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painting See art; calligraphy.

Pakistan (Official name: Islamic Republic

of Pakistan; Urdu/Persian: Land of the

Pure, also an acronym for five homelands

of its people—Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir,

Sindh, and Baluchistan)

Pakistan is a South Asian country. It has an area

of 307,374 square miles, comparable in size to the

states of Texas and Virginia combined. It is bor-

dered by the Arabian Sea to the south, india and

kashmir to the east, china to the north, and iran

and aFghanistan to the west. The Indus River

transects the country from the Himalayas in the

north to the Arabian Sea.

Pakistan was created as a homeland for Indian

Muslims through the partition of the Indian sub-

continent following independence in 1947 from

British imperial rule. Its population is approxi-

mately 172.8 million (2008 estimate) and its capi-

tal is Islamabad. Ninety-seven percent of Pakistan’s

population is Muslim, which makes it the second

largest Muslim country after Indonesia. (India has

the second largest Muslim population overall, but

it is not a Muslim-majority country.) About 80

percent of Pakistani Muslims are Sunnis and follow

the hanaFi legal school. Pakistan’s Shii minority

are predominantly followers of tWelve-imam shi-

ism, although it also has a small Ismaili population.

It is also home to a large number of members of the

ahmadiyya sect, although they are legally consid-

ered to be non-Muslims by the government. There

are also relatively small numbers of Christians

(about 1 percent), Hindus, and Parsis (Zoroastri-

ans) in the country. Pakistan became the first Mus-

lim nation to elect a woman as head of state when

Benazir Bhutto became prime minister in 1988. She

was reelected in 1993 but was assassinated during

her third campaign for this office in 2007.

The idea that Muslims in the Indian subconti-

nent needed their own autonomous political iden-

tity was first articulated in the early 1930s by the

influential poet-philosopher mUhammad iqbal (d.

1938). By 1940 fears of an imminently independent

India that would be dominated by a Hindu majority

compelled the all-india mUslim leagUe to enact

the Pakistan Resolution, and, under the leader-

ship of mUhammad ali Jinnah (1876–1949), who

envisioned Pakistan as a liberal democratic state for

Muslims, the Muslim League worked alongside the

Hindu-dominated, but secularist, Indian National

Congress for independence from the British.

When Pakistan was created on August 14,

1947, Jinnah became its first governor-general. In

1949 the Objectives Resolution was passed stating

P