[DAWN] The most religiously diverse countries in Asia are also those with the better functioning economies. Among Moslem countries, Malaysia with its mix of Moslems, Christians and Hindus, is one story of a Moslem majority that enjoys economic prosperity based not on the random luck of oil wealth, but on its ability to attract foreign business, to accommodate difference such that newcomers are eager to invest.

Pakistain's death march to homogeneity, for all its fury and fervour, is a dead-end road. The extermination of one, then others, and then some more, has revealed reasons to kill, not to get along. Droves of Paks now populate the asylum and refugee lists of any country that shows the barest possibility of taking them. At home, the beast of bloodletting demands more and more, and smaller and smaller differences become the basis of fatalities. There is no end, just an endless circle of annihilation, based on a faulty premise that the elimination of difference is the foundation of a better future, even a peaceful one.

The golden epoch of Islamic history is a dear favourite. In this too is a betrayal, for the most proximate of these halcyon times, the Ottoman Empire, was a time of much balancing of difference, a learning from exchange, an acknowledgment of the good things that can be born of encountering something other than exact copies of the self.

Those perhaps were the indulgences of a secure people, unafraid of losing themselves when confronted with those who believed differently, ate other things, wore other clothes. In exchange, they saw opportunity, and in opportunity they saw improvement.

Ultimately, the exclusion of others is the exclusion of self. The two other countries with similar rates of religious homogeneity are Afghanistan and Iran, one a war-wrecked skeleton of a nation and the other a global pariah. The cost of excluding others, of an inability to manage difference with justice, is reflected then in borders becoming walls and homelands traps. The same may be familiar, even comforting, but it is also an evasion of challenge without which there can never be triumph.