When I first moved to North America, I was brought some cultural profiles of different countries, including Pakistan's. Other countries included Kenya, Lebanon and Canada.
These cultural profiles were short booklets intended to educate hosts on immigrants and brief insights to their national backgrounds.
The profiles contained some fact sheets, different categories of the country from sports to health care to spirituality and history.
The profiles have been put online and can be viewed on this site.
Also included were some interesting "facts" that are shown the same way one can find in school textbooks displayed as "did you know."
The "did you know" can be found on the profiles of every country listed.
But as usual many did you know "facts" on Pakistan are twisted and exaggerated. Amongst the did you knows on Pakistan it mentions Pakistanis being an ethnically diverse people.
When looking through India, Iran and Afghanistan's cultural profiles it did mention the major ethnic groups of the countries, but none of them highlighted the fact that all these countries are ethnically diverse.
Even when the fact is that these countries are more ethnically diverse than Pakistan. When I write more ethnically diverse, I don't just mean the sheer number of various ethnic groups being higher, but also the relationships between these being much more distinct.
In Pakistan we have about two dozen ethnic groups. Usually in modern times, an ethnic group is defined as a set of people speaking a single language. Now it does not matter weather the current languages of these people is not the same as that of their ancestors or even the same family as their ancestors' language.
In the case of Iran, Iraq, India and Afghanistan you have various ethnic groups speaking languages of completely different origins and also being genetically distinct.
Up to about one third of Afghans are Mongoloid by race. These Mongoloid Afghans except for the Hazaras speak Altaic languages such as Uzbek and Turkmen which are unrelated to Afghanistan's Indo-European languages the main ones being Dari and Pashto.
In Iraq there are Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans, all speaking unrelated languages. Arabic is Afro-Asiatic, Kurdish is Indo-European and Turkoman is Altaic.
In Iran we have various languages belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family, the Indo-European family and the Altaic family.
In India the number of ethnic groups is several times larger than that of Pakistan as well as various language families from Indo-European to Dravidian to Sino-Tibetian, Austroasiatic and others.
Even racially speaking we have many different skull types in India from Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Australoid, Negroid and a few others.
But despite all this, these cultural profiles don't highlight these facts in their did you knows.
They do mention ethnic diversity in the countries discussed, but don't highlight it in their cultural profiles the way they did in the case of Pakistan.
In Pakistan the racial and ethnic demographics are in a very different position than that of the other countries mentioned and discussed in this post. Pakistan is home to about two dozen distinct, but closely related ethnicities.
Except for three ethnic groups which are the Brahuis, the Baltistanis and perhaps even the Hunza, the rest of Pakistan's ethnic groups are of the same origin.
The Afroids known as "Makranis" are also somewhat distinct due to their African ancestry but I believe they have mixed with the local population. I also believe they speak Balochi dialects.
But the rest of the population up to 99% are of the same origin speaking Indo-European languages which can be further broken down into Indo-Iranic languages. Sindhi, Balochi, Urdu, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Pashto are the major languages of Pakistan. All of these languages descend from a common Proto-Indo-Iranic language spoken at some time era in the second or third millennium BC.
Click on images to enlarge:
Even genetically, most of Pakistan's population belong to common Haplogroup R1A:
Other ignorant things that these cultural profiles promoted were that Pakistan is a young state yet it doesn't mention the fact that as modern states so are India, nor Afghanistan nor Iran or Iraq.
Pakistan's national cuisine is also supposedly a "mix" of Indian and Middle Eastern. As always everything about Pakistani culture and history always has outside influence mentioned and exaggerated.
Then it was always labeling anything of Pakistan's pre-1947 history as "shared history" with India.
Whoever wrote the cultural profile on Pakistan is obviously an ignorant person and just spread his/her ignorance further by publishing all this into a cultural profile.
But the issue is not really about history or a single cultural profile. This false projection of Pakistan being a multi-ethnic country while making Iran and Afghanistan look like some homogeneous Persian countries or Iraq a homogeneous Arab country or India a homogeneous country is very widespread. Sometimes it is out of ignorance and sometimes to promote some sort of political agenda.
In one example I remember one of my parents explaining to my cousin's fiance who was of Irish descent on the Kashmir issue. It was explained to him by my parent that the subcontinent was "one India" divided by a British conspiracy. Yet this same parent of mine has a history of claiming that Pakistan has no identity due to it's ethnic diversity.
Many can probably already see the huge contradiction here. A united ethnically, linguistically, racially diverse subcontinent is one "Indian nation" yet one Pakistan compromising of an almost entirely Caucasoid population of Indo-Iranic speaking people is somehow not a nation.
Though my parent now has different views after I educated this parent of mine. However this claim is widespread amongst many people; especially Indians. Many Indians claim Pakistanis to be part of the "brown" "desi" or sometimes "South Asian race" alongside themselves.
