A CONQUEST OF PASTS 179
hideen yani Pak o Hind ki Qaum 'Arain ki Dastan (The Story of the
Descendants of the Syrian Companion Mujahideens of the Greatest
Mujahid, Muhammad bin Qasim, That Is the 'Arain Community of
India and Pakistan):
The 'Arain qaum (community) is sharif (a refined class), hardworking
and of Arab descent. They are the true mu;ahid of this nation. How-
ever, we are not united or organized. Whether you write Mian,
Chaudhri, etc. before your name, please write 'Arain after it. So that
by seeing the word, from east to west, from Peshawer to Karachi, we
can recognize ourselves.70
Similar originary myths were written and circulated in official his-
tories about other communities, such as the 'Awan, the Maliks, and
the Jats. In each case, these histories represented a direct engagement
with the state since they contained rosters of notable members in civil
service. (General Zia ul-Haq remajps the most prominent member of
the 'Arain community.) r
The state of Pakistan's orig{nary narrative of Muhammatl"bin Qa-
sim's conquest of Sind remains largely uncontested in recent.historiog-
raphy. Contemporary histories of So-qth Asia consider Sind a "back-
water region" and call the nearly three hundred years of Sind's Muslim
principalities and their Muslim ecumene a "forgotten" age.^71 As il result,
the most notable silence in this narrative is the silence of contemporary
historiography. The paucity of contemporary historical research on
the eighth through twelfth centuries has rendered any contestations
of Pakistan's origins narrative either communal memory or polemical
scholarship.