Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more What Have We Returned? Muhammad Mohsin Iqbal (Special supplementary on the occasion of 14th August, 79th anniversary of Independent day of Pakistan).
Pakistan was achieved on the fourteenth of August in the year nineteen hundred and forty-seven, after sacrifices of a magnitude that still stir the soul and a struggle whose tirelessness remains an enduring lesson. Millions crossed borders in those turbulent months, leaving behind ancestral homes, familial graves, and the familiar soil of generations, so that a new homeland might rise where Muslims could live according to their faith and their free will. We stand now upon the threshold of the eighth decade of that hard-won independence. I, a Pakistani by birth and by conviction, have myself lived nearly fifty-eight years within the borders of this free land. This country conferred upon me an identity that no foreign power could erase, furnished me with the means of an independent existence—schools in which to learn, roads upon which to travel, markets in which to earn my bread—bestowed a measure of respect in the eyes of the world, and, in some degree, granted me a name among my fello...