The Pakistan History Bibliography, curated by Dr Sana Haroon (of UMASS Boston) has been digitized into an online searchable portal by Habib University. However, what does this Bibliography mean for academics and history enthusiasts alike? An in-depth interview with Zahra Sabri (a historian and educator closely involved in shaping the resource) reveals the larger discourse surrounding knowledge dissemination and containment.
When Habib University launched the portal as a publicly accessible digital resource, the announcement framed it as an “exciting new addition” to Pakistan’s scholarly landscape. Nearly 600 entries, including books, articles, and digital curations, searchable by author and subject, and open to expansion through a “Submit a Source” feature. But what, in practice, makes a bibliography worth returning to, particularly in an era when Google Scholar, JSTOR, and library catalogs can produce thousands of results in seconds?
In a conversation about the purpose of this digital portal, Zahra Sabri emphasized a simple starting point. Seach engines are expensive, but not inherently disciplinary. Typing “Pakistan + women” or “authoritarianism + Pakistan” into a database may return a flood of results, yet it does not distinguish between an inherently historical source and a non-historical one. Sabri mentions, “Where would history stuff be brought together?” pointing to the absence of a simple filter that gathers historical work as a coherent body of research. The bibliography, by contrast, is intentionally bounded. It does not claim to be exhaustive; it claims to be useful.
Sabri was candid about the tradeoff. The internet will always offer more titles, more links, more commentary. But more is not equivalent to better, and it is rarely quick when the task requires judgment. The Pakistan History Bibliography positions itself as a curated guide, a place where users can begin with a baseline assurance that what they are seeing meets a minimum scholarly threshold.
That threshold is a pragmatic response to how students actually work. Limited time, limited word count, and limited patience for browsing dubious sources. For someone writing a paper on a tight deadline, a smaller but vetted list can reduce risk and improve quality.
At the same time, Sabri warned against reading curation as a promise of completeness. With roughly 600 entries at present, the bibliography represents just the tip of the iceberg. It is a “useful search,” she said, one that should sit alongside wider searching, instead of outright replacing it. Its strength is focus and quality control, not total coverage.
What Qualifies as Quality Scholarship?
Pressed on criteria, what exactly makes something eligible for inclusion in this Bibliography? Sabri explained that the project is currently “personality driven” in a specific sense. It is heavily guided by author credibility and scholarly reputation. Much of the bibliography has been built through invitations to networks of professional historians and scholars from related disciplines who have produced commendable historical work, which is an indication of reliability and academic worth. In her framing, this resembles how leading universities evaluate scholars; names matter because they reflect an accumulated record of method, peer engagement, and disciplinary standards.
This author-centered approach also explains why the bibliography can include forms of writing that databases often treat unevenly, such as newspaper articles. If a professional historian writes for a newspaper, Sabri argued, that piece often carries the imprint of scholarly training and years of experience, which can be meaningfully different from the hundreds of newspaper articles written every day. In other words, format alone does not determine value the way intellectual rigor and context do.
Yet she also resisted the implication that quality equals Western institutional prestige. The bibliography includes Pakistan-based scholars and local journals even when those venues might not meet the visibility or reputational benchmarks of major international universities. Sabri’s argument was that lifetime expertise, archival labor, and deep contextual knowledge can produce work worth reading regardless of where it appears. The implication is a deliberate widening of what counts, without abandoning scrutiny.
Sabri goes on to explain the process of submission if an author who is largely unfamiliar to the selecting committee submits their work. Although the work is not automatically excluded, it undergoes rigorous scrutiny to uphold the benchmark of quality scholarship.
What Metrics Determine the Success of the Bibliography?
What does the success of a bibliography look like? Unlike commercial products, scholarly infrastructure does not always succeed by going viral. Sabri described success in terms of stewardship and scholarly growth rather than sheer scale.
One metric is updating. If key authors included in the bibliography publish new work and the bibliography fails to reflect that, it begins to lose its dependency as a current reference point. Another metric is expansion. To ensure the success of the Bibliography, it is pertinent to steadily add authors and entries while maintaining quality. But expansion is not simply adding more of what is already well represented. Sabri emphasized the importance of “future-oriented categories,” tags that are currently underpopulated but conceptually crucial.
She offered examples of subjects that the bibliography treats as important even when the current entries are few: Portuguese influence in the region, railways, and other niche areas that do not yet have the depth the field can support. In her view, one sign of success will be whether these categories become meaningfully populated over time, moving from one or two entries to dozens, as scholars contribute and as the editorial team actively seeks to broaden coverage.
Finally, there is the slow, scholarly version of adoption: faculty and researchers recommending it, adding it to reading lists, and sharing it through word of mouth. Sabri noted that outreach has already led at least one external platform to begin linking to the Bibliography, an exceptionally early indication that it is entering the ecosystem of Pakistan studies resources.
The Impact of the Bibliography on Habib University’s Academic Sphere.
Within Habib University, Sabri located the resource’s immediate value in the realities of teaching and student research. In structured courses with fixed syllabi, students may not be required to do extensive outside research. But the moment they begin writing research papers, senior projects, or independent studies, they need a better, more holistic, and academic pathway than Wikipedia.
