From MA Jinnah's Lahore speech :
Address by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to the Muslim League, Lahore, 1940
As I said, for the sake of some brownie points dont chop at the very roots of the
raison d' etre of the Pakistan. You have nothing to do with our civilization. Your identity is Islamic and Islamic alone. You have nothing to do with the pre-Islamic history of the subcontinent especially the Vedic civilizations.
Ok to clarify when I meant Pakistanis I meant Pakistani Muslims. Not Pakistani Hindus, Sikhs.
We have moved on and reconciled to the fact that a nation to our West was formed on the basis of Islam and they have a different perspective to the history of the sub-continent. I fully sympathize with that. But just don't try to be a [lame] revisionist and lay claim on what you have no rights on.
Are you a Christian ? Did not your Prophet condemn jahiliya ?
This is incorrect on several dimensions.
First, please read Jinnah's speech carefully. There is nothing in that speech which cuts at the roots of his three-homeland solution. His stress was on the difficulties faced by a minority when minority and majority alike were of conflicting ways of life. His emphasis was on a creation of space for these minorities to be able to live without complete self-abnegation in front of the others.it will come out of these lines that a separate Pakistan separately constituted would not solve the problem, as it would have its own minorities in turn, who, again in their turn, would find living with the majority very difficult. Which is exactly what happened,when his triple homeland scheme was roughly rejected. I find the speech prophetic, not divisive.
Again, Pakistan's reason was to provide a safe haven for Muslims. There were no calls to expel Hindus from Pakistan to create a pure, Muslim-only state.
History is full of bad decisions and displays of bigotry. At some point, people have to move on.
Again, you are confusing practicing a religion with historical respect. The Brits respect druid culture as a historical part of their culture; it does not mean they have to spiritually accept druid deities. Swedes can be devout Christians and still accept Thor as part of their cultural heritage.
Precisely so. But neither you, nor we will get anywhere as long as we are unable to get under control those who wish to see the other side punished for daring to differ. These elements want a public, humiliating admission of guilt, of fault, of culpability. It is not going to happen. They know it as well as we do. Asking for the impossible is a gambit to put the monkey on the back of the other faction, and to disclaim responsibility for a widening gap. To these souls, whatever they are reacting to is nothing that can be set right. It is irrevocable hurt and suffering, and cannot be undone.
The crux of the identity dissonance here is simple, and its frankly churlish on the part of us Indians to deny those Pakistanis who are increasingly seeing the light and wanting to embrace their roots.
Truth be told, a Pakistan that is comfortable in its Indian skin and lifeblood, becomes a muslim India. We can live with that much better than an Arabic vassal state on our borders.
That obviously does not mean we have to give up our birth-right so that they can reclaim theirs.
60 years is not even the blink of an eye in the history of our civilization.
And that is precisely what was originally sought - a Muslim India, one bloc of three between which residents of any bloc could pass easily and conveniently. I blame the desiccation of that country, the distortion of this concept on the catastrophic degeneration of the Pakistani leadership following Jinnah's death, when their uncertainty and insecurity drove them to the path of least resistance, of abandonment of their independent thinking in favour of a dependence on clerics. Maududi finally won, after having abused Jinnah, the League and the very concept of Pakistan in a sustained manner for years.
We are going in circles. The basic fact that I keep stressing, and you keep discounting, is that respect and acknowledgement of a culture or spirituality is not contingent upon believing it.
I will refer you again to the examples of druids in Britain and vikings in Scandinavia. The OP mentioned Egypt and Greece. The same logic applies to Vedic culture and Pakistani Muslims.
You won't get understanding or comprehension from a person who does not want to listen.
That is where you have still not got them. If they want to return to their roots or even are prepared to face upto history and recognize the atrocities perpetrated on their own people by the people they now claim as their heroes or ghazis, then I have no problem with that.
But that is not what is happening.They want the best of both worlds. They will continue to honor the likes of Ghazni, Ghori, Abdali as their heroes, their saviours while at the same time lay claim to something that is the very anti-thesis to the afforementioned personalities. This is where I have a problem.
And here is the problem.
Unless you apologize, as a nation, for the long list of crimes listed, you are unforgivable. Period.
It is not possible to have a dialogue between the fanatics in Pakistan and the fanatics in India. They do not want anything but a state of permanent war. Or at best a complete shutting out of the other from all recognition.
They cannot afford to view themselves as a part of the larger Indic civilization.
Why?
And the one fact that you keep avoiding,deflecting is that the father of your nation rejected any notion of Mussalmans having to do anything with anything other than Islamic in nature [as shown from his Lahore speech] and that your own Prophet condemns Jahiliya.
Why do you keep bringing in Britons and Swedes when you are neither ? Yes, people can carry on with their faith systems while respecting their native culture...but that facility is not available in Islam nor is the former logic applicable here. Jahiliya is a concept unique to Islam I think.
You are supposed to look down upon your pre-Islamic past as an age of ignorance, of stupidity, of Jahiliya..not through any other lens. I don't say so..your Holy Book says so.
In other words, you don't know what you really think, so we will tell you.