoted the destruction of history with unswerving determination. In the name of a debatable patriotism and a supposititious ideology he made his control over history writing and teaching complete, arbitrary, coercive and totalitarian. He (1) subjected all textbooks of Social Studies to the scrutiny and approval of the Federal Ministry of Education, i.e., a group of civil servants, (2) created a new subject of "Pakistan Studies"; made it compulsory for all undergraduates in arts, sciences, medicine and engineering, and all graduates in law; and got a special textbook prepared for it by several committees and panels of experts working in close collaboration (the result was not even bad history), and (3) dictated that all these books must meet the requirements of an ideology (he did not call it Islam), of which he was the sole definer, judge and perpetrator.



Ahmed Salim and A.H. Nayyar have compiled a 140-page report on ‘The State of Curriculum and Textbooks in Pakistan’. The Report is nothing short of a sneak preview of how our Ministry of Education is preparing five and seventeen year old Pakistanis for ‘jihad’. To be certain, the ‘themes of ‘jihad’ and ‘shahadat’ clearly distinguish the pre- and post-1979 educational contents. There was no mention of these in the pre-Islamisation period curricula and textbooks, while the post-1979 curricula and textbooks openly eulogize ‘jihad’ and ‘shahadat’ and urge students to become ‘mujahids’ and martyrs. The official Curriculum Document, Primary Education, Class K-V specifically prescribes ‘simple stories to urge ‘jihad’.’ Under ‘Activity 4’, the prescription for three and eight-year old Pakistanis is: ‘To make speeches on ‘jihad’ and ‘shahadat’.’



Urdu Curriculum (First Language) for Classes IV and V, National Bureau of Curriculum and Textbooks, Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan sets the following objective: ‘Stories: eight lessons; folk tales, mythical, moral, Islamic, travel, adventure and ‘jihad’.’ Textbook writers are officially directed that ‘a feeling be created among students that they are the members of a Muslim nation. Therefore, in accordance with the Islamic tradition, they have to be truthful, honest, patriotic and life-sacrificing ‘mujahids’.’ A specific ‘suggestion on preparing textbooks’ for Class V is: ‘Simple stories to incite for ‘jihad’.’



Urdu Curriculum (first and second language) for Classes VI-VIII, National Bureau of Curriculum and Textbooks, Ministry of Education, instructs teachers that students ‘must be made aware of the blessings of ‘jihad’...’ and that teachers must ‘create yearning for ‘jihad’ in their hearts.’

The authors say :



Our curriculum still equates Islam, Pakistan and ‘jihad’. We are still ‘inspiring’ our children to become guerrilla fighters. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan still insists on making her children ‘aware of the blessings of ‘jihad’, to ‘make speeches on ‘jihad’ ‘, to ‘create a yearning for ‘jihad’ ‘, to ‘love and aspire for ‘jihad’.



Stephen Cohen ( Brookings Institution) Quote : By 2001 The Pakistan history and identity was being contested once again. Although Army had been able to impose its vision of the state other ideas exist for what Pakistan should be. The important clash inside Pakistan is not a civilization clash between Muslims and non-Muslims but a clash between different concepts of Islam, particularly how Pakistan should implement its Islamic identity.

Currently there is a movement to eulogize Allama Iqbal the poet during the pre-independence movement as the ideologue of Pakistan to replace Jinnah the Father of the nation. This clearly shows a deep search once again for a reason for the creation of Pakistan by the elite and they have been able to change the debate inside the country to suit their objective. There is a great debate on nationalism and Islamic ummah concept and what does Pakistan stands for.



Pakistan Studies, like most area studies, came into being at a time of crisis. The political and military upheavals of 1971 forced a rethinking of national life, which seems to have led to the conclusion that there was a need to study Pakistani society so as to contribute to our national cohesion.

In 1973, therefore, a university department of Pakistan Studies was established at the Islamabad (later Quaid-e-Azam) University. By 1976 a comprehensive programm for the promotion of the field was chalked out. Several centers were established, and curricula were developed for the secondary level. In 1978 Pakistan Studies was made compulsory up to the bachelor level. Since then knowledge of Pakistan affairs has been examined in tests and interviews for jobs in practically all government departments. The institutional framework for the growth and development of the discipline is furnished by a 1976 act under which was established the National Institute of Pakistan Studies at the Quaid-e-Azam University in 1983.



Pakistan Studies has its cognitive, practical and affective aspects. Cognitively, its main purpose is to promote knowledge of the individual about himself, his country, and the world around him. In its affective aspect, Pakistan Studies is intended to help socialize him to national life and inculcate patriotism and confidence in the future of Pakistan. The field is thus an instrument to create love and loyalty for Pakistan, and thus in the long run produce better policymakers and administrators.



The greatest threat to Pakistan’s future may be its abysmal education system. Pak¬istani schools—and not just madrassahs— are churning out fiery zealots, fueled with a passion for jihad and martyrdom. The obstacles to reform are great. For example, recent street rampages by Islamists forced Musharraf’s former minister of education, Zubaida Jalal, to declare herself a fundamentalist and denounce as unacceptable school text-books that do not include Quranic verses on jihad.



The United States, along with the United Kingdom and the European Union, has recently poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Pakistani educational system but with minimal effect. US-AID officials in Pakistan have shown little inclination or desire to engage with the government on the issue of eliminating jihad and militarism from school books. Indeed, rather than calling Musharraf ’s government on the continuing espousal of jihadist doctrine, the White House, out of either ignorance or compromise, even praised former Education Minister Jalal for her “reforms.” Jalal’s successor, General Javed Ashraf Qazi, is a former intelligence chief known for his ruthless tactics. It therefore appears that Musharraf’s educational curriculum will go unchanged.



This difficulty, of course, reflects the underlying problems of Pakistan’s govern¬ment. Aware of its thin legitimacy and fearful of taking on powerful religious forces, no reigning government has made a serious attempt at curricular or educa¬tional reform, quietly allowing future minds to be molded by fanatics. But without such critical reforms, the long-¬term prospects for Pakistan are anything but comforting.



The social engineering started during the Zia rule has transformed the next generation of Pakistani. Dr Hoodbhoy says since Zia the Pakistani society had become more “Islamised”. The changes made in textbooks during his regime had taken effect and the young generation was extremely conservative. He said in his physics class there were 13 girls, seven of whom remained burqa-clad, three donned hijabs and only three retained a normal appearance. The change had been profound and it had penetrated to the roots, he added. The military had changed too and its slogan given by Zia and retained today was jihad in the cause of God. This social engineering done on the Pakistani society was initiated and influenced by the western think tanks and universities in a covert manner. The Indian elite and experts failed to comprehend the scope and breadth of the social engineering being done inside Pakistan for more than 30 years leading to a dangerous vacuum in understanding the threat to India and its society. From available information it is the RAND Corporation which has been the lead think tank in the social engineering project for the last 30 years primarily in Pakistan and Muslim world at large.