Muhammad bin Qasim
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Bin Qasim’s Thousand-Year Wound
X.T.M argues that India and Pakistan face a fault line over a thousand years old, dating to Muhammad bin Qasim’s landing in Sindh in 711. Each side now speaks only…
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Not All Our Ancestors Were “Just Hindu”
X.T.M rejects the claim in Aslan Pahari’s videos that Pakistanis’ pre-Islamic ancestors were uniformly Hindu. He argues the pre-8th-century Indus region was layered and regional, with Buddhists in Sindh, later…
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Pan-Sindhi Cross-Border Virality
X.T.M uses a viral Sindhi song to argue that Islam is native to Sindh after 13 centuries. He says Hindus stayed around 30 per cent while Buddhism vanished, because social…
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NCERT Books – Early Muslim invaders
Reviewing how Satish Chandra’s, Romila Thapar’s and NIOS history textbooks treat pre-Delhi Sultanate Muslim invaders, the author argues Hindutva criticism of these left-liberal historians is often overstated and straw-manned, and…
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Did the Brits “Indianise” the NorthWest?
Asking whether the British ‘re-Indianised’ the north-west, the author argues Sindh, Balochistan and the Frontier saw long Iranian and Muslim influence, while British patronage of Hindi, canal colonies and middle-class…
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Toxic textbooks and social engineering in Pakistan
A piece originally published at Naya Daur, citing K. K. Aziz’s The Murder of History, argues that Pakistani history and social-studies textbooks are an instrument of social engineering, and that…
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Jab We Met: Encounters between Islam and Hinduism in Early-Medieval Punjab
Prompted by a bilingual Ghaznavid dirham in his collection, the author argues that Pakistanis forget the layers of history beneath them and examines the first extended encounters between Islam and…
