Muslim Zion

"Offers a detailed analysis of the various political and ideological forces that were at play in the buildup to Pakistan's creation." (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Pakistan is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India's rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel.


A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world's sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam.


Revealing how Pakistan's troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.


"A trenchant analysis . . . of Islamic politics." ?Publishers Weekly

"Intellectual history as a page-turner." —Noah Feldman, author of Cool War: The Future of Global Competition

"Brilliantly written, deeply felt . . . an important contribution." —Anatol Lieven, author of Pakistan: A Hard Country

"A remarkable book." —New Republic