The practice of publishing old texts is common in Pakistan; British-era district gazetteers and other colonial texts are routinely reprinted as de facto introductions to the history of the Subcontinent. The unwholesome after-effect of this is that colonial biases and frameworks remain uncontested and widely popular. There is neither any attempt to decolonise our history nor is there any awareness of what violence colonial knowledge practices have wreaked on writings about our pasts.Seventy years after Partition, it is about time that readers and writers in Pakistan rethink and reimagine their histories. The past requires analysis in the light of new questions and new critical frameworks. We cannot be held hostage to British narratives about Muslim arrival in India as religion-inspired invaders from Arabia.
I have a review essay in Herald Dawn-- How to counter colonial myths about Muslim arrival in Sindh-- which is half book-synopsis and half review of an unpublished dissertation from 1973 Utah. Fun fact about 1973 Utah was that Aziz S. Atiya, scholar of Coptic Egypt and the Crusades made it his intellectual home after the President of University of Utah, A. Ray Olpin, invited him to direct the Middle East Center in 1965. They produced much important scholarship on Islam in USA though rarely get mentioned alongside places like Yale, Princeton, Chicago etc.
Anyhow.