The exchange (which has now been removed after mutual agreement) that just unfolded was not about architecture. It was about authority.
SD made factual errors, quietly corrected them, and apologised in private. That should have ended the matter. Instead, the loudest resistance came from Kabir: a reflex insistence that disagreement was illegitimate because the author was “credentialed,” “Oxford,” and therefore beyond challenge.
This is the residue of colonisation. Pakistanis were not only carved out of British India; they were produced by the collapse of a Muslim ruling class already broken by the British after the destruction of Mughal power. What followed was not confidence but deference. The habit of looking upward, to Western institutions, American accents, British titles, for permission to speak. That habit persists. Continue reading Why Pakistani Liberals Remain a Colonised Intellectual Class
