The Reluctant Republic: Ethos and Mythos of Pakistan

by Nadeem Farooq Paracha

In this sixth book of his, Nadeem F. Paracha ventures even deeper to explore the statist-nationalist narratives of Pakistan. He deconstructs these narratives to offer a counter-narrative for a country that is still struggling to posit a convincing national identity.

168 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2021

Reviews

[Abeer Hamid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing book by Nadeem Paracha.

[Muhammad Raza · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been encouraging to see the newly published book of Nadeem Farooq Paracha (NFP) titled as The Reluctant Republic: Ethos and Mythos of Pakistan. Whilst this is his sixth book since 2016, all those who are regular readers of Pakistan’s newspaper ‘Daily Dawn’ knows NFP due to his weekly columns. I have had the privilege of reading all his books and hence, when I saw this new one at the bookstore there was no reason to be tempted to get the same. The book cover itself is uniquely attractive to show mirror image of Urdu word ‘Aql’ as ‘Naql’. In the preface to the book (titled as Context), NFP has reproduced his article (also titled as the reluctant republic) published in the daily dawn in July 2021 which inter alia includes a reference to a 2006 TV debate where the intellectual Khaled Ahmad asked people in the audience whether they were Muslim first or Pakistani and 90% of the audience answered they were Muslims first. As per NFP, this kind of response shows an absurdity keeping in view the concept of nation state evolved after 18th century. There has been a consistent view of NFP that this whole confusion arose after the debacle of East Pakistan in 1971 when it was felt that the two nation’s theory has fallen to the ground and thenceforth, there was a need to come up with a new ideology of surviving Pakistan. With this context, NFP has bifurcated the books in following three Chapters:-
Chapter 1: Textbook maneuvers: Conflicted Projections, Forsaken Memories and Trojan Horses
Chapter 2: Holier than thou: Competing Manifestations of Islam in Pakistan
Chapter 3: Hegemony of Passions: A Creationist State at Odds with Evolutionary Republicanism
I found this book to be very well-researched and NFP has (in my view, successfully) attempted to decipher the roots of certain concepts, most notably, the Nation State as it evolved post French Revolution of 18th century. With his usual way of quoting anecdotes from his personal interactions with different people both from his college days and then even during his recent visits to USA, he also tried to dig out the past to understand the current state of affairs in Pakistani society.
All in all, I found this latest book of NFP to be one of his best works where his assertions are well reasoned and supported by the research done on various important concepts and subjects.