Faculty often receive familiar requests, “Where do I begin my research on gender in Pakistan?” and answering from memory is not always efficient. Sabri described the Bibliography as a tool that even instructors can use as a quick reference. They can scan a category, find credible starting points, and share them with students. For students, the appeal is similarly pragmatic; the interface offers a “quick fix” that is still anchored in scholarly work, without the burden of sorting through hundreds of irrelevant or low-quality search results.
A rather expansive benefit of the Bibliography is its ability to support exploratory learning. A student curious over the summer can “tinker around” subject categories and build depth through self-directed reading. In that sense, the site is not only a research tool, but it is also a structured invitation to intellectual exploration.
What Does the Curation of this Bibliography Mean for the Dissemination of Knowledge Concerning Pakistan’s History?
Perhaps the most intellectually charged part of the discussion emerged when the conversation turned to classification itself. When asked whether this Bibliography serves solely as a discovery tool or a curated mechanism of knowledge dissemination, Sabri argued that the Bibliography is not merely a discovery tool, rather, it also participates in shaping how Pakistan’s past is imagined and studied. That happens through subject categories, a deceptively simple mechanism.
She stressed the project’s commitment to situating Pakistan in a wider, historically connected region. Studying Pakistan without India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, and without pre-1947 interconnections may become a narrow exercise, easily pulled towards nationalism or state-centered narratives. According to Sabri, historical realities do not align neatly with present borders. Indian towns and cities such as Deoband and Bareilly matter for religious movements within present-day Pakistan; Lahore’s Mughal history connects deeply with Delhi; Peshawar’s past cannot be fully grasped without Kabul and shifting sovereignties. Even the project’s categories are reflective of this view. For instance, there is a category for Deccan, despite the Deccan being located in present-day India, because its cultural and intellectual influences remain part of Pakistan’s historical inheritance.
At the same time, Sabri acknowledged the tension: public-facing materials may foreground the map of present-day Pakistan for grounding and visibility (and to counter Karachi-centric habits of thinking mainly of Lucknow and Delhi as cultural hubs or originators), but the bibliography itself must keep reminding users that modern maps are historically new and only partially relevant as analytic boundaries.
Most strikingly, she described active efforts to avoid Orientalist and Islamophobic frames that often dominate Western journalism and, by extension, public imagination. Categories such as fundamentalism were consciously avoided because they come preloaded with reductive assumptions and danger stamps. Instead, the bibliography uses terms that allow complexity and comparative framing categories like conflict and violence that can include multiple forms (ethnic, political, religious), or sectarian dynamics rather than sectarian violence, signaling that sectarian relations can involve cooperation and everyday life, not only crisis.
In Sabri’s view, classification is a form of power; it can quietly train readers to see Pakistan through crisis, terrorism, and exceptionalism, or it can widen the lens and insist on methodological care. The bibliography, she suggested, is an attempt at the latter: a small act of decolonizing the categories through which knowledge about Pakistan circulates.
The Curation of a Machine-Readable Portal
The interview also revealed the behind-the-scenes labor that rarely appears in press releases. Databases require precision and accuracy. The United States and the United States of America cannot casually coexist as two tags if the goal is reliable search. The project needed standardized spellings and careful decisions about geography. Continents as broad tags, neighboring countries as specific tags (Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, Bangladesh), and additional tagging for countries with significant imperial or political relationships (e.g., Great Britain, Portugal, the United States). It also required region tags such as South Asia, the Middle East, and the Gulf, acknowledging that Gulf dynamics shape Pakistan in ways that a generic “Middle East” label might miss.
What the Bibliography Uncovered for its Own Editors
Sabri revealed that working on the Bibliography became an education for her as well. As she edited and explored, she realized “so much work has come out” beyond what any one historian can keep up with while teaching or focused on a dissertation. The bibliography surfaced authors she only partially knew, and it revealed the extent of work produced by scholars outside the most famous institutions, work she began adding directly into her syllabi.
The database also foregrounded themes she had not previously thought of as categories, for instance, medicine, which prompted her to look for related work in the future and to guide students beyond her own research specialization. Even more unexpectedly, it surfaced digital curation projects. She recalled discovering a virtual, walk-through gallery experience connected to Sikh history (including 3D viewing of objects), a resource she wished she had known while teaching South Asian history because it would have enriched students’ engagement.
In that sense, the Bibliography functions not only as an index of what already exists, but as a generator of new intellectual attention. By naming categories and placing resources together, it “wakes up sensors, it trains scholars and students to notice themes they might otherwise miss.
Why is Now the Right Time to Launch the Bibliography?
Finally, Sabri situated the bibliography in a larger trajectory. Pakistan is a young state, and the institutional development of humanities, particularly robust history departments, has been uneven. Early historical work often concentrated heavily on 1947 and the freedom movement, while broader historical inquiry remained constrained. Over time, however, more Pakistan-focused scholars have emerged, many trained abroad, influencing both international and local scholarly ecosystems.
She noted the growing visibility of forums and workshops that bring Pakistani historians into conversation, where Pakistani history can be discussed as more than a marginal subset of South Asian historiography. In earlier decades, South Asian history often effectively meant “India, with Pakistan at the margins.” That balance, she suggested, is shifting as the field matures, making a dedicated, curated Pakistan history bibliography not only possible but necessary.
Written and interviewed by Esha Irshad Zaidi (Management Trainee, Marketing and Communications)
