Pakistan: An Introduction

This class meets the following breadth requirements: Social and Behavioral Sciences or Historical Studies.

Whenever Pakistan comes up as a subject of sustained conversation in the US it usually is for all the wrong reasons: the worst nuclear proliferator in recent history, the refuge of Osama bin Laden, a major source of regional (read “jihadi”) instability in South and Central Asia. Perhaps President Clinton summarized US attitudes best when he, in the late 1990s, pronounced Pakistan to be “the most dangerous place in the world.” Inasmuch as Pakistan isn’t a country that most Americans are lining up to visit it behooves us to not forget that it is the second largest Muslim nation, the sixth most populous country in the world, and a country that the US cannot simply write off even after it withdraws from Afghanistan. Although Pakistan may be viewed with deep mistrust by US policy planners and the American public alike, this course seeks to remind us that it is also a country of great political, economic, religious, and social complexity. Nowhere is this in better evidence than in its vibrant civil society, its raucous media, its world-class English-language literateurs, its deeply contentious politics, and its widening class, ethnic and sectarian fractures. Understanding these facts, among others, offers a path to understanding Pakistan. This course will situate Pakistan in its historical, political, literary, religious, economic and social contexts with the hope that students will develop nuanced and deeply grounded perspectives on a country that defies easy stereotypes.