Think Pakistan With Rana Eijaz Ahmad

The right answer could be to end all immigration control, or it could be to seek more generous, more rapid, and more humane pathways at all skill levels, with the idea still being to make migration a choice rather than the only choice, subject to the idea being met with actual efforts to invest in the “sending” countries.

The Selective Gate: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Politics of Who Gets to Move Introduction

Intelligence Creates Delusions and Wisdom Satisfies

As with most things, a paradox lies at the heart of human civilization: the species that created libraries, laboratories, and universities is the species most likely to concoct comforting lies about itself. An elephant is not comforted when the calf dies, saying that it is in a better place. A chimpanzee doesn’t have a group of chimps who believe that they’ll get a reward after they die. It is only the “intelligent” animal that does that. It is an essay in support of a division which we have long ignored: between intelligence and wisdom, and in the name of the latter, a claim that this modern system of education, which rewards us with degrees and certificates, has been depriving us of wisdom for too long.
Intelligence is the ability to understand information, identify patterns, solve problems, and manipulate symbols and tools to achieve a result. It can be measured, learned, and, importantly, is morally neutral. A narrow sense of intelligence is what a calculator has. A chess engine is a computer program that is intelligent. A con artist is very smart. Intelligence is the question whose answer is “how do I get what I want?”
This is another thing altogether, wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to see clearly, that is, to see the true nature of things, the true size of one’s own little self in it, the consequences of one’s action in time, seeing it, and acting in accordance with it, and not according to one’s appetite or one’s ego. Wisdom comes with a different response: what is the truth, and what does the truth demand of me? The measure of wisdom is not the product of work, but the fruits of wisdom are peace, self-control, and good order.
This paradox in the first paragraph is no longer a surprise; before separating the two, it is a given. Without wisdom, intelligence is a gadget for devising intricate excuses, a brain smart enough to build entire systems of beliefs to appease its fears and needs. Such architecture is unneeded for wisdom. It simply sees.
The Animal Test
Take the case of after death seriously, as it is a more devastating case than it first seems. Humans, with the most advanced minds on the planet, have created thousands of cosmologies about the nature of the afterlife, many of which conflict with one another, but most agree that there is a happy afterlife for the faithful. The elephants mourn their dead in a manner that makes it absolutely evident that they are grieving. They are brought back to bones, and they touch them; they linger. However, no elephant has ever had to imagine heaven to make that suffering more bearable. No bird has ever made a ritual out of resurrection. There have never been horses in war on which the afterlife is the right one.
This is not an assertion that animals are, in some esoteric way, more intelligent than humans. It is a much more benign and useful assertion: raw cognitive horsepower is not a safeguard against delusion; it can actually become the raw material for delusion. The very intelligence that enables us to model the future fairly well is the intelligence that enables escape hatches from the fear of the future.
The Only Way to Find Wisdom is in God
If intelligence is not the fruit of wisdom, then where is wisdom? History, as told in the different traditions, is similar; it says the same thing: observation and contemplation, and not the gathering of information.
This stamp is on all prophetic traditions. Prior to the revelation, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) used to sit in a cave called Hira, away from the marketplace, away from the books, away from the intelligence of the Meccans in the marketplace, and away from the intrigues in the marketplace to ponder and meditate. Wisdom was not gained from reading books and learning from what has passed; it came from withdrawal, observation, and being led out of self. Then, the Sahaba were not out-arguing each other with clever arguments to find out what is good and what is bad, but they went back to the Quran and the Sunnah, and considered revealed guidance as a check on their cleverness.
However, amongst them, Hazrat Ali (may Allah be pleased with him) is remembered not just for his ability to speak knowledgeably in debate, but also for his wisdom. The wisdom that can be heard from a man who had deeply thought on the subject of justice and the order of Allah, that wisdom whose judgments are still studied and followed for their sheer penetrating clarity today, after all these years. No one recalls Hazrat Ali’s memory for the vast number of things. They will never forget his vision, which was beyond the scope of others.
The significance of these traditions is that when we reflect upon the reality with which we come in contact, wisdom grows; but in these traditions, wisdom grows through revealed guidance, not through cleverness built up over time. A book can preserve knowledge of wisdom, but it cannot create wisdom. One may learn all there is known about justice in all his books, and yet still be a tyrant. A shepherd who has never read a book can see a man dying, and wordlessly know what mercy is.
The Absurdity in the System is a Work of Fiction
