BORN TO LEAD

First Published on 15 August, 2007
More than ever before, I have come to believe that we are a nation of destiny. Pakistan is a country with more than just geographical boundaries. It has spiritual frontiers too. These spiritual frontiers originate from the ethos which triggered the historic movement for the creation of Pakistan. The ethos is known to history as the two-nation theory. This ethos implies that India was the habitat of two nations—one of which believed that it owed its allegiance to the Holy Quran.
All the rest were the ‘other nation’, irrespective of their diverse faiths, cultures and practices.
Without this ethos, Pakistan would not have been created. The man behind its creation—Mohammad Ali Jinnah—virtually snatched this country from the jaws of Mahabharat. The nation he thus liberated from the colonial tyranny of the British Raj on the one hand—and the looming threat of Hindu domination on the other—acknowledged the far-sightedness of his vision, by giving him the title of Quaid-e-Azam.
The spiritual frontiers I have mentioned above were drawn by none other than the Quaid himself—inspired of course by the concept of nationhood that Allama Iqbal had been projecting in his poetry and lectures.
It is because of these spiritual frontiers that I believe that Pakistan is destined to spearhead the drive that is going to lead the followers of the Holy Prophet to a grand Renaissance of Muslim power. It is not for no reason that the All-Powerful Allah willed Pakistan to become a nuclear power against all odds. It is not for nothing that Pakistan has been able to survive nearly six decades of misrule on the part of the successors of its founder. It is not for nothing that the obscene self-interest and self-glorification as well as crisis-generating adventurism of most of its rulers have failed to deal any lethal blow to its integrity. It is not for nothing that even today, when it happens to be surrounded by hordes of threats, crises and challenges, Pakistan stands tall and majestic as a tower of light for all those who are driven by dreams of a Muslim Renaissance.
Pakistan is destined to survive all the desecrators of its ethos.
Just as it was able to carve its way through and out of its hours of gloom and despair in the past, it is likely to break all the shackles, it finds itself in, today. And it will move forward to fulfill its destiny. Pakistan was born to lead.