Gain Your Copy The Murder Of History: A Critique Of History Textbooks Used In Pakistan Drafted By K.K. Aziz Offered As Paper Copy
a matter of sorrow that our textbooks on history, like many other countries, teach highly propagated accounts of history since we are dominated by a very strong nationalistic ideology.
As Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal states, "Pakistan's history textbooks are amongst the best available sources for assessing the nexus between power and bigotry in creative imaginings of a national past.
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Agreeing with the thoughts of Ayesha Jalal, I find our textbooks a source of spreading lies, hatred, bigotry and prejudice by building a hate culture towards India, glorifying the Military Dictatorship and Wars, considering the political leadership inept and incompetent and omitting reference of the contrubution of Bengali's in Indian independence and the Pakistan movement.
Results of these distortions and falsehood have been horrendous and history students seem to acquire a very bias, narrow and superficial view of the world.
every Pakistani Punjabi should read this book, One of its kind book ever written in my country, It exposes how words were twisted to bear a stunted nation, the text books were engineered to assure that intlectual horizon remain dark, rather become even darker, In my humble view, every person with a fragment of thinking mind and who is to live life in my country, must , must, must read it To begin with, finding accurate and veracious historical facts in Pakistan Study textbooks taught in schools and colleges is as hard as nailing a jelly to the tree.
Which is appalling. But even more appalling is the fact that only a few try to unravel the concrete historical facts about Pakistan and its history.
Only a few dare to unknot the fabricated and concocted tangles of this slant and manipulated history,
Reading Pakistan Study school texts is the same as listening to the unending chatter of your phuppo, whichof the time is filled with bogus and counterfeit facts and knowledge, but you still somehow grow up believing her, staying all ignorant and oblivious to reality.
But wait a minute, Hassan! As there always exists a teen who exposes our phuppos toxicity, Is there a daring author who thrashes the myths being told to all of us in Pakistan Studies Books
Yes, uncle Shabeer.
K K Aziz is the one who comes up with this herculean act of unearthing facts and figures, Aziz , in this Book, Murder of History, turns out to be the one who takes the plunge of distilling myths out of reality.
Hes the one who boldly thrashes those who presented us with a fabricated, concocted and fallacious history,
The book starts with references out of the various textbooks, which the audacious author later discusses in detail in further chapters and uses these references to shun away the myths attached to each one.
And it continues till thepages or so, You might want to skip that section to jump directly into the details,
There are a lot of eyeopeners in this book, I wish I could pen down some of them here, But Id leave that up to you to find them out because some of them are rather controversial topics.
This book is extremely important in its historical value as Aziz is one of the rarest historians this country has ever seen, with a great acumen for finding out the truths and brushing off fabrications.
Do Iagree with what the author has jotted down in the book
No, But yes, I agree with himof the time, Theis only because Im an avid reader and I can draw parallels and can find on my own where I disagree with the author.
In short, this book stands on its promise and rightly presents Pakistani students what garbage theyve been taught in the name of Pakistan Studies.
Yes, after reading this book, I rightly understand why this book was banned, As I earlier said, telling the truth in this country is as hard as locking horns with the most powerful phuppo in the family.
My first response upon reading K, K. Aziz's 'The Murder of History' was not surprise but outrage, I didn't ambivalently wonder 'How could they do this', but angrily questioned 'How DARE they do this' I felt like all those misguided generations including mine have been robbed of a chance to construct a more meaningful identity as compared to the confused swamp that it has become.
Published in the the earlys, The Murder of History lays bare with incriminating evidence from a plethora of textbooks the fallacious and fraudulent history that has been taught, and continues to be taught, at all levels of public educational institutions.
Here rewritten, deceitful mythologies are clearly concocted with an Islamcentric, Hinduphobic, and religionationalistic intent in order to mould and condition young minds into myopic tools of the State.
The book reads like a prophetic foreboding of what is to come and three decades later these predictions have come to pass and we have come to suffer it.
Our celebration of idol destroyers and violent conquerors has led to fetishizing a supremacist future where one ideology reigns supreme and words like shaheed, ghazi, and ghazwa are aspirational ones.
What's worse, I found myself reading the very prejudiced myths that I was taught in school even though I attended a private school where the Cambridge board's curriculum was followed.
