Journey through Pakistan

Mohammed Amin e.a.

Published by Camarapix Publishers International, hardcover with dustjacket, illustrated


Pakistan stands at the crossroads of the world where the cultures of the Middle East and Asia meet and become one. Here ancient history exerts a profound and mellowing influence over the manner in which the technologies and attitudes of the late twentieth century are taken up, interpreted and used. Here religion and nationalism converge within society to a fine point of common feelings and shared values. Here a long ribbon of river unites disparate geographical features, tying mountains to the sea and deserts to green and fertile plains.

Pakistan is a physically dramatic country and this drama shapes and influences the everyday life of the people. It conditions their behaviour and colours their outlook on the world around them.

More than thirty million years ago the giant natural forces that shaped the continents and the oceans as we know them today raised up a great buckled arc of mountains between central Asia and the Indian
land mass. These mountains—the Himalayas, the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush range and the Sulaimans—now form the northern and western borders of Pakistan. Eight of the world's ten highest peaks are to be found here, including Mount Godwin-Austen—K2—which, at 28,250 feet (8,610 metres), bows only to mighty Everest in earth's struggle to reach up to the skies.

The same natural forces that threw up the mountains around Pakistan also carved gateways into those sheer and forbidding walls. These gateways were destined to enter into human history and to
inspire poets and philosophers, soldiers and kings. Most of us have probably never heard of the Kurram, Tochi, Gomal and Bolan Passes, but the Khyber, their infamous northern cousin, is a familiar name and
we all have an image in our minds of the fierce and formidable tribesmen who guard it.

A sizeable minority of Pakistanis are mountain people, and their courage, dignity and independence run like bright threads through the fabric of national life. The valleys and the hillsides are the homelands of
the Pathans, the world's most numerous tribal community; their harsh and unrelenting code of honour contrasts with their strangely soft and gentle lyric poetry handed down from father to son. Here too, ranged out across the roof of Pakistan, are to be found the Baluch, the Kohistanis, the pagan Kalash of the Chitral Highlands, and the Hunzakut, for centuries cut off from the mainstream of progress in a
remote northern Shangri-La but now facing up to the technical explosion of the modern world with fortitude and dignity.

The Indus River, the other outstanding geographical feature of beautiful Pakistan, has influenced the people's outlook on life in the same way that the craggy mountains have forged the resilience of
Pakistan's frontier peoples. Rising in Tibet from a spring known as `The Mouth of the Lion', the Indus flows down through the Karakoram Mountains to enter the northern wastes of Pakistan. Thence it
continues its 2,880-kilometre journey southwards and westwards through the heart of the country. At first it flows fast and tumultuously; later it becomes broad, spent and sluggish at the point where it enters the Arabian Sea near the city of Karachi.