The following small, almost comical example shows how much of formal education is arbitrary convention masquerading as knowledge: the reason the two almost identical words but and put are sounded differently in English. It is just that children do not know; it happened historically and then drifted into dialects; it is just that the scribes got it wrong, and it is hardened into a “rule” for children. There are thousands of such: no-fun silent letters, spelling rules whose exceptions abound, correct grammar that varies by postcode. None of this is knowledge in any sense. It is a convention that is memorized, and children spend years on its mastery and are sorted, graded, and shamed for it.
It is NOT a minor quibble over English orthography. It is a symptom. Much that passes for “education” consists of learning arbitrary conventions, cloaked in the authority of institutions, as a means of sorting human beings into winners and losers of a game of which neither they nor their institutions chose the rules, nor can many justify them.
Education as Industry, Not Enlightenment
You can fully understand the sorting function; the rest is already followed. Today, education is less an educating system and more a system of “certifications,” a process that produces class differences. Education is a toll station on the road to hope. When the toll is too high for too many, however, you end up with what you see everywhere else: deprived, stymied mobility, and what can be called the migration of dreams, talented people at times at risk of death, picking up and moving to pursue an opportunity structure that a more equitable allocation of resources would have kept closer to home.
When dreams are blocked, they do not just go away. They turn into bitterness, and bitterness feeds into hostility. Nevertheless, war, for those who want to believe there is a good old boy system, is a money-spinner. War is an industry: arms manufacturers, reconstruction contractors, private security companies, all with balance sheets enhanced by extending instability throughout most of the world. Pharma is an abnormally similar business: A cured population is a contracting business; a chronically managed population is a recurring revenue stream. It is all people need: incentives and intelligence’s turf. Intelligence is superbly an optimizer for profit. It is not particularly good at assessing whether it is correct to optimize for profit. Wisdom’s role is to ask that question, and she was the one pushed out of the room.
A Manufactured Menu of “-isms”
This is where the argument comes to the crux. There is a whole ‘another way of talking that has sprung up to suggest that it is the right label that will bring political salvation to the people. A whole new language industry has emerged, where the idea is that political salvation can be found in identifying the right label. However, consider results, not labels: A one-party system has been achieving growth rates that many liberal democracies would be proud of, while many (properly) “democratic” states are still stuck in dysfunction. This is the takeaway message from what is often referred to as the Ahmad and Mansoor thesis, which claims that the shape of a country’s government, as it is labeled, is not as important as its system capabilities: the actual system of government’s ability to plan fairly, execute, deliver services, and enforce rules. However, the opposition of democracy and communism is the wrong dichotomy to make, as it serves more to keep ideologues, consultants and academic departments busy than to enlighten anybody.
And here a different kind of animal test is brought back, honed. It would be wrong to expect a dog to have a theory of governance that it would follow to be faithful. The imitation of speech can be remarkably close, and does not require a concept of “modernism” to do it for a parrot. A well-trained horse will be able to take a rider safely across any terrain that not one political theorist would be able to traverse on foot. These creatures work through direct training and direct feedback from reality. This simple but sincere feedback process resulted in Hazrat Ali’s wisdom: direct encounter with what works, not abstraction for abstraction’s sake. Meanwhile, a great scientist might advance human knowledge without reading a page of political theory. What we consider essential principles are, on examination, found to be essential principles, not so much for the people who need them, as for those who benefit from teaching.
Once in a lifetime, with no regrets, a passing Mark for Passing Objections. It would be untrue to mention that there has also been a book tradition of real wisdom handed down through the ages, the Quran itself being a book; the hadith a tradition of words that has been preserved. The point of this claim is not that texts are unimportant; it is that texts are a vessel, not the source. He who reads a scripture without thinking becomes a scholar who can read but cannot see. If we read a scripture with the contemplative attitude that Hazrat Ali brought to it, that is what we get closer to. This failure is not about literacy; it is about taking literacy out of the silence.
The Way Forward
If this is correct, then we should not get rid of books, but rather discontinue the false notion of “the more, the better.” It means helping youth wait patiently before they learn to take exams. It involves asking of all institutions, whether school, market, or government, not if it sounds sophisticated but if it corresponds to what is really true out there and if it actually eases suffering. The accuracy and complexity of the delusions will continue to increase as time goes on, since unanchored intelligence builds ever more elaborate and convincing delusions. Wisdom requires another and more humble and rarefied thing: observation, contemplation, the ability to hear what the day says rather than what the herd screams, to let a true, real story prevail, rather than a story that fits into one’s agenda or financial bottom line or ideology.

Intelligence Creates Delusions, Wisdom Satisfies As with most things, a paradox lies at the heart of human civilization: the species that created libraries, laboratories, and universities is the species most likely to concoct comforting lies about itself.

