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Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the second-largest Muslim population as of 2023. Islamabad is the nation's capital, while Karachi is its largest city and financial centre. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area and the ninth-largest in Asia. Bounded by the Arabian Sea on the south, the Gulf of Oman on the southwest, and the Sir Creek on the southeast, it shares land borders with India to the east; Afghanistan to the west; Iran to the southwest; and China to the northeast. It shares a maritime border with Oman in the Gulf of Oman, and is separated from Tajikistan in the northwest by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan Corridor.
Pakistan is the site of several ancient cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan, the Indus Valley civilisation of the Bronze Age, and the ancient Gandhara civilisation. The regions that compose the modern state of Pakistan were the realm of multiple empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid, the Maurya, the Kushan, the Gupta; the Umayyad Caliphate in its southern regions, the Samma, the Hindu Shahis, the Shah Miris, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, and most recently, the British Raj from 1858 to 1947. (Full article...)
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Photograph of the temple and gateway in Kashmiri style at Malot, Jhelum District, taken by Joseph David Beglar in the 1870s. Alexander Cunningham wrote in his report for the Archaeological Survey of India in 1872-3, "The only remains of any antiquity at Mallot are a temple and gateway in the Kashmirian style of architecture. They are built of a coarse sandstone of various shades of ochreous red and yellow, and many parts have suffered severely from the action of the weather, the surface having altogether crumbled away...The temple is a square of 18 feet inside, with a vestibule or entrance porch on the east towards the gateway. The gateway is...a massive building...divided into two rooms...On each side of these rooms to the north and south there are highly decorated niches for the reception of statues, similar to those in the portico of the temple. These niches are covered by trefoil arches which spring from flat pilasters. Each capital supports a statue of a lion under a half trefoil canopy...The roof is entirely gone; but judging from the square shape of the building, I conclude that it must have been pyramidal, outside with flat panelled ceilings of overlapping stones." Photo credit: Talha |
Clickable map of the four provinces and three federal territories of Pakistan.
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Provinces:
Territories: Pakistani-administered portions of the Kashmir: |
Akhter Hameed Khan (Urdu: اختر حمید خان, pronounced [ˈəxt̪ər ɦəˈmiːd̪ xaːn]; 15 July 1914 – 9 October 1999) was a Pakistani development practitioner and social scientist. He promoted participatory rural development in Pakistan and other developing countries, and widely advocated community participation in development. His particular contribution was the establishment of a comprehensive project for rural development, the Comilla Model (1959). It earned him the Ramon Magsaysay Award from the Philippines and an honorary Doctorate of law from Michigan State University.
In the 1980s he started a bottom-up community development initiative of Orangi Pilot Project, based in the outskirts of Karachi, which became a model of participatory development initiatives. He also directed many programmes, from microcredit to self-finance and from housing provision to family planning, for rural communities and urban slums. It earned him international recognition and high honours in Pakistan. Khan was fluent in at least seven languages and dialects. Apart from many scholarly books and articles, he also published a collection of poems and travelogues in Urdu. (Full article...)
“ | Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us. | ” |
— Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Founder of Pakistan) |
Religions in Pakistan
Indian Subcontinent
Other countries
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