I've come into contact with Indians including a Muslim who claimed this. Yet these very same Indians tout that Pakistanis are not a race and that all the ethnic groups in Pakistan are completely different.
One of them said this with some emotion. This is obviously a way of trying to diminish Pakistan's separate identity and culture. On one hand by calling them all "Indians" on the other hand by saying they are distinct from one another. Sadly many naive Pakistanis and foreigners buy into this.
Even the Islamists in Pakistan who oppose secularism try to portray Pakistan as a multi-national state often claim Pakistan's ethnicities have nothing in common outside of religion and so that religion alone is the unifying factor of Pakistan.
India is home to several dozen unrelated ethnic groups. Iran doesn't have as high of a number as ethnicities as India, but still it's populations also speak languages that are unrelated. The same is true for Afghanistan.
Ethnic diversity is very little in Pakistan when compared to India, Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan. Many Indians also proudly parade the diversity of their country yet ironically claim a sense of national identity.
Many anti-Pakistan elements around the world like to propagate the ethnic diversity of Pakistan's predominantly Indo-Iranic populations.
This claim is also recently being promoted by the upper class Muhajir fifth columnists such as Pervez Hoodbhoy. I even saw an article written by an Indian on Pakistan's 2008 independence anniversary again claiming that Punjabis, Sindhis, Muhajirs and others were all put together "artificially."
But let's face it. The name Pakistan is new and has no ancient roots. Though the country today known as "India" is also new and it's name has roots derived from the Pakistan/Indus Valley region, the name itself still has ancient roots.
The name Afghanistan is from Afghan, a tribal name that's been around centuries. Iran is also a new name but derived from an ancient name referring to the Aryans or nobles.
Many Pakistanis have argued that Pakistan should have been called India while India Bharat since Pakistan is the land of the Indus Valley. Even in her book, Empires of the Indus, British author Alice Albina suggests that Pakistan would have been better off keeping the name India or called itself Industan meaning land of the Indus.
But why should it be that the name of a country be used to judge it's past? Names change, the land and history remained unchanged.
Hopefully with the age of the Internet and technological advancement, the flow and access of information will be much faster and easier. People ignorant to the reality and history of Pakistan- including many Pakistanis themselves- will see the flawed reasoning behind calling Pakistan "diverse" and pretending that other countries in it's region are "homogeneous."
Post update: A more factual but brief cultural profile on Pakistan can be viewed here.
These cultural profiles were short booklets intended to educate hosts on immigrants and brief insights to their national backgrounds.
The profiles contained some fact sheets, different categories of the country from sports to health care to spirituality and history.
The profiles have been put online and can be viewed on this site.
Also included were some interesting "facts" that are shown the same way one can find in school textbooks displayed as "did you know."
The "did you know" can be found on the profiles of every country listed.
But as usual many did you know "facts" on Pakistan are twisted and exaggerated. Amongst the did you knows on Pakistan it mentions Pakistanis being an ethnically diverse people.
When looking through India, Iran and Afghanistan's cultural profiles it did mention the major ethnic groups of the countries, but none of them highlighted the fact that all these countries are ethnically diverse.
Even when the fact is that these countries are more ethnically diverse than Pakistan. When I write more ethnically diverse, I don't just mean the sheer number of various ethnic groups being higher, but also the relationships between these being much more distinct.
In Pakistan we have about two dozen ethnic groups. Usually in modern times, an ethnic group is defined as a set of people speaking a single language. Now it does not matter weather the current languages of these people is not the same as that of their ancestors or even the same family as their ancestors' language.
In the case of Iran, Iraq, India and Afghanistan you have various ethnic groups speaking languages of completely different origins and also being genetically distinct.
Up to about one third of Afghans are Mongoloid by race. These Mongoloid Afghans except for the Hazaras speak Altaic languages such as Uzbek and Turkmen which are unrelated to Afghanistan's Indo-European languages the main ones being Dari and Pashto.
In Iraq there are Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans, all speaking unrelated languages. Arabic is Afro-Asiatic, Kurdish is Indo-European and Turkoman is Altaic.
In Iran we have various languages belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family, the Indo-European family and the Altaic family.
In India the number of ethnic groups is several times larger than that of Pakistan as well as various language families from Indo-European to Dravidian to Sino-Tibetian, Austroasiatic and others.
Even racially speaking we have many different skull types in India from Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Australoid, Negroid and a few others.
But despite all this, these cultural profiles don't highlight these facts in their did you knows.
They do mention ethnic diversity in the countries discussed, but don't highlight it in their cultural profiles the way they did in the case of Pakistan.
In Pakistan the racial and ethnic demographics are in a very different position than that of the other countries mentioned and discussed in this post. Pakistan is home to about two dozen distinct, but closely related ethnicities.