Even theor so privileged Pakistanis are not safe from this ubiquiotus Naziesque massconditioning, Whether this continues today, I am not sure, But if Biology students can disregard Evolution despite studying it as a fact integral to their curriculum due to conditioned biases, I'm afraid History is a more guileless prey to such predatory conditioning.
Why did the educated class of the time not oppose this propaganda and allow this to happen Why does this book remain obscure despite its evidences and warnings Did the Pakistani lack of selfreflection already exist or was it brought about by such miseducation Ironically, K.
K. Aziz himself laments in this book, that given the comfort of the myths propagated by these textbooks, the people themselves will choose to ignore their false origins.
Again, this wasyears ago, and the rest is History, an eye opener on lies told in Pakistani textbooks the way history is molded and fabricated to suit best the ruling class of the country the way local cultures of Pakistan are replaced and predominated by some imported culture and the way mind of our kids spoiled by feeding them with hatred, narcissism and lack of truth.
K K aziz sahab not only criticized the content of text books but give a concise account on how history should be dealt in Pakistan.
a must read Read for research for Islamic reception paper An eye opener, Every parent must buy this book for their children, if they are taught in Pakistani schools, In this volume, Aziz sets out to correct the injustice that has been committed in Pakistan ever since its creation, and still continues.
The history text books in the country have been woefully distorted for political ends, In this book, he has critiqued and provided the corrections fortext books being taught in the Social Studies, Pakistan Studies and History disciplines to students from gradesto.
Its indeed a courageous effort that unfortunately went unnoticed in his time, But then again, according to Aziz, he wrote this for posterity after all, With a vacant mind and vacant thoughts, we are admitted to schools and colleges to gain knowledge and to learn TRUTH HISTORY.
We are instructed strictly, to obey elders, teachers, parents, preachers, and religious figures and to shut our mouths and minds on whatever they teach us, otherwise we will be labelled as DISOBEDIENT.
But what if someone comes or writes and tells us about the lies, written in our textbooks in the name of HISTORY.
For instance,, august is the Independence Day, notand, March is the Lahore Resolution day, not, Allama Iqbal never asked for the independent state, Pakistanis didnt choose QuaidEAzam as a GOVERNOR GENERAL, the All India Muslim League's behaviour wasn't satisfactory with Bengalis,'s war wasn't a war of independence, the reason of the partition of East Pakistan Bangladesh was West Pakistan, not India, ZiaulHaq used the name of Islam for his benefits, and Pakistanis aren't superior nation but the liars and blinds.
And so on. Unacceptable! At first, we would think because we were/are taught “THE PRESCRIBED MYTHS”, They teach us Pakistan is the fortress of Islam and our language URDU is lingua franca and used in overall Asia, even French and English are losing their importance, India/Europe/ British is our enemies but in reality, what we see There are many other prescribed myths,
highlighted by K.
K. Aziz in a detailed way, He analyzedtextbooks of Pakistan from class I to degree classes and demanded us to read and look at the prescribed myths with an eagle eye.
Furthermore, in the last, he describes how “manipulated history” impacts on children and readers and affects society.
According to him, in our society, the reason behind hypocrisy, abhorrence, lack of morals and misbehaviour are those books and scholars who teach nothing but misguide us.
Whom we should blame The bitter truth is that these textbooks written by socalled professors of History/Arabic/Education.
When professors are telling and writing lies where we should go, Moreover, He also draws attention that textbooks should be prepared according to the psychology of child and adult, Overwhelming patriotism should be avoided, pupils should be taught TRUE History in which wrong and good decisions of our ancestors are mentioned then we can think about our future properly without narrow and conservative minds.
The book is similar to Mphill/PhD thesis means a complete researchbased work, so as a student of social sciences, I found it an interesting read as well as dry.
While I was reading it, all the scenes from school to college came to my mind and then I realized why I never paid attention to social studies.
K. K Aziz concluded the answer in a way that if we tell lies in the name of history and portray ourselves as superior, consequently, our generations lose interest in reading even in thinking critically.
In last, he suggests to other researchers to analyze the textbooks of politics and Islamiat because both have a deep connection with our history.
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