None of this is a rebellion; no one is losing. It urges the establishment of Pakistan to do what the country cannot keep doing anymore, that Pakistan’s own interior minister has, in public, said is broken: fix it on terms it sets itself, rather than it being set for them.
https://ranaeijaz.substack.com/p/ruling-elite-face-prisoners-dilemma?r=1mbf8m&utm_medium=ios

Ruling Elite Face Prisoner’s Dilemma

Rana Eijaz Ahmad

Something bizarre is going on in Pakistan. The leader of the country’s politics has not spoken at a rally in more than three years. He has not been able to communicate with most journalists, and according to Amnesty International’s report this month, he has not seen his family for over eight months, during which one eye is said to have suffered from a deterioration of its sight. Since December 2025, he and his wife have not been allowed to have regular access to a lawyer. But, one by one, the world he is in has been rearranging itself, not because he is doing something wrong from inside that cell, but because the system set up to put him there is doing something wrong to itself.
So this is not the story of Imran Khan as a martyr, nor the second coming of Jinnah, nor as the Mandela; he is not either of them, nor does he need to be. Now, this is a political fact, documented in public records: A leader can be taken out of action but not out of the equation.
When the Top Players Pitted Themselves Against the Top Players: 2018–2022.
The selling point of Khan’s core contradiction was always his selling point. He was a world-class cricketer and philanthropist behind Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and, by any fair measure, part of the creme de la creme of Pakistan’s cricketers. The establishment of PTI was based on two things that have been the hallmark of the country since independence: the landlords, dynastic ‘biradari’ political families, and the military-bureaucratic establishment that determines the limits of civilian rule. He came to power in 2018 with tacit backing from that establishment. He lost it in 2022 when that backing was withdrawn.
The Crackdown, Documented: 2023
This record is not in dispute even among Khan’s critics; it is just how they interpret it. He was arrested on 9 May 2023, while in the midst of the country-wide unrest, and was subsequently arrested again on August 05, 2023. That was one of the most sweeping attacks on a mainstream party in Pakistan’s recent history, which Al Jazeera and Amnesty International have both covered: mass arrests of PTI workers following the May 9 riots, a series of leadership defections, and a series of prosecutions, the cipher case, the Toshakhana case, the Al-Qadir Trust case.
In January 2025, Khan was acquitted of charges relating to the cipher and the Amnesty-related charges at the official-secrets court, according to Amnesty’s reporting, but was convicted of the other charges: a 14-year sentence for the Amnesty-related case Al-Qadir Trust, and a 17-year sentence in the state gifts case in December 2025, along with his wife. This month, Amnesty International’s South Asia director made it clear that his “imprisonment was unlawful and politically motivated,” not a talking point of the PTI but rather the findings of an independent human rights group. The party has seen PTI members like Yasmin Rashid, Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Sarfraz Cheema languishing in detention for charges the party has always claimed were fabricated to taint the leadership of the party.
This week’s election was an event nobody could explain away: it was not scheduled, and it was unpublicized.
In the lead-up to the 2024 general elections, the Supreme Court upheld a previous decision ruling that the PTI would have to contest the elections under a mix of unrelated symbols instead of its cricket bat logo, removing its ability to campaign in a unified way. The traditional theory of politics would say that when a party loses its brand, its funding sources, and its rally, it ceases to be around on the outcome. It did not. This was the biggest victory for PTI-backed independents in the National Assembly, a result confirmed by international media at the time, and it remains a fundamental issue in Pakistani politics to this day. It was a vote that was, among other things, against the parties that had launched the operation to remove one man from the ballot during the past year.
Winning the Election, Making The Space Cozy: 2024-2026
Since then, the coalition that formed government has not weakened; it has incorporated it into the Constitution. The 26th Amendment altered the appointment process for judges and reduced the courts’ power to oversee judges. The 27th Amendment was far more radical, as it altered the military command structure in a manner that was widely described, yours truly among them, and Yousuf Nazar in a Dawn column, as representing a new concentration of power under Field Marshal Asim Munir. State authorities are more powerful in regulating online speech through the 2025 PECA amendments. The same office has new command and pension structures, codified in this year’s CDF Act. Each has passed through parliament, which, PTI says, does not reflect the votes of 2024, and each has been criticized at home and by rights groups overseas: laws made by the people in power, for the people in power.
It is the self-conceived trap the order is in right now. During this time, Pakistan has, on the other hand, made comprehensive diplomatic and security achievements in the international arena. Nothing has ever come of it except the intractable, the most difficult of all things to make: legitimacy at home.
The Man in the Cell
This is the personal trajectory of Khan that is unusual, if not for the entire history of Pakistan’s leadership, at least for its own during his time. He was a well-documented London socialite, a well-known celebrity in world sport, had high-profile relationships, and lived a jet-set life far removed from the solitary cell in Adiala Jail. Between the 1992 World Cup and the establishment of the cancer hospital named after his mother, something else happened; he became a different kind of public person: more religious, more ascetic in his approach to life, and more open to talking about faith and personal discipline than most Pakistani politicians ever are.
