Treasures of the past
It was assumed that due to these Persian connections, the relations between the two countries grew extremely close during the Mirza years, who was a frequent guest of the Shah with his better half
Lately, there has been a spike in cross-border violence between Pakistan and Iran which is quite unusual when compared with the good relations that the two nations enjoyed in the beginning.
Not only was Iran the first country to recognise the independence of Pakistan, the Shah of Iran was the first foreign head of state to visit this country which was doubled down with a Friendship Treaty between the two countries. The Pakistanis were equally keen as it was for Shah’s visit that they hurriedly composed their national anthem, and earlier on, immediately after independence, the Pakistani government requested the Iranian government to send whatever books or papers they could regarding their constitutional laws that could serve as a guide or model for constitution-making in the nascent state. The good beginning blossomed in the ‘50s, when, in addition to the agreements on culture and air-travel, they finalised their common border, which, till today, has never been brought into question and proved a big relief to Pakistan, which has disputed borders in the east with India over Kashmir and in the north with Afghanistan, which has never accepted the legitimacy of the Durand Line.
However, there were some hiccups as well, when, in 1949, the Iranians wanted an ‘inter-government’ Friendship Treaty but the Pakistanis insisted on a ‘state-to-state agreement.’ This was because the Iranians being aware of the British being the ‘cunning fox’ and Pakistan being a new dominion, thought that the British still called the shots in Pakistan and therefore wanted to avoid the controversy whether the British king was the ultimate head of state of the Pakistani dominion or not. The British foreign office complicated the issue by asserting that the pact could only be sealed by the signature of the British King George VI and warned the Pakistanis to avoid any action that might look discourteous to the King otherwise this treaty “might not be recognised internationally.” The Pakistanis were furious because such interpretation challenged their hard-earned independence and shot back that “Pakistan has already entered treaties…without the British King’s authority” and no other country raised such objections; notwithstanding this complication, the treaty was nonetheless signed by the two nations in May 1950.
This hiccup apart, the lands of Pakistan and Persia are historically deeply connected in several ways. The Shah of Iran’s beloved Peacock Throne was actually a novelty from the subcontinent which the Persian Emperor Nader Shah had taken along with him after the conquest of Delhi. Although the people of the subcontinent resisted the Persian swords, they dubbed the gate where the Battle of Karnal took place as the “Khuni Darwaza” (Gateway of Blood) and the name of “Nader Shah” became synonymous with “massacre” in the local parlance yet they fell in love with the Persian soft-power that seeped in the subcontinental psyche through poetry, philosophy, mysticism, art, theology and statecraft, to name a few. The Persian language, which the Mughals adopted as the official language became so popular at one time that there were seven times more readers of Persian in the subcontinent than Persia itself. More so, the Pakistani national anthem contains more words of Persian than the Urdu language.
The Persian connection is centuries old as large number of Iranians for various reasons settled along the coastal regions of the subcontinent, particularly in Sindh extending up to the city of Multan. Among the many prominent Persian immigrant families was the family of the Aga Khan, the spiritual head of the Ismaili shias that came in 1843 to avoid religious persecution at the hands of the Qajar rulers in Iran. Later on, his grandson, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, also called Aga Khan III became the president of the All-Indian Muslim League, the party that played a pivotal role in the creation of Pakistan. It were such families and other shia immigrants that were instrumental in converting the local sunni dynasties and their subjects to the shia doctrine so much so that now shias constitute about twenty percent of the population of Pakistan.
Although the shias never crossed the twenty percent mark in the population ratio, there was a “growing theme of shia domination of Pakistan” in the first decade after independence, may be because the founder of the country, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah as well as Iskander Ali Mirza, the first president of Pakistan were shias, which incidentally was the official religion of the Persian state as well. The relations between the two states warmed up because Mirza’s second wife, Nahid Afghamy, was an Iranian and Mirza’s Commerce Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s wife Nusrat Ispahani was of Persian origin as well as a cousin of Nahid. Nusrat’s Kurdish-Iranian parents had also immigrated to Bombay from Persia and the Ispahanis, along with the Shirazis, Namazis, Shustris and Yazdis, were considered the pioneers and patrons of shiaism in the western subcontinent.
It was assumed that due to these Persian connections, the relations between the two countries grew extremely close during the Mirza years, who was a frequent guest of the Shah with his better half. No wonder some labelled Mirza as the “shia president.” Had Mirza stayed on as president, this closeness could have bonded the two states into one entity under some constitutional arrangement. In the Urdu version of Mirza’s biography penned down by Ahmed Salim, his daughter Shah Taj claimed that her father was working on the idea of building a confederation of the Muslim states comprising Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey which was torpedoed by the Americans through the courtesy of his C-in-C, Ayub Khan. Her claim cannot be corroborated in its entirety, however what can be said with certainty on the basis of Alex Vatanka’s recent research on Pak-Iran relations is that a movement did exist in Pakistan at that time which supported the idea of a “union between predominantly sunni Pakistan and shia Iran, in which the Shah of Iran would be the head of the state!” We do not know whether it was Pakistan or Iran who initiated the idea of this union but what we do know is that the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi did want an economic union of the countries on the rim of the Indian Ocean that could not materialise. The union that did materialise between Persia and the subcontinent was the one imposed by the victorious Emperor Nader Shah which he tried to sustain by a forced marriage between his son and the daughter of the defeated Mughal Emperor Mohammad Shah “Rangeela” but that too ended in nothingness the moment Nader Shah returned to Persia.
The moot point is that were the Pak-Iran relations determined by sectarian considerations in the time of President Mirza? To assume that the family connections of Nahid Afghamy and Nusrat Ispahani could determine the course of relations between the two states would be naïve as there is no historical evidence in Pakistan to support this supposition. The answer is in the negative from across the border as well. There is no mention of such sectarian inclination anywhere in Shah’s memoirs whereas Ardeshir Zahedi, who twice served as the foreign minister of Iran, rejected such insinuations as far-fetched in a 2012 interview by stating, “The shia-sunni divide was not important at the time.”