Abstract
Muhammad Abdul Qadeer, the social scientist may not be popularly known as is the case of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear scientist who is acclaimed as the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb. However, Abdul Qadeer’s achievements as a surveyor of Pakistan’s social history from the mid twentieth century onwards would be rated as outstanding by any academic standards. He has provided us with the most relevant and useful insights into the dynamics of Pakistan society through his classic: Pakistan: Social and Cultural Transformations in a Muslim Nation. It is imperative that a nation which is globally acknowledged as a nuclear power must be thoroughly examined in terms of its strengths and weaknesses, its social choices, internal compulsions, its external challenges and its vision for the future. The book meets this objective fairly well. Pakistan today is burdened with a host of contradictions, anomalies, paradoxes and dualities which pervade almost every sphere of its social life. Highlighting these contradictions in an emphatic and holistic manner could be adjudged as the seminal contribution of the author as a means to comprehending the compelling constraints on the socio-economic development of Pakistan. Fully conscious of these contradictions, the author focuses his mental energies on an important question ‘Whither Pakistan?’ This being the title of the last chapter of the book, the author examines this question from diverse perspectives and then concludes, albeit with a sense of guarded optimism, that given all its paradoxes and contradictions, Pakistan as an independent state would not wither away.