By one of those coincidences which Jung thought deeply significant, on the day when the Historical Dictionary of Pakistan was delivered to me, BBC Television broadcast a documentary on the country, in which two of the contemporary statesmen featured in it (both retired generals) were interviewed. Prominent personalities, many of them still active, make up the largest component of the 500 entries in the dictionary, which range in length from 150 to 2,000 words. By no means all are politicians: there are economic and cultural figures also, not forgetting several cricketers. It is explained that some people are entered under their first names because that is how they are generally known in Pakistan; this system produces confusing results to western eyes (and they are not elucidated by cross‐references), so one finds, for instance, the Northwest Frontier politician Khan Sahib under K, but his son Abdul Ghaffar Khan under G. Other entries cover parties, organizations and religious groups, industries, cities and provinces, elections, constitutional documents, foreign countries with which Pakistan has close relationships, and a few general headings such as Education. As might be expected, the great majority of articles refer to the period after independence came in 1947, but a few go back to earlier history and one or two even into prehistory. The text has been updated to the end of 2005.
The supplementary material includes a chronology of Pakistan's history, starting from the introduction of Islam in 712 CE, but in much more detail after 1947; a long introduction to its history and present state; a general map (which mysteriously omits Karachi, the country's largest city and one of the world's largest); and a classified bibliography of about 1,000 books, articles and websites, which include the significant editorial observation that “Pakistan does not publish a serious journal devoted to politics and history” so that most academic work on these topics appears in foreign journals. There is, as usual in this series, no index, but a large number of cross‐references.
A telling feature of the book is that the appendix listing prominent office‐holders includes not only Governors‐General, Presidents and Prime Minister, but also Chiefs of the Army General Staff. It transpires that a third of the latter, including the present incumbent, engineered military coups that made them President (I was interested to find that a graduate of St Andrews University had been involved in the first of them). So predominant did military rule become that the Supreme Court propounded a “Doctrine of Necessity” under which it forebore to object to constitutional infringements by the Executive of the day. Political dynasties have also been much to the fore: the dictionary includes nine members of the Bhutto family, of whom the youngest to feature separately was only eighteen years old at the time of writing. The author, a highly qualified banker who once served as his country's Minister of Finance, minces no words in his enumeration of Pakistan's current problems: Islamic fundamentalism, important political groups excluded from power, an inferior standard of education, low economic growth and the perennial conflict with India over Kashmir. With such a volatile situation, it may not be long before another edition will be needed of this well informed guide to one of the world's most populous countries.
