"THE FUNDAMENTALISTS were known to English-speaking people in Pakistan as the “fundos.” They were to that extent a presence now. They were still in the background, but they pushed and pushed, and always wanted more. The Indian subcontinent had been bloodily partitioned to create the state of Pakistan. Millions had died, and many more had been uprooted, on both sides of the new frontiers. More than a hundred million Muslims had been abandoned on the Indian side, but virtually all the Hindus and Sikhs had been chased away from Pakistan, to create the all-Muslim polity of Iqbal’s casual poetic dream. That should have been enough. But the fundamentalists wanted more. It wasn’t enough that this large portion of the ancient land had ceased, after the millennia, to be India; and—like Iran, like the Arab countries—had been finally cleansed of the older faiths. The people themselves now had to be cleansed of the past, of everything in dress or manners or general culture that might link them to their ancestral land. The fundamentalists wanted people to be transparent, pure, to be empty vessels for the faith. It was an impossibility: human beings could never be blanks in that way. But the various fundamentalist groups offered themselves as the pattern of goodness and purity. They offered themselves as true believers. They said they followed the ancient rules (especially the rules about women); all they asked of people was to be like them and, since there was no absolute agreement about the rules, to follow the rules they followed."