People like Babar Ayaz, who say that Pakistanis are still looking for their identity are influenced by their ignorance.
Pakistanis have an identity. An identity which is imbued in the 40,000 year old history of the land they live on. We the Pakistanis are the scions of Indus Valley Civilization. We the people of this land were Hindus, were Buddhists and the current religion that people of this land follow is Islam.
From the Harappan civilization in the late fourth to mid-second millennium BC, whose language has not so far been deciphered, to Mauryan Empire to Kushan Empire whose capital once was also Peshawar, all were embodiment of Indus Civilization, which currently is Muslim. And this fact hurts the Indian Hindu zealots more than anything else, because by losing it, they lost their identity, whereas, we the Pakistanis have retained our identity as scions of Indus valley Civilization who are now Muslims.
The vision of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in the 1940s did not constitute a mere power grab at the expense of India's Hindu-dominated Congress party. There was much history and geography behind his drive to create a separate Muslim state anchored in the subcontinent's northwest, abutting southern Central Asia.
Indians and many Europeans (Lary Collins, Dominique Lapier Freedom at Mid Night) say that Pakistan was an artificially created state. This is far from the truth. Pakistan exists along the Indus Valley, which separates it from Ganges Valley in India along Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient, a line running from eastern Punjab southwest to the Arabian Sea in Gujarat. This is the watershed, and it matches up almost exactly with the Pakistan-India border.
The Indus, much more than the Ganges, since thousands of years has had an organic relationship with the Arab, Persian, and Turkic worlds. It is historically and geographically a fact that the Indus Valley civilization, long ago was a part of Achaemenid Persia and the forward bastion of Alexander the Great's Near Eastern empire. Therefore, its historical linkages with Arab and Turkic world did not take place after the Muslims conquered this area.
The Indians and many pseudo-intellectual Pakistanis need to understand the historical and geographical facts before they start uttering such nonsense that Pakistanis are still looking for an identity and force us to believe in something which is wrong, historically and factually.
