THE MURDER OF HISTORY A CRITIQUE OF HISTORY TEXTBOOKS USED IN PAKISTAN

by K. K. AZIZ

Publication Date: 2004

Extent: 278 pages

The Book:

In Pakistani schools and colleges what is being taught as History is really national mythology, and the subjects of Social Studies and Pakistan Studies are nothing but vehicles of political indoctrination. Our children don’t learn History.

They are ordered to read a carefully selected collection of falsehoods, fairy tales and plain lies. Why and how has this come about? Who is responsible for it? In what ways is this destroying the country? Why doesn’t anyone protest against it? In this book, the distinguished Pakistani historian K K Aziz asks and answers these questions for the first time, by making an in-depth study of 66 textbooks on these subjects currently in use in the schools and colleges of the country.

He (1) lists their errors of fact, emphasis and interpretation, (2) enumerates their major omissions, (3) corrects their mistakes, (4) brings out the distortions they teach and perpetuate, (5) estimates their ravaging effects on the students, and (6) measures their impact on the nation at large.

He does this with documented scholarship, meticulous care, deep understanding, acute concern, and rare courage.

This is a stinging but fully deserved attack on the governments which order and prescribe these textbooks, the scholars and educationists who plan and approve them, the professors who write them, and the parents who accept them.

The contents of this book should shake every general reader and throw every parent into a panic.

The Author:

Professor KHURSHEED KAMAL AZIZ was born in December 1927, in village Ballamabad near Faisalabad. He was educated at the M. B. High School Batala, Forman Christian College and the Government College, Lahore, and the Victoria University of Manchester. He has been on the academic staff of the Government College, Lahore, and of the Universities of the Punjab, London, Cambridge, Khartoum and Heidelberg, and has delivered occasional lectures at the Universities of Karachi, Peshawar, Dacca, Islamabad, Hull, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Geneva, Oxford and Bergen.

During intervals snatched from teaching abroad he has served at home as Deputy Official Historian to the Government of Pakistan, Chairman of the National Commission on Historical and Cultural Research, and Special Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister (Z. A. Bhutto). Author of over a dozen books, he is a historian of rank with an international reputation.