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Pakistan is both a new and a very old country, its modern incarnation under the name of Pakistan began only in 1947, when this nation was set up at the moment of India's independence from the British empire. Hindus and Muslims, the followers of India's two major religions, were then living in a state of such mutual hostility that the only solution appeared to be the partition of India into two different, wholly independent countries. Pakistan, with two widely separated homeland for the Muslims. The name of Pakistan means “The Land of the Pure.”

The religion of Islam unified its people and acted as a guiding force for the fledgling country. However, a series of political misunderstandings between the eastern and western provinces eventually led them into a bitter civil war. The eastern province declared its independence from Pakistan in 1970. Thereafter it became known as Bangladesh – a new, separate nation between India and Burma.

The western province, by far the larger of the two geographically, kept the name of Pakistan, and continued to shape its society and laws according to the strict principles of Islam. Today it is hard to believe that this big country was ever anything but Muslim. The ubiquitous mosques and minarets, the limited or sequestered role of women, public prayer fine times a day, the month-long fast during Ramadan, the yearly pilgrimage to Macca --- all these elements of life in Pakistan have the traits of a static, traditional and long-standing culture.

Its true that Islam touches the daily life of nearly every Pakistani, but it was a latecomer to this part of the world compared to the others great religions of Asia, arriving only in the eighth century AD. The new faith took a firm hold on the coastal lowlands and inland plains, but its spread in the many mountainous areas was slow, and even today there are small pockets of infidels in remote valleys.

Thousands of years of history predate the arrival of Islam in the lands that make up Pakistan today, ages and centuries rich with vivid and varied events. The earliest of the world’s four great cradles of civilization arose here in antiquity along the bank of the Indus River.

Alexander the great crossed deserts and mountains from Europe to conquer and occupy this land 2,000 years later. Greeks, Scythians and parathions have had their tenure. Religions have come and gone. A remarkable flowering of Buddhism occurred here, only to be replaced by Hinduism. Barbarians from central Asia, Huns and Turks swept down into the lands of Pakistan through the fabled Khyber Pass. They built and destroyed cities and institutions--- all before Muslim Arabs come to the shores of Sindh, in southern Pakistan, carrying the new faith oh Muhammad in Ad 711.

It is necessary here to loot at Pakistan, geography, which so clearly affected the movements of history across its face. Pakistan is 2,415 kilometers (1,500 miles) long from north to south, stretching across the northwestern edge of the Indian Subcontinent. Its axis is the Indus River, the traditional source of life to its people. The Indus and its tributaries drain the entire country, expect for the western desert region of Baluchistan, and its waters create the largest irrigation system in the world.

The Indus rises in Tibet, loops through the deep gorges of the Himalaya in northern India, then wends its way through Pakistan’s province of Panjab, its most prosperous region which is, in many ways, the heart of the country. Panjab means “Five Waters” a reference to the river and its four main tributaries. Growing ever wider, the Indus flows southwards into the distinctive and arid region of Sindh, a powerful Hundu outpost in the former days of undivided India. The very name Sindh is derived from the word Indus, and is home to the final stages of the mighty river with its immense, 242 kilometer (150-mil) – long delta stretching all the way from Karachi to the Indian border.

Despite all this talk of water, Pakistan is, nonetheless, an extremely dry country. To the west of the Indus lies the huge, desert plateau of Baluchistan, covering 44 percent of the country’s surface area. Separated from the Indus Plain by mountain ranges, Baluchistan's spares population takes care of its water needs by channeling underground water through an ingenious system of tunnels, known as karez, which minimize any loss of water by evaporation in the dry desert air.

A series of large, scorching deserts forms a barrier to life east of the Indus River.
The Sindh, Thar and Colistan deserts cover the border region with India, and a harsh internal desert, known as Sindh Sagar Doab, fills the land between the Indus and its tributary, the Chenab.

The most dramatic and awesome aspect of Pakistan’s geography is the jumbled mass of mountains in the far north. Here occurs a convergence of the highest ranges in the world--- Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush and within the country’s borders stand 13 of the 30 tallest peaks. The Karakoram, confused by many people with the Himalaya, is in fact a separate range, tightly packed and fantastically assembled along Pakistan’s border with China and India. The peak of K-2 is the second highest point on the planet, surrounded by a spectacular array of glaciers, ice spires, snow and giant mountains.

Just south of the Karakoram, separated by the deep gorge of the Indus, rise the Himalaya. Their western anchor is Nanga Parbat, ninth-tallest mountain in the world and most infamous killer of mountaineers.

To the west, jammed up against the border of Afghanistan, stand the Hindu Kush, a dramatic, little-known range with snow-capped Tirich Mir, towering more than 7’500 meters (25,000 feet) tall, as the centerpiece.

All of there mountains are exceedingly young in geological terms, their abrupt and violent creation began a more 80 million years ago when India broke away from an early massive proto-continent and rammed into the soft underside of Asia. Mountains were pushed up from sea level, and many achieved their height of nearly 9,000 meters (30,000 feet) only in the last million years.

A board plateau extends south of the southern edge is the salt Range, a remarkably dry set of hills, of much interest to geologists since its strata record a more complete history of the earth’s crust then can be found anywhere else.

Pakistan is divided into four main provinces—Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and the north-west Frontier Province (NWFP). In addition, there are two areas under special administration because of their sensitive location in border regions—the Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir, Sindh and Panjab are the most important and influential provinces, but factors of history and geography always kept them distinct. Through the centuries Sindh has had virtually no ties with Punjab and was actually administered from Bombay Intel 1937. Baluchistan and NWFP have tribal societies. They are linguistically and culturally separate from the rest of the country and rely largely on raising livestock.

Any discussion of the people of Pakistan invariably leads down complex and confusing avenues. The ceaseless waves of migration and invasion over the past 5,000 years all left their mark on the local population. Indo-Aryans, the first invaders who arriver between 1500 and 1200 BC, still predominate. No single language is common to the entire population. Urdu, the national language and lingua franca, is not indigenous to Pakistan, but is closely related to Hindu and was originally the tongue of educated Muslims in northern India. This latter factor gave Urdu strong symbolism and association for the Muslim nationalists, who succeeded in giving it its present official status. Only a very small percentage of Pakistanis speaks Urdu.

Punjabi, a major language of the country, is more spoken then written, more rural then urban, and has numerous dialects. Every educated Punjabi reads and writes Urdu as well, so the necessity for a second written language is not so strong.

However, local pride has helped fuel a movement to expand the use of written Punjabi and publish local classics.