This chapter discusses the story of state nationalism in Pakistan, which is an ongoing and complex project rather than a completed and unilinear achievement. The relationship between Islam and ethnicity is probably the most problematic and paradoxical aspect of this process of nation building. Pakistan is a peculiar case o f “ethnonationalism” (Tambiah 1996: 11—12). Rather than in the state, the Pakistani nation is rooted in refashioned primordial attachments or, in the words of Clifford Geertz (1993: 259), “assumed givens” of social existence. Yet these assumed givens are not congruities of blood, speech, or custom, but primarily of religion.