His fans viewed three years of silence in jail and a lack of a public plea deal or apparent deal with the town as proof that things were really changing. His critics’ fault is his stubbornness, the very characteristic that has hindered him from forming lasting alliances. However, readings can be made in light of the same facts. He is not Jinnah trying to construct a state out of thin air; he is not Mandela coming out of prison after 27 years trying to mend a country with its former jailers. He is a particular political temperament, one particular kind of man; he betrays that in his iconoclastic reckoning of endurance as a kind of politics, and that is an empirically successful kind of politics, whatever one may think of it on the moral plane.
The Views of The Government’s Own Accomplices
The best sign that something is amiss has not been from PTI but from within the government itself. Dawn reported, and social media picked up, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s assertion at the Pakistan Economic Summit on July 30 that the country’s governance system “has collapsed” and is unable to address the country’s issues. By all accounts, he is close to the military leadership, and commentators such as Yousuf Nazar said the remark could be interpreted as targeting not only the civilian cabinet Naqvi sits in, nevertheless, the establishment itself. Analysts quoted by websites such as Indiablooms pointed out the comment the following days, raising fresh doubts about the durability of the current ‘hybrid arrangement’ in Pakistan. This is not an “outlandish” interpretation of a casual sentence; it is the “standard” one.
On the other hand, the government’s messaging about Khan has been more focused on his irrelevance than his legality. PML-N’s Azma Bukhari has said Khan’s hopes for his own supporters to be in the streets are unsuitable for a public that is economically drained and out of resources to support Khan’s demands. This could be what it feels like when you are truly exhausted. It is a feeble rebuttal to the fact that people still know what they want as their symbols, knowing they voted in February 2024. Naqvi’s own remarks indicate that even the government leadership is not sure the current setup will hold up against that memory.
A Face-Saving Route for All
None of these requires the Pakistani military and civilian leadership to openly repent, change direction abruptly, or concede surrender to the world. In fact, it is probably that insistence that has kept a resolution from being passed for three years; nobody gives way to a position that they would feel like losers. In contrast, a long-lasting off-ramp is different, and Pakistan has come across variants of it in the past:
Allow courts to do their job, on a set time frame. Khan does not have to be released by decree of the government; he can be released or granted a resolution of his and the other co-defendants’ pending appeals through the existing judicial system, as Amnesty and others have asked, with international observers allowed to attend, but in a manner that is determined and time-bound. That means the establishment could truly make a case that the rule of law was followed, not that it bent to the will of the people.
Do not politicize access to medical services. Allowing Khan’s family, lawyers, and independent physicians unrestricted access, something the Supreme Court has already ruled this month, is not a loss to the government on any front, and can be presented domestically and internationally as respecting Khan’s due process, not appeasing him.
Revise the electoral symbol in a prospective manner, not retroactive. Rather than reopening the 2024 outcome, restoring PTI’s ballot symbol and party status gives the government a chance to present the move as a step to further enhance competition in the ongoing elections, which it can claim credit for, instead of simply relitigating an unfair result. Add this to Naqvi’s own reform drive. The interior minister has already, publicly, suggested other administrative divisions and structurally reforming the system as a solution to a “collapsed system.” Combined with a real political conversation involving PTI, the government, and the military, that reform program can then be presented as a change the establishment initiated, rather than a compromise with any one side. This is not the first time in Pakistan’s history it has had to negotiate a transition; in 1988 and 2008, both were referred to as the establishment’s own decision to expand the field, rather than as a retreat.
Separate Khan’s personal fate from PTI’s survival as an institution. The government could still have charges it feels are on point against Khan. Even so, that does not mean the entire organization’s workers, symbol, and elected representatives should remain caught in legal limbo. The separation provides the state with a means to be tough on any individual, while eliminating the collective-punishment language that undermines its credibility in the international arena.
None of this is a rebellion; no one is losing. It urges the establishment of Pakistan to do what the country cannot keep doing anymore, that Pakistan’s own interior minister has, in public, said is broken: fix it on terms it sets itself, rather than it being set for them.

Ruling Elite Face Prisoner’s Dilemma Something bizarre is going on in Pakistan.

Merit Over Monopoly: The Quiet Revolution at Punjab University
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Think Pakistan with Rana Eijaz Ahmad Merit based, Quiet Revolution at the PU Merit Over Monopoly: The Quiet Revolution at Punjab UniversityThe...

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