Transition Into Extremism Sparknotes

The subject of this review is Hassan Abbas’ book, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror (Pentagon Press, 2005). At the time of writing this book, he was a Ph.D candidate at Tufts University (USA), a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and had served in the government of Pakistan for ten years during the administrations of Prime Mnister Benazir Bhutto and President Musharraf.

This book examines the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan, and analyzes its connections to Pakistan Army’s polices and fluctuating U.S. Pakistan relations. The author includes a detailed history of the various governments of Pakistan, much of which is only loosely supports the topic of the book. This review focuses on the chapter-by-chapter chronology of historical periods and events as Abass covers them.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Abbas writes in introduction about the history of Islam on the Sub-continent, starting with Mohammad bin Qasim, an Arab general who conquered part of Sindh. Then he talks about the Muslim conquerors from the north--Central Asians, Afghans, and Persians. Sufis (mystic saints) also played a vital role for spreading Islam in subcontinent.

Further down Abbas explains about Muslims being behind in political development. In 1885 the Indian National Congress was a Hindu dominated Party. Abbas said Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, was a Muslim primarily by birth and loyalty, and in all other ways was more British than British. He was not overly keen on independence, but was also aware that the Muslims of India were far too backward compared with the Hindu majority, and needed guarantees to protect Muslims against exploitation when the British were to wit...

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...y different cloth.

Conclusion

Reading this book was an eye opening experience. I found the rich historical details as exciting as the intended purpose of the book. He covered so many things about history of Pakistan which I was not aware of before. A very informative book. Abbas’ writing style was also interesting and easily readable--narrative style. It should be noted that history he tell is limited to those events that support Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism.

The topics that particularly interested me included discussions of the following:

1- Jinnah’s position change on favoring unified India to a separate homeland.

2- The problems the choice of Urdu language as the National language created.

3- That Gen. Zia had a warning before getting on the fatal air craft.

4- General Zia managed the Kashmiri issue into the central issue for Pak foreign policy.