There is no dearth of books about Pakistan. And there are all kinds of explanations for its raison d'etre—its contentious birth, the authoritarian roots, and the ongoing persistence of ethnic and religious violence. In her book Making Sense of Pakistan, Farzana Shaikh traces today’s Pakistan to conflicting visions of Islam's role in public life.
Over the years, scholars have debated significantly about the conflicting visions of what it means to be a Pakistani and what Pakistan stands for. In some of the early explanations about Pakistan, Hamza Alavi discussed Pakistan as an “overdeveloped state” with a powerful military-bureaucratic state apparatus that continually works to subordinate the native social classes.
A few years later, Ayesha Jalal, in her Sole Spokesman, suggested that Mohammad Ali Jinnah used the demand for Pakistan as a political tactic—a “bargaining chip”—to secure the interests of India’s Muslims and ensure that they were well represented. And therefore, Jalal contends that Jinnah referred to the post-partition Pakistan as “moth-eaten”. Others, like Venkat Dhulipala in his Creating a New Medina, have argued that Pakistan was created to be an Islamic state that enforced Sharia as the law of the land.