Except for three ethnic groups which are the Brahuis, the Baltistanis and perhaps even the Hunza, the rest of Pakistan's ethnic groups are of the same origin.
The Afroids known as "Makranis" are also somewhat distinct due to their African ancestry but I believe they have mixed with the local population. I also believe they speak Balochi dialects.
But the rest of the population up to 99% are of the same origin speaking Indo-European languages which can be further broken down into Indo-Iranic languages. Sindhi, Balochi, Urdu, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Pashto are the major languages of Pakistan. All of these languages descend from a common Proto-Indo-Iranic language spoken at some time era in the second or third millennium BC.
Click on images to enlarge:
Even genetically, most of Pakistan's population belong to common Haplogroup R1A:
Other ignorant things that these cultural profiles promoted were that Pakistan is a young state yet it doesn't mention the fact that as modern states so are India, nor Afghanistan nor Iran or Iraq.
Pakistan's national cuisine is also supposedly a "mix" of Indian and Middle Eastern. As always everything about Pakistani culture and history always has outside influence mentioned and exaggerated.
Then it was always labeling anything of Pakistan's pre-1947 history as "shared history" with India.
Whoever wrote the cultural profile on Pakistan is obviously an ignorant person and just spread his/her ignorance further by publishing all this into a cultural profile.
But the issue is not really about history or a single cultural profile. This false projection of Pakistan being a multi-ethnic country while making Iran and Afghanistan look like some homogeneous Persian countries or Iraq a homogeneous Arab country or India a homogeneous country is very widespread. Sometimes it is out of ignorance and sometimes to promote some sort of political agenda.
In one example I remember one of my parents explaining to my cousin's fiance who was of Irish descent on the Kashmir issue. It was explained to him by my parent that the subcontinent was "one India" divided by a British conspiracy. Yet this same parent of mine has a history of claiming that Pakistan has no identity due to it's ethnic diversity.
Many can probably already see the huge contradiction here. A united ethnically, linguistically, racially diverse subcontinent is one "Indian nation" yet one Pakistan compromising of an almost entirely Caucasoid population of Indo-Iranic speaking people is somehow not a nation.
Though my parent now has different views after I educated this parent of mine. However this claim is widespread amongst many people; especially Indians. Many Indians claim Pakistanis to be part of the "brown" "desi" or sometimes "South Asian race" alongside themselves.
I've come into contact with Indians including a Muslim who claimed this. Yet these very same Indians tout that Pakistanis are not a race and that all the ethnic groups in Pakistan are completely different.
One of them said this with some emotion. This is obviously a way of trying to diminish Pakistan's separate identity and culture. On one hand by calling them all "Indians" on the other hand by saying they are distinct from one another. Sadly many naive Pakistanis and foreigners buy into this.
Even the Islamists in Pakistan who oppose secularism try to portray Pakistan as a multi-national state often claim Pakistan's ethnicities have nothing in common outside of religion and so that religion alone is the unifying factor of Pakistan.
India is home to several dozen unrelated ethnic groups. Iran doesn't have as high of a number as ethnicities as India, but still it's populations also speak languages that are unrelated. The same is true for Afghanistan.
Ethnic diversity is very little in Pakistan when compared to India, Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan. Many Indians also proudly parade the diversity of their country yet ironically claim a sense of national identity.
Many anti-Pakistan elements around the world like to propagate the ethnic diversity of Pakistan's predominantly Indo-Iranic populations.
This claim is also recently being promoted by the upper class Muhajir fifth columnists such as Pervez Hoodbhoy. I even saw an article written by an Indian on Pakistan's 2008 independence anniversary again claiming that Punjabis, Sindhis, Muhajirs and others were all put together "artificially."
But let's face it. The name Pakistan is new and has no ancient roots. Though the country today known as "India" is also new and it's name has roots derived from the Pakistan/Indus Valley region, the name itself still has ancient roots.
The name Afghanistan is from Afghan, a tribal name that's been around centuries. Iran is also a new name but derived from an ancient name referring to the Aryans or nobles.
Many Pakistanis have argued that Pakistan should have been called India while India Bharat since Pakistan is the land of the Indus Valley. Even in her book, Empires of the Indus, British author Alice Albina suggests that Pakistan would have been better off keeping the name India or called itself Industan meaning land of the Indus.
But why should it be that the name of a country be used to judge it's past? Names change, the land and history remained unchanged.
Hopefully with the age of the Internet and technological advancement, the flow and access of information will be much faster and easier. People ignorant to the reality and history of Pakistan- including many Pakistanis themselves- will see the flawed reasoning behind calling Pakistan "diverse" and pretending that other countries in it's region are "homogeneous."
Post update: A more factual but brief cultural profile on Pakistan can be viewed here.
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